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

It was enough to make an archangel spit.

In its container, the aqua regia was growing darker by the minute, as if it, too, were waiting impatiently for answers.

And suddenly I saw the way.

Lighting a Bunsen burner, I set it beneath the flask. I would warm the acid gently before proceeding with the next step.

From a cupboard I took down a small wooden box upon the end of which Uncle Tar had penciled the word “platinum”; and slid open the lid. Inside were perhaps a dozen flat squares of the silvery-gray mineral, none larger than an adult’s fingernail. I selected a piece that weighed perhaps a quarter of an ounce.

When the aqua regia had reached the proper temperature, I picked up the bit of platinum with a pair of tweezers and held it above the mouth of the flask. Aside from the hiss of the gas, the laboratory was so quiet that I actually heard the tiny plop as I let the platinum drop into the fluid.

For a moment, nothing happened.

But now the liquid in the flask was a darkening red.

And then the platinum began to writhe.

This was the part I liked best!

As if in agony, the bit of metal crept towards the glass wall of the flask, trying to escape the acids that were consuming it.

And suddenly poof! The platinum was gone.

I could almost hear the aqua regia licking its lips. “More, please!”

It wasn’t that the platinum had not put up a noble fight, because it had. The important thing, I reminded myself, was this: Platinum cannot be dissolved by any one acid!

No, platinum could not be dissolved by nitric acid alone, and it merely laughed a jolly “ha-ha!” at hydrochloric acid. Only when the two combined could platinum be broken down.

There was a lesson here—two lessons, in fact.

The first was this: I was the platinum. It was going to take more than a single opponent to overcome Flavia Sabina de Luce.

What was left in the flask was bichloride of platinum, which in itself would be useful to test—in some future experiment, perhaps—for the presence of either nicotine or potassium. More to the point, though, was the fact that although the platinum chip had vanished, something new had been formed: something with a whole new set of capabilities.

And then quite suddenly, I caught a glimpse of my face reflected in the glassware, watching wide-eyed as the somewhat cloudy liquid in the flask, shifting uneasily, took on, perhaps, a tinge of sickly yellow, as if in the drifting mists of a Gypsy’s crystal ball.

I knew then what I had to do.

“Aha! Flavia!” the vicar said. “We missed you at church on Sunday.”

“Sorry, Vicar,” I told him, “I’m afraid I rather overdid myself on Saturday, what with the fête and so forth.”

Since good works do not generally require trumpeting, I did not feel it necessary to mention the assistance I had offered to Fenella. And as it turned out, I was right to hold my tongue, because the vicar quickly brought up the subject himself.

“Yes,” he said. “Your father tells me you were allowed rather a luxurious Sabbath lie-in. Really, Flavia, it was most kind of you to play the Good Samaritan, as it were. Most kind.”

“It was nothing,” I said, with becoming modesty. “I was happy to help.”

The vicar got to his feet and stretched. He had been snipping away with a pair of kitchen scissors at the tufts of grass growing round the wooden legs of the St. Tancred’s signboard.

“God’s work takes many strange forms,” he said, when he saw me grinning at his handiwork.

“I visited the poor soul in hospital,” he went on, “directly after Morning Prayer.”

“You spoke to her?” I asked, astonished.

“Oh, dear, no. Nothing like that. I’m sure she wasn’t even aware of my presence. Nurse Duggan told me that she hadn’t regained consciousness—the Gypsy woman, of course, not Nurse Duggan—and that she—the Gypsy woman, I mean—had spent a restless night, crying out every now and then about something that was hidden. The poor thing was delirious, of course.”

Something hidden? What could Fenella have meant?

It was true that she had mentioned to me the woman whose fortune she had told just before mine: something about something that was buried in the past, but would that count as hidden? It was worth a try.

“It’s too bad, isn’t it?” I said, shaking my head. “Hers was the most popular pitch at the fête—until the tent caught fire, that is. She was telling me how startled someone was—the person who went in just before me, I believe—when she happened to guess correctly something about her past.”

Had a little cloud drifted across the vicar’s face?

“Her past? Oh, I should hardly think so. The person whose fortune was told immediately before yours was Mrs. Bull.”

Mrs. Bull? Well, I’ll be blowed! I’d have been willing to take an oath that Mrs. Bull’s first encounter with Fenella in several years had taken place in my presence, on Saturday, in the Gully—after the fête.

“Are you sure?” I asked.

“Quite sure,” the vicar said. “I was standing near the coconut pitch talking to Ted Sampson when Mrs. Bull asked me to keep an eye on her tots for a few minutes. ‘I shan’t be long, Vicar,’ she said. ‘But I must have my fortune read—make sure there are no more of these little blighters in my future.’

“She was joking, of course, but still, it seemed a very odd thing to say, under the circumstances.” The vicar reddened. “Oh, dear, I fear I’ve been indiscreet. You must forget my words at once.”

“Don’t worry, Vicar,” I told him. “I won’t say a word.”

I went through the motions of sewing my lips shut with a needle and a very long piece of thread. The vicar winced at my grimaces.

“Besides,” I said, “it’s not the same as if the Bulls were your parishioners.”

“It is the same,” he said. “Discretion is discretion—it knows no religious bounds.”

“Is Mrs. Bull a Hobbler?” I asked suddenly.

His brow wrinkled. “A Hobbler? Whatever makes you think that? Dear me, that somewhat peculiar faith was, if I am not mistaken, suppressed in the late eighteenth century. There have been rumors, of course, but one mustn’t—”

“Was it?” I interrupted. “Suppressed, I mean?”

Could it be that the Hobblers had gone underground so effectively that their very presence in Bishop’s Lacey was disbelieved by the vicar of St. Tancred’s?

“Whatever her allegiances,” the vicar continued, “we mustn’t pass judgment upon the beliefs of others, must we?”

“I suppose not,” I said, just as the meaning of his earlier words struck home.

“Did you say you were talking to a Mr. Sampson? Mr. Sampson of East Finching?”

The vicar nodded. “Ted Sampson. He still comes back to lend a hand with the tents and booths. He’s been doing it man and boy for twenty-five years. He says it makes him feel close to his parents—they’re both of them buried here in the churchyard, you understand. Of course he’s lived in East Finching since he married a—”

“Yes?” I said. If I’d had whiskers they’d have been trembling.

“Oh dear,” the vicar said. “I fear I’ve said too much. You must excuse me.”

He dropped to his knees and resumed his snipping at the grass, and I knew that our interview was at an end.

Gladys’s tires purred on the tarmac as we sped north towards East Finching. It was easy going at first, but then as the road rose up, fold upon fold, into the encircling hills, I had to lean on her pedals like billy-ho.

By the time I reached Pauper’s Well at the top of Denham Rise, I was panting like a dog. I dismounted and, leaning Gladys against the stone casing of the well, dropped to my knees for a drink.

Pauper’s Well was not so much a well as a natural spring: a place where the water gurgled up from some underground source, and had done so since before the Romans had helped themselves to an icy, refreshing swig.

Spring water, I knew, was a remarkable chemical soup: calcium, magnesium, potassium, iron, and assorted salts and sulphates. I grabbed the battered old tin cup that hung from a chain, scooped it full of the burbling water, and drank until I thought I could feel my bones strengthening.

With the water still dribbling down my chin, I stood up and looked out over the countryside. Behind me, spread out like a handkerchief for a doll’s picnic, was Bishop’s Lacey. Through it, this side of the high street, the river Efon wound its lazy way round the village before ambling off to the southwest and Buckshaw.

Now, almost two weeks into the harvest, most of the countryside had traded its intense summer green for a paler, grayish shade, as if Mother Nature had nodded off a little, and let the colors leak away.

In the distance, like a black bug crawling up the hillside, a tractor dragged a harrow across a farmer’s field, the buzz of its engine coming clearly to my ears.

From up here, I could see the Palings to the south, a green oasis at a bend in the river. And there was Buckshaw, its stones glowing warmly in the sunlight, as if they had been cut from precious citrine and polished by a master’s hand.

Harriet’s house, I thought, although for the life of me I don’t know why. Something was welling up in my throat. It must have been something in the well water. I took Gladys from her resting place and shoved off towards East Finching.

From this point on, the journey was all downhill. After a couple of jolly good pumps to get up speed, I put my feet up on the handlebars, and Gladys and I with the wind in our teeth came swooping like a harrier down the dusty road and into East Finching’s high street.

Unlike its neighbors, Malden Fenwick and Bishop’s Lacey, East Finching was not a pretty bit of Ye Olde England. No half-timbered houses here—no riot of flowers in cottage gardens. Instead, the word that came to mind was “grubby.”

At least half the shops in the high street had boarded-up windows, while those that were apparently still in business had rather a sad and defeated look.

In the window of a tobacconist’s shop on the corner, a crooked sign advertised: Today’s Papers.

A bell above the door gave out a harsh jangle as I stepped inside, and a gray-haired man with old-fashioned square spectacles looked up from his newspaper.

“Well?” he said, as if I had surprised him in his bath.

“Excuse me,” I said. “I wonder if you can help me? I’m looking for Mr. Sampson—Edward Sampson. Could you tell me where he lives?”

“What you want with him, then? Selling biscuits, are you?”

His mouth broke into a ghastly grin, revealing three horrid teeth which appeared to be carved from rotted wood.

It was the same thing, more or less, that the abominable Ursula had said to me at Vanetta Harewood’s door: a bad joke that was doing the rounds of the countryside, the way bad jokes do.

I held my tongue.

“Selling biscuits, are you?” he said again, like a music hall comic beating a joke to death.

“Actually, no,” I said. “Mr. Sampson’s parents are buried in St. Tancred’s churchyard, in Bishop’s Lacey, and we’re setting up a Graves Maintenance Fund. It’s the war, you see … We thought that perhaps he’d like to—”

The man stared at me skeptically over his spectacles. I was going to have to do better than this.

“Oh, yes—I almost forgot. I also bring thanks from the vicar and the ladies of the Women’s Institute—and the Altar Guild—for Mr. Sampson’s help with the fête on Saturday. It was a smashing success.”

I think it was the WI and the Altar Guild that did it. The tobacconist wrinkled his nose in disgust, hitched his spectacles a little higher, and jabbed his thumb towards the street.

“Yellow fence,” he said. “Salvage,” and went back to his reading.

“Thank you,” I said. “You’re very kind.”

And I almost meant it.

The place was hard to miss. A tall wooden fence, in a shade of yellow that betrayed the use of war surplus aviation paint, sagged inwards and outwards along three sides of a large property.

It was evident that the fence had been thrown up in an attempt to hide from the street the ugliness of the salvage business, but with little effect. Behind its boards, piles of rusting metal scrap towered into the air like heaps of giant jackstraws.

On the fence tall red letters, painted by an obviously amateur hand, spelled out: SAMPSON—SALVAGE—SCRAP IRON BOUGHT—BEST PRICES—MOTOR PARTS.

An iron rod leant against the double gates, holding them shut. I put my eye to the crack and peered inside.

Maddeningly, there wasn’t much to see—because of the angle, my view was blocked by a wrecked lorry that had been overturned and its wheels removed.

With a quick glance up and down the street, I shifted the rod, tugged the gates open a bit, took a deep breath, and squeezed through.

Immediately in front of me, a sign painted in blood-red letters on the hulk of a pantechnicon said BEWARE OF THE DOC—as if the animal in question had gone for the artist’s throat before he could finish the letter G.

I stopped in my tracks and listened, but there was no sign of the beast. Perhaps the warning was meant simply to scare off strangers.

On one side of the yard was a good-sized Nissen hut which, judging by the tire tracks leading to its double doors, was in regular use. To my right, like a row of iron oasthouses, the towering junk piles I had seen from outside the gates led away towards the back of the lot. Projecting from the closest heap—as if it had just crashed and embedded itself—was what surely must be the back half of a Spitfire, the red, white, and blue RAF markings as fresh and bright as if they had been applied just yesterday.

The fence had concealed the size of the place—it must have covered a couple of acres. Beyond the mountains of scrap, spotted here and there, scores of wrecked motorcars subsided sadly into the grass, and even at the back of the property, where the scrap gave way gradually to an orchard, blotches of colored metal glinting among the trees signaled that there were bodies there, too.

As I moved warily along the gravel path between the heaps of broken machinery, hidden things gave off an occasional rusty ping as if they were trying to warm themselves enough in the sun to come back to life—but with little success.

“Hello?” I called, hoping desperately that there would be no answer—and there wasn’t.

At the end of an L-shaped bend in the gravel was a brick structure: rather like a washhouse, I thought, or perhaps a laundry, with a round chimney rising up about thirty feet above its flat roof.

The windows were so coated with grime that even by rubbing with my fist, I could see nothing inside. In place of a knob, the door was furnished with what looked like a homemade latch: something cobbled together from bits of iron fencing.

I put my thumb on the tongue of the thing and pressed it down. The latch popped up, the door swung open, and I stepped into the dim interior.