The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie

by Alan Bradley

  As Ophelia and Daphne came down to lunch, I noticed with disappointment Ophelia's unusual clarity of complexion. Had my concoction backfired? Had I, through some freak accident of chemistry, produced a miracle facial cream?

  Mrs. Mullet bustled in, grumbling as she set our soup and sandwiches on the table.

  "It's not right," she said. "Me already behind my time, what with all this pother, and Alf expectin' me home, and all. The nerve of them, axin' me to dig that dead snipe out of the refuse bin," she said with a shudder, ". so's they could prop it up and take its likeness. It's not right. I showed them the bin and told them if they wanted the carcass so bad they could jolly well dig it out themselves; I had lunch to make. Eat your sandwiches, dear. There's nothing like cold meats in June—they're as good as a picnic."

  "Dead snipe?" Daphne asked, curling her lip.

  "The one as Miss Flavia and the Colonel found on my yesterday's back doorstep. It still gives me the goose-pimples, the way that thing was layin' there with its eye all frosted and its bill stickin' straight up in the air with a bit of paper stuck on it.”

  "Ned!" Ophelia said, slapping the table. "You were right, Daffy. It's a love token!"

  Daphne had been reading The Golden Bough at Easter, and told Ophelia that primitive courting customs from the South Seas sometimes survived in our own enlightened times. It was simply a matter of being patient, she said.

  I looked from one to the other, blankly. There were whole aeons when I didn't understand my sisters at all.

  "A dead bird, stiff as a board, with its bill sticking straight up in the air? What kind of token is that?" I asked.

  Daphne hid behind her book and Ophelia flushed a little. I slipped away from the table and left them tittering into their soup.

  "MRS. MULLET,” I said, “didn't you tell Inspector Hewitt we never see jack snipe in England until September?”

  "Snipes, snipes, snipes! That's all I hear about nowadays is snipes. Step to one side, if you please—you're standin' where it wants scrubbin'."

  "Why is that? Why do we never see snipe before September?"

  Mrs. Mullet straightened up, dropped her brush in the bucket, and dried her soapy hands on her apron.

  "Because they're somewhere else," she said triumphantly.

  "Where?"

  "Oh, you know. they're like all them birds what emigrate. They're up north somewhere. For all I know, they could be takin' tea with Father Christmas.”

  "By up north, how far do you mean? Scotland?"

  "Scotland!" she said contemptuously. "Oh dear, no. Even my Alf's second sister, Margaret, gets as far as Scotland on her holidays, and she's no snipe.

  "Although her husband is," she added.

  There was a roaring in my ears, and something went “click.”

  "What about Norway?" I asked. "Could jack snipe summer in Norway?"

  "I suppose they could, dear. You'd have to look it up."

  Yes! Hadn't Inspector Hewitt told Dr. Darby that they had reason to believe the man in the garden had come from Norway? How could they possibly know that? Would the Inspector tell me if I asked?

  Probably not. In that case I should have to puzzle it out for myself.

  "Run along now," Mrs. Mullet said. "I can't go home till I finish this floor, and it's already one o'clock. Poor Alf's digestion is most likely in a shockin' state by now."

  I stepped out the back door. The police and the coroner had gone, and taken the body with them, and the garden now seemed strangely empty. Dogger was nowhere in sight, and I sat down on a low section of the wall to have a bit of a think.

  Had Ned left the dead snipe on the doorstep as a token of his love for Ophelia? She certainly seemed convinced of it. If it had been Ned, where did he get the thing?

  Two and a half seconds later, I grabbed Gladys, threw my leg over her saddle, and, for the second time that day, was flying like the wind into the village.

  Speed was of the essence. No one in Bishop's Lacey would yet know of the stranger's death. The police would not have told a soul—and nor had I.

  Not until Mrs. Mullet finished her scrubbing and walked to the village would the gossip begin. But once she reached home, news of the murder at Buckshaw would spread like the Black Death. I had until then to find out what I needed to know.

  seven

  AS I SKIDDED TO A STOP AND LEANED GLADYS AGAINST a pile of weathered timbers, Ned was still at work in the inn yard. He had finished with the beer barrels and was now showily unloading cheeses the size of millstones from the back of a parked lorry.

  "Hoy, Flavia," he said as he saw me, jumping at the opportunity to stop work. "Fancy some cheese?"

  Before I could answer he had pulled a nasty-looking jackknife from his pocket and sliced off a slab of Stilton with frightening ease. He cut one for himself and tucked into it on the spot with what Daphne would call “noisy gusto.” Daphne is going to be a novelist, and copies out into an old account book phrases that strike her in her day-to-day reading. I remembered “noisy gusto” from the last time I snooped through its pages.

  "Been home?" Ned asked, looking at me with a shy sideways glance. I saw what was coming. I nodded.

  "And how's Miss Ophelia? Has the doctor been round?"

  "Yes," I said. "I believe he saw her this morning."

  Ned swallowed my deception whole.

  "Still green then, is she?"

  "More of a yellow than before," I said. "A shade more sulphuric than cupric."

  I had learned that a lie wrapped in detail, like a horse pill in an apple, went down with greater ease. But this time, as soon as I said it, I knew that I had overstepped.

  "Haw, Flavia!" Ned said. "You're making sport of me."

  I let him have my best slow-dawning country-bumpkin smile.

  "You've caught me out, Ned," I said. "Guilty, as charged."

  He gave me back a weird mirror image of my grin. For a fraction of a second I thought he was mocking me, and I felt my temper begin to rise. But then I realized he was honestly pleased to have puzzled me out. This was my opportunity.

  "Ned," I said, "if I asked you a terrifically personal question, would you answer it?"

  I waited as this sunk in. Communicating with Ned was like exchanging cabled messages with a slow reader in Mongolia.

  "Of course I'd answer it," he said, and the roguish twinkle in his eye tipped me off to what was coming next. "'Course, I might not say the truth."

  When we'd both had a good laugh, I got down to business. I'd start with the heavy artillery.

  "You're frightfully keen on Ophelia, aren't you?"

  Ned sucked his teeth and ran a finger round the inside of his collar. “She's a right nice girl, I'll give her that.”

  "But wouldn't you like to settle down with her one day in a thatched cottage and raise a litter of brats?"

  By now, Ned's neck was a rising column of red, like a thick alcohol thermometer. In seconds he looked like one of those birds that inflate its gullet for mating purposes. I decided to help him out.

  "Just suppose she wanted to see you but her father wouldn't allow it. Suppose one of her younger sisters could help."

  Already his ruddy crop was subsiding. I thought he was going to cry.

  "Do you mean it, Flavia?"

  "Honest Injun," I said.

  Ned stuck out his calloused fingers and gave my hand a surprisingly gentle shake. It was like shaking hands with a pineapple.

  "Fingers of Friendship," he said, whatever that meant.

  Fingers of Friendship? Had I just been given the secret handshake of some rustic brotherhood that met in moonlit churchyards and hidden copses? Was I now inducted, and would I be expected to take part in unspeakably bloody midnight rituals in the hedgerows? It seemed like an interesting possibility.

  Ned was grinning at me like the skull on a Jolly Roger. I took the upper hand.

  "Listen," I told him. "Lesson Number One: Don't leave dead birds on the loved one's doorstep. It's something that only a courtin
g cat would do."

  Ned looked blank.

  "I've left flowers once or twice, hopin' she'd notice," he said. This was news to me; Ophelia must have whisked the bouquets off to her boudoir for mooning purposes before anyone else in the household spotted them.

  "But dead birds? Never. You know me, Flavia. I wouldn't do a thing like that."

  When I stopped to think about it for a moment, I knew that he was right; I did and he wouldn't. My next question, though, turned out to be sheer luck.

  "Does Mary Stoker know you're sweet on Ophelia?" It was a phrase I had picked up at the cinema from some American film—Meet Me in St. Louis or Little Women—and this was the first opportunity I'd ever had to make use of it. Like Daphne, I remembered words, but without an account book to jot them down.

  "What's Mary have to do with it? She's Tully's daughter, and there's an end of it."

  "Come off it, Ned," I said. "I saw that kiss this morning as I was. passing by."

  "She needed a little comfort. 'Twas no more than that."

  "Because of whoever it was that crept up behind her?"

  Ned leapt to his feet. “Damn you!” he said. “She don't want that getting out.”

  "As she was changing the sheets?"

  "You're a devil, Flavia de Luce!" Ned roared. "Get away from me! Go home!"

  "Tell her, Ned," said a quiet voice, and I turned to see Mary at the door.

  She stood with one hand flat on the doorpost, the other clutching her blouse at the neck like Tess of the d'Urbervilles. Close up, I could see that she had raw red hands and a decided squint.

  "Tell her," she repeated. "It can't make any difference to you now, can it?"

  I detected instantly that she didn't like me. It's a fact of life that a girl can tell in a flash if another girl likes her. Feely says that there is a broken telephone connection between men and women, and we can never know which of us rang off. With a boy you never know whether he's smitten or gagging, but with a girl you can tell in the first three seconds. Between girls there is a silent and unending flow of invisible signals, like the high-frequency wireless messages between the shore and the ships at sea, and this secret flow of dots and dashes was signaling that Mary detested me.

  "Go on, tell her!" Mary shouted.

  Ned swallowed hard and opened his mouth, but nothing came out.

  "You're Flavia de Luce, aren't you?" she said. "One of that lot from up at Buckshaw." She flung it at me like a pie in the face.

  I nodded dumbly, as if I were some inbred ingrate from the squire's estate who needed coddling. Better to play along, I thought.

  "Come with me," Mary said, beckoning. "Be quick about it—and keep quiet."

  I followed her into a dark stone larder, and then into an enclosed wooden staircase that spiraled precipitously up to the floor above. At the top, we stepped out into what must once have been a linen press: a tall square cupboard now filled with shelves of cleaning chemicals, soaps, and waxes. In the corner, mops and brooms leaned in disarray amid an overwhelming smell of carbolic disinfectant.

  "Shhh!" she said, giving my arm a vicious squeeze. Heavy footsteps were approaching, coming up the same staircase we had just ascended. We pressed back into a corner, taking care not to knock over the mops.

  "That'll be the bloody day, sir, when a Cotswold horse takes the bloody purse! If I was you I'd take a flutter on Seastar, and be damned to any tips you get from some bloody skite in London what don't know his ark from his halo!"

  It was Tully, exchanging confidential turf tips with someone at a volume loud enough to be heard at Epsom Downs. Another voice muttered something that ended in “Haw-haw!” as the sound of their footsteps faded away in the warren of paneled passages.

  "No, this way," Mary hissed, tugging at my arm. We slipped round the corner and into a narrow corridor. She pulled a set of keys from her pocket and quietly unlocked the last door on the left. We stepped inside.

  We were in a room which had not likely changed since Queen Elizabeth visited Bishop's Lacey in 1592 on one of her summer progresses. My first impressions were of a timbered ceiling, plastered panels, a tiny window with leaded panes standing ajar for air, and broad floorboards that rose and fell like the ocean swell.

  Against one wall was a chipped wooden table with an ABC Railway Guide (October 1946) shoved under one leg to keep it from teetering. On the tabletop were an unmatched Staffordshire pitcher and ewer in pink and cream, a comb, a brush, and a small black leather case. In a corner near the open window stood a single piece of luggage: a cheap-looking steamer trunk of vulcanized fiber, plastered over with colored stickers. Beside it was a straight chair with a missing spindle. Across the room stood a wooden wardrobe of jumble-sale quality. And the bed.

  "This is it," Mary said. As she locked us in, I turned to look at her closely for the first time. In the gray dishwater light from the sooty windowpanes, she looked older, harder, and more brittle than the raw-handed girl I had just seen in the bright sunlight of the inn yard.

  "I expect you've never been in a room this small, have you?" she said scornfully. "You lot at Buckshaw fancy the odd visit to Bedlam, don't you? See the loonies—see how we live in our cages. Throw us a biscuit."

  "I don't know what you're talking about," I said.

  Mary turned her face towards me so that I was receiving the full intensity of her glare. “That sister of yours—that Ophelia—sent you with a message for Ned, and don't tell me she didn't. She fancies I'm some kind of slattern, and I'm not.”

  And in that instant I decided that I liked Mary, even if she didn't like me. Anyone who knew the word slattern was worth cultivating as a friend.

  "Listen," I said, "there's no message. What I said to Ned was strictly for cover. You have to help me, Mary. I know you will. There's been a murder at Buckshaw."

  There! I'd said it!

  ". and nobody knows it yet but you and me—except the murderer, of course."

  She looked at me for no more than three seconds and then she asked, “Who is it that's dead, then?”

  "I don't know. That's why I'm here. But it makes sense to me that if someone turns up dead in the cucumbers, and even the police don't know who he is, the most likely place he'd be staying in the neighborhood—if he was staying in the neighborhood—is right here at the Thirteen Drakes. Can you bring me the register?”

  "Don't need to bring it to you," Mary said. "There's only one guest right now, and that's Mr. Sanders."

  The more I talked to Mary the more I liked her.

  "And this here's his room," she added helpfully.

  "Where is he from?" I asked.

  Her face clouded. “I don't know, rightly.”

  "Has he ever stopped here before?"

  "Not so far as I know."

  "Then I need to have a look at the register. Please, Mary! Please! It's important! The police will soon be here, and then it will be too late."

  "I'll try." she said, and, unlocking the door, slipped from the room.

  As soon as she was gone, I pulled open the door of the wardrobe. Except for a pair of wooden coat hangers it was empty, and I turned my attention to the steamer trunk, which was covered over with stickers like barnacles clinging to the hull of a ship. These colorful crustaceans, however, had names: Paris, Rome, Stockholm, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Stavanger—and more.

  I tried the hasp, and to my surprise, it popped open. It was unlocked! The two halves, hinged in the middle, swung easily apart, and I found myself face-to-face with Mr. Sanders's wardrobe: a blue serge suit, two shirts, a pair of brown Oxfords (with blue serge? Even I knew better than that!), and a floppy, theatrical hat that reminded me of photographs I'd seen of G. K. Chesterton in the Radio Times.

  I pulled out the drawers of the trunk, taking care not to disturb their contents: a pair of hairbrushes (imitation tortoiseshell), a razor (Valet AutoStrop), a tube of shaving cream (Morning Pride Brushless), a toothbrush, toothpaste (thymol: “specially recommended to arrest the germs of dental decay”),
nail clippers, a straight comb (xylonite), and a pair of square cuff links (Whitby jet, with a pair of initials inset in silver: HB).

  HB? Wasn't this Mr. Sanders's room? What could HB stand for?

  The door flew open and a voice hissed, “What are you doing?”

  I nearly flew out of my skin. It was Mary.

  "I couldn't get the register. Dad was—Flavia! You can't go through a guest's luggage like that! You'll get both of us in a pickle. Stop it."

  "Right-ho," I said as I finished rifling the pockets of the suit. They were empty anyway. "When was the last time you saw Mr. Sanders?"

  "Yesterday. Here. At noon."

  "Here? In this room?"

  She gulped, and nodded, looking away. “I was changing his sheets when he come up behind me and grabbed me. Put a hand over my mouth so's I shouldn't scream. Good job Dad called from the yard just then. Rattled him a bit, it did. Don't think I didn't get in a good kick or two. Him and his filthy paws! I'd have scratched his eyes out if I'd had half the chance.”

  She looked at me as if she'd said too much; as if a great social gulf had suddenly opened up between us.

  "I'd have scratched his eyes out and sucked the holes," I said.

  Her eyes widened in horror.

  "John Marston," I told her. "The Dutch Courtesan, 1604.”

  There was a pause of approximately two hundred years. Then Mary began to giggle.

  "Ooh, you are a one!" she said.

  The gap had been bridged.

  "Act Two," I added.

  Seconds later the two of us were doubled over, hands covering our mouths, hopping about the room, snorting in unison like a pair of trained seals.

  "Feely once read it to us under the blankets with a torch," I said, and for some reason, this struck both of us as being even more hilarious, and off we went again until we were nearly paralyzed from laughter.

  Mary threw her arms round me and gave me a crushing hug. “You're a corker, Flavia,” she said. “Really you are. Come here—take a gander at this.”

  She went to the table, picked up the black leather case, unfastened the strap, and lifted the lid. Nestled inside were two rows of six little glass vials, twelve in all. Eleven were filled with a liquid of a yellowish tinge; the twelfth was a quarter full. Between the rows of vials was a half-round indentation, as if some tubular object were missing.