I Am Half-Sick of Shadows

by Alan Bradley

  “You and Father were in the army together, weren’t you?” I asked, in so casual and offhanded a manner that I hated myself for having bungled it before I even began.

  “Yes, miss,” Dogger had said. “But there are things which must not be spoken of.”

  “Even to me?” I wanted to ask.

  I wanted him to say “Especially to you,” or something like that: something I could mull over deliciously in the midnight hours, but he did not. He simply reached among the thorns and, with a couple of precision snips, deadheaded the last of the dying roses.

  Dogger was like that—his loyalty to Father could sometimes be infuriating.

  “I think,” he was saying, “you’d best slip down and awaken Dr. Darby … if you wouldn’t mind, of course.”

  “Of course,” I said, and letting myself out, made for the stairs.

  To my surprise, Dr. Darby was not where I had last seen him: The spot where he had rested was empty, and he was nowhere in sight.

  As I wondered what to do, the doctor appeared from beneath the stairs.

  “Telephone’s bust,” he said, as if to himself. “Wanted to call Queenie and let her know I’m still respirating.”

  Queenie was Dr. Darby’s wife, whose terrible arthritis had confined her to a wheelchair.

  “Yes, Mrs. Richardson tried to use it last night. Don’t you remember?”

  “Of course I do,” he said snappishly. “It’s just that I’d forgotten.”

  “Dogger has asked if you’d mind coming upstairs,” I said, taking care not to give out any details in case one of the sleepers might be listening to us with their eyes closed. “He’d like your advice.”

  “Lead on, then,” Dr. Darby said, with surprisingly little reluctance.

  “ ‘… amid the encircling gloom,’ ” he added, extracting his first mint of the day from his waistcoat pocket.

  I led the way upstairs to the Blue Bedroom, where Dogger was still crouched beside the corpse.

  “Ah, Arthur,” Dr. Darby said. “Again I find you on the scene.”

  Dogger looked from one of us to the other with something like a smile, and then he was gone.

  “We’d better be having the police,” Dr. Darby said, after making the same examination of Phyllis Wyvern’s eyes that Dogger had already done.

  He felt one of the limp wrists and applied his thumb to the angle of the jaw.

  “Is life extinct, Doctor?” I asked. I had heard the phrase on a wireless program about Philip Odell, the private eye, and thought it sounded much more professional than “Is she dead?”

  I knew that she was, of course, but I liked to have my own observations confirmed by a professional.

  “Yes,” Dr. Darby said, “she’s dead. You’d better roust out that German chap—Dieter, is it? He looks as if he’d be good with skis.”

  Fifteen minutes later I was in the coach house with Dieter, helping him strap the skis to his boots.

  “Did these belong to your mother?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I suppose so.”

  “They are very good skis,” he said. “Madshus. In Norway, they were made. Someone has looked after them.”

  It must have been Father, I thought. He came here sometimes to sit in Harriet’s old Rolls-Royce, as if it were a glass chapel in a fairy tale.

  “Well, then,” Dieter said at last. “Off we go.”

  I followed him as far as the Visto, climbing in my rubber boots from drift to drift. As we passed the wall of the kitchen garden, I caught a glimpse of a face at the driver’s window of one of the lorries. It was Latshaw.

  I waved, but he did not return my greeting.

  When the snow was too deep to follow, I stopped and watched until Dieter was no more than a tiny black speck in the snowy wastes.

  Only when I could no longer see him did I go back into the coach house.

  I needed to think.

  I climbed up into the backseat of Harriet’s old Rolls-Royce and wrapped myself in a motoring rug. Words like “warm” and “snug” swam into my mind.

  When I awoke, the clock of the Phantom II was indicating a silent five forty-five A.M.

  “What on earth—” Mrs. Mullet said, obviously surprised to see me coming in through the kitchen door. “You’ll freeze to death!”

  I shrugged in my cardigan.

  “I don’t care,” I said, hoping for a little sympathy and perhaps an advance on the Christmas pudding, which was one of the few dishes that she cooked to my satisfaction.

  Mrs. Mullet ignored me. She was bustling busily about the kitchen, boiling a huge dented kettle for tea and slicing loaves of freshly baked bread for toast. It was obvious that Phyllis Wyvern’s murder had not yet been announced to the household.

  “Good job I laid in so much for Christmas, isn’t it, Alf? Got an army to feed, I ’ave. Lyin’ in this mornin’ like so many lords and ladies, the lot of ’em—’ard floors or no. That’s the way of it with snow—couple of inches and they goes all ’elpless, like.”

  Alf was sitting in the corner spreading jam on an Eccles cake.

  “ ’Elpless,” he said. “As you say.

  “What’s Father Christmas bringin’ you this year?” he asked me suddenly. “A nice dolly, then, p’raps, with different outfits, an’ that?”

  A nice dolly indeed! What did he take me for?

  “Actually, I was hoping for a Riggs generator and a set of graduated Erlenmeyer flasks,” I said. “One can never have too much scientific glassware.”

  “Arrr,” he said, whatever that meant.

  Alf’s mention of Father Christmas, though, had reminded me that it was now Sunday—that tonight would be Christmas Eve.

  Before I slept another night I would be scaling Buckshaw’s roof and chimneys to set in motion my chemical experiment.

  “You’d better watch out …” I sang as I strolled out of the kitchen.

  Beyond the kitchen door, the place was a madhouse. The foyer, in particular, was like the lobby of a West End theater at the interval—scores of people pretending to have a jolly old chin-wag and everyone talking at the same time.

  The noise level, for someone with my sensitive hearing, was nearly intolerable. I needed to get away. The police would probably not be here for hours. There was still plenty of time to put the finishing touches to my plans for Christmas Eve.

  I had first thought of the fireworks long before Father had signed his agreement with Ilium Films. My original plan had been to set them off on the roof of Buckshaw, a display of fire and lights that could clearly be seen a mile away in Bishop’s Lacey: my Christmas gift to the village, so to speak—a gift that would be talked about long after Saint Nicholas had flown home to the frozen north.

  I would send up showers of fire that would shame the northern lights: elaborate parasols of hot and cold fire of every color known to man. Chemistry would see to that!

  That plan had expanded slowly over the months to include a scheme to capture the bearded old elf himself, to put to rest for once and for all the cruel taunts of my stupid sisters.

  Now, as I prepared the chemical ingredients, I was suddenly subdued. It had only just occurred to me that it might be disrespectful to set off such a terrific celebration with a corpse in the house. Even though, in all likelihood, the remains of Phyllis Wyvern would be removed by the time Father Christmas came to call, I wouldn’t want to be accused of being insensitive.

  “Eureka!” I said, as I set out in neat rows the flowerpots I had borrowed from the greenhouse. “I have it!”

  I would manufacture a giant Rocket of Honor in Phyllis Wyvern’s memory! Yes, that was it—a dazzling and earsplitting finale to end the show.

  I had found the formula devised by the wonderfully named Mr. Bigot, in an old book in Uncle Tar’s library. All that was required was to add the right amount of antimony and a handful of cast-iron filings to the basic recipe.

  Twenty minutes with a file and a convenient hot-water radiator had produced the first o
f these ingredients—the other was in a bottle at my fingertips.

  Wads of waxed paper and a hollow cardboard tube made an admirable casing, and before you could say “Ka-Boom!” the rocket was ready.

  With the dessert prepared, it was now time for the main course. This was the dangerous part, and I needed to pay close attention to my every move.

  Because of the risk of explosion, the potassium chlorate had to be mixed with exceedingly great care in a bowl that would not produce sparks.

  Fortunately I remembered the aluminum salad set Aunt Felicity had given Feely for her last birthday.

  “Dear girl,” she had said, “you are now eighteen. In a few years—four or five, if you’re lucky—your teeth shall begin to fall out and you shall find yourself eyeing the girdles at Harrods. The early girls get the most vigorous grooms, and don’t you forget it. Don’t stare at the ceiling with that vacuous look on your face, Ophelia. These aluminum bowls are manufactured from salvaged aircraft. They’re lightweight, practical, and pleasing to the eye. How better to begin your trousseau?”

  I had found the bowls hidden at the back of a high shelf in the pantry and seized them in the name of science.

  To produce the blue explosions, I mixed six parts of potassium nitrate, two of sulfur, and one part of trisulfide of antimony.

  This was the formula used for the glaring rescue rockets at sea, and I reckoned these ones would be visible from Malden Fenwick—perhaps even from Hinley and beyond.

  To one or two of the portions, I added a dollop of oak charcoal to give the explosions the appearance of rain; to others a bit of lampblack to produce spurs of fire.

  It was important to keep in mind the fact that winter fireworks required a different formula than those designed for summer. The basic idea was this: less sulfur and lots more gunpowder.

  I had concocted the gunpowder myself from niter, sulfur, charcoal, and a happy heart. When working with explosives, I’ve found that attitude is everything.

  It was something I had learned at the time of that awful business with the unfortunate Miss Gurdy, our former governess—but stop! That catastrophe was no longer spoken of at Buckshaw. It was in the past and, mercifully, had almost been forgotten. At least I hoped it had been forgotten, since it was one of my few failures in experimenting with dualin—a substance containing sawdust, saltpeter, and nitroglycerin, and notorious for its instability.

  I sighed and, banishing poor, scorched Miss Gurdy from my mind, turned it to more pleasant thoughts.

  Before packing the ingredients into earthenware flowerpots I’d borrowed from the greenhouse, I had added to some of them a certain amount of arsenious oxide (AS4O6), sometimes known as white arsenic. Although it was pleasant to think that a deadly poison should produce the whitest of aerial explosions, that wasn’t my reason for choosing it.

  What appealed to me, what really warmed my heart, was the thought of suspending over our ancestral home, even if only for a few seconds, an umbrella of deadly poisonous fire that would fall—then suddenly vanish as if by magic, leaving Buckshaw safe from harm.

  I didn’t care if it made sense or not. It was the idea of the thing, and I was happy that I’d thought of it.

  Each of the flowerpots now needed to be sealed, like preserves, with a lid of onionskin paper to protect the chemicals against moisture. Later tonight, just before bedtime, I would lug them, one at a time, up the narrow staircase that led from my laboratory to the roof.

  And then I’d begin my work among the chimney pots.

  I was halfway down the stairs, hoping I didn’t smell too much of gunpowder, when the doorbell rang. Dogger appeared, as he always does, as if from nowhere, and as I reached the last step, he opened the door.

  There stood Inspector Hewitt of the Hinley Constabulary.

  I hadn’t seen the Inspector for quite some time and our last meeting had been one I’d rather not dwell upon.

  We stood staring at each other across the foyer like two wolves that have come from different directions upon a clearing full of sheep.

  I was hoping Inspector Hewitt would let bygones be bygones—that he would stride across the foyer, give me a chummy handshake, and tell me that it was nice to see me again. I had, after all, helped him out of a number of jams in the past without so much as a pat on the back or a “kiss my arsenic.”

  Well, that’s not quite true: His wife, Antigone, had asked me to tea in October, but the less said of that the better.

  Which is why I was now standing there in the foyer, pretending to check something that had become lodged between my teeth by examining my reflection in one of the polished newel posts at the end of the banister. Just as I decided to relent and give the Inspector a curt nod, he turned and, without a backward glance, walked away towards Dr. Darby, who had made an appearance suddenly on the west landing.

  Blue curses! If I’d been thinking straight, I’d have welcomed the Inspector myself—shown him upstairs to the scene of the crime.

  But it was too late. I had shut myself out of the Chamber of Death (that’s what they called it on the wireless mystery programs) and it was now too late to eat crow.

  Or was it?

  “Oh, Mrs. Mullet,” I said, barging into the kitchen as if I’d only just heard the news. “The most dreadful thing has happened. Miss Wyvern has met with a frightful accident, and Inspector Hewitt is here. I thought that, what with the awful weather and so forth, he’d be grateful for a cup of your famous tea.”

  Flattery can never be overcooked.

  “If you mean she’s dead,” said Mrs. Mullet, “I already knewed it. Word like that gets round like beeswax. Shockin’, I’m sure, but there’s no ’oldin’ it back, is there, Alf?”

  Alf shook his head.

  “I knewed it as soon as I seen Dr. Darby’s face. ’E goes all-over sobersides whenever death’s about. I mind the time Mrs. Tarbell was took in the bath. ’E’s always been like that an’ ’e always will be. Might just as well ’ave a sign plastered on ’is fore’ead sayin’ ‘She’s Dead,’ mightn’t ’e, Alf.”

  “A signboard,” Alf said. “On ’is fore’ead.”

  “I told Alf, I did, didn’t I, Alf? ‘Alf,’ I said. ‘Somethin’s not right,’ I said. ‘There’s such a face on Dr. Darby which I seen in the corridor just now an’ if I didn’t know better I should say as there’s a corpse in the ’ouse.’ That’s what I said, didn’t I, Alf.”

  “ ’Er exact words,” said Alf.

  I didn’t bother knocking at the door of the Blue Bedroom. I simply strolled in as if I’d been born at Scotland Yard.

  I gave the knob a twist and pushed the door open with my behind, maneuvering the tray through the doorway in the way that Mrs. Mullet always did.

  For a moment I thought I had annoyed the Inspector.

  He turned slowly from Phyllis Wyvern’s staring body, sparing me no more than a rapid glance.

  “Thank you,” he said. “You may put it on the table.”

  Meekly, I obeyed—dog that I am—hoping desperately he wouldn’t order me to leave. In my mind, I made myself invisible.

  “Thank you,” the Inspector said again. “It’s very kind of you. Please tell Mrs. Mullet we’re most grateful.”

  “Bug off,” was what he meant.

  Dr. Darby said nothing, but noisily extracted a mint from the bottomless bag in his waistcoat pocket.

  I kept as still as a snake in winter.

  “Thank you, Flavia,” the Inspector said, without turning round.

  Well, at least he hadn’t forgotten my name.

  There was a silence that grew more uncomfortable by the second. I decided to fill it before anyone else had a chance.

  “I expect you’ve already noticed,” I blurted, “that her makeup was applied after she was dead.”

  • THIRTEEN •

  TO MY SURPRISE, THE Inspector chuckled.

  “Another of your chemical deductions?” he asked.

  “Not at all,” I said. “I simply observed that there
was makeup on the upper surface of her lower lip. Since she has a slight overbite, she’d have licked it away in seconds if she’d been alive.”

  Dr. Darby bent in for a closer look at Phyllis Wyvern’s lips.

  “By George!” he said. “She’s right.”

  Of course I was right. The endless hours I had spent being fitted and refitted with braces in Dr. Reekie’s chamber of tortures in Farringdon Street had made me a leading authority on jaw alignment. In fact, there had been times when I’d thought of myself as the Human Nutcracker. To me, Phyllis Wyvern’s mandibular displacement had been as easy to spot as a horse in a birdbath.

  “And when did you make that observation?” the Inspector asked.

  I had to give him credit. For an older man, he had a remarkably nimble mind.

  “It was I who discovered the body,” I told him. “I went for Dogger at once.”

  “Why would you do that?” he asked, instantly spotting the flaw in my account. “When Dr. Darby was no farther away than the foyer?”

  “Dr. Darby came with Dieter in the sleigh,” I said. “I saw him arrive, and I knew he hadn’t brought his medical bag. He was also very tired. I noticed him dozing during the performance.”

  “And?” he said, raising an eyebrow.

  “And … I was frightened. I knew that Dogger was likely the only one awake in the entire house—he sometimes doesn’t sleep well, you know—and I just wanted someone to—I’m sorry. I wasn’t thinking clearly.”

  It was a lie, but a jolly good one. Actually, I’d been thinking as clearly as a mountain stream.

  I made my lower lip tremble just a trifle.

  “It was easy to see that Miss Wyvern was quite dead,” I added. “It wasn’t a question of saving her life.”

  “And yet you had your wits about you sufficiently to spot the makeup where no makeup ought to be.”

  “Yes,” I said. “I notice things like that. I can’t help it.

  “Please don’t strike me,” I wanted to add, but I knew I was already slicing the bacon a trifle on the thin side.

  “I see,” the Inspector said. “It’s most kind of you to point it out.”