The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie

by Alan Bradley

  As if I hadn't problems enough, there was a storm coming. Black clouds were boiling in the western sky, while those scudding directly overhead were already unpleasantly purple and bruised.

  Fear filled me, and then anger. How could I have been so stupid as to leave Gladys unlocked in a strange place? How would I get home? What was to become of poor Flavia?

  Feely had once told me never to look vulnerable in unfamiliar surroundings, but how, I found myself wondering, does one actually go about doing that?

  That was what I was thinking about when a heavy hand fell onto my shoulder and a voice said, “I think you'd better come with me.”

  It was Inspector Hewitt.

  "THAT WOULD BE HIGHLY IRREGULAR,” the Inspector said. “Most improper.”

  We were sitting in his office: a long narrow room that had been the saloon bar of this onetime coaching inn. It was impressively neat, a room that needed only a potted aspidistra and a piano.

  A file cabinet and a desk of quite-ordinary design; a chair, a telephone, and a small bookshelf, atop which was a framed photograph of a woman in a camel-hair coat perching on the rail of a quaint stone bridge. Somehow I had expected more.

  "Your father is being detained here until we are in receipt of certain information. At that time he will likely be taken elsewhere, a place which I'm not at liberty to disclose. I'm sorry, Flavia, but seeing him is out of the question.”

  "Is he under arrest?" I asked.

  "I'm afraid so," he answered.

  "But why?" This was a bad question, and I knew it as soon as it was out of my mouth. He was looking at me as if I were a child.

  "Look, Flavia," he said, "I know you're upset. That's understandable. You didn't have a chance to see your father before. well, you were away from Buckshaw when we brought him here. These things are always very difficult for a police officer, you know, but you must understand that there are sometimes things which I would very much like to do as a friend, but which, as a representative of His Majesty, I am forbidden to do."

  "I know," I said. "King George the Sixth is not a frivolous man."

  Inspector Hewitt looked at me sadly. He got up from his desk and went to the window where he stood looking out at the gathering clouds, his hands clasped behind his back.

  "No," he said at last, "King George is not a frivolous man."

  Then suddenly, I had an idea. Like the proverbial bolt of lightning, everything fell into place as smoothly as one of those backwards cinema films in which the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle jump each into its proper place, completing itself before your very eyes.

  "May I be frank with you, Inspector?" I asked.

  "Of course," he said. "Please do."

  "The body at Buckshaw was that of a man who arrived in Bishop's Lacey on Friday after a journey from Stavanger, in Norway. You must release Father at once, Inspector, because, you see, he didn't do it.”

  Although he was a little taken aback, the Inspector recovered quickly and gave me an indulgent smile.

  "He didn't?"

  "No," I said. "I did. I killed Horace Bonepenny."

  fourteen

  IT WAS ABSOLUTELY PERFECT. THERE WAS NO ONE who could prove otherwise.

  I had been awakened in the night, I would claim, by a peculiar sound outside the house. I had gone downstairs and then into the garden, where I had been put upon by a prowler: a burglar, perhaps, bent on stealing Father's stamps. After a brief struggle I had overpowered him.

  Hold on, Flave, that last bit seemed a little far-fetched: Horace Bonepenny was more than six feet tall and could have strangled me between his thumb and forefinger. No, we had struggled and he had died—a dicky heart perhaps, the result of some long-forgotten childhood illness. Rheumatic fever, let's say. Yes, that was it. Delayed congestive heart failure, like Beth in Little Women. I sent up a silent prayer to Saint Tancred to work a miracle: Please, dear Saint Tancred, let Bonepenny's autopsy confirm my fib.

  "I killed Horace Bonepenny,” I repeated, as if saying it twice would make it seem more credible.

  Inspector Hewitt drew in a deep breath and let it out through his nose. “Tell me about it,” he said.

  "I heard a noise in the night, I went out into the garden, someone jumped out at me from the shadows—"

  "Hold on," he said, "what part of the shadows?"

  "The shadows behind the potting shed. I was struggling to get free when there was a sudden gurgle in his throat, almost as if he had suffered congestive heart failure due to a bout of rheumatic fever he suffered as a child—or something like that."

  "I see," Inspector Hewitt said. "And what did you do then?"

  "I went back into the house and fetched Dogger. The rest, I believe, you know."

  But wait—I knew that Dogger had not told him about our joint eavesdropping on Father's quarrel with Horace Bonepenny; still, it was unlikely that Dogger would tell the Inspector I had awakened him at four in the morning without mentioning the fact that I had killed the man. Or was it?

  I needed time to think this through.

  "Struggling with an attacker is hardly murder," the Inspector said.

  "No," I said, "but I haven't told you everything."

  I riffled at lightning speed through my mental index cards: poisons unknown to science (too slow); fatal hypnotism (ditto); the secret and forbidden blows of jujitsu (unlikely; too obscure to explain). Suddenly, it began to dawn on me that martyrdom required real inventive genius—a glib tongue was not enough.

  "I'm ashamed to," I added.

  When in doubt, I thought, fall back on feelings. I was proud of myself for having thought of this.

  "Hmm," the Inspector said. "Let's leave it for now. Did you tell Dogger you had killed this prowler?"

  "No, I don't believe I did. I was too upset by it all, you see."

  "Did you tell him later?"

  "No, I didn't think his nerves were up to it."

  "Well, this is all very interesting," Inspector Hewitt said, "but the details seem a bit sparse."

  I knew that I was standing at the edge of a precipice: one step more and there would be no turning back.

  "There's more," I said, "but—"

  "But?"

  "I'm not saying another word until you let me speak to Father."

  Inspector Hewitt seemed to be trying to swallow something that wouldn't go down. He opened his mouth as if some obstruction had suddenly materialized in his throat, then closed it again. He gulped, and then did something that I had to admire, something I made a mental note to add to my own bag of tricks: He grabbed for his pocket handkerchief and transformed his astonishment into a sneeze.

  "Privately," I added.

  The Inspector blew his nose loudly and went back to the window, where he stood gazing out at nothing in particular, his hands again behind his back. I was beginning to learn that this meant he was thinking deeply.

  "All right," he said abruptly. "Come along."

  I jumped up eagerly from my chair and followed him. At the door he barred the way into the corridor with one arm and turned, his other hand floating down as gently as a feather onto my shoulder.

  "I'm about to do something which I may have grave cause to regret," he said. "I'm risking my career. Don't let me down, Flavia. please don't let me down."

  "FLAVIA!" Father said. I could tell he was amazed to see me there. And then he spoiled it by adding, "Take this child away, Inspector. I beg of you, remove her."

  He turned away from me and faced towards the wall.

  Although the door of the room had been painted over with yellowish cream enamel, it was obvious that it was clad with steel. When the Inspector had unlocked it, I had seen that the chamber itself was little more than a small office with a fold-down cot and a surprisingly clean sink. Mercifully they had not put Father into one of the barred cages I'd glimpsed earlier.

  Inspector Hewitt gave me a curt nod, as if to say, “It's up to you,” then stepped outside and closed the door as quietly as possible. There was no sound of
a key turning in the lock, or of a bolt shooting home, although a bright flash outside and the sudden crash of thunder might well have masked the sound.

  Father must have thought that I'd gone out with the Inspector, because he gave a nervous start as he turned round and saw that I was still there.

  "Go home, Flavia," he said.

  Although he stood stiffly and perfectly erect, his voice was old and tired. I could see that he was trying to play the stolid English gentleman, fearless in the face of danger, and I realized with a pang that I loved him and hated him for it at the same time.

  "It's raining," I said, pointing to the window. The clouds had torn themselves apart as they had done earlier at the Folly, and the rain was falling heavily once again, the fat drops clearly audible as they bounced like shot from the ledge outside the window. In a tree across the road, a solitary rook shook itself out like a wet umbrella.

  "I can't go home until it stops. And someone's pinched Gladys."

  "Gladys?" he said, his eyes like those of an extinct sea creature swimming up from unknown depths.

  "My bicycle," I told him.

  He nodded absently, and I knew he hadn't heard me.

  "Who brought you here?" Father asked. "Him?" He jerked his thumb towards the door to indicate Inspector Hewitt.

  "I came by myself."

  "By yourself? From Buckshaw?"

  "Yes," I said.

  This seemed to be more than he could grasp, and he turned back to the window. I couldn't help noticing that he took up the same stance as Inspector Hewitt, with his hands clasped behind his back.

  "By yourself. From Buckshaw," he said at last, as if he had just worked it out.

  "Yes."

  "And Daphne and Ophelia?"

  "They are both well," I assured him. "Missing you terribly, of course, but they're looking after things until you come home."

  If I tell a lie, my mother will die.

  That was what the little girls sometimes chanted as they skipped rope in the churchyard. Well, my mother was already dead, wasn't she, so what harm could it possibly do? And who knows? Because of it, I might even have a credit in Heaven.

  "Come home?" Father said at last, as something like a sigh escaped him. "That might not be for some time. No. that might not be for quite some time."

  On the wall, beside a barred window, was pasted up a calendar from a Hinley greengrocer, bearing a picture of King George and Queen Elizabeth, each hermetically sealed in his or her own private bubble, and dressed in a way that made me think the photographer had caught them by chance on their way to a costume ball at the castle of some Bavarian princeling.

  Father gave the calendar a furtive glance and began pacing restlessly back and forth in the little room, studiously avoiding my gaze. He seemed to have forgotten I was there, and had now begun making irregular little humming noises punctuated with an occasional indignant sniff as if he were defending himself before an invisible tribunal.

  "I confessed just now," I said.

  "Yes, yes," Father said, and went on pacing and mumbling to himself.

  "I told Inspector Hewitt that I killed Horace Bonepenny.”

  Father came to as dead a stop as if he had run onto a sword. He turned and fixed me with that dreaded blue stare which was so often his weapon of choice when dealing with his daughters.

  "What do you know about Horace Bonepenny?" he asked in a chill tone.

  "Quite a lot, actually," I said.

  Then, surprisingly, the fight went out of him all at once, just like that. One moment his cheeks were puffed out like the face of the winds that blow across medieval maps, and the next they were as hollow as a horse trader's. He sat down on the edge of the bunk, spreading out the fingers of one hand to steady himself.

  "I overheard your disagreement in the study," I said. "I'm sorry if I eavesdropped. I didn't mean to, but I heard voices in the night and came downstairs. I know that he tried to blackmail you. I heard the quarrel. That's why I told Inspector Hewitt that I killed him."

  This time it filtered through to Father.

  "Killed him?" he asked. "What do you mean, killed him?"

  "I didn't want them to know it was you," I said.

  "Me?" Father said, rocketing up off the bed. "Good Lord! Whatever makes you think I killed the man?"

  "It's all right," I said. "He most likely deserved it. I'll never tell anyone. I promise."

  With my right hand I crossed my heart and hoped to die, and Father stared at me as if I were some monstrous wet creature that had just flopped out of a painting by Hieronymus Bosch.

  "Flavia," he said. "Please understand this: Much as I should have liked to, I did not kill Horace Bonepenny."

  "You didn't?"

  I could scarcely believe it. I had already come to the conclusion that Father must have committed murder, and I could see that it was going to be hard cheese admitting I was wrong.

  Still, I remembered that Feely had once told me that confession was good for the soul—this while she had my arm bent behind my back trying to force me to tell her what I had done with her diary.

  "I overheard what you said about killing your housemaster, Mr. Twining. I went to the library and looked it up in the newspaper archives. I talked to Miss Mountjoy—she's Mr. Twining's niece. She remembered the names Jacko and Horace Bonepenny from the inquest. I know that he stayed at the Thirteen Drakes and that he brought a dead jack snipe from Norway hidden in a pie."

  Father shook his head slowly and sadly from side to side, not in admiration of my detective skills, but like an old bear that has been shot yet refuses to lie down.

  "It's true," he said. "But do you really believe your father capable of cold-blooded murder?"

  When I thought about it for a moment—actually thought about it—I saw how foolish I had been. Why had I not realized this before? Cold-blooded murder was just one of the many things Father was incapable of.

  "Well. no," I ventured.

  "Flavia, look at me," he said, but when I looked up and into his eyes, I saw, for an unnerving instant, my own eyes staring back at me and I had to look away.

  "Horace Bonepenny was not particularly a decent man, but he did not deserve to die. No one deserves to die," Father said, his voice fading out like a distant broadcast on the shortwave, and I knew that he was no longer speaking only to me.

  "There is already so much death in the world," he added.

  He sat, looking at his hands, each thumb stroking the other, his fingers engaging like the cogs of an old clock.

  After a time he said, “What about Dogger?”

  "He was there too," I admitted. "Outside your study."

  Father gave a groan.

  "That is what I feared," he whispered. "That is what I feared more than anything."

  And then, as the rain swept in sheets across the windowpane, Father began to talk.

  fifteen

  AT FIRST FATHER'S UNACCUSTOMED WORDS CAME slowly and hesitantly—jerking into reluctant motion like rusty freight cars on the railway. But then, picking up speed, they soon smoothed out into a steady flow.

  "My father was not an easy man to like," he said. "He sent me away to boarding school when I was eleven. I seldom saw him again. It's odd, you know: I never knew what interested him until someone at his funeral, one of the pallbearers, chanced to remark that his passion had been netsuke. I had to look it up in the dictionary."

  "It's a small Japanese carving in ivory," I said. "It's in one of Austin Freeman's Dr. Thorndyke stories."

  Father ignored me and went on. “Although Greyminster was no more than a few miles from Buckshaw, in those days it might just as well have been on the moon. We were fortunate indeed in our headmaster, Dr. Kissing, a gentle soul who believed no harm could ever come to the boy who was administered daily doses of Latin, rugger, cricket, and history, and on the whole, we were treated well.

  "Like most, I was a solitary boy at first, keeping to my books and weeping in the hedgerows whenever I could get away on my own.
Surely, I thought, I must be the saddest child in the world; that there must be something innately horrid about me to cause my father to cast me off so heartlessly. I believed that if I could discover what it was, there might be a chance of putting things right, of somehow making it up to him.

  "At night in the dorm I would tunnel under the blankets with an electric torch and examine my face in a stolen shaving mirror. I couldn't see anything particularly wrong, but then I was only a child and not really equipped to judge these things.

  "But time went on, as time does, and I found myself being swept up into the life of the school. I was good at history but quite hopeless when it came to the books of Euclid, which put me somewhere in the middle ranks: neither so proficient nor so stupid as to draw attention to myself.

  "Mediocrity, I discovered, was the great camouflage; the great protective coloring. Those boys who did not fail, yet did not excel, were left alone, free of the demands of the master who might wish to groom them for glory and of the school bully who might make them his scapegoat. That simple fact was the first great discovery of my life.

  "It was in the fourth form, I think, that I finally began to take an interest in the things around me and, like all boys of that age, I had an insatiable taste for mystification, so that when Mr. Twining, my housemaster, proposed the founding of a conjuring circle, I found myself suddenly ablaze with new enthusiasm.

  "Mr. Twining was more kindly than adept; not a very polished performer, I must admit, but he carried off his tricks with such ebullience, such good-hearted enthusiasm, that it would have been churlish of us to withhold our noisy schoolboy applause.

  "He taught us, in the evenings, to turn wine into water using no more than a handkerchief and a bit of colored blotting paper; how to make a marked shilling vanish from a covered drinking glass before being extracted from Simpkins's ear. We learned the importance of 'patter,' the conjurer's line of talk, as it were; and he drilled us in spectacular shuffles which left the ace of hearts always at the bottom of the pack.

  "It goes without saying that Mr. Twining was popular; loved might be a better word, although few of us at the time had seen enough of that emotion to recognize it for what it was.