by Alan Bradley
With a bit of patience and a Bunsen burner, some truly foul odors can be generated in the laboratory. In 1889, for instance, the entire city of Freiburg, in Germany, had to be evacuated when chemists let a bit of thioacetone escape. It was said that people even miles away were sickened by the odor, and that horses fainted in the streets.
How I wish I had been there to see it!
While other substances, such as the lower aliphatic acids, can be easily manipulated to produce every smell from rancid butter to a sweaty horse, or from a rotten drain to a goat’s rugger boots, it is the lower amines—those ragged children of ammonia—that have a most unique and interesting characteristic: As I have said, they smell like rotten fish.
In fact, propylamine and trimethylamine could, without exaggeration, be given the title “The Princes of Pong,” and I knew this for a fact.
Because she has given us so many ways of producing these smelly marvels, I know that Mother Nature loves a good stink as much as I do. I thought fondly of the time I had extracted trimethylamine (for another harmless Girl Guide prank) by distilling it with soda from a full picnic basket of Stinking Goosefoot (Chenopodium olidum), an evil-smelling weed that grew in profusion on the Trafalgar Lawn.
Which brought me back to Brookie Harewood.
One thing I was quite certain of was this: that the riddle of Brookie’s death would be solved not by cameras, notebooks, and measuring tapes at the Poseidon fountain, but rather in the chemical laboratory.
And I was just the one to do it.
I was still thinking about riddles as I slid down the banister and landed in the foyer. Nursery rhyme riddles had been as much a part of my younger years as they had anyone else’s.
Thirty white horses upon a red hill
Now they tramp, now they champ
Now they stand still.
“Teeth!” I would shout, because Daffy had cheated and whispered the answer in my ear.
That, of course, was in the days before my sisters began to dislike me.
Later came the darker verses:
One’s joy, two’s grief,
Three’s marriage; four’s a death.
The answer was “magpies.” We had seen four of these birds land on the roof while having a picnic on the lawn, and my sisters had made me memorize the lines before they would allow me to dig into my dish of strawberries.
I didn’t yet know what death was, but I knew that their verses gave me nightmares. I suppose it was these little rhymes, learned at an early age, that taught me to be good at puzzles. I’ve recently come to the conclusion that the nursery rhyme riddle is the most basic form of the detective story. It’s a mystery stripped of all but the essential facts. Take this one, for instance:
As I was going to St. Ives
I met a man with seven wives.
Each wife had seven sacks
Each sack had seven cats
Each cat had seven kits.
Kits, cats, sacks, wives
How many were going to St. Ives?
The usual answer, of course, is “one.” But when you stop to think about it, there’s much more to it than that. If, for instance, the teller of the rhyme happened to be overtaking the man with the traveling menagerie, the actual number—including sacks—would be almost three thousand!
It all depends upon how you look at things.
Mrs. Mullet was having her tea at the window. I helped myself to a digestive biscuit.
“The Hobblers,” I said, diving in with both feet. “You said they’d have my blood for sausages. Why?”
“You keep clear o’ them lot, miss, like I told you.”
“I thought they were extinct?”
“They smells just the same as everybody else. That’s why you don’t reck’nize ’em till somebody points ’em out.”
“But how can I keep clear of them if I don’t know who they are?”
Mrs. M lowered her voice and looked over both shoulders. “That Mountjoy woman, for one. God knows what goes on in ’er kitchen.”
“Tilda Mountjoy? At Willow Villa?”
I could hardly believe my good fortune!
“The very one. Why, it was no more than this morning I saw her in the Gully—headed for the Palings, she was, just as bold as brass. They still go there to do things with the water—poison it, for all I know.”
“But wait,” I said. “Miss Mountjoy can’t be a Hobbler—she goes to St. Tancred’s.”
“To spy, most likely!” Mrs. Mullet snorted. “She told my friend Mrs. Waller it was on account of the organ. The ’Obblesr got no organs, you know—don’t ’old by ’em. ‘I do love the sound of a good organ well played,’ she told Mrs. Waller, who told it to me. Tilda Mountjoy’s an ’Obbler born and bred, as was ’er parents before ’er. It’s in the blood. Don’t matter whose collection plate she puts ’er sixpences in, she’s an ’Obbler from snoot to shoes, believe you me.”
“You saw her in the Gully?” I asked, making mental notes like mad.
“With my own eyes. Since that Mrs. Ingleby come into her troubles I’ve been havin’ to stretch my legs for eggs. All the way out to Rawlings, now, though I must say they’re better yolks than Ingleby’s. It’s all in the grit, you know—or is it the shells? ’Course once I’m all the way out there, it makes no sense to go traipsin’ all the way back round, does it? So it’s into the Gully I go, eggs and all, and take a shortcut through the Palings. That’s when I seen her, just by Bull’s bonfires, she was—no more’n a stone’s throw ahead of me.”
“Did she speak to you?”
“Ho! Fat chance of that, my girl. As soon as I seen who it was I fell back and sat on a bank and took my shoe off. Pretended I’d got a stone in it.”
Obviously, Mrs. M had been walking in the same direction as Miss Mountjoy, and was about to overtake her—just like the person who was walking to St. Ives.
“Good for you!” I said, clapping my hands together with excitement and shaking my head in wonder. “What a super idea.”
“Don’t say ‘super,’ dear. You know the Colonel doesn’t like it.”
I made the motion of pulling a zipper across my lips.
“Oon ewdge?”
“Sorry, dear. I don’t know what you’re saying.”
I unfastened the zipper.
“Who else? The other Hobblers, I mean.”
“Well, I really shouldn’t say, but that Reggie Pettibone, for one. His wife, too. Reg’lar stuffed hat, she thinks she is, at the Women’s Institute, all Looey the Nineteenth, an’ that.”
“Her husband owns the antiques shop?”
Mrs. Mullet nodded her head gloomily, and I knew she was reliving the loss of her Army and Navy table.
“Thank you, Mrs. M,” I said. “I’m thinking of writing a paper on the history of Buckshaw. I shall mention you in the footnotes.”
Mrs. Mullet primped her hair with a forefinger as I walked to the kitchen door.
“You stay away from them lot, mind.”
SEVENTEEN
LIKE SEVERAL OF THE shops in Bishop’s Lacey, Pettibone’s had a Georgian front with a small painted door squeezed in between a pair of many-paned bow windows.
I bicycled slowly past the place, then dismounted and strolled casually towards the shop, as if I had only just noticed it.
I put my nose to the glass, but the interior was too dim to see more than a stack of old plates on a dusty table.
Without warning, a hand came out of nowhere and hung something directly in front of my face—a hand-lettered cardboard sign.
CLOSED, it said, and the card was still swaying from its string as I made a dash for the door. I grabbed the knob, but at the same instant, the disembodied pair of hands seized it on the inside, trying desperately to keep it from turning—trying to drive home the bolt before I could gain entry.
But luck was on my side. My hearty shove proved stronger than the hands that were holding it closed, and I was propelled into the shop’s interior a little faster than I should have liked
.
“Oh, thank you,” I said. “I thought you might be closed. It’s about a gift, you see, and—”
“We are closed,” said a cracked, tinny voice, and I spun round to find myself face to face with a peculiar little man.
He looked like an umbrella handle that had been carved into the shape of a parrot: beaked nose, white hair as tight and curly as a powdered wig, and red circles on each cheek as if he had just rouged them. His face was powder white and his lips too red for words.
He seemed to stand precariously on his tiny feet, swaying so alarmingly backwards and forwards that I had the feeling he was about to topple from his perch.
“We’re closed,” he repeated. “You must come back another time.”
“Mr. Pettibone?” I asked, sticking out a hand. “I’m Flavia de Luce, from Buckshaw.”
He didn’t have much choice.
“Pleased to meet you, I’m sure,” he said, taking two of my fingers in his miniature fist and giving them a faint squeeze. “But we’re closed.”
“It’s my father, you see,” I went on breathlessly. “Today’s his birthday, and we wanted to—my sisters and I, that is—surprise him. He’s expressed a great interest in something you have in your shop, and we’d hoped to—I’m sorry I’m so late, Mr. Pettibone, but I was folding bandages at the St. John’s Ambulance …”
I allowed my lower lip to tremble very slightly.
“And what is this … er … object?”
“A table,” I blurted. It was the first thing that came to mind, and a jolly good thing I’d thought of it. There must be dozens of tables in a place like this, and I’d be able to have a good old snoop round while searching for the right one.
“Could you … er … describe it?”
“Yes,” I said. “Of course. It has four legs and—a top.”
I could see that he was unconvinced.
“It’s for stamps, you see. Father’s a philatelist, and he needs something he can spread his work on … under a lamp. His eyes are not quite what they used to be, and my sisters and I—”
He was edging me towards the door.
“Oh—just a minute. I think that’s it,” I said, pointing to a rather sorry bit of furniture that was huddled in the gloom beneath an ormolu clock with plump-bellied pewter horses. By moving to touch it, I was six or eight feet deeper into the shop.
“Oh, no, this one’s too dark. I thought it was mahogany. No—wait! It’s this one over here.”
I had plunged well towards the back of the shop and into the shadows. With Pettibone bearing down upon me like a wolf upon the fold, I realized that I was now cut off from the door and freedom.
“What are you playing at?” he said, making a sudden grab for my arm. I leapt out of his reach.
Suddenly the situation had turned dangerous. But why? Was there something in the shop Pettibone didn’t want me to see? Did he suspect that I was on to his shady antiques dealings?
Whatever the cause of his aggressiveness, I needed to act quickly.
To my right, standing about a foot out from the wall, was a massive wardrobe. I slid behind it.
For a while, at least, I was safe. He was too big to squeeze behind the thing. I might not be able to come out, but I’d have a moment to plan my next move.
But then Pettibone was back with a broom. He shoved the bristles into my ribs—and pushed. I stood my ground.
Now he turned the broom around and began prodding at me furiously with the handle, like a man who has trapped a rat behind the kitchen cupboard.
“Ouch!” I cried out. “Stop! Stop it! You’re hurting me!”
Actually, he wasn’t, but I couldn’t let him know that. I was able to slip far enough along the wall that I was beyond reach of his broom.
As he came round the wardrobe to have a try from the other side, I slithered back to the far end.
But I knew I was trapped. This game of cat and mouse could go on all day.
Now the wardrobe had begun to move, its china casters squealing. Pettibone had put his shoulder to a corner and was shifting the thing out from the wall.
“Oh!” I shrieked. “You’re crushing me!”
The wall of wood stopped moving and there was a brief pause in his attack, during which I could hear him breathing heavily.
“Reginald!”
The voice—a woman’s—cut through the shop like a falling icicle. I heard him mutter something.
“Reginald, come up here at once! Do you hear me?”
“Hello upstairs!” I shouted. “It’s Flavia de Luce.”
There was a silence, and then the voice said, “Come up, Flavia. Reginald, bring the girl here.”
It was as if she’d said “fetch.”
I slipped out from behind the wardrobe, rubbing my elbows, and shot him a reproachful look.
His eyes strayed to a narrow staircase at the side of the shop, and before he could change his mind, I moved towards it.
I could have made a break for the door, but I didn’t. This could be my only chance at scouting out the place. “In for a penny, in for a pound,” as Mrs. Mullet was fond of saying.
I put my foot on the first step and began my slow trudge upstairs to whatever fate awaited me.
The room at the top came as a complete surprise. Rather than the rabbit’s warren of little cubicles I had imagined, the place was unexpectedly large. Obviously, all of the interior walls had been knocked out to form a spacious attic which was the same size as the shop beneath.
And what a contrast with the shop it was! There was no clutter up here: In fact, with one exception, the room was almost empty.
In the middle of the floor stood a great square bed hung with white linen, and in it, propped up by a wall of pillows, was a woman whose features might well have been chiseled from a block of ice. There was a faint bluish—or cyanotic—tinge to her face and hands which suggested, at first glance, that she might be the victim of either carbon monoxide or silver poisoning, but as I stared, I began to see that her complexion was colored not by poison, but by artifice.
Her skin was the color of skim milk. Her lips, like those of her husband (I presumed that the parrot-man was her husband) were painted a startling red, and, as if she were a leftover star from the silent cinema, her hair hung down around her face in a mass of silver ringlets.
Only when I had taken in the details of the room and its occupant did I allow my attention to shift to the bed itself: an ebony four-poster with its posts carved into the shape of black angels, each of them frozen into position like a sentry in his box at Buckingham Palace.
Several mattresses must have been piled one atop the other to give the thing its height, and a set of wooden steps had been constructed at the bedside, like a ladder beside a haystack.
Slowly, the icy apparition in the bed lifted a lorgnette to her eyes and regarded me coolly through its lenses.
“Flavia de Luce, you say? One of Colonel de Luce’s daughters—from Buckshaw?”
I nodded.
“Your sister Ophelia has performed for us at the Women’s Institute. A remarkably gifted player.”
I should have known! This landlocked iceberg was a friend of Feely’s!
Under any other circumstances, I’d have said something rude and stalked out of the room, but I thought better of it. The investigation of murder, I was beginning to learn, can demand great personal sacrifice.
Actually, the woman’s words were true. Feely was a first-rate pianist, but there was no sense going on and on about it.
“Yes,” I said, “she’s quite talented.”
Until then I had been unaware that Reginald was close behind me, standing on the stairs just one or two steps from the top.
“You may go, Reginald,” the woman said, and I turned to watch him descend, in uncanny silence, to the shop below.
“Now then,” she said. “Speak.”
“I’m afraid I owe you and Mr. Pettibone an apology,” I said. “I told him a lie.”
“Which
was?”
“That I’d come to buy a table for Father. What I really wanted was an opportunity to ask you about the Hobblers.”
“The Hobblers?” she said with an awkward laugh. “Whatever makes you think I’d know anything about the Hobblers? They haven’t existed since the days of powdered wigs.”
In spite of her denial, I could see that my question had caught her off guard. Perhaps I could take advantage of her surprise.
“I know that they were founded in the seventeenth century by Nicodemus Flitch, and that the Palings, at Buckshaw, have played an important role in their history, what with baptisms, and so forth.”
I paused to see how this would be received.
“And what has this to do with me?” she asked, putting down the lorgnette and then picking it up again.
“Oh, somebody mentioned that you belonged to that … faith. I was talking to Miss Mountjoy, and she—”
True enough—I had been talking to Miss Mountjoy. As long as I didn’t actually say that she’d told me, I’d be guilty of no great sin. Other than one of omission, perhaps. Feely was always going on and on about sins of commission and omission until your eyes were left spinning like fishing lures.
“Tilda Mountjoy,” she said, after a long pause. “I see … tell me more.”
“Well, it’s just that I’ve been making a few notes about Buckshaw’s history, you know, and as I was going through some old papers in Father’s library, I came across some quite early documents.”
“Documents?” she demanded. “What kind of documents?”
She was rising to the bait! Her thoughts were written on her face as clearly as if they were tattooed on her cheeks.
Old papers relating to Nicodemus Flitch and the Hobblers? she was thinking. Now here’s my opportunity to pull the rug out from under dear, dull-as-ditchwater old Tilda, and her long-winded papers in the Hobblers’ Historical Society Journal. Former librarian be blowed! I’ll show her what real research can bring to light.