Alan Bradley - A Red Herring Without Mustard: A Flavia de Luce Novel

I put my nose to the glass, but the interior was too dim to see more than a stack of old plates on a dusty table.

Without warning, a hand came out of nowhere and hung something directly in front of my face—a hand-lettered cardboard sign.

CLOSED, it said, and the card was still swaying from its string as I made a dash for the door. I grabbed the knob, but at the same instant, the disembodied pair of hands seized it on the inside, trying desperately to keep it from turning—trying to drive home the bolt before I could gain entry.

But luck was on my side. My hearty shove proved stronger than the hands that were holding it closed, and I was propelled into the shop’s interior a little faster than I should have liked.

“Oh, thank you,” I said. “I thought you might be closed. It’s about a gift, you see, and—”

“We are closed,” said a cracked, tinny voice, and I spun round to find myself face to face with a peculiar little man.

He looked like an umbrella handle that had been carved into the shape of a parrot: beaked nose, white hair as tight and curly as a powdered wig, and red circles on each cheek as if he had just rouged them. His face was powder white and his lips too red for words.

He seemed to stand precariously on his tiny feet, swaying so alarmingly backwards and forwards that I had the feeling he was about to topple from his perch.

“We’re closed,” he repeated. “You must come back another time.”

“Mr. Pettibone?” I asked, sticking out a hand. “I’m Flavia de Luce, from Buckshaw.”

He didn’t have much choice.

“Pleased to meet you, I’m sure,” he said, taking two of my fingers in his miniature fist and giving them a faint squeeze. “But we’re closed.”

“It’s my father, you see,” I went on breathlessly. “Today’s his birthday, and we wanted to—my sisters and I, that is—surprise him. He’s expressed a great interest in something you have in your shop, and we’d hoped to—I’m sorry I’m so late, Mr. Pettibone, but I was folding bandages at the St. John’s Ambulance …”

I allowed my lower lip to tremble very slightly.

“And what is this … er … object?”

“A table,” I blurted. It was the first thing that came to mind, and a jolly good thing I’d thought of it. There must be dozens of tables in a place like this, and I’d be able to have a good old snoop round while searching for the right one.

“Could you … er … describe it?”

“Yes,” I said. “Of course. It has four legs and—a top.”

I could see that he was unconvinced.

“It’s for stamps, you see. Father’s a philatelist, and he needs something he can spread his work on … under a lamp. His eyes are not quite what they used to be, and my sisters and I—”

He was edging me towards the door.

“Oh—just a minute. I think that’s it,” I said, pointing to a rather sorry bit of furniture that was huddled in the gloom beneath an ormolu clock with plump-bellied pewter horses. By moving to touch it, I was six or eight feet deeper into the shop.

“Oh, no, this one’s too dark. I thought it was mahogany. No—wait! It’s this one over here.”

I had plunged well towards the back of the shop and into the shadows. With Pettibone bearing down upon me like a wolf upon the fold, I realized that I was now cut off from the door and freedom.

“What are you playing at?” he said, making a sudden grab for my arm. I leapt out of his reach.

Suddenly the situation had turned dangerous. But why? Was there something in the shop Pettibone didn’t want me to see? Did he suspect that I was on to his shady antiques dealings?

Whatever the cause of his aggressiveness, I needed to act quickly.

To my right, standing about a foot out from the wall, was a massive wardrobe. I slid behind it.

For a while, at least, I was safe. He was too big to squeeze behind the thing. I might not be able to come out, but I’d have a moment to plan my next move.

But then Pettibone was back with a broom. He shoved the bristles into my ribs—and pushed. I stood my ground.

Now he turned the broom around and began prodding at me furiously with the handle, like a man who has trapped a rat behind the kitchen cupboard.

“Ouch!” I cried out. “Stop! Stop it! You’re hurting me!”

Actually, he wasn’t, but I couldn’t let him know that. I was able to slip far enough along the wall that I was beyond reach of his broom.

As he came round the wardrobe to have a try from the other side, I slithered back to the far end.

But I knew I was trapped. This game of cat and mouse could go on all day.

Now the wardrobe had begun to move, its china casters squealing. Pettibone had put his shoulder to a corner and was shifting the thing out from the wall.

“Oh!” I shrieked. “You’re crushing me!”

The wall of wood stopped moving and there was a brief pause in his attack, during which I could hear him breathing heavily.

“Reginald!”

The voice—a woman’s—cut through the shop like a falling icicle. I heard him mutter something.

“Reginald, come up here at once! Do you hear me?”

“Hello upstairs!” I shouted. “It’s Flavia de Luce.”

There was a silence, and then the voice said, “Come up, Flavia. Reginald, bring the girl here.”

It was as if she’d said “fetch.”

I slipped out from behind the wardrobe, rubbing my elbows, and shot him a reproachful look.

His eyes strayed to a narrow staircase at the side of the shop, and before he could change his mind, I moved towards it.

I could have made a break for the door, but I didn’t. This could be my only chance at scouting out the place. “In for a penny, in for a pound,” as Mrs. Mullet was fond of saying.

I put my foot on the first step and began my slow trudge upstairs to whatever fate awaited me.

The room at the top came as a complete surprise. Rather than the rabbit’s warren of little cubicles I had imagined, the place was unexpectedly large. Obviously, all of the interior walls had been knocked out to form a spacious attic which was the same size as the shop beneath.

And what a contrast with the shop it was! There was no clutter up here: In fact, with one exception, the room was almost empty.

In the middle of the floor stood a great square bed hung with white linen, and in it, propped up by a wall of pillows, was a woman whose features might well have been chiseled from a block of ice. There was a faint bluish—or cyanotic—tinge to her face and hands which suggested, at first glance, that she might be the victim of either carbon monoxide or silver poisoning, but as I stared, I began to see that her complexion was colored not by poison, but by artifice.

Her skin was the color of skim milk. Her lips, like those of her husband (I presumed that the parrot-man was her husband) were painted a startling red, and, as if she were a leftover star from the silent cinema, her hair hung down around her face in a mass of silver ringlets.

Only when I had taken in the details of the room and its occupant did I allow my attention to shift to the bed itself: an ebony four-poster with its posts carved into the shape of black angels, each of them frozen into position like a sentry in his box at Buckingham Palace.

Several mattresses must have been piled one atop the other to give the thing its height, and a set of wooden steps had been constructed at the bedside, like a ladder beside a haystack.

Slowly, the icy apparition in the bed lifted a lorgnette to her eyes and regarded me coolly through its lenses.

“Flavia de Luce, you say? One of Colonel de Luce’s daughters—from Buckshaw?”

I nodded.

“Your sister Ophelia has performed for us at the Women’s Institute. A remarkably gifted player.”

I should have known! This landlocked iceberg was a friend of Feely’s!

Under any other circumstances, I’d have said something rude and stalked out of the room, but I thought better of it. The investigation of murder, I was beginning to learn, can demand great personal sacrifice.

Actually, the woman’s words were true. Feely was a first-rate pianist, but there was no sense going on and on about it.

“Yes,” I said, “she’s quite talented.”

Until then I had been unaware that Reginald was close behind me, standing on the stairs just one or two steps from the top.

“You may go, Reginald,” the woman said, and I turned to watch him descend, in uncanny silence, to the shop below.

“Now then,” she said. “Speak.”

“I’m afraid I owe you and Mr. Pettibone an apology,” I said. “I told him a lie.”

“Which was?”

“That I’d come to buy a table for Father. What I really wanted was an opportunity to ask you about the Hobblers.”

“The Hobblers?” she said with an awkward laugh. “Whatever makes you think I’d know anything about the Hobblers? They haven’t existed since the days of powdered wigs.”

In spite of her denial, I could see that my question had caught her off guard. Perhaps I could take advantage of her surprise.

“I know that they were founded in the seventeenth century by Nicodemus Flitch, and that the Palings, at Buckshaw, have played an important role in their history, what with baptisms, and so forth.”

I paused to see how this would be received.

“And what has this to do with me?” she asked, putting down the lorgnette and then picking it up again.

“Oh, somebody mentioned that you belonged to that … faith. I was talking to Miss Mountjoy, and she—”

True enough—I had been talking to Miss Mountjoy. As long as I didn’t actually say that she’d told me, I’d be guilty of no great sin. Other than one of omission, perhaps. Feely was always going on and on about sins of commission and omission until your eyes were left spinning like fishing lures.

“Tilda Mountjoy,” she said, after a long pause. “I see … tell me more.”

“Well, it’s just that I’ve been making a few notes about Buckshaw’s history, you know, and as I was going through some old papers in Father’s library, I came across some quite early documents.”

“Documents?” she demanded. “What kind of documents?”

She was rising to the bait! Her thoughts were written on her face as clearly as if they were tattooed on her cheeks.

Old papers relating to Nicodemus Flitch and the Hobblers? she was thinking. Now here’s my opportunity to pull the rug out from under dear, dull-as-ditchwater old Tilda, and her long-winded papers in the Hobblers’ Historical Society Journal. Former librarian be blowed! I’ll show her what real research can bring to light.

And so forth.

“Oh, just odd bits and pieces,” I said. “Letters to one of my ancestors—Lucius de Luce—about this and that—

“Just a lot of names and dates,” I added. “Nothing terribly interesting, I’m afraid.”

This was the cherry on the icing—but I would pretend to brush it off as worthless.

She was staring at me through her lenses like a birdwatcher who has unexpectedly come upon the rare spotted crake.

Now was the time to keep perfectly still. If my words hadn’t primed the pump of curiosity, then nothing would.

I could almost feel the heat of her gaze.

“There’s more,” she said. “What is it? You’re not telling me the whole truth.”

“Well,” I blurted, “actually, I was thinking of asking if I might be allowed to convert to the Hobblers. We de Luces are not really Anglicans, you see—we’ve been Roman Catholics for ages, but—Feely was telling me that the Hobblers were non—non—”

“Nonconformists?”

“Yes, that’s it—Nonconformists, and I thought that, since I’m a nonconformist myself … well, why not join?”

There was a grain of truth in this: I remembered that one of my heroes, Joseph Priestley, the discoverer of oxygen, had once been the minister of a dissenting sect in Leeds, and if it was good enough for the esteemed Joseph—

“There’s been a great deal of debate,” she said reflectively, “about whether we’re Nonconformists or Dissenters, what with our Reconstitution in 17—”

“Then you are a Hobbler!”

She stared at me long and hard, as if thinking. “There are those,” she said, “who work to preserve the foundations upon which their forefathers built. It is not always easy in this day and age …”

“It doesn’t matter to me,” I said. “I’d give anything to be a Hobbler.”

And in a way it was true. I had visions of myself limping cheerily along a country lane, my arms outstretched for balance, teetering like a tightrope walker, as I veered crazily from hedge to hedge.

“I’m a Hobbler,” I would shout out to everyone as I stumped past.

As I was hobbling to St. Ives …

“Most interesting,” the woman was saying as I came back to reality. “And is your father aware of your aspirations?”

“No!” I said, aghast. “Please don’t tell him! Father is very set in his ways and—”

“I understand,” she said. “We shall let it be our little secret, then. No one but you and I shall know about any of this.”

Hey presto!

“Oh, thank you,” I breathed. “I knew you’d understand.”

As she rattled on about the Act of Toleration, the Five Mile Act, the Countess of Huntingdon, and the Calvinist Connection, I took the opportunity to look around the room.

There wasn’t much to see: the bed, of course, which, now that I had time to think about it, reminded me of the Great Bed of Ware in the Victoria and Albert Museum. In a far corner near a window was a small table with an electric ring and a small kettle, a Brown Betty teapot, a biscuit tin, and a single cup and saucer. Reginald Pettibone was evidently not in the habit of having breakfast with his wife.

“Would you care for a biscuit?” she asked.

“No, thank you,” I said. “I don’t use sugar.”

It was a lie—but an excellent one.

“What an unusual child you are,” she said, and with a wave of the hand towards the tin, she added, “Well, then, perhaps you won’t mind fetching one for me. I have no such scruples.”

I went to the window and reached for the biscuit tin. As I turned, I happened to glance outside—down into the fenced area behind the shop’s back door.

A rusty green van stood with its double doors open, and I knew instantly that it was the one I’d seen parked outside Willow Villa.

As I watched, a powerful man in shirtsleeves stepped into view from somewhere below. It was the bulldog man—the man who had almost caught me in the coach house!

Unless I was sadly mistaken, this would be Edward Sampson, of Rye Road, East Finching—whose name I had found on the papers in the glove compartment.

As I stood rooted to the spot, he reached into the back of the van and dragged out a couple of heavy objects. He turned and, perhaps feeling my eyes upon him, looked straight up at the window where I was standing.

My immediate reaction was to shrink back—to step away from the glass—but I found that I could not. Some remote part of my mind had already spotted a detail that was only now leaking slowly into my consciousness, and I’m afraid I let out a gasp.