by Alan Bradley
The Pit Shed was the outbuilding farthest from the library's main building. Tottering precipitously on the river's bank, it was a conglomeration of weathered boards and rusty corrugated tin, all overgrown with moss and climbing vines. In the heyday of the motor showroom, it had been the garage where autos had their oil and tires changed, their axles lubricated, and other intimate underside adjustments seen to.
Since then, neglect and erosion had reduced the place to something resembling a hermit's hovel in the woods.
I gave the key a twist and the door sprang open with a rusty groan. I stepped into the gloom, being careful to edge round the sheer sides of the deep mechanic's pit which, though it was boarded over with heavy planks, still occupied much of the room.
The place had a sharp and musky smell with more than a hint of ammonia, as if there were little animals living beneath its floorboards.
Half of the wall closest to Cow Lane was taken up with a folding door, now barred, which had once rolled back to allow motorcars to enter and park astride the pit. The glass of its four windows had been painted over, for some unfathomable reason, with a ghastly red through which the sunlight leaked, giving the room a bloody and unsettling tint.
Round the remaining three walls, rising like the frames of bunk beds, were ranged wooden shelves, each one piled high with yellowed newspapers: The Hinley Chronicle, The West Counties Advertiser, The Morning Post-Horn, all arranged by year and identified with faded handwritten labels.
I had no trouble finding 1920. I lifted down the top pile, choking with the cloud of dust that flew up into my face like an explosion in a flour mill as tiny shards of nibbled newsprint fell to the floor like paper snow.
Tub and loofah tonight, I thought, like it or not.
A small deal table stood near a grimy window: just enough light and enough room to spread the papers open, one at a time.
The Morning Post-Horn caught my eye: a tabloid whose front page, like the Times of London, was chock-full of adverts, snippets of news, and agony columns:
Lost: brown paper parcel tied with butcher's twine.
Of sentimental value to distressed owner. Generous reward offered.
Apply “Smith,” c/o The White Hart, Wolverston
Or this:
Dear One: He was watching. Same time Thursday next. Bring
soapstone. Bruno.
AND THEN SUDDENLY I REMEMBERED! Father had attended Greyminster… and wasn't Greyminster near Hinley? I tossed The Morning Post-Horn back onto its bier, and pulled down the first of four stacks of The Hinley Chronicle.
This paper had been published weekly, on Fridays. The first Friday of that year was New Year's Day, so that the year's first issue was dated the following Friday: the eighth of January, 1920.
Page followed page of holiday news—Christmas visitors from the Continent, a deferred meeting of the Ladies' Altar Guild, a “good-sized pig” for sale, Boxing Day revels at The Grange, a lost tire from a brewer's dray.
The Assizes in March were a grim catalogue of thefts, poaching, and assaults.
On and on I went, my hands blackening with ink that had dried twenty years before I was born. The summer brought more visitors from the Continent, market days, laborers wanted, Boy Scout camps, two fêtes, and several proposed road works.
After an hour I was beginning to despair. The people who read these things must have possessed superhuman eyesight, the type was so wretchedly small. Much more of this and I knew I'd have a throbbing headache.
And then I found it:
Popular Schoolmaster Plummets to Death
In a tragic accident on Monday morning, Grenville Twining, M.A. (Oxon.), 72, Latin scholar and respected housemaster at Greyminster School, near Hinley, fell to his death from the clock tower of Greyminster's Anson House. Those familiar with the facts have described the accident as “simply inexplicable.”
"He climbed up onto the parapet, gathered his robes about him, and gave us the palm-down Roman Salute. 'Vale!' he shouted down to the boys in the quad,” said Timothy Greene of the sixth form at Greyminster, “… and down he came!”
"Vale"? My heart gave a leap. It was the same word the dying man had breathed into my face! "Farewell." It could hardly be coincidence, could it? It was just too bizarre. There had to be some connection—but what could it be?
Damn! My mind was racing away like mad and my wits were standing still. The Pit Shed was hardly the place for speculation; I'd think about it later.
I read on:
"The way his gown fluttered, he seemed just like a falling angel," said Toby Lonsdale, a rosy-cheeked lad who was near tears as he was shepherded away by his comrades before giving way and breaking down altogether nearby.
Mr. Twining had recently been questioned by police in the matter of a missing postage stamp: a unique and extremely valuable variation of the Penny Black.
"There is no connection," said Dr. Isaac Kissing, who has been Headmaster at Greyminster since 1915. "No connection whatsoever. Mr. Twining was revered and, if I may say so, loved by all who knew him."
The Hinley Chronicle has learned that police inquiries into both incidents are continuing.
The newspaper's date was the 24th of September, 1920.
I reshelved the paper, stepped outside, and locked the door. Miss Mountjoy was still sitting idle at her desk when I returned the key.
"Did you find what you were looking for, dearie?" she asked.
"Yes," I said, making a great show of dusting off my hands.
"May I inquire further?" she asked coyly. "I might be able to direct you to related materials."
Translation: She was perishing with nosiness.
"No, thank you, Miss Mountjoy," I said.
For some reason I suddenly felt as if my heart had been ripped out and swapped with a counterfeit made of lead.
"Are you all right, dearie?" Miss Mountjoy asked. "You seem a little peaked."
Peaked? I felt as if I were about to puke.
Perhaps it was nervousness, or perhaps it was an unconscious attempt to stave off nausea, but to my horror I found myself blurting out, “Did you ever hear of a Mr. Twining, of Greyminster School?”
She gasped. Her face went red, then gray, as if it had caught fire before my eyes and collapsed in an avalanche of ashes. She pulled a lace handkerchief from her sleeve, knotted it, and jammed it into her mouth, and for a few moments, she sat there, rocking in her chair, gripping the lace between her teeth like an eighteenth-century seaman having his leg amputated below the knee.
At last, she looked up at me with brimming eyes and said in a shaky voice, “Mr. Twining was my mother's brother.”
six
WE WERE HAVING TEA. MISS MOUNTJOY HAD EXCAVATED a battered tin kettle from somewhere, and after a dig in her carry-bag, come up with a scruffy packet of Peek Freans.
I sat on a library ladder and helped myself to another biscuit.
"It was tragic," she said. "My uncle had been housemaster of Anson House forever—or so it seemed. He took great pride in his house and in his boys. He spared no pains in urging them always to do their best; to prepare themselves for life.
"He liked to joke that he spoke better Latin than Julius Caesar himself, and his Latin grammar, Twining's Lingua Latina—published when he was just twenty-four, by the way—was a standard text in schools round the world. I still keep a copy beside my bed, and even though I can't read much of it, I sometimes like to hold it for the comfort it brings me: qui, quae, quod, and all that. The words have such a comforting sound about them.
"Uncle Grenville was forever organizing things: He encouraged his boys to form a debating society, a skating club, a cycling club, a cribbage circle. He was a keen amateur conjurer, although not a very good one—you could always see the ace of diamonds peeping out of his cuffs with the bit of elastic dangling down from it. He was an enthusiastic stamp collector, and taught the boys to learn the history and the geography of the issuing countries, as well as to keep neat, orderly albums. And th
at was his downfall."
I stopped chewing and sat expectantly. Miss Mountjoy had slipped into a kind of reverie and seemed unlikely to go on without encouragement.
Little by little, I had come under her spell. She had talked to me woman-to-woman, and I had succumbed. I felt sorry for her… really I did.
"His downfall?" I asked.
"He made the great mistake of putting his trust in several wretched excuses for boyhood who had wormed themselves into his favor. They pretended great interest in his little stamp collection, and feigned an even greater interest in the collection of Dr. Kissing, the headmaster. In those days, Dr. Kissing was the world's greatest authority on the Penny Black—the world's first postage stamp—in all of its many variations. The Kissing collection was the envy—and I say that advisedly—of all the world. These vile creatures convinced Uncle Grenville to intercede and arrange a private viewing of the Head's stamps.
"While examining the crown jewel of this collection, a Penny Black of a certain peculiarity—I've forgotten the details—the stamp was destroyed.”
"Destroyed?" I asked.
"Burned. One of the boys set it alight. He meant it to be a joke."
Miss Mountjoy took up her tea and drifted like a wisp of smoke to the window, where she stood looking out for what seemed like a very long time. I was beginning to think she'd forgotten about me, but then she spoke again:
"Of course, my uncle was blamed for the disaster."
She turned and looked me in the eye. “And the rest of the story you've learned this morning in the Pit Shed.”
"He killed himself," I said.
"He did not kill himself!” she shrieked. The cup and saucer fell from her hand and shattered on the tile floor. “He was murdered!”
"By whom?" I asked, getting a grip on myself, even managing to get the grammar right. Miss Mountjoy was beginning to grate on my nerves again.
"By those monsters!" she spat out. "Those obscene monsters!"
"Monsters?"
"Those boys! They killed him as surely as if they had taken a dagger into their own hands and stuck him in the heart."
"Who were they, these boys. these monsters, I mean? Do you remember their names?"
"Why do you want to know? What right have you coming here to stir up these ghosts?"
"I'm interested in history," I said.
She passed a hand across her eyes as if commanding herself to come out of a trance, and spoke in the slow voice of a woman drugged.
"It's so long ago," she said. "So very long ago. I really don't care to remember. Uncle Grenville mentioned their names, before he was—"
"Murdered?" I suggested.
"Yes, that's right, before he was murdered. Strange, isn't it? For all these years one of their names has stuck most in my mind because it reminded me of a monkey. a monkey on a chain, you know, with an organ grinder and a little round red hat and a tin cup."
She gave a tight, nervous little laugh.
"Jacko," I said.
Miss Mountjoy sat down heavily as if she'd been pole-axed. She stared at me with goggle eyes as if I'd just materialized from another dimension.
"Who are you, little girl?" she whispered. "Why have you come here? What's your name?"
"Flavia," I said as I paused for a moment at the door. "Flavia Sabina Dolores de Luce." The "Sabina" was real enough; "Dolores" I invented on the spot.
UNTIL I RESCUED HER from rusty oblivion, my trusty old three-speed BSA Keep Fit had languished for years in a toolshed among broken flowerpots and wooden wheelbarrows. Like so many other things at Buckshaw, she had once belonged to Harriet, who had named her l'Hirondelle: "the swallow." I had rechristened her Gladys.
Gladys's tires had been flat, her gears bone dry and crying out for oil, but with her own onboard tire pump and black leather tool bag behind her seat, she was entirely self-sufficient. With Dogger's help, I soon had her in tiptop running order. In the tool kit, I had found a booklet called Cycling for Women of All Ages, by Prunella Stack, the leader of the Women's League of Health and Beauty. On its cover was written with black ink, in beautiful, flowing script: Harriet de Luce, Buckshaw.
There were times when Harriet was not gone; she was everywhere.
As I raced home, past the leaning moss-covered headstones in the heaped-up churchyard of St. Tancred's, through the narrow leafy lanes, across the chalky High Road, and into the open country, I let Gladys have her head, swooping down the slopes past the rushing hedges, imagining all the while I was the pilot of one of the Spitfires which, just five years ago, had skimmed these very hedgerows like swallows as they came in to land at Leathcote.
I had learned from the booklet that if I bicycled with a poker back like Miss Gulch in The Wizard of Oz at the cinema, chose varied terrain, and breathed deeply, I would glow with health like the Eddystone Light, and never suffer from pimples: a useful bit of information which I wasted no time in passing along to Ophelia.
Was there ever a companion booklet, Cycling for Men of All Ages? I wondered. And if so, had it been written by the leader of the Men's League of Health and Handsomeness?
I pretended I was the boy Father must always have wanted: a son he could take to Scotland for salmon fishing and grouse shooting on the moors; a son he could send out to Canada to take up ice hockey. Not that Father did any of these things, but if he'd had a son, I liked to think he might have done.
My middle name should have been Laurence, like his, and when we were alone together he'd have called me Larry. How keenly disappointed he must have been when all of us had come out girls.
Had I been too cruel to that horror, Miss Mountjoy? Too vindictive? Wasn't she, after all, just a harmless and lonely old spinster? Would a Larry de Luce have been more understanding?
"Hell, no!" I shouted into the wind, and I chanted as we flew along:
Oomba-chukka! Oomba-chukka
Oomba-chukka-Boom!
But I felt no more like one of Lord Baden-Powell's blasted Boy Scouts than I did Prince Knick-Knack of Ali Kazaam.
I was me. I was Flavia. And I loved myself, even if no one else did.
"All hail Flavia! Flavia forever!" I shouted, as Gladys and I sped through the Mulford Gates, at top speed, into the avenue of chestnuts that lined the drive at Buckshaw.
These magnificent gates, with their griffins rampant and filigreed black wrought iron, had once graced the neighboring estate of Batchley, the ancestral home of “The Dirty Mulfords.” The gates were acquired for Buckshaw in the 1760s by one Brandwyn de Luce, who—after one of the Mulfords absconded with his wife—dismantled them and took them home.
The exchange of a wife for a pair of gates (“The finest this side Paradise,” Brandwyn had written in his diary) seemed to have settled the matter, since the Mulfords and the de Luces remained best of friends and neighbors until the last Mulford, Tobias, sold off the estate at the time of the American Civil War and went abroad to assist his Confederate cousins.
"A WORD, FLAVIA,” Inspector Hewitt said, stepping out of the front door.
Had he been waiting for me?
"Of course," I said graciously.
"Where have you been just now?"
"Am I under arrest, Inspector?" It was a joke—I hoped he'd catch on.
"I was merely curious."
He pulled a pipe from his jacket pocket, filled it, and struck a match. I watched as it burned steadily down towards his square fingertips.
"I went to the library," I said.
He lit his pipe, then pointed its stem at Gladys.
"I don't see any books."
"It was closed."
"Ah," he said.
There was a maddening calmness about the man. Even in the midst of murder he was as placid as if he were strolling in the park.
"I've spoken to Dogger," he said, and I noticed that he kept his eyes on me to gauge my reaction.
"Oh, yes?" I said, but my mind was sounding the kind of "Oogah!" warning they have on a submarine preparing to dive.
Careful! I thought. Watch your step. How much did Dogger tell him? About the strange man in the study? About the quarrel with Father? The threats?
That was the trouble with someone like Dogger: He was likely to break down for no reason whatsoever. Had he blabbed to the Inspector about the stranger in the study? Damn the man! Damn him!
"He says that you awakened him at about four A.M. and told him that there was a dead body in the garden. Is that correct?”
I held back a sigh of relief, almost choking in the process. Thank you, Dogger! May the Lord bless you and keep you and make his face to shine upon you, always! Good old faithful Dogger. I knew I could count on you.
"Yes," I said. "That's correct."
"What happened then?"
"We went downstairs and out the kitchen door into the garden. I showed him the body. He knelt down beside it and felt for a pulse."
"And how did he do that?"
"He put his hand on the neck—under the ear."
"Hmm," the Inspector said. "And was there? Any pulse, I mean?"
"No."
"How did you know that? Did he tell you?"
"No," I said.
"Hmm," he said again. "Did you kneel down beside it too?"
"I suppose I could have. I don't think so. I don't remember."
The Inspector made a note. Even without seeing it, I knew what it said: Query: Did D. (1) tell F. no pulse? (2) See F. kneel BB (Beside Body)?
"That's quite understandable," he said. "It must have been rather a shock."
I brought to mind the image of the stranger lying there in the first light of dawn: the slight growth of whiskers on his chin, strands of his red hair shifting gently on the faint stirrings of the morning breeze, the pallor, the extended leg, the quivering fingers, that last, sucking breath. And that word, blown into my face… “Vale.”
The thrill of it all!
"Yes," I said, "it was devastating."
I HAD EVIDENTLY PASSED the test. Inspector Hewitt had gone into the kitchen where Sergeants Woolmer and Graves were busily setting up operations under a barrage of gossip and lettuce sandwiches from Mrs. Mullet.