by Alan Bradley
Inspector Hewitt’s eyes would crinkle at the corners.
“One and the same, my love,” he would tell her, shaking his head at the memory of me. “One and the same.”
We had reached the end of my statement, the point at which the Inspector himself had arrived upon the scene in the Palings.
“That will do for now,” he said, flipping closed his notebook and shoving it into the inside pocket of his jacket. “I’ve asked Sergeant Graves to come round later to take your fingerprints. Quite routine, of course.”
I wrinkled my brow, but secretly I couldn’t have been more delighted. The dimpled detective sergeant with his winks and grins had come to be one of my favorites among the Hinley Constabulary.
“I expect they’ll be all over everything,” I said helpfully. “Mine and Dr. Darby’s.”
“And those of the Gypsy woman’s attacker,” he might have added, but he did not. Rather, he stood up and stuck his hand out to be shaken, as formally as if he were being received at a royal garden party.
“Thank you, Flavia,” he said. “You’ve been of great assistance … as always.”
As always? Was the Inspector twitting me?
But no—his handshake was firm and he looked me straight in the eye.
I’m afraid I smirked.
SEVEN
“DOGGER!” I SAID. “THEY’RE coming to take my fingerprints!”
Dogger looked up from the vast array of silverware he was polishing on the kitchen table. For just a moment his face was a complete blank, and then he said, “I trust they will be returned to you in good order.”
I blinked. Was Dogger making a joke? I hoped desperately that he was.
Dogger had suffered the most awful privations in the Far East during the war. His mind now seemed sometimes to consist of no more than a crazy tangle of broken suspension bridges joining the past with the present. If he had ever made a joke before, I had never heard of it. This, then, could be a momentous occasion.
“Oh! Ha ha ha.” I laughed too loudly. “That’s very good, Dogger. Returned to me in good order … I must remember to tell that one to Mrs. Mullet.”
I had no intention whatever of sharing this precious moment with our cook, but sometimes flattery does not know when to stop.
Dogger formed a faint smile as he returned a fish fork to the cutlery chest and selected another. The de Luce silverware was kept in a dark folding cabinet which, when opened, presented a remarkable array of fish forks, toddy ladles, mote spoons, marrow scoops, lobster picks, sugar nips, grape shears, and pudding trowels, all arranged in steps, like so many silvery salmon leaping up the stony staircase of a whisky-colored stream somewhere in Scotland.
Dogger had lugged this heavy box to the kitchen table for the ritual cleaning of the cutlery, a seemingly endless task that occupied a great deal of his time, and one that I never tired of watching.
Mrs. Mullet loved to tell about how, as a child, I had been found on top of the table playing with the dolls I had contrived by clothing a family of sterling silver forks in folded napkins. Their identical faces—long noses and round cheeks—were just barely suggested by the engraved D L on the top of each handle, and required a great leap of the imagination to make them out at all.
“The Mumpeters,” I had called them: Mother Mumpeter, Father Mumpeter, and the three little Mumpeter girls, all of whom—even though they were burdened with three or four legs each—I had made to walk and dance and sing gaily upon the tabletop.
I could still remember Grindlestick, the three-legged waif I had fashioned from a pickle fork (which Father referred to as a trifid), who performed the most amazing acrobatics until I jammed one of her legs in a crack and broke it off.
“Better than the ’ippodrome, it were,” Mrs. M would tell me as she wiped away a tear of laughter. “Poor little tyke.”
I still don’t know if she meant Grindlestick or me.
Now, as I watched him at his work, I wondered if Dogger had known about the Mumpeters. It was likely that he did, since Mrs. Mullet, when it came to gossip, was equaled only by the News of the World.
I knew that there would never be a better time to dig for information: Mrs. M was away from her usual post in the kitchen and Dogger seemed to be at a peak of alertness. I took a deep breath and plunged directly in: “I found Brookie Harewood in the drawing room last night,” I said. “Actually, it was past two in the morning.”
Dogger finished polishing a grapefruit knife, then put it down and aligned it perfectly with its mates on a strip of green baize.
“What was he doing?” he asked.
“Nothing. Just standing by the fireplace. No, wait! He was crouched down, touching one of the firedogs.”
These fire irons had belonged to Harriet, and although they had different faces, each was that of a wily fox. Harriet had used them as the main characters in the bedtime stories she’d invented for Daffy and Feely: a fact of which they never tired of reminding me.
To be perfectly truthful, I bitterly resented the fact that my mother had spun so many tales of the make-believe world for my sisters but not for me. She had died before I was old enough to receive my due.
“Which of the two irons was he touching?” Dogger asked, already halfway to his feet.
“The Sally Fox,” I said. “The one on the right.”
Sally Fox and Shoppo were the names Harriet had given to the cunning pair, who had gone jauntily adventuring through an imaginary world—a world that had been lost with Harriet’s death. From time to time, Feely and Daffy, trying to resuscitate the warm and happy feeling of bygone days, had made up their own tales about the two crafty foxes, but in recent years they had, for some reason, stopped trying. Perhaps they had grown too old for fairy tales.
I followed as Dogger walked from the kitchen through to the foyer and made for the drawing room in the west wing.
He paused for a moment, listening at the door, then seemed to vanish through its panels like a wisp of smoke, as so many of the older servants are able to do.
He went straight to the Sally Fox, regarding her as solemnly as if he were a priest come to administer the last rites. When he had finished, he moved a few feet to his left and repeated the same performance with Shoppo.
“Most odd,” he said.
“Odd?”
“Most odd. This one,” he said, pointing to the Sally Fox, “has been missing for several weeks.”
“Missing?”
“It was not here yesterday. I did not inform the Colonel because I knew he would worry. At first I thought I might have misplaced it myself during one of my—my …”
“Reveries,” I suggested.
Dogger nodded. “Thank you,” he said.
Dogger suffered occasional terrors during which his very being was snatched away for a while by unseen forces and hurled into some horrid abyss. At such times his soul seemed to be replaying old atrocities, as he was once more thrown into the company of his dear old comrades-in-arms, their restless spirits dragged back from death by his love for them.
“A month ago it was Shoppo: here one day, gone the next. And then he reappeared. I thought I must be imagining things.”
“Are you sure, Dogger?”
“Yes, Miss Flavia—quite sure.”
I thought for a moment of telling him I had taken the firedogs, but I couldn’t bring myself to mouth the lie. There was something in Dogger that demanded truth.
“Perhaps Daffy borrowed them for one of her drawing sessions.”
Daffy’s occasional pencil sketches usually began well enough but then, quite often, took a spectacularly wrong turn. The Virgin Mary would suddenly sprout buck teeth, for instance, or an impromptu cartoon of Father seated at the dinner table would turn into a man with no eyes. Whenever this happened, Daffy would set the drawing aside and go back to her reading. For weeks afterwards we would keep finding, stuffed into the crevices of the chesterfield and under the cushions of the drawing-room chairs, the pages she had ripped from her sketc
hbook.
“Perhaps,” Dogger said. “Perhaps not.”
I think it was at that moment, without realizing it, that I began to see the solution to the puzzle of the fire irons.
“Is Mrs. Mullet here today?”
I knew perfectly well that she was but I hadn’t seen her in the kitchen.
“She’s outside having a word with Simpkins, the milk-float man. Something about a wood chip in the butter.”
I’d have to wait until Dogger put away the cutlery before I tackled Mrs. M.
I wanted to be alone with her.
“Them tradesmen don’t give a flick,” Mrs. Mullet said disgustedly, her arms white to the elbows with flour. “Really, they don’t. One day it’s a fly in the clotted cream, and the next it’s a—well, you really don’t want to know, dear. But one thing’s as clear as dishwater. If you lets ’em get away with it, there’s never any tellin’ what they’ll bring round next time. Keep quiet about a toothpick in today’s butter and next thing you know you’ll be findin’ a doorknob in the cottage cheese. I don’t like it, dear, but it’s the way of the world.”
How on earth, I wondered, could I bring the conversation around from tradesmen to Brookie Harewood without seeming to do so?
“Perhaps we should eat more fish,” I suggested. “Some of the fishermen in the village sell it fresh from their creels. Brookie Harewood, for instance.”
Mrs. Mullet looked at me sharply. “Hmph! Brookie Harewood! He’s no more than a poacher. I’m surprised the Colonel hasn’t run him off the Palings. Them are your fish he’s sellin’ at the cottage gates.”
“I suppose he has to earn a living.”
“Livin’?” She bristled, giving the great mound of bread dough an extra pummel. “He don’t need to make a livin’ no more than Grace’s goose. Not with that mother of his over in Malden Fenwick sendin’ him reg’lar checks to stay away. He’s a layabout, plain and simple, that one is, and a rascal to boot.”
“A remittance man?” I asked.
Daffy had once told me about the black-sheep son of our neighbors, the Blatchfords, who was paid to keep well away in Canada. “Two pounds ten shillings per mile per year,” she said. “He lives in the Queen Charlotte Islands to maximize his pension.”
“Mittens man or not, he’s no good, and that’s a fact,” said Mrs. Mullet. “He’s managed to get in with a bad lot.”
“Colin Prout?” I suggested, thinking of the way Brookie had bullied the boy at the fête.
“Colin Prout’s no more than Brookie Harewood’s spare fingers, or so I’ve ’eard. No, I was talkin’ about Reggie Pettibone an’ that lot what ’as the shop in the ’igh street.”
“The antiques place?”
Pettibone’s Antiques & Quality Goods was just a few doors west of the Thirteen Drakes. Although I had passed it often, I had never been inside.
Mrs. Mullet sniffed.
“Antiques, my sitter!” she exclaimed. “Sorry, dear, but that’s ’ow I feels about it. That Reggie Pettibone give us two pounds six and three last year for a table me and Alf bought new at the Army and Navy when first we was married. Three weeks later we spots it in ’is window with silver knobs and fifty-five guineas on it! And a sign what says ‘Georgian Whist Table by Chippendale.’ We knew it was ours because Alf reckernized the burn mark on the leg where ’e raked it with an ’ot poker whilst ’e was tryin’ to fish out a coal what ’ad popped out of the grate and rolled under it when our Agnes was just a mite.”
“And Brookie’s in with Pettibone?”
“I should say he is. Thick as thieves. Tight as the jaws off a nutcracker, them two.”
“What does his mother think of that, I wonder?”
“Pfaw!” Mrs. Mullet said. “A fat lot she cares about ’im. ’Er with ’er paints and brushes! She does the ’orses and ’ounds crowd, you know—that lot o’ swells. Charges ’em a pretty penny, too, I’ll wager. Brookie and ’is under’anded ways ’as brought ’er nothin’ but shame. To my mind, she don’t rightly care what ’e gets ’isself up to so long as ’e keeps clear of Malden Fenwick.”
“Thank you, Mrs. M,” I said. “I enjoy talking to you. You always have such interesting stories to tell.”
“Mind you, I’ve said nothing,” she said in an undertone, raising a finger. “My lips are sealed.”
And in rather an odd way, there was truth in what she said. Since I first came into the room I had been waiting for her to ask me about the Gypsy, or why the police had turned up at Buckshaw, but she had done neither. Was it possible she didn’t know about either of these events?
It seemed unlikely. Mrs. M’s recent chin-wag at the kitchen door with the milk-float man was likely to have resulted in more swapping of intelligence than a chin-wag between Lord Haw-Haw and Mata Hari.
I was already across the kitchen with my hand on the door when she said it: “Don’t go wandering too far off, dear. That nice officer—the one with the dimples—will be round soon to ’ave your fingerprints.”
Curse the woman! Was she eavesdropping from behind every closed door at Buckshaw? Or was she truly clairvoyant?
“Oh, yes,” I replied lamely. “Thanks for reminding me, Mrs. M. I’d almost forgotten about him.”
The doorbell rang as I came through the passage beneath the stairs. I put on a sprint but Feely beat me to it.
I skidded to a stop on the foyer’s checkerboard tiles just as she swung open the front door to reveal Detective Sergeant Graves standing on the doorstep, small black box in hand and his jaw already halfway to the ground.
I have to admit that Feely had never looked more beautiful: From her salmon-colored silk blouse to her sage green mohair sweater (both of which, as I knew from my own snooping expeditions, she had pinched from Harriet’s dressing room), from her perfect honey-colored hair to her sparkling blue eyes (having, of course, left her black-rimmed spectacles, as she always did, stuffed behind the pillows on the chesterfield), she was a close-up from a Technicolor cinema film.
She had planned this, the hag!
“Sergeant Graves, I presume?” she said in a low, husky voice—one I had never heard her use before. “Come in. We’ve been expecting you.”
We? What in the old malarkey was she playing at?
“I’m Flavia’s sister, Ophelia,” she was saying, extending a coral-encrusted wrist and a long white hand that made the Lady of Shalott’s fingers look like meathooks.
I could have killed her!
What right did Feely have to insert herself, without so much as a by-your-leave, between me and the man who had come to Buckshaw expressly to take my fingerprints? It was unforgiveable!
Still, I mustn’t forget that I’d had more than one daydream in which the chipper little sergeant married my older sister and lived in a flower-choked cottage where I would be able to drop in for afternoon tea and happy professional chats about criminal poisoners.
Sergeant Graves had finally recovered enough of his wits to say “Yes,” and bumble his way into the foyer.
“Would you like a cup of tea and a biscuit, Sergeant?” Feely asked, managing to suggest in her tone that the poor dear was overworked, dog-tired, and malnourished.
“I am quite thirsty, come to think of it,” he managed with a bashful grin. “And hungry,” he added.
Feely stepped back and ushered him towards the drawing room.
I followed like a neglected hound.
“You may set up your gear here,” Feely told him, indicating a Regency table that stood near a window. “How dreadfully trying the life of a police officer must be. All firearms and criminals and hobnail boots.”
Sergeant Graves had the good grace not to slug her. In fact, he seemed to be enjoying himself.
“It is a hard life, Miss Ophelia,” he said, “at least most of the time.”
His dimpled grin suggested that this was one of the easier moments.
“I’ll ring for Mrs. Mullet,” Feely said, reaching for a velvet pull that hung near the mantelpiece, and which p
robably hadn’t been used since George the Third was foaming at the mouth. Mrs. M would have kidney failure when the bell in the kitchen went off right above her head.
“What about the dabs?” I asked. It was a term I had picked up from Philip Odell, the private eye on the wireless. “Inspector Hewitt will be dead keen on having a squint at them.”
Feely laughed a laugh like a tinkling silver bell. “You must forgive my little sister, Sergeant,” she said. “I’m afraid she’s been left alone too much.”
Left alone? I almost laughed out loud! What would the sergeant say if I told him about the Inquisition in the Buckshaw cellars? About how Feely and Daffy had trussed me up in a smelly potato sack and flung me onto the stony floor?
“Dabs it is, then,” said the sergeant, opening the clasps and flinging open his kit. “I suppose you’ll be wanting to have a dekko at the chemicals and so forth,” he added, giving me a wink.
If I’d had my way, he’d have been sanctified on the spot: Saint Detective Sergeant Graves. Come to think of it, I didn’t even know his given name, but now was not the time to ask.
“This,” he said, extracting the first of two small glass bottles, “is fingerprint powder.”
“Mercury-based, I assume? Fine enough to give good definition to the loops and whorls, and so on?”
This, too, I had learned from Philip Odell. It had stuck in my mind because of its chemical connection.
The sergeant grinned and pulled out the second bottle, this one darker than the first.
“Go on,” he said. “See if you can guess this one.”
Guess? I thought. The poor deluded man!
“Graphite-based,” I said. “More coarse than the mercury, but shows up better on certain surfaces.”
“Top marks!” the sergeant said.
I turned away as if to wipe a bit of grit from my eye and stuck out my tongue at Feely.
“But surely these are for dusting?” I protested. “… and not needed for recording prints?”
“Right enough,” the sergeant said. “I just thought you’d be interested in seeing the tools of the trade.”