by Alan Bradley
“Oh, dear!” I said. It was the kind of weak remark I despise in others, and I was disappointed to hear such sappy words coming out of my own mouth. I tried to correct the slipup.
“I was led to believe that she had vanished.”
“Led to believe” was a clever phrase: the move of a chessman. It implied that someone else was to blame for my faulty belief.
“I suppose she did, in a way,” Miss Fawlthorne said. “Her body was never recovered. Absolutely tragic. Ryerson—Dr. Rainsmith, I mean—was devastated.”
Pfaugh! I spat mentally. He apparently hadn’t been too devastated to prance off to the altar with the dread Dorsey before the remains of Wife One had settled safely on the bottom.
She saw the look on my face.
“Grief takes many forms, Flavia,” she said quietly. “I expected that you would have learned that by now.”
She was right, of course, and I accepted the little stab in the heart as having been deserved.
“Dorsey was his medical protégée. She was a pillar of strength in his grief.”
A pillar of strength, Daffy had once remarked, was a nice way of saying someone was terminally bossy, but I managed to keep that thought to myself.
“Tragic,” Miss Fawlthorne said again, and I wondered for the first time what she meant by it.
At the same time, the realization was slowly rising in my mind, like the water rising round a shackled prisoner in a riverside dungeon, that yet another corpse had been added to the equation.
I had believed—at least until recently—that the blackened body was more likely Clarissa Brazenose, or perhaps the missing Le Marchand … or the equally missing Wentworth.
Now, another possibility had presented itself, and an intriguing one at that.
My nerves must have been slightly on edge, as I jumped when a knock came at the door and Fitzgibbon’s head appeared.
“Excuse me, Miss Fawlthorne,” she said, “but the Veneerings are here for Charlotte.”
Charlotte Veneering was a pale, weepy slug in the third form who had, as they put it, “failed to flourish” at Miss Bodycote’s Female Academy, and was being sent home at the request of her parents. Being an “FF,” as it was called, was the equivalent, so far as the other girls were concerned, to being drummed out of the regiment, and the sad subject was usually whisked away under cover of darkness to whatever FF—feeble future—awaited them.
“Thank you, Fitzgibbon,” Miss Fawlthorne said. “Put them in St. Ursula. I’ll be there right away.”
St. Ursula was the chilly little reception chamber barely inside the front door where nuns had once been permitted—but only under special circumstances—brief glimpses of their families.
With a quick nod, Fitzgibbon was gone. Miss Fawlthorne got slowly to her feet.
“A pillar of strength,” she said again, and I realized she was still talking about Dorsey Rainsmith.
“Have you finished your report on William Palmer?” she asked suddenly. “I haven’t forgotten it, you know.”
“No, Miss Fawlthorne,” I said. I hadn’t the heart—or any other of the required guts, for that matter—to tell her that, with the exception of the few notes through which Jumbo had snooped, I hadn’t even begun.
“Well, time is running out,” she said, almost reflectively. “You might wish to work on it until I return. You may sit at my desk.”
“Yes, Miss Fawlthorne,” I said, ever obedient.
I waited until her footsteps were fading in the hall before I got up and resettled myself in her swivel chair.
Now, then, into which drawer had she shoved the papers?
Ah, yes … here they were. Second drawer from the bottom. I spread them on the desktop. Pink paper, black headlines. Yesterday’s edition.
THE MORNING STAR …
FOUR STAR SPECIAL
WHOSE HEAD?
By Wallace Scroop,
Morning Star Crime Reporter.
AUTOPSY SHOCKER.
There was a photograph of the said Scroop standing alone on the many steps of what might have been a courthouse, notebook in hand, pencil poised.
The Morning Star has learned that the human remains recently found in a chimney at Miss Bodycote’s Female Academy in East York have yet to be identified. An autopsy has revealed that while the body is that of a woman aged 14–45, the detached head is that of a mummified male, possibly from ancient Egypt. “We’re at a loss,” said pathologist Dr. Dorsey Rainsmith. “These findings are most unusual and most unexpected.” Dr. Rainsmith went on to say that anthropologists at the Royal Ontario Museum had been consulted. “So far, they’re as baffled as we are,” she admitted. Officials contacted at the ROM have declined to be interviewed further. “It’s still a police matter,” said one public relations staffer, who requested that his name not be published.
There was more: much more, but all of it repetitive with little additional information. The only real facts were those contained in the first couple of sentences, spun, like candy floss, into endless threads of speculation, and I couldn’t help noticing that the story was as much about the Morning Star as it was about anything else.
Were they withholding anything?
I knew that certain details likely to be known only to the killer—and who would believe for an instant that the body in the chimney was not a murder victim?—were often held back from the public.
If there was more to be known, the only way I was going to find it out was from (a) Dorsey Rainsmith, (b) the police, in the form of Inspector Gravenhurst, or (c) Wallace Scroop.
The choice was an easy one. I reached for the telephone directory.
Ah, yes … here it was: the Morning Star. ADelaide 1666.
Miss Fawlthorne was not likely to be back in the next few minutes. It was now or never.
I dialed the number, which was picked up almost immediately by a surprisingly bright-sounding young woman.
“Newsroom, please,” I said, trying to make my voice sound as if I did this every day.
“Who’s calling?” she asked.
“Gloria Chatterton,” I said. “I wish to speak with Wallace Scroop.”
There was a pause, during which I knew she was making up her mind whether to put me through or not.
“Oh, Sister Mary Xavier,” I said, half covering the telephone’s mouthpiece, “could I ask you to close the chapel door, please? I’m speaking to the Morning Star and don’t want to disturb the High Mass. Thank you, Sister. It’s very kind of you, I’m sure.”
“I’m putting you through,” the operator said. “Hold the line, please.”
She must have been Catholic. I had to pinch myself to keep from exploding.
“Newsroom,” said a suitably gruff voice.
“Wallace Scroop,” I said sharply, cutting the niceties. “He’s expecting my call.”
There was a hollow bang at the other end as the phone was put down and I was left to listen to what sounded like the pounding of a platoon of typewriters.
This was living! My blood was electric!
“Scroop,” his voice said.
“We met at Miss Bodycote’s,” I said, plunging in with no preliminaries. “I have some information for you.”
“Who is this?” he demanded. “I need a name.”
“No names, no pack drill,” I told him. It was a phrase I had heard Mrs. Mullet’s husband, Alf, use on more than one occasion.
There was a dry chuckle at the other end of the phone, followed by a rustling, a scratching, and a wheeze. I knew he had just lit a cigarette, and I could almost see him, perched on the corner of a desk, cigarette in mouth and pencil in nicotine-stained fingers, ready to take down my every word.
“Shoot,” he said, and I shot.
“Three girls have gone missing from Miss Bodycote’s in the past two years. Their names are Le Marchand, Wentworth, and Brazenose.”
“Brazenose with a Z or an S?”
“A zed,” I told him. This man was wizard sharp.
“
Is that it?” he asked.
“No,” I said. It was, in fact, only the bit of bait I was using to get him on the hook.
“I’ll trade you,” I told him. “Fact for fact. You give me one, I’ll give you one.”
“Tit for tat,” he said.
“Exactly,” I said. “Your turn.”
“What do you want to know?”
“The body in the chimney. Identity … cause of death.”
“Hard to say. Badly smoke-damaged. They’re working on it.”
“And the skull?”
“Like I said in the article, ancient, possibly Egyptian.”
“Is there an Egyptian skull missing from the Royal Ontario Museum?” I asked.
“Shrewd kid. They’re looking into that, too.”
There was a bit of a lull in our conversation, during which I could hear him scribbling notes.
“My turn,” he said. “What’s the scuttlebutt at the school? What are the kids saying?”
“Ghosts,” I said, and he laughed, and then I laughed.
“And the teachers?”
“Nothing.”
He paused to let my answer sink in. “Bit odd, isn’t it?”
And it was.
When you stopped and thought about it, it was odd indeed that there had been no official mention of a death at Miss Bodycote’s. There had been no assembling of the girls to reassure, or explain, or even deny. The police had come and gone in near silence.
Which could mean only one thing: that they already had their answers; that they were only waiting to pounce.
It was a chilling thought.
“Still there?” Scroop’s voice emerged tinnily from the receiver, and I realized that I had let it slip away from my ear, listening to the sound of approaching footsteps in the hall.
“Yes,” I whispered. “I have to go”—at the same time closing the telephone directory and shoving the newspaper back into the desk drawer.
“No! Wait!” he shouted, putting me even more on edge. “Give me something … anything. I need more to go on.”
“The first Mrs. Rainsmith,” I whispered, my lips tight against the holes of the telephone’s mouthpiece.
And then the door opened and I was caught.
Miss Fawlthorne and I stood there staring at each other for half an eternity.
“Hello? Hello?” Wallace Scroop’s voice was saying, as if from the depths of a well.
“Oh, yes,” I said into the receiver. “Here she is now. She’s just come back. I’ll put her on.”
At the same time, I slowly pressed down on the cradle with my left forefinger, disconnecting poor Scroop in the middle of a “Hello?”
“Someone for you, Miss Fawlthorne,” I said, handing her the now-dead receiver. “I’m sorry, I told them you had stepped out.”
She took the instrument from me and held it to her ear.
“Yes?” she said. She had fallen for it hook, line, and sinker. “Hello? Hello?”
But of course there was no answer.
“Did they leave a name?” she asked, hanging up.
“No,” I said. “It was a man’s voice.”
I added this in case she had heard any of Wallace Scroop’s words leaking from the receiver.
“Possibly the police,” I couldn’t resist adding, watching her reaction. “It sounded official.”
She stared at me as if I had slapped her face, and in a way, perhaps I had.
“Sit down, Flavia,” she said. “It’s time we had a little talk.”
• TWENTY-THREE •
WHENEVER SOMEONE TELLS YOU they want to have a little talk, you can be sure they mean a big one.
There’s something in human nature, I’m beginning to learn, that makes an adult, when speaking to a younger person, magnify the little things and shrink the big ones. It’s like looking—or talking—through a kind of word-telescope that, no matter which end they choose, distorts the truth. Your mistakes are always magnified and your victories shrunken.
Has no one ever noticed this but me? If not, then I’m happy to take the credit for being the first to point it out.
Perhaps only J. M. Barrie, the author of Peter Pan, saw through dimly to the truth: that by the time we are old enough to protest such rotten injustice, we have already forgotten it.
I sat, reluctantly, watching Miss Fawlthorne with wary eyes.
“It isn’t easy, is it? Being so aware, I mean.”
God help me! Here it came again, that whole “Poor, dear, lonely, unhappy Flavia de Luce” business. She had pulled this sudden switch the night I arrived at Miss Bodycote’s and now here she was trying it on again.
As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end, Amen.
Whichever one of the Desert Fathers it was who originally came up with those words certainly knew his onions.
I felt like tossing my toast.
“I’ve spoken to the Rainsmiths,” Miss Fawlthorne began. “They tell me you had a bit of a … contretemps.”
There it was again: “a bit of a—”
That did it. I was fed up.
“If you call attempted murder a contre-whatever-it-was,” I shot back angrily. I didn’t even know the meaning of the word.
“There is a tendency in some girls,” Miss Fawlthorne said, putting her fingertips together as a sign that she was about to say something important, “to overdramatize the commonplace.”
I unleashed one of my famous glares. I couldn’t help myself.
“Quod erat demonstrandum,” Miss Fawlthorne said, almost to herself, thinking, I suppose, that I didn’t know the meaning of the phrase, when in fact I’d probably written it in my laboratory notebook more times than she’d been kissed.
Q.E.D. As if my glare had proved her point.
Well, she could jolly well suck my salmon sandwiches. I am a calm, cool, and composed person by nature, but when my temper is up, I am a sight to behold.
I leapt to my feet.
“They’re drugging Collingwood!” I shouted, and I didn’t care who heard me. “They’ve been giving her chloral hydrate. Now she’s gone—like the others. They’ve probably killed her.”
“Flavia, listen to me—”
“No!”
I knew what she was thinking: that I was a petulant brat who ought to be turned over her knee and given a good thrashing. But I didn’t care. Collingwood was in trouble and there was no one to rescue her but me.
“Flavia—”
“No!”
“They’re on our side.”
It took quite a long while for her words to trickle from my ears into my brain, and when they finally did arrive, I didn’t believe them.
I think my mouth fell open.
“What?”
It was like watching the moment in some ghastly silent film in which the booby realizes that the shoe he has set on fire is his own. Not just disbelief, but horror, shock, dismay, and yet in spite of it all, the urge to let out a filthy great donkey laugh.
“They’re on our side,” she repeated, her words still seeping like slow honey into my understanding.
“But Collingwood—she’s gone. They—”
“Collingwood experienced a very bad shock. She was given chloral hydrate to help her sleep, to help her cope. Unfortunately, she has since somehow come down with rheumatic fever. She needs better and more intensive medical care than we’re equipped to offer. Dr. Rainsmith has arranged—at his own expense—to have her moved into quarantine at his own private nursing home. Miss Bodycote’s can ill afford an outbreak. It’s a dreadful time, Flavia, and the Rainsmiths are doing their best.”
The words “rheumatic fever” struck fear into my heart. I would never forget Phyllis Higginson—“Laughing Phyllis,” they called her—in far-off Bishop’s Lacey, who was struck down so suddenly. There had been panic in the village until Dr. Darby had called a meeting at the parish hall to explain that the disease was not, in itself, contagious, although the streptococcal throat that preceded it wa
s. Phyllis had died on a heartbreakingly glorious day in June and I had attended her funeral in the churchyard of St. Tancred’s.
I could still remember refusing to believe she was dead. It was all a dream … a joke … a fantasy that had spilled over into real life.
Poor dead Phyllis. Poor Collingwood.
Had I been exposed to her contagion? Had anyone else at Miss Bodycote’s?
“I’m sorry,” I said to Miss Fawlthorne, not sure if I really meant it, or whether I was apologizing under the pressure of fear.
“Do you mean that the Rainsmiths are members of the Nide?” I asked. I couldn’t put it more bluntly than that. Enough of this pussyfooting about with word games, I thought. Miss Fawlthorne and I were both adults—or as near as dammit—together in a closed room, and it was time to say some things that needed to be said.
Did she go a little white? I couldn’t tell.
It was, after all, she who had brought up rheumatic fever. Would she have done so if she thought we were overheard?
I knew at once that I had overstepped. This wasn’t the way the game was played.
If my own aunt Felicity, the Gamekeeper, refused to tell me whether certain persons—including my own father!—were members of the Nide, what chance did I have of wheedling such information from a relatively low-ranking sub-officer in this far-flung corner of the Empire?
Precious little, I realized. None, in fact.
My thoughts flew back to the dismal day the Rainsmiths had come to Buckshaw. Had there been the slightest indication that they were part of any Inner Circle? That Father had ever laid eyes upon them before?
“Please come in” were the only words I could remember him speaking. I had, in fact, admired the quiet, not-quite-openly-bristling way with which he had met their coarse gushings. That the Rainsmiths could be members of the Nide simply beggared belief, and my expression must have shown it.
“You must learn to trust, Flavia,” Miss Fawlthorne said, and I noticed that she hadn’t answered my question.
What kind of muddle was this woman’s mind? Did she not realize that her words directly contradicted the advice she had given me earlier?
“What about Le Marchand and Wentworth?” I demanded. “What about Clarissa Brazenose? Did they learn to trust?”