As Chimney Sweepers Come to Dust: A Flavia De Luce Novel

by Alan Bradley

  “Huh?” was all I could manage.

  Meanwhile, Dorsey was oozing down the staircase with slow, cautious steps, the way you might approach a rattlesnake that has been run over by a car and is writhing, injured, at the side of the road.

  I had the most awful feeling that she was suddenly going to produce a blanket from somewhere about her abominable person and throw it over my head.

  Her mouth was moving meaninglessly, but no sound was emerging.

  And then I realized that she had been talking to me but I hadn’t been listening.

  “… a very bad shock,” she was saying.

  Shock? Who was she talking about? Collingwood?… Or me?

  Were they planning to bind me in wet bedsheets and pump me full of chloral hydrate? Was there a chimney waiting for Flavia de Luce?

  It was only at that moment, I think, that my mind finally grasped how horribly far from home I was, and how off-balance and deprived of sleep. In ordinary circumstances I would have dealt the Rainsmiths their comeuppance and be already dusting off my hands—but I was not. I was fighting for my life and I knew it.

  I backed slowly away from the descending Dorsey, matching her step for step in a deadly tango, edging ever closer to the door.

  “Wait,” she said. “You don’t understand.”

  Oh, yes, I do, Miss Knockout Drops. I understand all too perfectly.

  The average person, I suppose, does not often stop to think about what can be done to one’s body by a pair of homicidal medical doctors. The very thought of it is enough to make the blood dry up like the Dead Sea.

  They could, for instance, remove my organs, slowly and one at a time, until nothing was left on the dissecting table but my two eyeballs rolling wildly about in search of mercy, and my arms and legs.

  Or they could—but enough!

  I knew that I would have one chance—and one chance only—to get myself out of this scrape.

  Should I run? Attack? Or use my brain.

  The decision was an easy one.

  “Daddy!” I called out with a glance toward one of the empty hallways. “Look who’s here. It’s Mr. and Mrs. Rainsmith.”

  In real life, if I had ever stooped to calling Father “Daddy,” we both of us should have shriveled up and died from mortification. But this was not real life: It was a bit of impromptu theater I was staging to save my bacon.

  And with that vile name “Daddy” on my lips, I slowly strolled casually off with open arms toward my invisible parent who was standing, so to speak, in the wings.

  “I hope your flight wasn’t too tiresome?” I said loudly, once I was out of their sight.

  And it worked!

  The Rainsmiths, as far as I knew, had remained frozen on the staircase—hadn’t moved a muscle, in fact, until sometime after I had crept quietly out the back door and made my way round to the laundry.

  The key I had pinched made it a matter of less than three seconds—I counted—before I was inside that hellish temple of cleanliness (a phrase I borrowed from Daffy, who always used it to describe Armfields, the only London dry cleaners to whom Father would entrust his threadbare wardrobe—except his linens, of course, which were permitted to be washed, ironed, stiffened with potato starch, and correctly folded by no one but Mrs. Mullet in the kitchen of her cottage in Cobbler’s Lane).

  Again, a pang of something struck at my heart. I swallowed and looked round the cavernous laundry.

  Lock the door! my brain commanded, and I obeyed instantly.

  Because it was Sunday, the place was cold and clammy and—with the machines shut off, the great boilers as quiet as a pair of landlocked submarines—the whole place was as silent as the grave.

  I shivered. Never in my life had I felt more of a trespasser—and that was saying a lot.

  For a minute or two, I stood motionless on the same spot, listening. But there was not a sound. Surely, even if the Rainsmiths had the nerve to follow me, I would hear their footsteps. The gravel outside the door would guarantee it.

  Meanwhile, I might as well make use of the fact that I was now locked into the laundry, and probably would be for some time.

  What better excuse for a jolly good snoop?

  On my first visit to this hellhole, I had glimpsed briefly, through the steam, a small room in one corner—no more than a cubicle, really—which appeared to be an office.

  Might as well start there.

  A battered wooden desk with an ancient telephone handset and a mechanical chair with protruding springs took up most of the space. On the back wall were shelves lined with ledgers bound in linen, most of them dated on their spines with a span of years: 1943–46, 1931–35, and so forth.

  I pulled open the desk drawers, one by one. Of the six, two were empty and the remaining four contained a remarkably uninteresting lot of litter: rubber stamps, ink in a pad, the moldy remains of a cheese sandwich in waxed paper, a bottle of Jergens Lotion, aspirin, a pair of rubber gloves, a rubber finger protector, pencils (broken) red and black, and two dog-eared paperbacks: How To Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie, and How To Stop Worrying and Start Living, ditto.

  Not very encouraging.

  But in the bottom right-hand drawer was a fat telephone directory, its curled cover jamming the sliding rail. I could not seem to free it, and could not look behind it without getting down onto my hands and knees on the unsanitary stone floor.

  By bending my elbow at a scarecrow angle, I was somehow able to work my hand behind the bowed book. My fingers came in contact with something furry.

  My first thought was that it was a dead mouse: one that had nibbled on the cheese sandwich, perhaps, and expired of penicillin poisoning, or anaphylaxis.

  I fought down my girlish instinct to pull my hand away, or perhaps, even, to scream. I forced my fingers to close around the object and pull it into view.

  It was a sock—a red wool sock. And I knew at once that I had seen its mate before.

  I studied it carefully and shoved it back into the drawer. Fingerprints, I knew, could not be retrieved from most fabrics, least of all wool. But I had seen all that I needed to see, and I wouldn’t want to be accused of tampering excessively with evidence.

  Besides, there was no point in taking it with me for comparison when its matching mate was in the morgue.

  Turning my attention to the shelf of ledgers, I took down the right-most book, 1950, its ending date not yet lettered. Obviously the current volume.

  The binding gave a dusty sigh and a brisk crackle as I opened the book, and the smell of sweat and old starch came to my nostrils. These were the laundry registers of Miss Bodycote’s Female Academy.

  Would they be of any use in my investigations? I remembered something Mrs. Mullet had once told me when I had made a condescending joke about her galvanized tubs: “Don’t ever look down your nose at your laundry maid, miss,” she had snapped in a rare show of short temper. “We knows what you eats, what you drinks, and what you gets up to in between. There’s many a tale told on the scrub board.”

  I hadn’t known what she meant, but it sounded like a handy bit of knowledge to keep up my sleeve for future reference, and now, it seemed, was the time.

  I leafed through the pages of the ledger, each one ruled into five columns: Date, Name, Item, Notes, and Charge.

  For instance:

  Sept. 10, 1951 / Scarlett, A. / SW WL 2, BLM 2, ST 2, TUN, HNK 2, NGTN / $1.85

  From which I deduced that Amelia Scarlett’s parents were to be charged $1.85 for the laundering of two woolen sweaters, two pairs of bloomers (a form of undergarment I thought existed nowadays only in rude poems and even ruder songs), two pairs of stockings, a tunic, two handkerchiefs, and a nightgown.

  This was a recent entry, made not much more than a month ago.

  What tales would be told by the entries from a couple of years ago: in the aftermath, for instance, of the Beaux Arts Ball? Surely such an extravagant event would never pass without a few spilled glasses of punch or lemonade.


  I reached for the previous volume. Inside the front cover were pasted calendars for 1947, 1948, and 1949, with various dates ticked off in ink.

  Yes—here we were in June 1949, which had four Saturdays, the 4th, 11th, 18th, and 25th. The Beaux Arts Ball must have taken place on one of them. The question was: which?

  There were a flurry of entries before and after the 18th: people having their clothing cleaned before the ball and mopping up afterward, or so I guessed. I could check the actual date later with someone who knew.

  I leafed on through the book, more out of idle curiosity than anything. Mrs. Mullet was right: The laundry staff knew everything. Here, in remarkable detail, were the rips and the tears, the spills and the stains of everyday life. Doxon, M., for instance, had spilled hydrochloric acid on her blouse in chemistry class; Johnson, S. had ripped her tunic on barbed wire during a hare-and-hounds chase; while some clown named Terwilliger, A. had fallen downstairs with two jam tarts in her pocket. It was all recorded in horrible, laughable, fascinating detail.

  As my eyes swept across the 6th of July, a familiar name caught my eye: Brazenose, C.

  Clarissa Brazenose.

  But wait! Hadn’t she vanished weeks earlier? The night of the Beaux Arts Ball? And reappeared two years later—at least, according to Scarlett—the night before our trip to the training camp … the same day, coincidentally, as my walk in the churchyard with Miss Fawlthorne … and on the eve of my first class in the chemistry lab with Mrs. Bannerman?

  Could there be a connection?

  Where had she been for the past six hundred and some-odd days? For that matter, where was she now?

  Assuming that Clarissa Brazenose was still alive and not a specter, it could hardly have been her body that had tumbled down the chimney.

  Whose was it, then?

  My mind was writhing with ideas like so many snakes in a pit.

  For instance, I had not so far come across any entries for the teaching staff. Perhaps they were expected to see to their own laundry expenses, but was that likely? Any institution with such a great roaring steam laundry as Miss Bodycote’s would surely not deny its services to the faculty.

  Another reach to the top shelf brought down an unmarked volume.

  Aha! This was more like it: Fawlthorne, Puddicombe, Moate, Bannerman, Fitzgibbon—here they were, the faculty bigwigs, in all their laundered glory.

  I was exalted for about six and a half seconds, and then I saw that there were no informative details given, as there had been for the students. The items cleaned were simply listed, which made sense, of course, since the owners were not being charged for the service.

  But what had I expected? Cyanide stains on the frock of Mrs. Bannerman close to the date of her husband’s demise? It was too much to hope. Life didn’t work that way—nor did death.

  The only item of interest was a recurring entry for “Overalls” under the name Kelly.

  At last! Here was my missing “K”: that so-far invisible person who stoked the boilers—or whatever it was he or she did to require access to the laundry—whose key I had just used to gain entry to the place.

  I saw at once that Kelly was subject to rips and grass stains, and once each to “tar” and “lock oil.”

  I was standing there with the book in my hand when, from the corner of my eye, I caught a sudden movement.

  I whipped round and found myself face-to-face with a cliff of hulking flesh. Where on earth had he come from? I had locked the door behind me when I came in, and the only other access to the laundry was by way of a pair of steel doors at the back which, as I could plainly see, were locked and barred.

  He must have been here all along! The very thought of it made my toes curl.

  “What are you up to?” he demanded in a wood-rasp voice.

  The smell of alcohol almost bowled me over.

  It didn’t take the brains of a Sherlock Holmes to deduce that this bruiser had been drinking behind the boilers. His red and crusted eyes told the rest of the tale: Here was a man who made the most of a quiet Sunday to have a nip and a nap. There were probably hundreds like him the world over.

  “I found the door unlocked,” I said, with just a trace of recrimination in my voice, a trick I had learned from Feely. I waved the laundry book at him.

  “I was just looking to see if Miss Fawlthorne’s number is listed. I intended to ring her up and then stand guard until she can come and secure the place. What I mean is that I’ve just rung her up, and I’m waiting for her to arrive.”

  The fact that it was Sunday and that Miss Fawlthorne and her entire scurvy crew and officers were away at church hardly mattered to this boozy specimen—or at least I hoped it didn’t.

  Alcohol is impervious to logic, my late Uncle Tarquin had written in one of his laboratory notebooks, though whether this insight was from personal experience, a specific chemical observation, or simply a bit of stray philosophy I had never been able to decide.

  “No, don’t do that!” the man snarled, wrenching the book from my hands. “I’m in charge here. If the dooorss’s open—” He fumbled as if he couldn’t think of the next word. “S’because I opened it, see?”

  His vaporous breath trembled in the air, making the laundry seem more than ever like Dante’s Inferno. I found myself waiting for lava to come bubbling from his mouth.

  Here you are, Flavia, locked in a soundproof stone building with an angry, inebriated stranger who’s three times your size and weight: a bruiser who, with one fist, could reduce you to a splatter of jam on the floorboards. There’s no one nearby to rescue you. You’re on your own—it’s brains against brawn.

  “You must be Mr. Kelly,” I said, sticking out a hand.

  The Human Mountain struggled to focus, edging his feet farther apart for better balance, his stale eyes staring.

  “Miss Fawlthorne has often spoken so well of you,” I added, “that I feel as if we’ve already met.”

  And then, incredibly, a great oily ham of a hand came forward and seized mine. “How do you do, miss. Edward Kelly is my name.”

  A wave of something swept over me, and I had a sudden vision of this pathetic human being as a boy, standing defenseless before some schoolmaster or schoolmistress, now long dead.

  “Say ‘How do you do,’ Edward.”

  He shuffled his feet, then and now, and I knew for a fact that those words had never, ever, since that long-ago day, escaped from his lips.

  “How do you do?” he asked again, as if I hadn’t heard, the words stilted and awkward—not at home in his slack mouth.

  “Very well, thank you, Mr. Kelly,” I said, retrieving my hand. “It’s a pleasure to meet you.”

  Was I pushing my luck? Perhaps, but his reaction told me I had chosen precisely the right words.

  “Likewise,” he said, reverting to some ancient remembered formula. “Likewise indeed.”

  Was he sobering a little, or was I imagining it?

  “Well, then,” I said, taking charge, “I can see there’s no need for Miss Fawlthorne to be bothered. I expect she’s already on her way, so I’ll just run along and head her off at the pass. She’ll be relieved to hear everything’s under control.”

  “Head off at the pass” was a phrase I had heard in the cinema films, often used by Hopalong Cassidy or Randolph Scott or Roy Rogers, which seemed somehow more appropriate here in North America than it did back home in Merrie England, where cowboy chitchat was as scarce as hens’ dentures.

  I stepped to the door, Kelly tracking me with his sad eyes.

  “A very great pleasure,” I added, partly for his sake and partly for my own.

  My exit was as serene and duchesslike as I could manage, and it occurred to me that this leaving people standing was becoming a habit: first the Rainsmiths and now Edward Kelly. If I kept it up, the whole planet would soon be peopled with people frozen stiff on the spot by my departures.

  A shout in the distance and the sound of girls laughing told me that the academy had
returned from church. The aged rector had either run out of energy or ideas, or passed away in the pulpit.

  I drifted toward the hockey field, wanting more than anything to be alone. It was a lovely autumn day, the sun was warm, and I still needed somewhere to think without being interrupted.

  I sank down onto my knees in the soft grass, planted my hands behind me, and fell back on them, turning my face upward toward the sky like a sunflower. No one would disturb me in such a posture, which clearly indicated someone communing privately with Nature.

  I knew that hunched shoulders, hanging hair, and eyes on the ground were fairly reliable signs of a girl dejected, a girl who needed to be approached and jollied into a nice talk or a nice cup of tea; whereas a back-flung head, with eyes closed and a secret smile on the upturned face, was the signal of someone who needed to be left alone with her thoughts.

  It was clever of me to have worked out such a useful tactic.

  “Hello,” said a voice. “May I join you?”

  I kept my eyes closed and my mouth shut, hoping she would go away.

  It was too late to form my thumbs and forefingers into little circles and begin loudly chanting “OM MANE PADME HUM” like a Tibetan lama, or the pilgrims in Lost Horizon.

  “De Luce …”

  I ignored her.

  “Flavia? Are you feeling better?”

  I allowed one eye to crack slightly open like an iguana.

  It was Jumbo.

  “Yes, thank you,” I said, and left it at that. Most people would have felt obliged to tack on some kind of explanation, but not I.

  There is a mystery in silence that can never be matched by mere words. Silence is power—at least until they grab you by the neck.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Quite sure, thank you.”

  I find there is always an electric thrill in such conversations: invisible fingers of excitement in the air, like lightning behind the hills.

  “We were worried about you. Miss Fawlthorne asked me to see if you were all right.”

  I let my eye drift slowly shut. “Yes, I’m quite all right, thank you.”

  It was incredible! How long could I keep this up? Five minutes? Ten minutes?