by Alan Bradley
And yet at the same time it was a perfectly ordinary Kodak Brownie Six-20. There were plenty of them about. Every tourist in every English village had one strapped around his or her neck, clicking away madly here and there at every quaint cottage, every tithe barn, and every duck on every village green.
But this camera was different. A tiny hole had been drilled in the shutter release lever, to which had been fastened a length of fishing line that passed through a couple of small brass rings attached to the side of the camera.
“Have you got it worked out yet?” Hob demanded, hopping from one foot to the other with excitement.
“It’s a cable release,” I said. “A kind of remote control.”
“Aerial photography!” he exploded, unable to contain himself any longer. “I knocked it together myself. Do you like it?”
“Extraordinary,” I said, feeling much older than my actual years.
“Altogether ripping!” I added, more for my own benefit than for Hob’s.
Hob fairly basked in the glow of my approval and I knew in that moment that he hadn’t many friends.
“I have an idea,” I said. “Let’s take the film to the chemist’s to be developed. I’ll put it in my name and you can put your brother’s camera back wherever you found it. That way, he’ll never know you even pinched it.”
“You’re brilliant!” Hob said, and I had to agree.
A few moments later, the roll was in my pocket, along with my handkerchief and whatever remained of the fluids from the lungs of the late Orlando.
As I was giving myself a mental pat on the back, a door at the end of the loft swung silently open and a man dressed entirely in black came into the room. He must have moved on oiled castors, I thought. Even my keen hearing had not detected his approach.
He seemed almost as surprised to see us as we were to see him.
“Hob!” he said. “What are you doing here? I thought you were out playing. And who’s this you’ve brought home?”
I saved Hob the trouble of explaining. Stepping forward in the most ladylike manner I could summon up, I offered him my hand and gave him a firm shake.
Remarkably strong, I thought, for an undertaker. And yet an undertaker had to be capable—when you got right down to it—of manhandling bodies as if they were so many sacks of potatoes.
His suit was clean but shabby, the cuffs slightly frayed. From rubbing against so many coffins, I thought. An honest workingman.
“I’m Flavia de Luce, sir,” I said. “Hob had a bit of a prang with his kite and I helped him get it home.”
“I’m much obliged to you, Miss de Luce,” he said. “Most grateful.”
He extracted an old-fashioned pocket watch from his waistcoat, glanced at it, and said: “But now you must excuse me. I’m afraid I have some rather urgent business to attend to, and—”
I knew what he was referring to even before he finished speaking.
Orlando! It had to be Orlando!
What else could be so urgent in a small town on a lazy summer afternoon? How many deaths were likely to come to light within the space of a single hour?
I fancied myself something of an expert on that topic. I knew, for instance, that most deaths in quiet country towns were due to old age, and that most of the elderly, when their time was up, tended to die quietly in the night and be discovered before breakfast.
Deaths in the afternoon, on the other hand, were much more likely to be due to causes such as heart attacks among hardworking farmers, or road accidents involving young drivers with an appetite for alcohol and speed.
There were other factors, of course, but these were the most likely.
“Of course, sir,” I said, offering another shake. “It’s been most pleasant to meet you.”
Pleasant! You genius, Flavia! Even old Peter Mark Roget, the thesaurus boffin, couldn’t have come up with a better word himself. Not in a hundred years. Not in an eon!
Mr. Nightingale adjusted his widower’s cuffs, and I knew I’d been approved.
But just to make sure, I added: “I know you’re extremely busy, sir, but I wanted to compliment you on your French polishing.”
I touched the gleaming coffin lid with appreciative fingertips.
“I noticed by the bottles in the courtyard that you use shellac and methylated spirits. I love the luster it gives.”
I caressed the highly polished wood.
Mr. Nightingale straightened his tie.
“Sometime, when you have a minute, sir, you must give me your views on the use of bullens as an ornamental device. I realize there’s a great deal of controversy—especially in Dissenting parishes—but…”
I allowed my words to trail off.
Bullens were the square-headed brass nails beloved of undertakers who wished to make a bit of easy profit at little expense. I had read up on them with great interest in Coffins and Coffin Making, a well-thumbed copy of which was kept on a high shelf in the Bishop’s Lacey Free Library.
I excused my boldness by forcing a slight but pretty blush, which isn’t as easy as it sounds. It’s a matter of holding one’s breath while forcing air from the lungs toward the head without appearing to do so.
“I am flattered, Miss de Luce,” the undertaker said. “Perhaps another time.”
I inclined my head graciously and gave him a coy smile. It was jolly good luck I didn’t have a fan in my hand!
Had he clicked his heels together, or was it my imagination?
At any rate, he was suddenly, smoothly, and gracefully gone, just as you would expect from someone of his standing.
“What a lovely man your father is, Hob,” I remarked. He was grinning from ear to ear.
“Now then,” I told him, dropping my duchess pose. “Let’s go find out what’s on that film.”
·FIVE·
FORTUNATELY, THE CHEMIST’S SHOP was in the opposite direction from the church, so we were at little risk of running into anyone I knew. It simply wouldn’t do to be stopped and ordered about by the police, although even that would have been better than coming face-to-face with Feely or Daffy.
Feely! I had completely forgotten about her. I had walked out of the church with Constable Otter, and left my sister producing a Niagara of notes on the church organ. For all I knew, she might still be at it. Old Johann’s Art of Fugue, uninterrupted, could run on for as long as an hour and a quarter, especially if my sister was upset and had recently eaten.
“Musick has charms to sooth a savage breast,” William Congreve had once written, in his play The Mourning Bride.
“ ‘Musick and chicken sandwiches,’ he ought to have said,” Daffy once remarked as Feely had stormed away from the dinner table and taken refuge in one of the most beautiful and heart-wrenching of the piano sonatas by Beethoven.
“Did you say you were going to pay for this?” Hob asked, interrupting my thoughts.
“Yes,” I told him. “But let’s hurry before I change my mind.”
If we cracked on with the film processing, I might be able to get back to the church and slip into a pew before Feely even noticed I was gone.
“What’s the hurry?” Hob asked, shooting me a most penetrating look.
“Nothing really,” I told him, biting my tongue. “It’s just that I’m awfully keen on aerial photos. I haven’t laid eyes on a good old aerophoto in simply ages. They used to print tons of them in The Illustrated London News, but that was before the war. Nobody gives a tinker’s curse about them nowadays. Except you, of course—and me.”
I shot him a beaming smile and he beamed back.
The chemist’s was next door to a butcher’s shop in the high street. WANLESS & SONS DISPENSING CHEMISTS, it said in peeling black and gold above the door and on the little bow window, in which were displayed two glass globes of tired-looking colored water.
A bell tinkled brightly as we stepped into a dim, cramped Aladdin’s cave of bottles, flasks, tins, bags, and boxes. There was barely enough space in the place to turn around, and
it smelled of sulfur; of lavender and mint; of bath salts and smelling salts; of licorice and aloes and nux vomica; of castor oil and oil of cloves (for toothache).
The atmosphere, I realized with a sudden start, was that of a sickroom—but the sickroom of a patient who had quite recently departed this life.
I didn’t want to think about it.
Behind an arched wire wicket, the chemist, tall, thin, and white-jacketed like a London tearoom attendant, didn’t bat an eye as I handed over the film.
“Prints?” he asked, his pencil poised.
“One of each,” I told him.
“Name?”
“Flavia de Luce,” I said. There was no point in lying about it.
“Are you from our neighborhood, Miss de Luce?” he asked.
“We’re staying at the Oak and Pheasant,” I said, “but we’re expecting to leave tomorrow. Do you think they’ll be ready by then?”
This was pure invention. I had no idea when we were leaving, but I wanted the prints as soon as possible.
The chemist frowned.
“I can’t promise anything. We process every day except Sundays, of course. But this is our busiest time of year…”
He didn’t say “because of the tourists” but I knew that’s what he meant.
I formed my mouth into a little pout to indicate that I might take my business elsewhere.
“Sometimes,” the chemist added reluctantly, “they’re ready the same day, but only rarely. We’re rushed off our feet this time of year, you know.”
I put on a guilty look, as if it were all my fault.
He stared at me intently for a moment and then, as if having come to some momentous decision, turned away and began to paw with his right foot at the wooden floorboards, as if he were a maddened bull who had just spotted the matador in the ring.
“Howland!” he shouted in a new and alarmingly loud voice, quite unlike the one in which he had been speaking to me. “When can you do a roll of six-twenty?”
Howland, whoever he was, must be remarkably hard of hearing.
From under the floor there came an angry subterranean grumble, as if the gods of the underworld were suffering badly from indigestion.
I could not make out any of the words.
I peered round the edge of the wicket at which I was standing. Sure enough, there was a trapdoor beneath the chemist’s feet. The invisible Howland must have his photo darkroom in the cellar.
“In due course,” the chemist said, turning back to me.
“Thank you,” I replied, baring my teeth and rewarding him with a full-on but well-chosen grin from my inner grab bag of smiles.
“I know you’ll do your best,” I said, and somehow I knew that he would.
Outside in the high street I said my goodbyes to Hob.
“I must get back,” I said, “otherwise my sister will be frantic. She worries about me too much. You know how it is.”
A little untruth never hurt a casual acquaintance.
Hob nodded and made off along the high street.
Only after he was gone did I realize how few words he had spoken.
As I walked back toward the church I heard the unmistakable sound of a hurdy-gurdy. Was it a wandering organ grinder with his monkey? I wondered. A “peripatetic pest,” as Daffy would call him?
My question was quickly answered as I came to a short passageway on the left side of the street. Through a brick archway was a cobbled lane that led to an open space beyond which were fields. I knew by the ancient stone cross and cattle troughs that this was the town marketplace, now taken over by a small traveling fair.
A canvas banner announced that this was SHADRACH’S CIRCUS & MENAGERIE: THE GRANDEST LITTLE SHOW ON EARTH.
The music was coming from a small merry-go-round, its gaudy horses, pigs, griffins, and a single (but fierce) fire-breathing dragon spinning endlessly in the warm summer sunshine. There were no more than a handful of small riders astride these handsome beasts, and one of those, a red-faced little chap, was holding on for dear life and wailing for his mother.
Nearby, a bored-looking elephant, shackled at the leg, munched half-heartedly on a mound of hay.
Arranged round the four sides of the market square were the usual stalls: a coconut pitch and a pieman, a ring-toss, and an Aunt Sally. Directly across from these was a shooting gallery, with flying mechanical ducks, grouse, partridges, and a leftover portrait of Neville Chamberlain flying jerkily across a crudely painted landscape. Someone had painted a happy grin on Chamberlain’s exhausted-looking face with lipstick.
Beyond, in a row of side stalls, were games of Crown and Anchor, Under and Over, and, in spite of the ban on casino games at village fairs, a surprisingly large illuminated roulette wheel. A hand-lettered sign on a stick said NO CHILDREN PLEASE.
For the little ones, there was a fishpond with magnetic hooks to pull worthless trinkets from a cellophane “pool.”
“Hello there!” someone said behind me, and I spun round to find myself face-to-face with one of the men I had seen in the pub. The largest one. I recognized him by his polka-dot kerchief.
“Haven’t we met before?” he asked. “Your face is familiar.”
I knew better than to fall for a line like that. Daffy had coached me in dealing with strange men who claim that you have a familiar face. Her instructions ranged from the sharp retort and rapid departure all the way up to a swift kick in the colonies.
“You have to show them you mean business,” Daffy had said.
I shook my head and turned away. But the man was not so easily discouraged. He shuffled round in front of me, blocked my way, and held out a roll of colored tickets.
“Take a chance on the Lucky Draw,” he coaxed. “Sixpence each, six for a shilling. What could be fairer than that?”
“Go away,” I said quite loudly. That was Step A.
“Come on,” he persisted. “You look like a sport—a girl who likes to take a chance.”
“Go away,” I repeated. That was Step B.
“Can’t win if you don’t enter,” he said, going into a faint whine.
Step C was not to be executed unless the man physically laid hands upon you, but if he did—even so much as a finger—he was fair game.
“I’m warning you—” I said.
A hand touched my upper arm. I swung round, spotted my target, and—
“Let’s go, Flavia,” Hob said, tugging at my sleeve. “You can buy me a candy floss.”
I had come within an ace of flattening him. Had the little dickens been following me?
I gave him a raised eyebrow.
“You know as well as I do that sweets are still rationed.”
“I do know that as well as you do”—Hob grinned—“but I have a ration book.”
And so it was that the two of us, our faces covered with cobwebs of pink sugar, strolled back into the high street, licking our chops like butcher shop cats, and wiping our sticky fingers on the leaves of overhanging trees.
Gorging on sweets together creates as strong a bond between two people as being in love. Or so it seems to me, although I’ve never been in love. Nor am I much accustomed to sugar. The war had seen to that.
And yet, walking along with Hob, both of us inhaling spun sucrose like a pair of jet engines, we became, almost instantly, old pals.
“How does it feel to have an undertaker for a father?” I asked.
It was a question I had been dying to ask him since the moment we met; a question to which, for some strange reason, I desperately required an answer.
“Do you really want to know?”
“Of course I do,” I said, picking strands of pink fiber off my chin. “It’s the kind of thing that interests me. I wish my father had been in the trade.”
“Wasn’t he?” Hob asked.
“No. At least not directly.”
I was thinking of Father’s wartime service, when he and Dogger had been shipped out to the Far East in order to dispatch foreigners to an early grave.<
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“Anyway,” I said, pulling myself back into the moment, “you haven’t answered my question.”
Hob shrugged.
“Well,” he said, “they tease me about it at school.”
“I’d rip their hearts out,” I said, suddenly fiercely defensive of this tiny creature.
“Oh, I don’t mind,” Hob said. “Da says that life is full of death, and that it’s better to make friends with it than fight it.”
Oh! The wisdom of the man!
It was as if the heavens had suddenly opened and a disembodied arm had handed down to me the Secret of the Universe, scribbled on a slip of wrinkled paper.
A weight had been lifted from my shoulders: a weight of which I hadn’t been aware until it was gone.
I wanted to hug someone. I wanted to burst into glorious song.
“Hmmm,” I said. “Yes. I suppose that’s one way of looking at it.”
I hadn’t noticed until now that Hob had stopped strolling and begun cantering. Yes, cantering!
It seemed as if a little of my elation had rubbed off on him.
“What do you know about Poppy Mandrill?” I asked suddenly.
In my experience, it is often a bolt from the blue that shakes loose the biggest avalanche.
“Everyone’s afraid of her,” Hob replied, without batting an eye.
“Everyone?”
“Well, I’m not, of course,” Hob said, jutting his chin out. “But I only know her to see her.”
I couldn’t resist.
“Then how do you know everyone’s afraid of her?”
“Because I keep my ears open,” Hob said. “At funerals.”
I realized at once, of course, that I had, almost accidentally, tapped into a vast reservoir. If there’s one place where people speak with unguarded tongues, it’s at a funeral. Emotion—and especially grief—loosens tongues even more than alcohol.
I’ll bet there have been more truths told over an open coffin than in all the confession boxes in Christendom.
“Do you really?” I asked admiringly.
Hob fairly preened.
“Mrs. Perry said that to Mrs. Belaney at old Mr. Arkwright’s funeral. As soon as Poppy Mandrill came into the room, everybody moved away from her—as if she had the Black Plague or something.”