Speaking From Among the Bones

by Alan Bradley

  “Anything else?”

  “No. The torch was throwing quite a narrow beam.”

  “Excellent! I see that your reputation—which precedes you—is well deserved.”

  My reputation? The vicar must have told him about those several earlier cases in which I had been able to point the police in the right direction.

  I preened a little, inwardly.

  “No dried petals … vegetation … anything of that sort?”

  “Not that I noticed.”

  Mr. Sowerby gathered himself, as if he were about to ask a tender question. In a hushed voice, he said, “It must have been quite a shock to you. The poor man’s body, I mean.”

  “Yes,” I said, and left it at that.

  “The police have made quite a hash of the scene—removing the remains and so forth. Anything that may have been of interest to me is now no more than—”

  “Dust on the sergeant’s boots,” I suggested brightly.

  “Precisely. Now I shall have to go over the ground with a magnifying glass, like Sherlock Holmes.”

  “What are you hoping to find?”

  “Seeds,” he said. “Remnants of Saint Tancred’s interment. The mourners often tossed fresh flowers into the tomb, you know.”

  “But there was nothing in the tomb,” I said. “It was empty. Except for Mr. Collicutt, of course.”

  Adam Sowerby gave me a quizzical look. “Empty? Oh, I see what you mean. No, it’s hardly likely to be empty. The crevice where you found Mr. Collicutt is actually a chamber above the tomb proper. Its lid, if you like. Saint Tancred will still be nicely nestled somewhere down below.”

  So that was why there had been no bones! My question was answered.

  “Then it’s quite likely that you’ll still find seeds and so forth?”

  “I should be surprised if we didn’t. It’s just that, in any investigation, one likes to start at the outside and nibble one’s way in.”

  I couldn’t have put it better myself.

  “And these seeds,” I asked. “What shall you do with them?”

  “I shall coddle them. I shall put them in a warm place and provide them with the nourishment they need.”

  I could tell by the passion in his voice that seeds were to him as poisons were to me.

  “And then?” I asked.

  “They might well germinate,” he said. “If we’re extraordinarily lucky, one of them will be brought to blossom.”

  “Even after five hundred years?”

  “A seed is a remarkable vessel,” he told me. “Our one true time machine. Each of them is capable of bringing the past, alive, into the present. Think of that!”

  “And then?” I asked. “After they’ve blossomed?”

  “I sell them. You’d be surprised what some people will pay to be the sole possessor of an extinct flower.

  “Oh, and then there are the academic trumpets, of course. Who can live nowadays without the academic trumpets?”

  I had no idea what he was talking about, but the part about the flowers was intriguing enough.

  “Would you mind giving me a lift into the village?” I asked suddenly. It was still early in the day and an idea was taking shape.

  “Does your father allow you to beg rides from complete strangers?” he asked, but there was a twinkle in his eyes.

  “He won’t mind, if you’re a friend of the vicar’s,” I said. “May I put Gladys in the back, Mr. Sowerby?”

  “Adam,” he said. “Since we’re both under the vicar’s spell, I expect that it’s all right to call me Adam.”

  I climbed up into the front passenger’s seat. There was a prolonged and grinding judder as Adam trod on the clutch and coddled the shifting lever down into first gear, and then we were off.

  “Her name is Nancy,” he said, indicating the instrument panel, then glancing at me, added, “… after Burns’s poem.”

  “I’m afraid I don’t know it,” I said. “My sister Daphne is the bookish one.”

  “‘Though poor in gear, we’re rich in love,’” he quoted. “From The Soldier’s Return.”

  “Ah!” I said.

  The churchyard was, if anything, more vividly green than it had been in the early morning light. The Inspector’s blue Vauxhall was still parked in the same spot, as was Mr. Haskins’s van.

  “I’ll drop you off here,” Adam said at the lych -gate. “I have odds and ends to discuss with the vicar.”

  It was a way of saying “I want to speak with him privately,” but he handled it so politely that I could hardly object.

  Although I could see that Gladys was excited about her first ride in a Rolls-ROyce, I sensed that she was glad to be on solid ground again. I waved as I wheeled her away.

  I had no sooner set foot in the church when a large, dark figure loomed up, barring the way.

  “Hold on,” growled a voice.

  “Oh, good morning, Sergeant Woolmer,” I said. “Lovely day, isn’t it? In spite of the rain earlier, it’s actually turned out quite well.”

  “It’s no good, miss,” he said. “You’re not getting in. The place is closed. Off limits. It’s the scene of a crime.”

  “I just want to say a few prayers,” I said, going all stoop-shouldered and mousy like Cynthia Richardson, the vicar’s wife, and injecting a bit of a whine into my voice. “I won’t stay long.”

  “You can pray in the churchyard,” the sergeant said. “The Lord has large ears.”

  I sucked in my breath as if I had been shocked at his blasphemy.

  Actually, he had given me an idea.

  “Very well, Sergeant,” I said. “I shall remember to mention your name.”

  That would give the brute something to think about!

  Cassandra Cottlestone’s tomb had the appearance of a massive Elizabethan dresser which had been made off with by culprits who, being caught in the act, had abandoned the thing in the churchyard where, over the centuries, it had turned to stone.

  Longish grass sprouted all round the limestone base, a clear sign that this part of the churchyard was seldom visited.

  The sun went behind a cloud, and I realized with a shiver that just under my feet was the secret tunnel through which the wraith of the dead Cassandra was said to walk.

  Pray for mye bodie to sleepe

  And my soule to wayke.

  As I went round towards the north side of the monument, my heart gave a little leap.

  An adjacent grave had sunk, and the turf no longer wholly covered the base of the Cottlestone tomb.

  It was just as Daffy had said!

  At the northwest corner, a large stone slab had been leaned at an angle against the monument, parts of it draped with a weathered tarpaulin which had filled with pools of rainwater. The sheeting was held down at the corners with broken chunks of stone and, by the amount of sediment that had already settled, I deduced that it had been left lying like this for some time.

  Either Mr. Haskins had been diverted from repairing the cave-in, or he was simply lazy.

  From where I now stood at its north end, the bulky tomb blocked the view of the church, and vice versa. As I have said, nobody ever came to this part of the churchyard anyway. It might as well have been on another planet.

  I got down onto my hands and knees and peered under the tarpaulin. What lay beneath was a gaping hole. Around it, in the disturbed soil, were a number of footprints, some of them blurred by the recent rain, others protected by the tarpaulin and remarkably clear. They had not all been made by the same person.

  I removed the stones and pulled back the covering, taking care to let the puddled water run off to one side in the grass.

  Now the hole was fully revealed.

  Once more on hands and knees, I was able to see into the opening.

  Had I been expecting bones? I wasn’t quite sure, but what lay beneath the tomb was a stone chamber, most of which was filled with darkness.

  Oh, for a torch! I thought.

  Why didn’t nature provide us with a head
lamp in the middle of our foreheads, something like the glowworm, but with our lights on the opposite end? And more powerful, of course—it would have been a matter of simple phosphorescent chemistry.

  I was craning my neck for a better look when the soil gave way beneath my pressing hands.

  I grabbed wildly at the long grass to save myself, but the blades either broke off or slipped wetly through my fingers.

  For an instant I tottered, arms windmilling, fightly madly to gain my feet. But it was no use. My shoes slithered and slipped one last time on the muddy turf and I plummeted into the grave.

  •SEVEN•

  I must have had the wind knocked out of me. For what seemed like ages, but was in fact probably no more than a few seconds, I’m sure I lay there in a daze.

  And then the smell. Oh, the smell!

  It was like being hit in the nose with a brick.

  My nostrils felt suddenly raw, as if they were being forcibly bored out with a brace and bit.

  I clapped a hand to my nose and scrambled to my knees, but that only made things worse. I realized instantly that the smelly sludge which I had just smeared onto my face was all that remained of Cassandra Cottlestone and her neighbors.

  I knew that the instant life ends, the human body begins to consume itself in a most efficient manner. Our own bacteria transform us with remarkable swiftness into gas bags containing methane, carbon dioxide, hydrogen sulfide, and mercaptan, to name just a few. Although I had for some time been making notes toward a future work to be called De Luce on Decomposition, I had not had until that moment any real, so to speak, firsthand experience.

  Now, I was learning quickly that the stuff acts as smelling salts.

  I leapt to my feet, gagging, and fell back against a hard stone wall.

  As my eyes became accustomed to the darkness, I saw that the opening through which I had fallen was actually no larger than the entrance to a fox’s den. In the weak light, I could see that the walls of the tomb were all of crumbling stone.

  Except for a few bits of rubble on the floor, the rectangular cavern was empty.

  On the side opposite the hole, set into the wall, was a small, but surprisingly ordinary-looking wooden door.

  I took hold of the knob and gave it a turn. The door was locked.

  In other circumstances, I would have taken a handy bit of wire and picked the lock—an art which Dogger had taught me in exchange for helping him clean flowerpots in the greenhouse during one long winter.

  “It’s all in the fingers,” he used to say. “You must learn to listen to your fingertips.”

  Unfortunately, a person who has just tumbled headfirst into a grave is ill equipped with tools of the lock-picking trade. I had once improvised by removing my braces and forming the wire into a passable pick, but today I was not wearing them.

  I could, in a pinch, crawl out of the grave and beg Gladys’s permisson to borrow one of her spokes. But with the place crawling with police, it was more than likely I would be spotted and the game would be up.

  So far, it seemed as if Inspector Hewitt’s men had been kept so busy in the crypt that they had not yet discovered this end of the hidden tunnel.

  I pressed an ear against the door and listened intently. The acute sense of hearing which I had inherited from Harriet was seldom more useful than painful, but this was one such occasion.

  On the other side of the door there was nothing but silence: no burly policemen trampling their way along the tunnel in search of its origin.

  I gave the door one last powerful tug, but it barely moved. Someone meant to keep someone out, I thought.

  Or to keep someone in.

  I would need to come back at night: back to the churchyard with a hooded torch and dressed all in black.

  It would need to be done quickly. Tonight. If I was lucky, I would be one step ahead of the police.

  For now, all that remained was to climb out of this stinking pit and get home to Buckshaw for a bath. My clothing would probably have to be burned.

  I went to the hole, reached up, grasped its edge, and gave a great upwards leap, my toes pedaling like mad against the wall for traction.

  For an instant, my fingers touched the ledge at the bottom of the monument, but I couldn’t quite catch hold of it.

  I fell back into the muck. If I had been just an inch or two taller …

  I could see only one solution—other than screaming for help, of course, and I certainly didn’t want to do that.

  With filthy fingers I untied my laces and removed my shoes and socks. Shoving one of the socks into one of the shoes to give it additional thickness, I used the other to tie the shoes together, soles outermost, into a makeshift rubber brick. This I positioned tightly against the stone wall and stepped on top of it.

  I took a deep breath, prayed to Saint Tancred to give wings to my heels—and made a mighty leap.

  This time, my fingers caught the marble ledge easily, and with feet furiously paddling behind me, I rose up out of the grave.

  Standing there in the grass, staring at me in shock, her face as white as a shroud, her open mouth a black “O,” was Cynthia Richardson, the vicar’s wife.

  I suppose I should have said something polite: uttered some comforting reassurance. But I didn’t.

  I don’t know what must have been running through her mind at the sight of this filthy, black-faced, foul-smelling apparition that suddenly came clawing its way up out of the grave under her very nose, but at that particular instant, I didn’t care. I did what any sensible girl would do under the circumstances. I took to my heels.

  Any thoughts I might have had of washing off the worst of the crud in the river behind the church were set aside.

  Oh, Flavia! I thought. Oh, Flavia!

  And then in one of those blinding flashes of inspiration that come from fear of punishment, I remembered that I had left my mackintosh on a hook in the tower room. With any luck I could retrieve it without being spotted. Yes, that was it! I would wear it home to conceal the filthy rags that my clothing had become.

  At the corner of the tower, I shot back a glance at Cynthia, who was still standing frozen as I had left her, as white as all the rest of the boneyard angels.

  I edged slowly along the tower wall, my back pressed tightly against the stones. A quick peep round the corner revealed Sergeant Woolmer sitting with his behind on the back seat of the Vauxhall, his feet outside in the grass. He was writing in his notebook.

  Trying to make myself paper-thin, I slipped round the corner and darted in at the door. If anyone was in the porch, I was sunk.

  But Fate was on my side. The porch was empty and the church beyond lay in dim silence. The police were obviously still going about their work in the crypt.

  I tiptoed up the winding stone staircase and stepped into the chamber at the top. My mackintosh was hanging exactly as I had left it.

  I folded it into as flat and compact a bundle as possible and shoved it under what was left of my sweater. No point in catching anyone’s eye with a fluorescent yellow coat which simply screamed for attention.

  If I ran into anyone on my way out, I would simply wrap my arms tightly round my tummy and concoct some sort of story. Stomach pain, for instance.

  I would blame it on Mrs. Mullet’s Hasty Pudding.

  Down the winding stairs I crept … stopping at every step to listen.

  Sergeant Woolmer was still absorbed in his notebook, and I flitted out the door and round the corner of the tower in a wink. Even though it is considered unlucky to do so, I worked my way counterclockwise (“widdershins,” as Daffy calls it) round the church, pausing before I attempted the north side. But the coast was clear. Cynthia Richardson was gone.

  Gladys was basking happily in the sun, and I wheeled her slowly through the churchyard, dodging from tombstone to tombstone, westward and south, along the winding riverbank. My normally drab cardigan and skirt, further camouflaged with splotches and smears of grave mud, should make me nearly invisible among
the weathered monuments. When we reached the stone wall that marked the boundary, I lifted Gladys over and set her down gently on the other side, and moments later, we were spinning happily home along the road to Buckshaw.

  I had not noticed until now, as I cycled along the avenue of chestnut trees, how seedy and run-down our home had begun to look. Its grass uncut, its hedges untrimmed, its gravel unraked, and its windows unwashed, the place had a look of neglect that snagged at my heart.

  Not that it was Father’s fault. His lack of ready funds had caused him to narrow his personal world until there was little left to him but his own small study: a little haven—or was it a prison?—in which he could insulate himself from a demanding world behind a barricade of ancient and cangeless postage stamps.

  Nor could Dogger be blamed: He did as much as he was physically and mentally able. Sometimes, when he was up to being gardener, the house and its grounds looked as spruce as they did in those long-gone days when they had been photographed for Country Life. At other times, functioning simply as Father’s man was more than enough of a strain on his shattered nerves, and I, for one, gave thanks that Dogger was able even to manage Father’s boots.

  His camp stool was nowhere in sight. Dogger had vanished to wherever it is that he vanishes.

  As before, it was a matter of getting across the foyer and upstairs without being seen. If Daffy or Feely saw the state of my clothing, it would be a matter of seconds before Father had been tattled to, and if Father himself were the first to catch a glimpse of my filthy condition … well, I shuddered at the very thought of the tongue-lashing.

  Thankfully, my mackintosh, having been washed by yesterday’s rain, was spotless. I turned up the collar and buttoned it from top to bottom. Who knows? I might even be praised for dressing warmly and keeping dry.

  My feet were the only problem. Not only were they bare, shoeless, and sockless, they were also caked with the reeking remains of Cassandra Cottlestone.

  I bent at the knees until the hem of my coat was touching the floor tiles, then waddled awkwardly across the foyer like a penguin, or perhaps like Mr. Pastry making his exit at the end of his pantomime, “The Passing Out Ceremony.” I must have looked as if I’d been sawn off at the knees, or driven into the ground like a tent peg.