A Red Herring Without Mustard

by Alan Bradley

  As the ambulance bumped slowly away, swerving to avoid the half-buried statuary, I noticed that a rainbow had appeared. An eerie yellow light had come upon the landscape, making it seem like some garish painting by a madman.

  On the far side of the Trafalgar Lawn, at the edge of the trees, something moved. I swiveled a bit and refocused quickly, just in time to see a figure vanish into the wood.

  Another poacher, I thought, watching the police; not wanting to be seen.

  I made a slow sweep of the tree trunks, but whoever had been there was gone.

  I found the ambulance again with the binoculars, and watched until it vanished behind a distant hedge. When it was lost to view, I climbed down from the stool and locked up the laboratory.

  If I wanted to search Brookie’s digs before the police got there, I’d have to get cracking.

  TEN

  THE ONLY PROBLEM WAS this: I hadn’t the faintest idea where Brookie lived.

  I could have made another visit to the telephone closet, I suppose, but in Buckshaw’s foyer I was risking an encounter with Father, or worse—with Daffy or Feely. Besides, it seemed most unlikely that a ne’er-do-well such as Brookie would be listed in the directory.

  Rather than risk being caught, I slipped stealthily into the picture gallery, which occupied nearly the entire ground floor of the east wing.

  An army of de Luce ancestors gazed down upon me as I passed, in whose faces I recognized, uncomfortably, aspects of my own. I wouldn’t have liked most of them, I thought, and most of them wouldn’t have liked me.

  I did a cartwheel just to show them that I didn’t care.

  Still, because the old boy deserved it, I gave Uncle Tar’s portrait a brisk Girl Guide salute, even though I’d been drummed out of that organization, quite unfairly I thought, by a woman with no sense of humor whatsoever. “Honestly, Miss Pashley,” I’d have told her, had I been given half a chance, “the ferric hydroxide was only meant to be a joke.”

  At the far end of the gallery was a box room which, in Buckshaw’s glory days, had been used for the framing and repair of the portraits and landscapes that made up my family’s art collection.

  A couple of deal shelves and the workbench in the room were still littered with dusty tins of paint and varnish whose contents had dried out at about the same time as Queen Victoria, and from which brush handles stuck up here and there like fossilized rats’ tails.

  Everyone but me seemed to have forgotten that this room had a most useful feature: a sashed window that could be raised easily from both inside and out—and all the more so since I had taken to lubricating its slides with lard pinched from the pantry.

  On the outside wall, directly below the window casing and halfway to the ground, a brick had half crumbled away—its slow decay encouraged somewhat, I’ll admit, by my hacking at it with one of Dogger’s trowels: a perfect foothold for anyone who wished to leave or get back into the house without attracting undue attention.

  As I scrambled out the window and climbed to the ground, I almost stepped on Dogger, who was on his knees in the wet grass. He got to his feet, lifted his hat, and replaced it.

  “Good afternoon, Miss Flavia.”

  “Good afternoon, Dogger.”

  “Lovely rain.”

  “Quite lovely.”

  Dogger glanced up at the golden sky, then went on with his weeding.

  The very best people are like that. They don’t entangle you like flypaper.

  Gladys’s tires hummed happily as we shot past St. Tancred’s and into the high street. She was enjoying the day as much as I was.

  Ahead on my left, a few doors from the Thirteen Drakes, was Reggie Pettibone’s antiques shop. I was making a mental note to pay it a visit later when the door flew open and a spectacled boy came hurtling into the street.

  It was Colin Prout.

  I swerved to avoid hitting him, and Gladys went into a long shuddering slide.

  “Colin!” I shouted as I came to a stop. I had very nearly taken a bad tumble.

  But Colin had already crossed the high street and vanished into Bolt Alley, a narrow, reeking passage that led to a lane behind the shops.

  Needless to say, I followed, offering up fresh praise for the invention of the Sturmey-Archer three-speed shifter.

  Into the lane I sped, but Colin was already disappearing round the corner at the far end. A few seconds more, having taken a roughly circular route, and he would be back in the high street.

  I was right. By the time I caught sight of him again, he was cutting into Cow Lane, as if the hounds of Hell were at his heels.

  Rather than following, I applied the brakes.

  Where Cow Lane ended at the river, I knew, Colin would veer to the left and follow the old towpath that ran behind the Thirteen Drakes. He would not risk going to ground anywhere along the old canal for fear of being boxed in behind the shops.

  I turned completely round and went back the way I’d come, making a broad sweeping turn into Shoe Street, where Miss Pickery, the new librarian, lived in the last cottage. I braked, dismounted, and, leaning Gladys against her fence, climbed quickly over the stile and crept into position behind one of the tall poplars that lined the towpath.

  Just in time! Here was Colin hurrying towards me, and all the while looking nervously back over his shoulder.

  “Hello, Colin,” I said, stepping directly into his path.

  Colin stopped as if he had walked into a brick wall, but the shifting of his pale eyes, magnified like oysters by his thick lenses, signaled that he was about to make a break for it.

  “The police are looking for you, you know. Do you want me to tell them where you are?”

  It was a bald-faced lie: one of my specialties.

  “N-n-n-no.”

  His face had gone as white as tissue paper, and I thought for a moment he was going to blubber. But before I could tighten the screws, he blurted out: “I never done it, Flavia! Honest! Whatever they think I done, I didn’t.”

  In spite of his tangle of words I knew what he meant. “Didn’t do what, Colin? What is it you haven’t done?”

  “Nothin’. I ’aven’t done nothin’.”

  “Where’s Brookie?” I asked casually. “I need to see him about a pair of fire irons.”

  My words had the desired effect. Colin’s arms swung round like the vanes on a weathercock, his fingers pointing north, south, west, east. He finally settled on the latter, indicating that Brookie was to be found somewhere beyond the Thirteen Drakes.

  “Last time I seen him ’e was unloading ’is van.”

  His van? Could Brookie have a van? Somehow the idea seemed ludicrous—as if the scarecrow from The Wizard of Oz had been spotted behind the wheel of a Bedford lorry—and yet …

  “Thanks awfully, Colin,” I told him. “You’re a wonder.”

  With a scrub at his eyes and a tug at his hair, he was over the stile and up Shoe Street like a whirling dervish. And then he was gone.

  Had I just made a colossal mistake? Perhaps I had, but I could hardly carry out my inquiries with someone like Colin drooling over my shoulder.

  Only then did a cold horror of an idea come slithering across my mind. What if—

  But no, if there’d been blood on Colin’s clothing, I’d surely have noticed it.

  As I walked back to retrieve Gladys, I was taken with a rattling good idea. In all of Bishop’s Lacey there were very few vans, most of which were known to me on sight: the ironmonger’s, the butcher’s, the electrician’s, and so forth. Each one had the name of its owner in prominent letters on the side panels; each was unique and unmistakeable. A quick ride up the high street would account for most of them, and a strange van would stand out like a sore thumb.

  And so it did.

  A few minutes later I had pedaled a zigzag path throughout the village without any luck. But as I swept round the bend at the east end of the high street, I could hardly believe my eyes.

  Parked in front of Willow Villa was a disreputa
ble green van that, although its rusty panels were blank, had Brookie Harewood written all over it.

  Willow Villa was aptly named for the fact that it was completely hidden beneath the drooping tassels of a giant tree, which was just as well since the house was painted a hideous shade of orange. It belonged to Tilda Mountjoy, whom I had met under rather unhappy circumstances a few months earlier. Miss Mountjoy was the retired Librarian-in-Chief of the Bishop’s Lacey Free Library where, it was said, even the books had lived in fear of her. Now, with nothing but time on her hands, she had become a freelance holy terror.

  Although I was not anxious to renew our acquaintance, there was nothing for it but to open her gate, push my way through the net of dangling fronds, squelch through the mosses underfoot, and beard the dragon in her den.

  My excuse? I would tell her that, while out bicycling, I had been overcome with a sudden faintness. Seeing Brookie’s van, I thought that perhaps he would be kind enough to load Gladys into the rear and drive me home. Father, I was sure, would be filled with eternal gratitude, etc., etc., etc.

  Under the willow’s branches, lichens flourished on the doorstep and the air was as cool and dank as a mausoleum.

  I had already raised the corroded brass knocker, which was in the shape of the Lincoln Imp, when the door flew open and there stood Miss Mountjoy—covered with blood!

  I don’t know which of us was the most startled to see the other, but for a peculiar moment we both of us stood perfectly still, staring wide-eyed at each other.

  The front of her dress and the sleeves of her gray cardigan were soaked with the stuff, and her face was an open wound. A few fresh drops of scarlet had already plopped to the floor before she lifted a bloody handkerchief and clapped it to her face.

  “Nosebleed,” she said. “I get them all the time.”

  With her mouth and nose muffled by the stained linen, it sounded as if she had said “I give them all the twine,” but I knew what she meant.

  “Gosh, Miss Mountjoy,” I blurted. “Let me help you.”

  I seized her arm and before she could protest, steered her towards the kitchen through a dark hallway lined with heavy Tudor sideboards.

  “Sit down,” I said, pulling out a chair, and to my surprise, she did.

  My experience with nosebleeds was limited but practical. I remembered one of Feely’s birthday parties at which Sheila Foster’s nose had erupted on the croquet lawn and Dogger had stanched it with someone’s handkerchief dipped in a solution of copper sulfate from the greenhouse.

  Willow Villa, however, didn’t seem likely to have a supply of Blue Vitriol, as the solution was called, although I knew that, given no more than half a teacup of dilute sulfurie acid, a couple of pennies, and the battery from Gladys’s bicycle lamp, I could whip up enough of the stuff to do the trick. But this was no time for chemistry.

  I grabbed for an ornamental iron key that hung from a nail near the fireplace and clapped it to the back of her neck.

  She let out a shriek, and came halfway out of the chair.

  “Easy now,” I said, as if talking to a horse (a quick vision of clinging to Gry’s mane in the darkness came to mind). “Easy.”

  Miss Mountjoy sat rigid, her shoulders hunched. Now was the time.

  “Is Brookie here?” I said conversationally. “I saw his van outside.”

  Miss Mountjoy’s head snapped back and I felt her stiffen even more under my hand. She slowly removed the bloody handkerchief from her nose and said with perfect cold clarity, “Harewood will never set foot in this house again.”

  I blinked. Was Miss Mountjoy merely stating her determination, or was there something more ominous in her words? Did she know that Brookie was dead?

  As she twisted round to glare at me, I saw that her nosebleed had stopped.

  I let the silence lengthen, a useful trick I had picked up from Inspector Hewitt.

  “The man’s a thief,” she said at last. “I should never have trusted him. I don’t know what I was thinking.”

  “Can I bring you anything, Miss Mountjoy? A glass of water? A damp cloth?”

  It was time to ingratiate myself.

  Without a word I went to the sink and wetted a hand towel. I wrung it out and gave it to her. As she wiped the blood from her face and hands, I looked away discreetly, taking the opportunity to examine the kitchen.

  It was a square room with a low ceiling. A small green Aga crouched in the corner and there was a plain, scrubbed deal table with a single chair: the one in which Miss Mountjoy was presently sitting. A plate rail ran round two sides of the room, upon which were displayed an assortment of blue and white plates and platters—mostly Staffordshire, by the look of them: village greens and country scenes, for the most part. I counted eleven, with an empty space about a foot and a half in diameter where a twelfth plate must once have hung.

  Filtered through the willow branches outside, the weak green light that seeped in through the two small windows above the sink gave the plates a weird and watery tint, which reminded me of what the Trafalgar Lawn had looked like after the rain: after the taking down of Brookie’s body from the Poseidon fountain.

  At the entrance to the narrow passage through which we had entered the kitchen was a chipped wooden cabinet, on top of which was a cluster of identical bottles, all of them medicinal-looking.

  Only as I read their labels did the smell hit me. How odd, I thought: the sense of smell is usually lightning fast, often speedier than that of sight or hearing.

  But now there was no doubt about it. The whole room—even Miss Mountjoy herself—reeked of cod-liver oil.

  Perhaps until that moment the sight of Miss Mountjoy’s nosebleed and her blood-splattered clothing had overwhelmed my sense of smell. Although I had first noticed the fishy odor when I saw her dripping blood at the door, and again when I had applied the cold key to the nape of her neck, my brain must have labeled the fact as not immediately important, and tucked it away for later consideration.

  My experience of cod-liver oil was vast. Much of my life had been spent fleeing the oncoming Mrs. Mullet, who, with uncorked bottle and a spoon the size of a garden spade, pursued me up and down the corridors and staircases of Buckshaw—even in my dreams.

  Who in their right mind would want to swallow something that looked like discarded engine oil and was squeezed out of fish livers that had been left to rot in the sun? The stuff was used in the tanning of leather, and I couldn’t help wondering what it would do to one’s insides.

  “Open up, dearie,” I could hear Mrs. Mullet calling as she trundled after me. “It’s good for you.”

  “No! No!” I would shriek. “No acid! Please don’t make me drink acid!”

  And it was true—I wasn’t just making this up. I had analyzed the stuff in my laboratory and found it to contain a catalogue of acids, among them oleic, margaric, acetic, butyric, fellic, cholic, and phosphoric, to say nothing of the oxides, calcium and sodium.

  In the end, I had made a bargain with Mrs. M: She would allow me to take the cod-liver oil alone in my room at bedtime, and I would stop screaming like a tortured banshee and kicking at her ankles. I swore it on my mother’s grave.

  Harriet, of course, had no grave. Her body was somewhere in the snows of Tibet.

  Happy to be relieved of a difficult and unwanted task, Mrs. Mullet had pretended to be scandalized, but cheerfully handed over both spoon and bottle.

  My mind came snapping back to the present like a rubber ball on an elastic string.

  “Trouble with antiques, was it?” I heard myself say. “You’re not alone in that, Miss Mountjoy.”

  Although I almost missed it, her rapid glance upwards, towards the spot where the missing plate had hung, told me I had hit the bull’s-eye.

  She saw me following her gaze.

  “It was from the time of Hongwu, the first Ming emperor. He told me he knew a man—”

  “Brookie?” I interrupted.

  She nodded.

  “He said he knew s
omeone who could have the piece assessed discreetly, and at reasonable cost. Things have been difficult since the war, you see, and I thought of—”

  “Yes, I know, Miss Mountjoy,” I said. “I understand.”

  With Father’s financial difficulties, and the blizzard of past-due accounts that arrived with every postal delivery being the subject of much idle chitchat in Bishop’s Lacey, there was no need for her to explain her own poverty.

  Her look formed a bond between us. “Partners in debt,” it seemed to say.

  “He told me the railway had broken it. He’d packed the plate in straw, he said, and put it in a barrel, but somehow—he’d taken out no insurance, of course, trying to keep expenses down—trying not to burden me with additional—and then—”

  “Someone spotted it in an antiques shop,” I blurted.

  She nodded. “My niece, Julia. In Pimlico. She said, ‘Auntie, you’ll never guess what I saw today: the mate to your Ming!’

  “She was standing right there where you are, and just as you did, she looked up and saw the empty space on the shelf. ‘Oh, Auntie!’ she said. ‘Oh, Auntie.’

  “We tried to get the plate back, of course, but the man said he had it on consignment from an MP who lived in the next street. Couldn’t give out names because of confidentiality. Julia was all for going to the police, but I reminded her that Uncle Jamieson, who brought the piece into the family, was not always on the up-and-up. I’m sorry to have to tell you that story, Flavia, but I’ve always made it a point to be scrupulously honest.”

  I nodded and gave her a little look of disappointment. “But Brookie Harewood,” I said. “How did he come to get his hands on the plate?”

  “Because he’s my tenant. He lives in my coach house, you see.”

  Brookie? Here? In Miss Mountjoy’s coach house? This was news to me.

  “Oh, yes,” I said. “Of course he does. I’d forgotten. Well, then, I’d better be getting along. I think you’d best lie down for a while, Miss Mountjoy. You’re still quite pale. A nosebleed takes so much out of one, doesn’t it? Iron, and so forth. You must be quite worn out.”