by Alan Bradley
One needed to be extremely careful at this game. Dogger nodded approvingly as I raised the window sash.
Sodium hydroxide crystals, upon contact with water, generate sudden tremendous heat—the so-called exothermic reaction—resulting in a furious foaming, which explains why they are so highly regarded in the unclogging of stubborn drains.
Because of the caustic nature of the stuff, it is necessary to protect the skin and clothing from unexpected splashes. I loved it that Dogger didn’t tell me to be careful.
“May I borrow your driving gloves?” I asked.
Did Dogger raise an eyebrow?
Perhaps by the width of a hair, but he hid it well.
“Of course you may, Miss Flavia,” he replied, and fished them from his jacket pocket.
As I slipped them onto my hands, I marveled at the soft luxury of the gloves, which Dogger had once told me were stitched from the skins of young hornless goats from the Cape of Good Hope.
Poor babies! I thought as I wiggled my fingers into position. I’d better be careful not to damage them.
Uncapping the tin of Drain Bane, I tipped a few crystals of the stuff into the glass of water from the kettle. They sank to the bottom. A few more crystals and they began to fizz. A few more and—
I stopped abruptly. Like a dose of stomach salts, the stuff was suddenly foaming fiercely up the sides of the glass, but fortunately it stopped just before reaching the lip.
“Perfect,” Dogger said. Until that moment I hadn’t realized he was watching me.
“As for the required glassware, I have taken the liberty of bringing up the bud vase from Miss Harriet’s Rolls-Royce.”
How I longed to hug him! Not just for thinking of how to provide a makeshift test-tube, but for still thinking of the Rolls as belonging to my late mother.
In the days when she was still alive, this small glass trumpet from Liberty’s had been one of two in the car, which my father had kept perpetually supplied with roses from the garden at Buckshaw.
The thought of it tugged at something inside me, but I didn’t want to give in to emotion in front of Dogger.
“Brilliant!” was all I could manage. “What shall we use for a stopper?”
But Dogger had already thought of that. “Candle wax,” he said, reaching for the hand lamp whose glass shade we had already put to such good use.
He plucked the candle from its socket, held its butt end over the hot plate, and turned on the switch. Rotating it as it warmed, he soon had a teardrop of wax the size of a penny ready to drop.
“If you’ll be so kind as to hold this for a moment,” he said, and taking the glass containing the submerged handkerchief, he gave it a final stir and a good poke with his pen.
Having done so, he poured some of the liquid contents into the bud vase and handed it to me.
With thumbs and first two fingers, I worked the wax to form a perfect plug, then pressed it into the top of the vase.
“Watertight!” I said, and Dogger nodded.
“Now for a centrifuge,” he said quietly, almost as if to himself.
Centrifuge?
At home, in my laboratory at Buckshaw, I had the lovely professional centrifuge that had been brought from Germany by my late uncle Tarquin. With an electrical motor powerful enough to swing an ox until Doomsday at 2000 revolutions per minute, or until the electrical power was cut off, whichever came first.
But here in a miserable bedroom at the Oak and Pheasant? What were we to do?
A small light dawned in my brain. I was already grinning from ear to ear.
“The blind cord!” I blurted. Then gaining control of myself, I said in softer tones—and with considerably less volume: “I think the cord from the blind will serve admirably.”
The look on Dogger’s face was worth a sultan’s ransom, as if his horse had won the Derby. If this wasn’t pride, it was something very much like it.
“Quite right,” he said. “I’m sure the good Mrs. Palmer won’t mind, as long as we leave everything as we found it.”
He stepped to the window, lowered the blind, brought out his penknife, selected the smallest blade, and before you could say “I name this racehorse Jack Robinson,” had detached the flaxen cord.
With a firm reef knot—left over right, right over left; granny knots begone—he fastened the cord firmly to the tapered neck of the bud vase.
“Now for the acrobatics.” He took up a position at the foot of the bed. “Please sit in the corner and mind your head.”
As I retreated to the chair in the corner, Dogger seized the cord in its center and, like an American cowboy about to lasso a calf, began swinging it—and the bud vase with its precious cargo—in a circle round his head.
As the speed accelerated, Dogger let out more and more cord until the glass was coming within a foot of each of the walls.
I watched for a while until—as always happens when you’re watching someone swing a rope—I began to grow bored.
“How long will it take?” I asked.
“Fifteen minutes, I reckon,” he said.
“I reckon”? Was this meant to be a joke? And a cowboy joke, at that? Was I supposed to laugh?
I smiled to cover all the possibilities and returned to my watching.
I understood perfectly what was taking place, of course. Inside the bud vase, the diatoms (if there were any), because of their relatively heavy siliceous composition, were overcoming both buoyant and frictional forces of the liquid solution as centrifugal force rammed them relentlessly and tightly into the very bottom of the bud vase.
“Shall I spell you for a while?” I asked Dogger, and he nodded with a look of what I guessed was gratitude.
I ducked in under the rope and synchronized my motions with his. Like a country stationmaster handing off the right-of-way token to the engine driver of the Flying Scotsman at speed, the transfer was perfection.
Dogger stepped neatly out of the way and perched on the edge of the chair.
“This is harder than it looks,” I said after a couple of minutes. My arm was already beginning to ache.
“Sustained muscular action often is,” Dogger said. “Without prior training, that is. Such fatigue is due largely to a surplus of chloride, potassium, lactic acid, and magnesium, caused by muscular contraction, and a simultaneous insufficiency of creatine phosphate, glycogen, and adenosine triphosphate.”
Why had no one ever put it so plainly? It suddenly made such perfect sense.
Muscle power needed to be chemically provided and, at the same time, muscular waste products efficiently removed, to allow Harry Plunkett to lift his father’s Clydesdale horse, Colossus, clear off the ground for charity every August at the Hinley Goose and Gooseberry Show.
My arms were feeling suddenly less heavy.
Round and round the bud vase flew on the end of its cord, producing an audible humming noise.
I was an angel and the glass container my oversized halo. But wait! I was now being transformed into a helicopter on the verge of lifting off!
If I could, I would fly out the window, across the road to the church, and hover there, an eye in the sky, getting a firsthand view of the landscape in which Orlando Whitbread had met his bitter end. There would be no need to wait for Hob’s aerial snapshots from the chemist’s.
“That ought to be sufficient,” Dogger said, snapping me abruptly out of my daydream.
I slowed the high-speed missile, letting it descend gently, little by little, until it came almost to rest, rotating slowly and idly, at the end of the cord.
“Now then,” Dogger said. “The sodium hydroxide ought to have digested any organic matter which was present in your sample—”
By my “sample,” he was referring to the slimy liquid I had wiped from Orlando’s mouth.
“—leaving only the siliceous cell walls and outer skeletons of the diatoms—presuming, of course, that diatoms were present.”
As he spoke, he poured off into the sink the excess liquid—which was
quite clear—leaving only the slightest trace of a foggy residue in the bottom of the bud vase.
“And if they weren’t present?” I asked, knowing the answer perfectly well, but wanting to hear it again from Dogger’s lips.
“If they weren’t present, then we can certainly make the case that our deceased friend was already dead when he entered the water. All that remains for us now is to improvise a microscope.”
Improvise a microscope? I think my heart stopped. Was all this to be for nothing?
“Which is quite easily done,” Dogger said, ignoring my open mouth.
Taking the torch, he switched it on and stood it on the table so that its beam was striking the ceiling.
Then, slipping two fingers into his waistcoat pocket, he removed a tiny object and held it up for my inspection.
“A paper clip?” I asked.
“Indeed. The humble paper clip, in certain circumstances, can be of more practical use than a magic wand.”
And without another word, he opened out one end of the metal clip and, with fingers as deft as any surgeon’s, twisted it into a tiny loop. From the first-aid kit he removed a small jar of petroleum jelly, into which he dipped the wire circle.
“Now,” he said, taking a deep breath, “shall we rake out the contents of our vase—whatever they may be—onto the bottom of…this?”
“This” was a small graduated measuring glass, which he was removing from the first-aid kit. He turned it upside down and placed it on the table beside the torch.
With a wooden tongue depressor—also from the first-aid kit—I scraped out the residue from the vase and spread it thinly on the bottom of the glass.
Dogger picked up the glass and slipped it, inverted, over the glowing lens of the torch. Drawing the loop of his paper clip along the inside of the glass lamp chimney, which still contained a small puddle of distilled water, he pulled it out and held it up for my inspection. Suspended in the loop of the clip was a single drop of water, which sparkled like a diamond in the light from the window.
“Wonderful,” I said, and I meant it.
It was the petroleum jelly, of course, which held the water drop in place. How clever of Dogger to have thought of it!
“Our objective lens,” Dogger said, moving it into position just above our smudge of residue on the bottom of the glass.
“What do you see?” he asked.
I bent at the waist until I was directly above the drop of water, which was illuminated from below by the torch. Several tiny grains, fringed with many colors, shimmered before my eyes.
“Are those diatoms?” I asked. “They’re quite tiny.”
Dogger reached into the pocket of his resourceful waistcoat and pulled out his reading glasses. “Use these as a magnifying eyepiece.”
I slipped them onto my nose and ears.
Gently, so as not to dislodge the drop of water, I took the paper clip from Dogger’s fingers, moving it up and down until the image in the water drop was clear.
Success! The reading glasses more than doubled the magnification of our homemade microscope.
I drew in a breath.
“What do you see?” Dogger asked.
“Stars,” I told him. “Triangles…circles…rods…strings…tiny seashells. It’s like a kaleidoscope.”
Dogger leaned in for a look.
“Diatoms,” he said in a quiet voice. “Definitely diatoms.”
“Meaning?” I asked.
“Death by drowning.”
Drat! I had been counting on cyanide to be the killer.
“Oh, well,” I said, trying to hide my disappointment. “At least it was an interesting chemical experiment.”
“Indeed it was, Miss Flavia. How is your headache now?”
I had completely forgotten my fib.
“It’s gone away,” I said.
Dogger nodded wisely.
“Yes,” he said. “Chemistry has that effect, has it not?”
·NINE·
THERE WENT ALL MY theories: shot down in flames.
So much for death by prussic acid. So much for the paraldehyde.
Death by drowning, Dogger had said.
Orlando, the idiot, had probably caught his foot on a plank while practicing his dance on the dock behind the church. He might easily have suffered a dizzy spell, fallen, and banged his head, or had a heart attack, or, suddenly tired of life, had sipped a bit of cyanide and hurled himself into the water and, by sheer determination, had kept his head beneath the surface until it was too late to be rescued.
That was easy enough to do. Virginia Woolf, Daffy had told me, loaded the pockets of her overcoat with stones and waded into the River Ouse.
I had a sudden sinking feeling. Had I checked Orlando’s pockets?
I had, and had found nothing but wet lint and that mysterious bit of paper.
Perhaps I had overlooked something.
“Dogger,” I asked, “did you by any chance check the pockets?”
There was no need to explain whose pockets I was talking about. That was the great thing about Dogger: He could follow my train of thought as easily as if he owned the railway.
“I could feel them, Miss Flavia, as I carried him ashore. No stones. And now, if you’ll excuse me—”
He needn’t have asked, as both of us knew perfectly well. His sense of duty was calling him to check up on my sisters. He had spent enough time with me.
Not that they needed him, of course. My two sisters were as tough as a pair of old blacksmith’s boots, but still, they enjoyed going through the motions of helplessness.
I knew that in a matter of minutes, Daffy would be sending Dogger off on a search of the local library for the second volume of John Forster’s The Life of Charles Dickens, the only book missing from the deluxe morocco-bound set in our library at Buckshaw.
Or should I say my library?
Because Buckshaw was now legally mine, lock, stock, and barrel, so, supposedly, were all the books in that vast mountain range of printed matter, including the missing Forster—wherever it might be.
Perhaps upon our return I would gift wrap the two surviving volumes and present them to Daffy with my compliments. I might even go so far as to inscribe them on their flyleaves.
But no—that might be a bit presumptuous: as if my name deserved to be displayed beside Dickens’s. Besides, an incomplete set of anything was hardly a decent gift, was it? That would be like presenting an avid golfer with a set of antique clubs that were missing the niblick, or the mashie, or whatever those iron bludgeons were called.
I would bide my time.
As for Feely, she would be sending Dogger trotting off to the chemists with instructions to replenish her stock of Dekur Bonne Nuit Turtle Oil Cream, Rubinstein’s Valaze Blackhead and Open Pore Paste, oatmeal cream, and a couple of Crinofricto Depilatory Stones.
The fact that she continued to medicate her hide indicated—to me, at least—that despite their most recent crockery-tossing split-up, she still had plans of making it up with Dieter.
As I made my way down the narrow creaking stairs, I heard piano music. Someone was singing:
“I’m the girl that makes the thing that drills the hole
that holds the ring that drives the rod that turns the knob
that works the thing-ummy-bob…”
I looked in through the glass door of the saloon bar and saw that it was Feely. She was seated at a rather battered piano, surrounded by three men in kerchiefs: the same three men we had seen when we first arrived at the pub. I had seen the one with the polka-dot handkerchief again at the fair.
“I’m the girl that makes the thing that holds the oil
that oils the ring that takes the shank that moves the crank
that works the thing-ummy-bob.”
I couldn’t believe my eyes. Feely was evidently having the time of her life and never had she had a more appreciative audience.
The three men hung on her every word, nodding along, tapping their feet and fi
ngers and occasionally joining in to roar with her, as they raised their glasses of ale, the words at the end of each line:
“…that works the thing-ummy-bob!”
I recognized the song, of course. It was one of Gracie Fields’s wartime classics: the one about the girl in the munitions factory making the parts for some top-secret but important machine whose function is a mystery.
Feely’s voice was high and clear, rising like a skylark above the coarse, rumbling voices of the three men who hemmed her in. Could this possibly be the same person who had, less than two hours ago, sat at the organ and summoned up the mathematical ghost of Johann S. Bach?
In spite of living with her all my life, there were still sides of my sister I had never seen before. She had as many facets as an icosahedron, that twenty-faceted form into which Plato believed—wrongly, as it turned out—the water in our human bodies decayed when we were dead.
There were faces of Feely which, like the far side of the moon, were always turned away. Perhaps this came of looking at herself in mirrors so much. Perhaps parts of her had, like Alice, slipped through to the other side of the looking-glass.
The song came to a sudden end:
“…that works the thing-ummy-bob!”
Feely looked around the room as if she had just awakened from a long trance and found herself on another planet. She got up from the piano, clasped her arms, and hugged herself in the way that she always does when she’s ashamed.
“You’re a corker, gal!” said one of the men. “Gi’ us another!”
“ ‘Kiss Me Goodnight, Sergeant Major,’ ” demanded the tallest one, leering and wiggling his ginger mustache at her as he spoke. “Do you know that one?”
Feely looked from one of the men to another with startled eyes.
“No, she doesn’t,” I interrupted, flinging open the glass door and stepping into the saloon bar.
Six eyes—eight counting Feely’s—swung round and fixed me in their glare.
“Come along, Ophelia,” I said, putting on a pretentious voice. “You’re wanted at Miss Wilberforce’s bedside. She’s taken rather a nasty turn and you’re needed at once.”