by Alan Bradley
“Perhaps you have, miss,” he said. “But in any event, it won’t be called for in this case, will it?
“Besides,” he added, almost as an afterthought, “the Chief Constable doesn’t fancy interference on his own turf. No, that he doesn’t. Not by a long chalk.”
There was no doubt about it. I was being warned.
Constable Otter knew a great deal more than he was telling, which was proper, I suppose, for a policeman, but still, if no crime had been committed, why had he gone to the trouble and expense of ringing up Inspector Hewitt to check on my background?
Something here was fishy, and it wasn’t just Orlando Whitbread.
Or perhaps it was.
I needed to get to the bottom of this business about Blue Boy and his scarlet dancing slippers, but how was I to do so?
The answer seemed obvious.
—
The low-beamed kitchen of the Oak and Pheasant was hot and hellish, like some turkey-tainted inferno. Pots bubbled busily on the cooker, giving off odors of gravy, potatoes, and mushy peas.
In spite of it being midsummer, the pub seemed to be doing a roaring business in hearty meals. Who ate them? I wondered.
Could it be the local farmers, who came in starving from the fields? If so, I hadn’t seen any tractors parked outside. Or the droves of tourists who, with petrol rationing ended, were everywhere in England, driving cars with names like Hawk or Snipe, suggesting that their tin wings could whisk you through the air over vast distances to anywhere your heart desired.
Perhaps the resting turkey on the sideboard was destined for the tummies of the roustabouts from Shadrach’s Circus & Menagerie. Other than my brief encounter with Polka-Dot Kerchief at the fair, I hadn’t had a chance to look into their presence.
I needed to ask some questions.
Brushing wet strands of hair out of her face, Mrs. Palmer looked up from stirring something that looked like a glue pot. She was not exactly delighted to find me in her kitchen.
I made an after-the-fact knock at the doorframe.
“Sorry to bother you, Mrs. Palmer,” I began, letting the words gush out like water from a hose, “but I want to apologize for the way I spoke to you. It wasn’t right. I don’t know what got into me. It may have been the shock of finding the body of that poor drowned man on the riverbank, I don’t know, but even that is no excuse. I beg your pardon and I promise it will never happen again.”
I moved my hand closer to my heart to emphasize the point.
I was proud of myself! I had groveled, made good, and brought the subject round to the corpse all in one breath.
I lowered my head and stood there looking abject.
Who could resist?
Not Mrs. Palmer, at any rate.
Slowly, as if to savor the moment, she removed her oven gloves and, with an audible sigh, placed them tenderly on the table.
“Who told you to come in here?” she asked. “Your sister Daphne?”
Darling Daphne obviously had Mrs. Palmer eating out of her hand.
“No,” I said. “I came of my own volition.”
I don’t know where the word came from. It popped out of me like the filling from a squeezed pimple.
“I don’t believe you,” Mrs. Palmer said, taking up her gloves again.
“You don’t have to,” I returned, taking the plunge. “But it’s true.”
It was masks off. Very seldom did I ever show the real Flavia de Luce to anyone, especially to strangers. But now? Well, she had asked for it.
“As Professor Cooke pointed out more than sixty years ago,” I said, taking a deep breath, “you cannot unite the chemical elements in any proportion you please. Twenty-three ounces of sodium will unite precisely with thirty-five and a half ounces of chlorine to produce table salt. But if you have carelessly added an extra half ounce of either substance, Nature will set aside the surplus. All the wishing in the world cannot force the extra to mix.”
Mrs. Palmer looked rather stunned. I think it was my use of table salt as an example that got through to her. She understood table salt.
“And your point is?” she demanded.
“I am here because I will myself to be here,” I told her. “And all the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t keep me here if I didn’t want to be,” I said, waving my hands in the air to add a bit of drama.
“Well,” Mrs. Palmer said, “if even half of what you tell me is true, I can only say that you’re a Force to Be Reckoned With.”
She spoke the last few words in capital letters. You could actually hear them!
I dropped my eyes modestly.
Spot-on! I thought. Her assessment was spot-on.
“Your sister told me you had dynamite for brains, but I had no idea—”
Dynamite for brains? Daffy told her that?
I might have to rethink my sister.
Mrs. Palmer seemed to have come to a sudden decision.
“Help yourself to the Mercy Seat,” she said, pointing to the kitchen’s only chair, an ancient wingback in the corner.
She saw my puzzled look.
“That’s what Arven calls it—the Mercy Seat. He lugged it down from the attics. In case I ever took a break, he said. Not that I ever have, mind. Belonged to his father, the Old Gaffer. Go on, sit yourself.”
I lowered my carcass reluctantly into the ancient upholstery, which reeked of departed dogs and so forth. I was expecting the chair to be uncomfortable and oppressive, but I was pleasantly surprised to find that it fit me like a glove. The Old Gaffer must have been quite slight of frame.
“I’ll make you a nice cup of tea,” Mrs. Palmer said, and I did not object. “Don’t mind me if I keep working. To a cook, the world consists of open mouths.
“Not that I’m complaining,” she went on. “Those lads from Shadrach’s Circus shoveling in their pies and pints in the summer is what keeps us in coal in the winter.”
Although Mrs. Palmer had not said so directly, it was obvious she had accepted my apology.
As she worked, she talked to me over her shoulder, clattering away like some wonderful automaton, bustling about the kitchen, lifting lids, sniffing sauces, pulling pies from the pantry, and dismembering the turkey. In an earlier century she might have been called The Marvelous Mechanical Maid. Wind her up—see her sweep!
People would have paid to see her, but now I had her all to myself.
I was trying to think of the best way to make my questions seem casual when she said suddenly, “You poor child!”
It took me a moment to realize she was referring to me.
“What a shock it must have been, finding Orlando’s body like that, without any warning. Your fingers in his mouth, so to speak. Just the thought of it gives me the heebie-jeebies.”
I nodded and widened my eyes a bit.
“Did you know him?” I asked.
“Orlando? Everybody knew Orlando. He was what you might call a local character.”
“In what way?” I said.
“Oh, in every way: the way he behaved, the way he talked, the way he dressed. Orlando was an original—one of a kind.”
“Wasn’t he the son of a former vicar?”
“Dear old Canon Whitbread, poor lamb…dear old soul. God rest him.”
Poor lamb? Dear old soul?
What kind of description was that? The man had gone to the scaffold for sending a clutch of communicants to an early grave by means of a poisoned chalice.
Poor lamb? Dear old soul? My great-aunt Fanny!
“God rest him,” I repeated, making the sign of the cross on my breast. “A good man, was he?”
Mrs. Palmer put down a pot roast and dabbed at her eyes with the corner of her apron.
“He was a martyr,” she said. “Put to death by the Powers of Darkness.”
“The powers of darkness?” I asked.
“Clement Atlee,” she said, “and the Labor Party. Curse them all!”
Mr. Atlee, the former prime minister, had, by onl
y a slender margin, been defeated last autumn by Winston Churchill, who had returned for his second term.
Because I had been incarcerated in Canada at Miss Bodycote’s Female Academy, I had heard little about Churchill’s victory, although I was quite fond of the man himself, who had taken the trouble to attend my mother’s funeral.
“Amen,” I said, and Mrs. Palmer beamed upon me.
“Hanged by the neck until he was dead. An innocent old man led to the slaughter,” she said, pulling open the oven to baste a large pan of roasting potatoes. “That’s what some say—including me.”
“But how is that possible? Surely someone—”
“Listen, sweetie,” Mrs. Palmer interrupted. “When good old Gabriel blows his horn, ‘Surely someone’ will be the last words ever to be spoken on this earth. When nothing’s left of the world but ashes and a smoking jawbone, that ruined mouth will still be croaking ‘Surely someone…’ You can count on it.”
I had begun to like this Mrs. Palmer. Immensely.
It was as if, somewhere in our vast universe, a giant planet had rolled over in its sleep—some great force had shifted, quaked, and then subsided once more into silence.
It left me numb for a moment—but only for a moment. Until I realized that this innkeeper’s wife, in her low, hot, greasy kitchen, had been the first person in my entire life to explain why there was a Flavia de Luce.
I was necessary. I was Someone.
I felt as if I had shed an invisible skin. A fresh layer of the onion had been exposed.
Had Mrs. Palmer noticed as the change came over me? Probably not. But if she did she gave no sign of it.
“Orlando had to live with that,” she continued. “And so did all the rest of us. We knew we had to get on with our lives. That’s why, when Orlando turned up to audition for the Puddle Lane Little Theatre just days after his father’s funeral, he was welcomed with open arms.”
“By everyone?” I asked.
“Well, almost everyone,” she replied. “Poppy Mandrill grumbled a bit. But then she always does. Poppy has a remarkable theatrical career behind her, with emphasis on behind. She just doesn’t realize it yet, as most faded actors don’t. But I think she realized from the start that this rather unusual young man had what it took to be a star.”
“And what about Canon Whitbread? Did he? Realize it, I mean?”
Mrs. Palmer shot me a penetrating look.
“About Orlando?”
I nodded.
“Canon Whitbread was under no illusions about anything or anyone. Including himself—or his son. Every canon, you must remember, has a cathedral somewhere in his past. The country canons are mostly lovely old gentlemen who have been given the title as a garment to keep them warm on their way to the grave, and no one was more aware of that than Canon Whitbread.”
“And Poppy Mandrill?”
“Well…” Mrs. P said, letting the word out in a long breath, “our dear canon was under no illusions about her, either. Particularly about her. St. Mildred’s is not exactly known for its High Church practices—not by a long chalk—and yet she insisted on his hearing her confessions every Saturday afternoon. ‘The Saturday Afternoon Matinées,’ he always called them.”
“He told you that?” I gasped.
As the child of a devout Catholic family, I could hardly believe that a churchman would break his vows of silence. The sanctity of the confessional was sacred no matter what the circumstances.
“He was joking, of course. Poppy wasn’t the only one of his flock who wanted to whisper in the vestry. We were very close, the canon and I,” she announced, brushing up her hair with the back of a damp hand. “I served as vicar’s warden when all but I had fled.”
“The boy stood on the burning deck,” I said.
Daffy had recited that horrific old potboiler to me when I was still in my pram, waving in great, swashbuckling circles around her head a smoking string mop whose strands she had set alight to simulate the breech-loading of Nelson’s cannon at the Battle of the Nile.
I knew what Mrs. P meant, though. Suspected of murder, old Canon Whitbread must have often found himself alone in his protested innocence. Nobody wants to be on cozy terms with a killer.
“It must have been difficult,” I remarked.
“Difficult is an understatement,” Mrs. Palmer said. “At times, toward the end, it seemed as if it were the two of us against the world.”
“What about Orlando?” I asked. “Surely he—”
“Orlando was estranged from his father, and had been for some time. Poor soul. He had a devil of a time trying to make both ends meet. He worked for a time delivering ale casks, but it got the better of him, if you know what I mean. And he filled in from time to time at the chemist’s, but that—well, let’s just say that didn’t work out, either. I even gave him whatever work I could find for him washing dishes, but Arven didn’t like having him underfoot, or so he claimed.”
She sighed.
“Orlando lived in a boathouse down by the river—Scull Cottage, they call it, although it’s not quite so grand as it sounds. A leaky boathouse with a bed and paraffin camp stove is more like it.”
She saw me looking at her.
“I only went down there once or twice,” she told me. “Toward the end. To try to talk some sense into him.”
“And did you?” I asked.
It was quite a long time before she answered. I could see her going over that visit, minute by minute in her mind.
“No,” she said at last. “I didn’t.”
“You didn’t?” the landlord said, appearing suddenly in the kitchen as if from a magic lamp. “You didn’t what?”
“Oh, nothing, Arven,” Mrs. Palmer said. “Dearie here was just asking me if I’d made her cucumber sandwich. It clear slipped my mind. Too many cooks.”
How fascinating, I thought, that she should both lie to her husband and, in the same breath, scold him for being in the kitchen.
Or was she scolding me?
Whatever the case, I noted that she was a lightning liar. As a connoisseur of the untruth myself, I was quick to recognize the gift in others.
“Well, I’d better be going,” I said, leaping up out of the Mercy Seat as if scalded (for the landlord’s sake). “Thank you, anyway, Mrs. Palmer. I’ll eat later. After I’ve picked up my snapshots.”
It was far too early for Hob’s photographs to have been processed: They would not be ready until tomorrow at the earliest. But it was a good excuse and I escaped with an—almost—clear conscience.
·ELEVEN·
WHEN YOU’RE PLANNING MISCHIEF, it’s always a good idea to throw up a smokescreen in advance. Excuses made after the fact are seldom successful.
Which is why I made a point of mentioning to the Palmers that I was departing the Oak and Pheasant to pick up photographs. One would not ordinarily bother, or feel it necessary, to explain to a landlord where you were going or why. My real intent was to draw attention to the fact that I was taking myself elsewhere: which ought always to be your first concern when you plan to burgle someone’s bedroom.
The second step is timing. It is only logical to plan your attack while the burglee is away from the intended target.
Say, for instance, that you were planning to rifle the bedroom of a country publican’s wife in search of a certain book of poems. Logic would dictate that the best time to do so would be when the said publican’s wife, being up to her ears in sauces in the kitchen, would be least likely to return to her sleeping chambers.
Which was now.
There wasn’t a moment to lose.
Up the stairs I went, as if returning to my bedroom. At the first landing, I stopped to examine the shelf of books which Daffy had scoffed at.
Under Two Flags…The Sea Hawk…Piracy…Eric Brighteyes…
The titles alone made me seasick except the last one, which made me gag.
How could people waste their lives writing—or reading—such utter bilge?
There
was no sign of anything slender enough to be poetry. Mrs. Palmer was not foolhardy enough to leave her explosive little book in plain sight where any commercial traveler might pick it up for a bit of bedtime reading. Hide in plain sight was a well-worn plot device used by legions of detective novelists, but not in this case.
Resuming my upward climb, I peered up through the old oak banisters and newel posts, but the landing above looked deserted. On tiptoe, I crept slowly up the last five steps.
The coast was clear.
The bedrooms rented out were at the front of the inn, facing the church, except mine and Dogger’s, which both overlooked the sunken garden at the rear. This left only one room unaccounted for: the one I had decided belonged to the Palmers.
The door of this room was painted with buttermilk emulsion in a peculiar shade of blue, a color which reminded me not of buttermilk, but watery milk of the thin, skimmed variety: the skin of a decrepit duchess.
I pressed my ear tightly against one of the door panels. The only sound to be heard was that of my own heart.
I seized the knob and twisted. The door opened and I stepped inside.
How often fortune favors the brave!
In spite of its tall four-poster bed—which surely must be the very one that Good Queen Bess had slept in—the room was surprisingly small and crowded: clothespress, dresser, chair, table with alarm clock, faded red Turkey carpet on the floor, washstand, sink, shaving gear, skin cream. Aside from those few personal belongings, it was as spare as if the landlord and his wife were transients themselves, stopping overnight at the inn on their way to visit an expiring aunt in Exeter: hardly the room of a longtime landlord and his churchwarden wife who had lived here since the year dot.
The ancient wallpaper—surely no newer than the eighteenth century—portrayed a smoke-darkened Chinese landscape with repetitive fishing boats, mountains, cranes, bamboo, and pagodas.
I began my search for The Mussel Bed in the most obvious place: under the mattress. The high bedstead itself was shaky and precarious. Its elderly bed slats clattered horribly, like old bones raining down on a slate roof, and I eased the bedding back into its original position, hoping the noise would not be heard in the kitchen directly below.