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

Perhaps a bath would buck me up. I smiled at the thought. Daffy would be dumbstruck if she knew of my bathing without being threatened. “Filthy Flavia,” she called me, at least when Father wasn’t around.

Daffy herself loved nothing better than to subside into a steaming tub with a book, where she would stay until the water had gone cold.

“It’s like reading in one’s own coffin,” she would say afterwards, “but without the stench.”

I did not share her enthusiasm.

A light tapping at the door interrupted these thoughts. I wrapped myself tightly in the tartan blanket and, like a penguin, waddled across the room.

It was Dogger, a fresh cup of steaming cocoa in his hand.

“Good morning, Miss Flavia,” he said. He did not ask how I was feeling, but nonetheless, I was aware of his keen scrutiny.

“Good morning,” I replied. “Please put it on the table. Sorry about the one you brought last night. I was too tired to drink it.”

With a nod, Dogger swapped the cups.

“The Colonel wishes to see you in the drawing room,” he said. “Inspector Hewitt is with him.”

Blast and double blast! I hadn’t had time to think things through. How much was I going to tell the Inspector and how much was I going to keep to myself?

To say nothing of Father! What would he say when he heard that his youngest daughter had been out all night, wading around in the blood of a Gypsy he had once evicted from his estate?

Dogger must have sensed my uneasiness.

“I believe the Inspector is inquiring about your health, miss. I shall tell them you’ll be down directly.”

Bathed and rigged up in a ribboned dress, I came slowly down the stairs. Feely turned from a mirror in the foyer in which she had been examining her face.

“Now you’re for it,” she said.

“Fizz off,” I replied pleasantly.

“Half the Hinley Constabulary on your tail and still you have time to be saucy to your sister. I hope you won’t expect a visit from me when you’re in the clink.”

I swept past her with all the dignity I could muster, trying to gather my wits as I walked across the foyer. At the door of the drawing room, I paused to form a little prayer: “May the Lord bless me and keep me and make His face to shine upon me; may He fill me with great grace and lightning-quick thinking.”

I opened the door.

Inspector Hewitt came to his feet. He had been sitting in the overstuffed armchair in which Daffy was usually lounging sideways with a book. Father stood in front of the mantelpiece, the dark side of his face reflected in the mirror.

“Ah, Flavia,” he said. “The Inspector was just telling me that a woman’s life has been saved by your prompt action. Well done.”

Well done? … Well done?

Was this my father speaking? Or was one of the Old Gods merely using him as a ventriloquist’s dummy to deliver to me a personal commendation from Mount Olympus?

But no—Father was a most unlikely messenger. Not once in my eleven years could I recall him praising me, and now that he had done so, I hadn’t the faintest idea how to respond.

The Inspector extracted me from a sticky situation.

“Well done, indeed,” he said. “They tell me that in spite of the ferocity of the attack, she’s come out of it with no more than a fractured skull. At her age, of course …”

Father interrupted. “Dr. Darby rang up to express his commendations, Flavia, but Dogger told him you were sleeping. I took the message myself.”

Father on the telephone? I could hardly believe it! Father only allowed “the instrument,” as he called it, to be kept in the house with the express understanding that it be used only in the direst of emergencies: the Apocalypse, for instance.

But Dr. Darby was one of Father’s friends. In due course, I knew, the good doctor would be sternly lectured on his breach of household standing orders, but ultimately would live to tell the tale.

“Still,” Father said, his face clouding a little, “you’re going to have to explain what you were doing wandering round the Palings in the middle of the night.”

“That poor Gypsy woman,” I said, changing the subject. “Her tent burned down at the fête. She had nowhere to go.”

As I talked, I watched Father’s face for any sign of balking. Hadn’t he, after all, been the one who had driven Johnny Faa and his wife from the Buckshaw estate? Had he forgotten the incident? He was almost certainly not aware that his actions had caused the Gypsy’s husband to fall dead in the road, and I wasn’t about to tell him.

“I thought of the vicar’s sermon, the one about Christian charity—”

“Yes, yes, Flavia,” Father said. “Most commendable.”

“I told her she could camp in the Palings, but only for one night. I knew that you’d—”

“Thank you, Flavia, that’s quite enough.”

“—approve.”

Poor Father: outflanked, outgunned, and outwitted. I almost felt sorry for him.

He crooked a forefinger and touched the angled joint to each side of his clipped mustache in turn: right and then left—a kind of suppressed, nervous preening that had probably been practiced by military officers since time immemorial. I’d be willing to bet that if Julius Caesar had a mustache he knuckled it in precisely the same way.

“Inspector Hewitt would like a word with you. Because it concerns confidential information about individuals with whom I am not acquainted, I shall leave you alone.”

With a nod to the Inspector, Father left the room. I heard the door of his study open, and then close, as he sought refuge among his postage stamps.

“Now then,” the Inspector said, flipping open his notebook and unscrewing the cap of his Biro. “From the beginning.”

“I couldn’t sleep, you see,” I began.

“Not that beginning,” Inspector Hewitt said without looking up. “Tell me about the church fête.”

“I’d gone into the Gypsy’s tent to have my fortune told.”

“And did you?”

“No,” I lied.

The last thing on earth I wanted to share with the Inspector was the woman on the mountain—the woman who wanted to come home from the cold. Nor did I care to tell him about the woman that I was in the process of becoming.

“I knocked her candle over, and before I knew it, I … I …”

Much to my surprise, my lower lip was trembling at the recollection.

“Yes, we’ve heard about that. The vicar was able to provide us with a very good account, as was Dr. Darby.”

I gulped, wondering if anyone had reported how I’d hidden behind a pitch as the Gypsy’s tent burned to ashes.

“Poor girl,” he said tenderly. “You’ve had quite a series of shocks, haven’t you?”

I nodded.

“If I’d had any idea of what you’d already been through, I’d have taken you to the hospital directly.”

“It’s all right,” I said gamely. “I’ll be all right.”

“Will you?” the Inspector asked.

“No,” I said, struggling with tears.

And suddenly it all came pouring out: From the fête to the Palings, not forgetting the seething Mrs. Bull; from my frankly fabricated tale of awakening in the night to fret about the Gypsy woman’s welfare to my discovery of her lying in a pool of her own blood in the caravan, I left out not a single detail.

Except Brookie Harewood, of course.

I was saving him for myself.

It was a magnificent performance, if I do say so. As I had been forced to learn at a very young age, there’s no better way to mask a lie—or at least a glaring omission—than to wrap it in an emotional outpouring of truth.

During it all, Inspector Hewitt’s Biro fairly flew over the pages, getting every scrap of it down for the record. He must have studied one of the shorthand methods, I thought idly as he scribbled. Later, he would expand these notes into a longer, neater, more legible form.

Perhaps he would dictate them to his wife, Antigone. I had met her not long before at a puppet show in the parish hall. Would she remember me?

In my mind I could see her seated at a typewriter at the kitchen table in their tastefully decorated cottage, her back ramrod straight in a position of perfect posture, her fingers hovering eagerly over the keys. She would be wearing hooped earrings, and a silk blouse of oyster gray.

“Flavia de Luce?” she would be saying, her large, dark eyes looking up at her husband. “Why, isn’t she that charming girl I met at St. Tancred’s, dear?”

Inspector Hewitt’s eyes would crinkle at the corners.

“One and the same, my love,” he would tell her, shaking his head at the memory of me. “One and the same.”

We had reached the end of my statement, the point at which the Inspector himself had arrived upon the scene in the Palings.

“That will do for now,” he said, flipping closed his notebook and shoving it into the inside pocket of his jacket. “I’ve asked Sergeant Graves to come round later to take your fingerprints. Quite routine, of course.”

I wrinkled my brow, but secretly I couldn’t have been more delighted. The dimpled detective sergeant with his winks and grins had come to be one of my favorites among the Hinley Constabulary.

“I expect they’ll be all over everything,” I said helpfully. “Mine and Dr. Darby’s.”

“And those of the Gypsy woman’s attacker,” he might have added, but he did not. Rather, he stood up and stuck his hand out to be shaken, as formally as if he were being received at a royal garden party.

“Thank you, Flavia,” he said. “You’ve been of great assistance … as always.”

As always? Was the Inspector twitting me?

But no—his handshake was firm and he looked me straight in the eye.

I’m afraid I smirked.

SEVEN

“DOGGER!” I SAID. “THEY’RE coming to take my fingerprints!”

Dogger looked up from the vast array of silverware he was polishing on the kitchen table. For just a moment his face was a complete blank, and then he said, “I trust they will be returned to you in good order.”

I blinked. Was Dogger making a joke? I hoped desperately that he was.

Dogger had suffered the most awful privations in the Far East during the war. His mind now seemed sometimes to consist of no more than a crazy tangle of broken suspension bridges joining the past with the present. If he had ever made a joke before, I had never heard of it. This, then, could be a momentous occasion.

“Oh! Ha ha ha.” I laughed too loudly. “That’s very good, Dogger. Returned to me in good order … I must remember to tell that one to Mrs. Mullet.”

I had no intention whatever of sharing this precious moment with our cook, but sometimes flattery does not know when to stop.

Dogger formed a faint smile as he returned a fish fork to the cutlery chest and selected another. The de Luce silverware was kept in a dark folding cabinet which, when opened, presented a remarkable array of fish forks, toddy ladles, mote spoons, marrow scoops, lobster picks, sugar nips, grape shears, and pudding trowels, all arranged in steps, like so many silvery salmon leaping up the stony staircase of a whisky-colored stream somewhere in Scotland.

Dogger had lugged this heavy box to the kitchen table for the ritual cleaning of the cutlery, a seemingly endless task that occupied a great deal of his time, and one that I never tired of watching.

Mrs. Mullet loved to tell about how, as a child, I had been found on top of the table playing with the dolls I had contrived by clothing a family of sterling silver forks in folded napkins. Their identical faces—long noses and round cheeks—were just barely suggested by the engraved D L on the top of each handle, and required a great leap of the imagination to make them out at all.

“The Mumpeters,” I had called them: Mother Mumpeter, Father Mumpeter, and the three little Mumpeter girls, all of whom—even though they were burdened with three or four legs each—I had made to walk and dance and sing gaily upon the tabletop.

I could still remember Grindlestick, the three-legged waif I had fashioned from a pickle fork (which Father referred to as a trifid), who performed the most amazing acrobatics until I jammed one of her legs in a crack and broke it off.

“Better than the ’ippodrome, it were,” Mrs. M would tell me as she wiped away a tear of laughter. “Poor little tyke.”

I still don’t know if she meant Grindlestick or me.

Now, as I watched him at his work, I wondered if Dogger had known about the Mumpeters. It was likely that he did, since Mrs. Mullet, when it came to gossip, was equaled only by the News of the World.

I knew that there would never be a better time to dig for information: Mrs. M was away from her usual post in the kitchen and Dogger seemed to be at a peak of alertness. I took a deep breath and plunged directly in: “I found Brookie Harewood in the drawing room last night,” I said. “Actually, it was past two in the morning.”

Dogger finished polishing a grapefruit knife, then put it down and aligned it perfectly with its mates on a strip of green baize.

“What was he doing?” he asked.

“Nothing. Just standing by the fireplace. No, wait! He was crouched down, touching one of the firedogs.”

These fire irons had belonged to Harriet, and although they had different faces, each was that of a wily fox. Harriet had used them as the main characters in the bedtime stories she’d invented for Daffy and Feely: a fact of which they never tired of reminding me.

To be perfectly truthful, I bitterly resented the fact that my mother had spun so many tales of the make-believe world for my sisters but not for me. She had died before I was old enough to receive my due.

“Which of the two irons was he touching?” Dogger asked, already halfway to his feet.

“The Sally Fox,” I said. “The one on the right.”

Sally Fox and Shoppo were the names Harriet had given to the cunning pair, who had gone jauntily adventuring through an imaginary world—a world that had been lost with Harriet’s death. From time to time, Feely and Daffy, trying to resuscitate the warm and happy feeling of bygone days, had made up their own tales about the two crafty foxes, but in recent years they had, for some reason, stopped trying. Perhaps they had grown too old for fairy tales.

I followed as Dogger walked from the kitchen through to the foyer and made for the drawing room in the west wing.

He paused for a moment, listening at the door, then seemed to vanish through its panels like a wisp of smoke, as so many of the older servants are able to do.

He went straight to the Sally Fox, regarding her as solemnly as if he were a priest come to administer the last rites. When he had finished, he moved a few feet to his left and repeated the same performance with Shoppo.

“Most odd,” he said.

“Odd?”

“Most odd. This one,” he said, pointing to the Sally Fox, “has been missing for several weeks.”

“Missing?”

“It was not here yesterday. I did not inform the Colonel because I knew he would worry. At first I thought I might have misplaced it myself during one of my—my …”