The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie

by Alan Bradley

  Daffy, Feely, and I had all brought notebooks to the drawing room and pretended to take notes while passing scraps of paper back and forth with scribbled messages to one another such as “Stamp Out Lectures” and “Let's Lick Boredom!”

  Postage stamps, Father had explained, were printed in sheets of two hundred and forty; twenty horizontal rows of twelve, which was easy enough for me to remember since 20 is the atomic number for Calcium and 12 the number for Magnesium—all I had to do was think of CaMg. Each stamp on the sheet carried a unique two-letter identifier beginning with “AA” on the upper left stamp and progressing alphabetically from left to right until “TL” was reached at the right end of the twentieth, or bottom, row.

  This scheme, Father told us, had been implemented by the Post Office to prevent forgeries, although it was not perfectly clear how this was to work. There had been rampant paranoia, he said, that dens of forgers would be toiling away day and night, from Land's End to John o'Groats, producing copies to bilk Her Victorian Majesty out of a penny per time.

  I looked closely at the stamp in my hand. At the bottom, below Queen Victoria's head, was written its value: ONE PENNY. To the left of these words was the letter B, to their right, the letter H.

  It looked like this: B ONE PENNY. H

  "BH." The stamp had come from the second row on the printed sheet, eighth column to the right. Two-eight. Was that significant? Aside from the fact that 28 was the atomic number for Nickel, I could think of nothing.

  And then I saw it! It wasn't a number at all: It was a word!

  Bonepenny! Not just Bonepenny, but Bonepenny, H.! Horace Bonepenny!

  Impaled on the jack snipe's bill (Yes! Father's schoolboy nickname had been “Jacko”!), the stamp had served as calling card and death threat. A threat that Father had taken in and understood at first glance.

  The bird's bill had pierced the Queen's head, but left the name of its sender in clear view for anyone who had the eyes to see.

  Horace Bonepenny. The late Horace Bonepenny.

  I returned the stamp to its hiding place.

  AT THE TOP OF THE HILL, a rotted wooden post—all that remained of an eighteenth-century gibbet—pointed two fingers in opposing directions. I could reach Hinley, I knew, by either taking the road to Doddingsley, or by following a somewhat longer, less traveled road that would take me through the village of St. Elfrieda's. The former would get me there more quickly; the latter, being more sparsely traveled, would offer less risk of being spotted in case someone reported me missing.

  "Har-har-har!" I said, with vast irony. Who could care enough?

  Still, I took the road to the right and pointed Gladys towards St. Elfrieda's. It was downhill all the way, and I made good speed. When I back pedaled, the Sturmey-Archer three-speed hub on Gladys's rear wheel gave off a noise like a den of enraged, venom-dripping rattlesnakes. I pretended they were right there behind me, striking at my heels. It was glorious! I hadn't felt in such fine form since the day I first produced, by successive extraction and evaporation, a synthetic curare from the bog arum in the Vicar's lily pond.

  I put my feet up on the handlebars and gave Gladys her head. As we shot down the dusty hill, I yodeled a song into the wind:

  "'They call her the lass

  With the delicate air!…’”

  thirteen

  AT THE BOTTOM OF OAKSHOTT HILL I SUDDENLY thought of Father and sadness came creeping back. Did they honestly believe he had murdered Horace Bonepenny? And if so, how? If Father had murdered him beneath my bedroom window, the deed had been done in utter silence. I could hardly imagine Father killing someone without raising his voice.

  But before I could speculate further, the road leveled out before twisting off to Cottesmore and to Doddingsley Magna. In the shade of an ancient oak was a bus stop bench, upon which sat a familiar figure: an ancient gnome in plus fours, looking like a George Bernard Shaw who had shrunk in the wash. He sat there so placidly, his feet dangling four inches above the ground, that he might have been born on the bench and lived there all his life.

  It was Maximilian Brock, one of our Buckshaw neighbors, and I prayed he hadn't seen me. It was whispered in Bishop's Lacey that Max, retired from the world of music, was now earning a secret living by writing—under feminine pseudonyms (such as Lala Dupree)—scandalous stories for American magazines with titles like Confidential Confessions and Red Hot Romances.

  Because of the way he pried into the affairs of everyone he met, then spun what he was told in confidence into news-seller's gold, Max was called, at least behind his back, “The Village Pump.” But as Feely's one time piano teacher, he was someone whom I could not politely ignore.

  I pulled off into the shallow ditch, pretending I hadn't seen him as I fiddled with Gladys's chain. With any luck, he'd keep looking the other way and I could hide out behind the hedge until he was gone.

  "Flavia! Haroo, mon vieux."

  Curses! I'd been spotted. To ignore a “haroo” from Maximilian—even one from a bus stop bench—was to ignore the eleventh commandment. I pretended I had just noticed him, and laid on a bogus grin as I wheeled Gladys towards him through the weeds.

  Maximilian had lived for many years in the Channel Islands, where he had been pianist with the Alderney Symphony, a position—he said—which required a great deal of patience and a good supply of detective novels.

  On Alderney, it was only necessary (or so he had told me once while chatting about crime, at St. Tancred's annual Flower Show), in order to bring down the full power of the law, to stand in the middle of the town square and cry “Haroo, haroo, mon prince. On me fait tort!" This was called the "hue and cry," and meant, in essence, "Attention, my Prince, someone is torting me!” Or, in other words, committing a crime against me.

  "And how are you, my little pelican?" Max asked, canting his head like a magpie awaiting a crumb of response even before it was offered.

  "I'm all right," I said warily, remembering that Daffy had once told me that Max was like one of those spiders that paralyzed you with a bite, and didn't quit until he had sucked the last drop of juice from your life—and from the life of your family.

  "And your father, the good Colonel?"

  "He's keeping busy, what with one thing and another," I said. I felt my heart give a flip-flop in my breast.

  "That Miss Ophelia, now," he asked. "Is she still painting her face like Jezebel and admiring herself in the tea service?"

  This was too close to home, even for me. It was none of his business, but I knew that Maximilian could fly into a towering rage at the drop of a hat. Feely sometimes referred to him behind his back as “Rumpelstiltskin,” and Daffy as “Alexander Pope—or lower.”

  Still, I had found Maximilian, in spite of his repellent habits, and perhaps because of our similarity in stature, occasionally to be an interesting and informative conversationalist—just so long as you didn't mistake his diminutive size for weakness.

  "She's very well, thank you," I said. "Her complexion was quite lovely this morning."

  I did not add “maddeningly.”

  "Max," I asked, before he could wedge in another question, "do you think I could ever learn to play that little toccata by Paradisi?"

  "No," he said, without an instant's hesitation. "Your hands are not the hands of a great artist. They are the hands of a poisoner."

  I grinned. This was our little joke. And it was obvious that he had not yet learned of the murder at Buckshaw.

  "And the other one?" he asked. "Daphne. the slow sister?"

  "Slow" was a reference to Daffy's prowess, or lack of it, at the piano: an endless, painful quest to place unwilling fingers upon keys that seemed to shy away from her touch. Daffy's battle with the instrument was one of the hen pitted against the fox, a losing battle that always ended in tears. And yet, because Father insisted upon it, the war went on.

  One day when I found her sobbing on the bench with her head on the closed piano lid, I had whispered, “Give it up, Daff,” and she
had flown at me like a fighting cock.

  I had even tried encouragement. Whenever I heard her at the Broadwood, I would drift into the drawing room, lean against the piano, and gaze off into the distance as if her playing had enchanted me. Usually she ignored me, but once when I said, “What a lovely piece that is! What's it called?” she had almost slammed the lid on my fingers.

  "The scale of G major!" she had shrieked, and fled the room.

  Buckshaw was not an easy place in which to live.

  "She's well," I said. "Reading Dickens like billy-ho. Can't get a word out of her."

  "Ah," Maximilian said. "Dear old Dickens."

  He didn't seem to be able to think of anything further on that topic, and I dived into the momentary silence.

  "Max," I said. "You're a man of the world—"

  At this he preened himself, and puffed up to whatever little height he could muster.

  "Not just a man of the world—a boulevardier," he said.

  "Exactly," I said, wondering what the word meant. "Have you ever visited Stavanger?" It would save me looking it up in the atlas.

  "What? Stavanger in Norway?"

  "SNAP!" I almost shouted aloud. Horace Bonepenny had been in Norway! I took a deep breath to recover myself, hoping it would be mistaken for impatience.

  "Of course in Norway," I said condescendingly. "Are there other Stavangers?"

  For a moment I thought he was onto me. His eyes narrowed and I felt a chill as the thunderclouds of a Maximilian tantrum blew across the sun. But then he gave a tiny giggle, like springwater gurgling into a glass.

  "Stavanger is the first stepping-stone on the Road to Hell. which is a railway station," he said. "I traveled over it to Trondheim, and then on to Hell, which, believe it or not, is a very small village in Norway, from which tourists often dispatch picture postcards to their friends with the message, 'Wish you were here!' and where I performed Grieg's Piano Concerto in A Minor. Grieg, incidentally, was as much a Scot as a Norwegian. Grandfather from Aberdeen, left in disgust after Culloden—must have had second thoughts, though, when he realized he'd done no more than trade the firths for the fjords.

  "Trondheim was a great success, I must say. critics kind, public polite. But those people, they never understand their own music, you know. Played Scarlatti as well, to bring a glimpse of Italian sunshine to those snowy northern climes. Still, at the intermission I happened to hear a commercial traveler from Dublin whispering to a friend, ‘It's all Grieg to me, Thor.’”

  I smiled dutifully, although I had heard this ancient jest about forty-five times before.

  "That was in the old days, of course, before the war. Stavanger! Yes, of course I've been there. But why do you ask?"

  "How did you get there? By ship?"

  Horace Bonepenny had been alive in Stavanger and now he was dead in England and I wanted to know where he had been in between.

  "Of course by ship. You're not thinking of running away from home, are you, Flavia?"

  "We were having a discussion—actually a row—about it last night at supper."

  This was one of the ways to optimize a lie: shovel on the old frankness.

  "Ophelia thought one would embark from London; Father insisted it was Hull; Daphne voted for Scarborough, but only because Anne Bronte is buried there."

  "Newcastle-upon-Tyne," Maximilian said. "Actually, it's Newcastle-upon-Tyne."

  There was a rumble in the distance as the Cottesmore bus approached, waddling along the lane between the hedgerows like a chicken walking a tightrope. It stopped in front of the bench, wheezing heavily as it subsided from the effort of its hard life among the hills. The door swung open with an iron groan.

  "Ernie, mon vieux,” Maximilian said. “How fares the transportation industry?”

  "Board," Ernie said, looking straight ahead through the windscreen. If he caught the joke he chose to ignore it.

  "No ride today, Ernie. Just using your bench to rest my kidneys."

  "Benches are for the sole use of travelers awaiting a coach. It's in the rule book, Max. You know that as well as I do."

  "Indeed I do, Ernie. Thank you for reminding me."

  Max slid off the bench and dropped to the ground.

  "Cheerio, then," he said, and tipping his hat, he set off along the road like Charlie Chaplin.

  The door of the bus squealed shut as Ernie engaged the juddering gears and the coach whined into reluctant forward motion. And so we all went our separate ways: Ernie and his bus to Cottesmore, Max to his cottage, Gladys and I resuming our ride to Hinley.

  THE POLICE STATION IN HINLEY was housed in a building that had once been a coaching inn. Uncomfortably hemmed in between a small park and a cinema, its half-timbered front jutted beetle-brow out over the street, the blue lamp suspended from its overhang. A cinder-block addition, painted a nondescript brown, adhered to the side of the building like cow muck to a passing railway carriage. This, I suspected, was where the cells were located.

  Leaving Gladys to graze in a bicycle stand that was more than half full of official-looking black Raleighs, I went up the worn steps and in the front door.

  A uniformed sergeant sat at a desk shuffling bits of paper and scratching his sparse hair with the sharpened end of a pencil. I smiled and walked on past.

  "'Old on, 'old on," he rumbled. "Where do you think you're goin', miss?" he asked.

  It seems to be a trait of policemen to speak in questions. I smiled as if I hadn't understood and moved towards an open door, beyond which I could see a dark passageway. More quickly than I would have believed, the sergeant was on his feet and had seized me by the arm. I was nabbed. There was nothing else to do but burst into tears.

  I hated to do it, but it was the only tool I had with me.

  TEN MINUTES LATER, we were sipping cocoa in the station tearoom, P. C. Glossop and I. He had told me that he had a girl just like me at home (which, somehow, I doubted), name of Elizabeth.

  "She's a great 'elp to her poor mother, our Lizzie is," he said, "seeing as 'ow Missus Glossop, the wife, that is, 'ad a fall from a ladder in the happle horchard and broke 'er leg two weeks ago come Saturday."

  My first thought was that he had read too many issues of The Beano or The Dandy; that he was laying it on a bit thick for entertainment purposes. But the earnest look on his face and the furrowed brow quickly told me otherwise: This was the real Constable Glossop and I would have to deal with him on his own terms.

  Accordingly, I began to sob again and told him I had no mother and that she had died in far-off Tibet in a mountaineering accident and that I missed her dreadfully.

  "'Ere, 'ere, miss," he said. "Cryin's not allowed in these 'ere premises. Takes away from the natural dignity of the surroundin's, so to speak. You'd best dry up now 'fore I 'ave to toss you in the clink."

  I managed a pale smile, which he returned with interest.

  Several detectives had slipped in for tea and a bun during my performance, each one of them giving me a silent thumbs-up smile. At least they hadn't asked any questions.

  "May I see my father, please?" I asked. "His name is Colonel de Luce, and I believe you're holding him here."

  Constable Glossop's face went suddenly blank and I saw that I had played my hand too quickly; that I was now up against officialdom.

  "Wait 'ere," he said, and stepped out into a narrow passageway at the end of which there appeared to be a wall of black steel bars.

  As soon as he was gone I had a quick look at my surroundings. I was in a dismal little room with sticks of furniture so shabby that they might have been bought directly off the tailgate of a peddler's cart, their legs chipped and dented as if they had suffered a century of kicks in the shin from government regulation boots.

  In a vain attempt to cheer things up, a tiny wooden cupboard had been painted apple green, but the sink was a rust-stained relic that might have been on loan from Wormwood Scrubs. Cracked cups and crazed saucers stood sadly cheek by jowl on a draining board, and I noticed for the
first time that the mullions of the window were, in fact, iron bars only halfheartedly disguised. The whole place had an odd, sharp odor that I had noticed when I first came in: It smelled as if a jar of gentleman's relish, forgotten years ago at the back of a drawer, had gone off.

  Snatches of a song from The Pirates of Penzance flashed into my mind. “A policeman's lot is not a happy one,” the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company had sung on the wireless and, as usual, Gilbert and Sullivan were right.

  Suddenly I found myself thinking about leaving. This whole mission was foolhardy, no more than an impulse to save Father; something thrown up from the prehistoric part of my brain. Just get up and walk to the door, I said to myself. No one will even notice you've gone.

  I listened for a moment, cocking my head like Maximilian to turn up my already acute hearing. Some where in the distance bass voices buzzed like bees in a far-off hive.

  I slid my feet slowly one in front of the other, like some sensuous señorita doing the tango, and stopped abruptly at the door. From where I stood, I could see only one corner of the sergeant's desk outside in the hallway and, mercifully, there was no official elbow resting upon it.

  I ventured a peep. The corridor was empty, and I tangoed unhindered all the way to the door and stepped outside into the daylight.

  Even though I was not a prisoner, my sense of escape was immense.

  I strolled casually over to the bicycle stand. Ten seconds more and I'd be on my way. And then, as if someone had thrown a pail of ice water into my face, I froze in shock: Gladys was gone! I almost screamed it aloud.

  There rested all the official bicycles with their officious little lamps and government-issue carriers—but Gladys was gone!

  I looked this way and that, and somehow, frighteningly, the streets seemed suddenly different now that I was on foot. Which way was home? Which way to the open road?