by Alan Bradley
“You’ve fell off the roof. It’s the same thing. Good job they’d shoveled them drifts into such a bloomin’ great ’eap, else you’d’ve gone straight through to China.”
Roof?
It all came surging back in a tidal wave.
“Val Lampman!” I said. “Marion Trodd! They tried to—”
“Now, then,” Mrs. Mullet said. “You’re not to think of anythin’ but gettin’ better. Dr. Darby thinks you might ’ave cracked a rib, an’ ’e doesn’t want you squirmin’ about.”
She fluffed up my pillow and brushed a strand of damp hair out of my eyes.
“But I can tell you this much,” she added, with a sniff. “They’ve took ’er away with the darbies on ’er wrists. They ’ad to cut ’er loose with tin-snips. You should of seen ’er. Reg’lar pouter, she is. Kept stickin’ to everythin’ she touched—even Constable Linnet, and ’im in ’is clean uniform—and after ’is wife ’ad just washed and ironed it, ’e told me. They’ll more’n likely ’ang ’er by the neck until she’s dead, but you mustn’t let on I told you. You’re not supposed to be gettin’ all worked up.”
“But what about Val Lampman?”
Mrs. Mullet arranged a serious look on her face.
“Fell, same as you. Landed square on Miss Wyvern’s motorcar. Broke ’is neck. But remember, my lips is sealed.”
I was silent for a long time, trying to work out in my mind how to respond to this honestly not unwelcome bit of news. It appeared that Justice had made up her own mind about how to deal with Val Lampman.
My mind was suddenly filled with a series of odd, faded images—of distorted faces swimming in and out of a hazy room in which I was lying helpless.
“Mrs. Hewitt,” I said at last. “Antigone. The Inspector’s wife—is she still here?”
Mrs. Mullet shot me a puzzled look.
“Never ’as been. Not that I knows of.”
“Are you quite sure? She was standing right where you are, just a few minutes ago.”
“Then she must ’ave been a dream, mustn’t she. There’s been no one in ’ere but me and Dogger since last night. And Miss Ophelia. She insisted on sittin’ up with you and moppin’ your face. Oh, and the Colonel, of course, when Dogger found you in the snowbank and carried you in, but that was last night, wasn’t it. ’E’s not been down yet today, poor soul. Worries somethin’ awful, ’e does. I expect ’e’ll ’ave somethin’ to say to you when you’re yourself again.”
“I expect he will.”
Actually, I was quite looking forward to it. Father and I seemed to talk to each other only in the most desperate of circumstances.
Without my hearing it, the door had opened and Dogger was suddenly in the room.
“Now, then,” Mrs. Mullet said. “ ’Ere’s Dogger. I might as well get back to my mutton. They’ve eat us out of ’ouse and ’ome, that lot ’ave. It was never-endin’, like the stream in that there ’ymn.”
She bustled officiously out of the room, giving the doorknob a polish with her apron on the way out.
Dogger waited until the door had closed behind her.
“Are you comfortable?” he asked quietly.
I caught his eye, and for some stupid reason I was suddenly near tears.
I nodded my head, afraid to speak so much as a single word.
“Only foreigners cry,” Father had once told me, and I didn’t want to let down the side by blubbering.
“It was a very near thing,” Dogger said. “I should have been most upset if anything had happened to you.”
Blast it all! Now my eyes were leaking like faucets. I reached for one of the tissues Mrs. Mullet had left beside me and pretended to blow my nose.
“I’m sorry,” I managed. “I didn’t mean to be any trouble. It’s just that I … I was conducting an experiment involving Father Christmas. He didn’t come, did he?”
“We shall see,” Dogger said, handing me another tissue. “You may hawk into this.”
I had hardly noticed that I was coughing.
“How many fingers am I holding up?” Dogger asked, his hand off to the right of my head.
“Two,” I said, without looking.
“And now?”
“Four.”
“What’s the atomic number of arsenic?”
“Thirty-three.”
“Very good. And the principal alkaloids in deadly nightshade?”
“That’s easy. Hyoscine and hyoscyamine.”
“Excellent,” Dogger said.
“They were in it together, weren’t they? Marion Trodd and Val Lampman, I mean.”
Dogger nodded. “She could not have overpowered Miss Wyvern alone. Strangulation by cellulose nitrate ciné film would require exceptionally strong hands and arms. It is a most slippery weapon, but with an exceedingly high tensile strength, as you, through your chemical experiments, are undoubtedly aware. A uniquely male weapon, I should say. The motive, though, remains murky.”
“Revenge,” I said. “And inheritance. Miss Wyvern was trying to tell someone—Desmond, or Bun—maybe it was Aunt Felicity. I couldn’t make it out. She knew they were planning to kill her. Since she kept up paid subscriptions to the Police Gazette and True Crime, News of the World, and so forth, she knew all the signs. She was writing her thoughts on a piece of paper when they interrupted her. She stuffed it into the toe of a boot, which they jammed onto her foot when they changed her costume. A bad mistake on their part.”
Dogger scratched his head.
“I’ll explain it later,” I said. “I’m so drowsy, I can hardly keep my eyes open.”
Dogger held out a hand.
“You may remove the mustard poultice,” he said. “I believe you’re sufficiently warmed. At least for now.”
He held out a silver tray and I handed him the reeking thing.
“Mind the tarnish,” I said, almost as a joke.
It was true, though. The sulfurous fumes would attack sterling silver before you could say “snap!”
“It’s quite all right,” Dogger said. “This one’s coated electroplate.”
I remembered with sudden shame that Father had sent the family silver to auction months ago, and I was instantly sorry for my thoughtless remark.
Without another word, Dogger pulled the quilt up under my chin and tucked me in, then went to the window and closed the curtains.
“Oh, and Dogger—” I said, when he was halfway out the door. “One more small point—Phyllis Wyvern was Val Lampman’s mother.”
“My word!” said Dogger.
• TWENTY-TWO •
“SO YOU SEE, INSPECTOR,” I said, “their idea was to do away with her in the midst of the greatest number of suspects, just as the killers did in Love and Blood. They must have seen the opportunity of shooting a film at Buckshaw as something of a godsend. Val Lampman picked the location himself.”
“Rather like an Agatha Christie,” Inspector Hewitt remarked drily.
“Exactly!”
It was now the fourth day after Christmas—December the twenty-ninth, to be precise.
After I’d spent two days and nights floating in a sweaty dream, awakening only to cough and to suck at soup fed to me on a spoon by Feely, who had insisted on keeping vigil at my bedside night and day, Dr. Darby had given grudging permission for me to be grilled by the Hinley constabulary.
“Two more days of mustard plasters, to be followed by no more than a couple of minutes with His Majesty’s Hounds,” he had said, as if I were a plate of perspiring roast beef—or an exhausted fox.
“I should be most grateful to hear your thoughts on the exchanging of Miss Wyvern’s costume,” the Inspector added. “Purely as a matter of interest, you understand.”
“Oh, that was the easy part!” I told him. “They swapped her Juliet costume for the peasant outfit she’d worn in Dressed for Dying. They’d even brought it with them. Premeditation, I believe you call it. They dressed her up, right down to her original makeup. Marion Trodd wanted it that way. You’ve
probably already found Miss Wyvern’s makeup, lipstick, and nail polish in her purse. It was no more than revenge, really.”
The Inspector looked puzzled.
“Val Lampman had originally promised Marion the leading role in Cry of the Raven, but he was made to take it away from her and give it to his mother. He had to, you see. Marion was not aware, of course, that Miss Wyvern was Val’s mother, and he wasn’t about to tell her. It’s all there in Who’s Who and the back numbers of Behind the Screen and Ciné Tit-Bits. There are tons of old film magazines in the cupboard under the stairs.”
Only as I spoke the words did it occur to me to wonder who had bought them, all those years ago.
“Get onto it, Sergeant,” the Inspector said to Detective Sergeant Woolmer, who closed his notepad, turned a little red, and lumbered off in the direction of the foyer.
“Now, then, you were suggesting that Marion Trodd was formerly an actress,” he said when the sergeant had gone. “Is that it?”
“Under the name of Norma Durance, yes. Sergeant Woolmer will find it in Silver Cinema, for 1933. The September issue, I believe. It’s a bit charred, I’m afraid, but in what’s left of it, there’s quite a good photo of her as Dorita in The Little Red Hen.”
Inspector Hewitt’s Biro had been fairly flying over the page, but he stopped long enough to shoot me a surprised smile.
In spite of looking like a barrage balloon in my woolen nightie and carpet-grade dressing gown, I must have positively preened.
“They were having an affair, of course,” I added casually, and the Inspector’s eyeballs gave an involuntary twitch. I didn’t really understand all that was involved in such a relationship, and I didn’t much care, actually. Once, when I had asked Dogger what was meant by the phrase, he had told me that it described two people who had become the very best of friends, and that was good enough for me.
“Of course,” the Inspector said, in a surprisingly meek voice, scribbling away in his notebook. “Well done.”
Well done? I tried not to simper. This was high praise from a man who had, at our first meeting, sent me off to rustle up some tea.
“You’re very kind,” I said, anxious to make the moment last.
“I am, indeed,” he said. “I’ve found exasperation to be quite useless.”
“So have I,” I said, without knowing fully what I meant. In spite of that, it sounded like an intelligent response.
“Well, thank you, Flavia,” the Inspector said, getting to his feet. “This has been most instructive.”
“I’m always happy to help,” I said, not at all bashfully.
“Of course … I had already come to the same conclusion myself,” he added.
A sudden clamminess gripped me. Come to the same conclusion himself? How could he! How dare he?
“Fingerprints?” I asked coldly.
They must have found the fingerprints of the killers in the murder room.
“Not at all,” he said. “It was the knot. She was strangled with a straightforward length of ciné film to which, after death, an additional bow was added. Two distinct layers and, we believe, by two different persons, one left-handed, the other right. The inner knot—the one that actually killed her—was rather an unusual one—a bowline—often used by sailors and seldom by others. Sergeant Graves has discovered—by noticing his tattoos—that Val Lampman had served for a time in the Royal Navy, a fact that we have since been able to confirm.”
I’d spotted that myself, of course, but hadn’t had the time to follow up.
“Of course!” I said. “The outer knot was purely decorative! Marion Trodd must have added it as a finishing touch after she had swapped the costumes.”
The Inspector closed his notebook.
“There is a knot that is known to florists, who tie it with ribbon onto floral arrangements, as ‘the durance,’ ” he said. “It is, as you say, purely decorative. It was also her signature. I hadn’t spotted the connection until just now, when you were good enough to provide the missing link.”
Maestro, a few triumphant trumpets! Something by Handel, if you please! “Music for the Royal Fireworks”? Yes, that will do nicely.
“Dressed for dying,” I said with a touch of the old drama.
“Dressed for dying.” Inspector Hewitt smiled.
“Do you suppose,” I asked, “that before she became the actress Norma Durance, Miss Trodd might have been employed in a florist’s shop?”
“I shouldn’t be surprised,” he said. “It seems as if, by two very different roads, we’ve both come to the same destination.”
Was this another of his two-edged compliments? I couldn’t really tell, so I responded with a stupid smile.
Flavia the Sphinx, he would be thinking. The inscrutable Flavia de Luce. Or something like that.
“You’d better get some rest,” he said suddenly, making for the door. “I wouldn’t want Dr. Darby holding me responsible for your extended convalescence.”
What a dear man he was, the Inspector! “Extended convalescence,” indeed. It was so like him. No wonder his wife, Antigone, shone like a searchlight when he was by her side. Which reminded me …
“Inspector Hewitt,” I said, “before you go, I want to—”
But he cut me short.
“No need,” he said, making a shooing motion with his hands. “No need at all.”
Blast it all! Was I to be robbed of my apology? But before I could say another word, he went on:
“Oh, by the way, Antigone asked me to compliment you on rather a spectacular display of fireworks. Despite the fact that you appear to have broken almost every single provision of the Explosives Acts of 1875 and 1923, discussion of which we shall leave until the Chief Constable has been coaxed down off the ceiling, she tells me your little show was seen and heard in Hinley. In spite of the snow.”
“In spite of the snow,” Father was saying, with what sounded, incredibly, like a measure of pride in his voice. “A friend of Mrs. Mullet’s reported seeing a distinct reddish glow in the southern sky at East Finching, and someone told Max Brock that the explosions were heard as far away as Malden Fenwick. By that time the snowfall was abating, of course, but still, when you stop to think of it … quite remarkable. A lightning bolt during a snowstorm is not completely unheard of, of course. I rang up my old friend Taffy Codling, who happens to be the Met officer at the Leathcote air base. Taffy tells me that although exceedingly rare, the phenomenon was indeed recorded in the early hours of Christmas morning, just about the time of your … ah … Flavia’s … ah … misadventure.”
I hadn’t heard Father say so many words since he had confided in me at the time of Horace Bonepenny’s murder. And the fact that he had used the telephone to find out about the lightning! Was the world coming off its hinges?
I had been cleaned up and arranged on the divan in the drawing room as if I were one of those Victorian heroines who are always dying of consumption in Daffy’s novels.
Everyone was gathered round me in a circle like the game of Happy Families we had once dragged out of a cupboard when it had been raining for three weeks, and had played endlessly at the dining room table with grim and determined hilarity.
“They think a bolt of lightning touched off your fireworks,” Daffy was saying. “So you can hardly be held responsible, can you? It left a ruddy great hole in the roof, though. Dogger had to organize a bucket brigade of villagers. What a smashing show! Too bad you missed it!”
“Daphne,” Father said, giving her one of those looks he reserves for marginal language.
“Well, it’s true,” Daffy went on. “You should have seen the lot of us standing round, up to our duffs in drifts, gaping like a gang of adenoidal carolers!”
“Daphne …”
The vicar clamped his jaws shut, trying to suppress an angelically silly grin. But before Daffy could offend again, there was a light tapping at the door, and a tentative nose appeared.
“May I come in?”
“Nialla!” I s
aid.
“We’ve just come to say good-bye,” she whispered theatrically, coming fully into the room, a swaddling bundle cradled in her arms. “The film crew’s gone, and Desmond and I are the last ones here. He was going to drive me home in his Bentley, but it seems to have frozen up. Dr. Darby happens to be running up to London for an old boys’ dinner, and he’s offered to drop the baby and me right at our own front door.”
“But isn’t it too soon?” Feely asked, speaking for the first time. “Couldn’t you stay awhile? I’ve hardly had a chance to see the baby, what with all the goings-on.”
She wrinkled her brow in my direction as she said it.
“Too kind, I’m sure,” Nialla said, looking round the room from face to face. “It’s been lovely seeing all of you again, and Dieter, too, but Bun’s put me onto someone who’s working on a new film adaptation of A Christmas Carol. Oh, please don’t grimace at me like that, Daphne—it’s work, and it will keep us fed until the real thing comes along.”
Father shuffled his feet and looked cautiously out from beneath his eyebrows.
“I’ve told Miss Gilfoyle she is welcome to stay as long as she likes, but …”
“… but she must be getting along,” Nialla finished brightly, smiling down at the child in her arms and brushing an imaginary something off its chin.
“He looks a little like Rex Harrison,” I said. “Especially his forehead.”
Nialla blushed prettily, glancing at the vicar, as if for support.
“I hope he has his father’s brains,” she said, “and not mine.”
There was one of those long, uncomfortable silences during which you pray in earnest that no one will make a rude noise.
“Ah, Colonel de Luce, here you are,” said the world-famous voice, and Desmond Duncan made his entrance with as polished and attention-getting a stride as had ever been stridden in front of a ciné camera or a West End audience. “Dogger told me I should find you here. I’ve been awaiting the opportunity to convey to you some remarkably good news.”
In his hand was the copy of Romeo and Juliet he had pocketed in the library.
“ ‘How beautiful are the feet of those who bring good news,’ or so, at least, said the apostle Paul, quoting Isaiah, but presumably speaking of his own feet, in his letter to the Romans,” the vicar remarked to no one in particular.