Speaking From Among the Bones

by Alan Bradley

  I shoved my hands into the pockets of my cardigan, looked up at the sky as if carelessly checking the weather, and sauntered, whistling, back round to the front door.

  I knocked again … and again. A regular volley of knocks.

  After what seemed like an hour, heavy footsteps came lumbering toward the door and a lace curtain fluttered in one of the side windows.

  An eye peered out and then withdrew.

  After another painfully long moment, the cracked china doorknob turned slowly through a few degrees and the door swung inwards to reveal a long tunnel of darkness that led away almost to infinity, ending in a small scrap of distant daylight somewhere at the back of the house.

  “Well?”

  The voice came from somewhere in the gloom.

  “Mrs. Battle?” I said. “I’m Flavia de Luce, from Buckshaw. May I come in?”

  Ask and ye shall receive, I had been told to believe, but it didn’t work. It’s difficult for the average person to refuse such a direct request, but Mrs. Battle was obviously not an average person.

  “Why?” she demanded.

  “It’s about Mr. Collicutt,” I said. “Actually, it’s rather private. I’d prefer to discuss it indoors where we can’t be overheard.”

  Step two: Insinuate that your message is both secret and juicy.

  “Well …” she said, wavering.

  “I don’t want anyone to see me here,” I said, lowering my voice and looking back over both shoulders as if checking for eavesdroppers.

  “Come,” she commanded, and a fleshy hand from the shadows behind the door beckoned me into the gloom.

  After the bright light of the outdoors it took several seconds for my eyes to adjust to the darkness, but when they did, I found myself face-to-face with the lady of the house. Or at least half face-to-face. The other half was still hidden in shadows behind the door.

  Although I had seen Mrs. Battle now and then about the village, it had always been at something of a distance, and I had never actually spoken to the woman. Up close, she was larger than I remembered, and more red-faced.

  “Well?”

  “Actually …” I said, using the word a second time.

  The word “actually,” like its cousin “frankly,” should, by itself, be a tip-off to most people that what is to follow is a blatant lie—but it isn’t.

  “Actually …” I said again, “it’s about my sister, Feely. Ophelia, I mean.”

  “Yes?”

  The eye widened a little in the gloom. So far, so good. I had rehearsed the entire conversation in my mind as I pedaled to the village from Buckshaw.

  I shifted from foot to foot, glancing uneasily about the dark-paneled hallway as if in fear of being overheard.

  “She’s … she’s getting married, you see, and there are certain letters …”

  Daffy had once read us a French novel in which this was the plot.

  I held my breath and strained to make my face red, although my effort was probably wasted in the darkness.

  “Mr. Collicutt—” I began to explain.

  “Letters, is it?” Mrs. Battle said. “I see. And you want them back.”

  Just like that!

  I bit my lip and nodded my head.

  “For your sister.”

  I nodded again, trying to remember how to look desolate.

  “Very sweet,” she said. “Very touching. You must love her.”

  I brushed away an imaginary tear and wiped my finger elaborately on my skirt.

  That did it.

  “Not that it will do much good,” she went on, waving a hand at the dark staircase. “The police have already had a good root through everything.”

  “Oh, no!” I said. “Feely will simply die.”

  I had an odd feeling even as I spoke the words.

  Nobody ever simply dies.

  Mr. Collicutt, for instance, had met his death at the hands of a couple of killers—I was now sure of it—and had been dragged, gas-masked (or had the mask been put on later?) through the churchyard, through the much-trampled grave of Cassandra Cottlestone, through a dank and earthy tunnel, to be dumped in the tomb of a long-dead saint.

  Nothing simple about that.

  “Turned everything upside down, Inspector Whatsis and his lot. Haven’t had the heart to straighten up. Whole thing has been such a—”

  “Frightful shock,” I put in.

  “Taken the words right out of my mouth,” she said. “Frightful shock.”

  I let a few moments pass in silence so that we could bond to one another as sisters in sorrow.

  “I hope you’re feeling better,” I told her. “Miss Tanty told me you’ve been a regular saint in driving her to her appointments. You have a very large heart, Mrs. Battle.”

  “Yes. Since you put it that way, I suppose I do.”

  Not even Saint Francis de Sales, whose dying word was “Humility,” could have refused a compliment like that.

  “I had a touch of the megrims that day,” she went on without being prompted. “I hated to let her down but Florrie—that’s my niece—offered to run her over since she didn’t start work till noon that day.

  “‘No, Florrie,’ Crispin—Mr. Collicutt, I mean—told her. ‘I need to have a word with the woman anyway. You deserve your half-day, and I shall be back well before noon.’”

  “The woman?” I asked. “Did he always refer to Miss Tanty as ‘the woman’?”

  Mrs. Battle’s eyes slowly came round and lighted on mine.

  “No,” she said. “He didn’t. Not always.”

  Was this, I wondered, “the rather odd comment” the vicar had mentioned?

  “Gosh, it must have been a worry for both you and Florence—having your car go missing like that, I mean. As well as Mr. Collicutt, of course.”

  “Car never went missing,” she said. “He never took it. Not far, anyway. Florrie found it parked in front of the church.”

  “Huh,” I said in a bored voice.

  Then I let out a sigh.

  “The letters …” I said, almost apologetically.

  She waved a hand toward the stairs.

  “First door left,” she said. “At the top.”

  I found myself creeping slowly up the dark staircase as if points were being given for silence, even though the fourth and seventh steps groaned horribly. The first door on the left was so small and so close to the top of the stairs that I almost missed it.

  I turned the china doorknob and stepped into Mr. Collicutt’s bedroom.

  I suppose I had been expecting something spacious. Having been accustomed to the stadium-sized bedrooms at Buckshaw, this tiny space beneath the eaves came as something of a shock. It was as if a few feet of attic had been banged into an extra bedroom for an emergency, and no one afterwards had ever quite got round to putting things back the way they were. An altogether peculiar room.

  But what a room!

  It was full to bursting with organ pipes. Like the rats in “The Pied Piper of Hamelin,” they were everywhere: great pipes, small pipes, lean pipes, brawny pipes, brown pipes, black pipes, gray pipes, tawny pipes, grave old plodders, gay young friskers, fathers, mothers, uncles—a thicket of wood, tin, zinc, lead, and brass—a maze of leaning tubes and cylinders. Racks of stops, like ribs of beef in the butcher’s window, each with its name engraved on an ivory disc: Trumpet, Gemshorn, Violin, Nason Flute, Rohrflöte, Bourdon, and a handful of others. Wedged into a corner beneath a sloping ceiling was a pitifully small bed, neatly made.

  For a sudden spinning moment I thought I was back inside the organ chamber at St. Tancred’s—the chamber where Mr. Collicutt had been murdered.

  A wooden tea chest, standing on end, served as a desk, and on it was an untidy pile of papers. I climbed over something which might have been a diapason and picked up the top sheet, which was covered with tiny, antlike handwriting—what Daffy would have called “miniscule.”

  The Coming-to-light of the 1687 Renatus Harris Organ at Braxhampstead With an Acc
ount of its Restoration, it said. This was underlined twice in red ink, and beneath it was written, by Crispin Savoy Collicutt, Mus. B., F.R.C.O.

  After that, in black, and in another hand, someone had added the word, “Deceased.”

  •TWENTY-ONE•

  Who could have done such a thing?

  The black word must have been added within the past few days—since the discovery of Mr. Collicutt’s body.

  Unless, of course, someone had added it earlier as a warning.

  Had Inspector Hewitt seen it? Surely he must have done. But if he had, why had he not taken it away with him as evidence?

  I riffled quickly through the pile of pages. I guessed that there were five hundred of them. Yes, here it was—they were numbered. Five hundred and thirteen sheets, each one covered closely with Mr. Collicutt’s microscopic handwriting. He must have been working on this thing since he was a schoolboy in short trousers.

  In spite of the density of his handwriting, thousands of additions and corrections crammed the margins of almost every page, each with a spidery line joining it to the place in the text where the change was to be made, “disarrangement” changed to “derangement,” “device” to “contrivance,” and so forth.

  Very straightforward.

  Were these scribbles what Adam’s friend, Pole, had called marginalia? Probably not. Marginalia were notes on everyday life, while these scribbles were Mr. Collicutt’s revisions to his own manuscript.

  At least that’s what I was thinking until I noticed the word adamas.

  At first I thought it said Adam. Was Mr. Collicut making a note in his book about Adam Sowerby? Was adamas meant to stand for “Adam A. Sowerby”?

  But no—it couldn’t be. Adam’s middle name was Tradescant. I had seen it on his calling card.

  And then the penny dropped! Dropped so hard that I felt it hit the bottom of my brainpan!

  Adamas was the Latin word for diamond. Adam had said so!

  The word was circled and linked with an arrowed line to a listing of the various stops which had once been part of the ancient organ at Braxhampstead. He had meant to insert the word between “Gemshorn” and “Violin.”

  “Have you found them yet?”

  Mrs. Battle’s voice, and her heavy tread on the creaking stairs.

  I sprang to the door and stuck my head out into the hall.

  “I’m just coming, Mrs. Battle,” I called, and I heard her footsteps stop. Stairs were probably difficult for her, and she wouldn’t want to climb any more than were necessary.

  “Would it be all right to use the WC while I’m up here?” I shouted, with sudden urgency. “I’m afraid I—”

  I did not elaborate, nor did I need to. The human imagination is capable of anything when left on its own to fill in the blanks.

  I prayed desperately that there was a loo up here. There had to be—it was a boardinghouse.

  “End of the hall,” she muttered, and her footsteps retreated downwards.

  I turned back to my examination of Mr. Collicutt’s belongings. For a cluttered room, there were surprisingly few of them, aside from the scrapyard of organ parts.

  Piles of music books, a metronome, a pitch pipe, a bust of Johann Sebastian Bach—who had been born and died in the same years as Cassandra Cottlestone, I remembered with a delicious shiver.

  On a side table an upright toothbrush was stuck into a water glass, and nearby, a tin of tooth powder. A nail file and a pair of nail scissors were perfectly aligned side by side, as you would expect. More than anything, organists needed to look after their hands.

  I thought of Mr. Collicutt’s shriveled fingers as I had seen them in the tomb at St. Tancred’s, and of the clean nails on the hand that clutched the broken bit of glass tubing.

  He had been dead when he was dragged through the tunnel. He had not clutched at the soil of the graveyard.

  I got to my knees and looked under the bed. It was too dark to see anything. I flattened myself with my cheek to the floorboards, edged forward, and reached as far as I could under the wooden frame. My fingers touched something—felt it—seized it—and pulled it slowly toward me.

  It was a flat tin cigarette box. Players Navy Cut. One hundred cigarettes.

  Surely the police had seen it. But if they had, why would they have shoved it back under the bed?

  Perhaps they had only looked, rather than felt—relied on eyes rather than fingers. A large police sergeant would not be as accustomed as I was to slithering about under beds on his belly. A thin tin would be easy enough to miss in a dark corner.

  I got to my knees and sat back on my heels. Judging by its weight, the box was not completely empty.

  I fiddled with the hinge and the lid popped open.

  Something fluttered into my lap.

  Paper banknotes! Half a dozen of them—one hundred pounds each.

  Six hundred pounds, in all. More money than I had ever seen in my entire life. I must confess that a number of ideas popped into my mind as quickly as the banknotes had spilled into my lap, but since every one of them involved theft I stifled the urge almost at once.

  The notes had been folded double in an envelope which had sprung out like a jack-in-the-box when I opened the lid.

  Six hundred pounds!

  So much for Mr. Collicutt being as poor as a church mouse—this was no village organist who had to scrape by on fifty quid a year.

  I picked up the notes one by one and was about to replace them in the tin when I noticed something odd about the envelope. The flap had been ripped off, leaving a raw edge.

  “Are you finished up there?”

  Mrs. Battle again. Impatient now.

  “Yes, just coming,” I called out. “I’ll be right down.”

  I folded the banknotes and pressed them back into the cigarette tin. Getting down onto my stomach again, I shoved the box back into the far corner behind one of the legs of the bed.

  I pocketed the envelope and made for the door.

  I tiptoed silently to the far end of the hall, stepped into the loo, pulled the chain and flushed … waited … pulled it again … and again, then slammed the door and sauntered casually down the stairs trying to look grateful.

  “Well?” Mrs. Battle demanded, hands on hips.

  I shook my head grimly.

  “Nothing,” I said. “Feely is going to be devastated. Please promise you’ll keep this confidental.”

  Mrs. Battle glared at me for a long moment, and then suddenly she softened. What might have been a smile flickered across her face.

  “Believe it or not, I was young once,” she said. “I’ll not breathe a word.”

  “Oh, thank you!” I told her.

  “By the way,” I added. “is your niece at home? I’d like to thank her personally for her great kindness toward Miss Tanty. I know my sister greatly appreciates it, what with the choir, and so forth. Miss Tanty is such a treasure, don’t you think?”

  “Florence is at work,” Mrs. Battle said, holding the door open for me. “I’ll give her the message.”

  “Oh, yes,” I said, scrambling madly to gather every slightest scrap of information. “She’s housekeeper at Foster’s, isn’t she.”

  It was a shot in the dark.

  “Housekeeper?” she sniffed. “I should say not. Florence is private secretary to Magistrate Ridley-Smith.”

  Home again, home again, jiggedy-jig. If it hadn’t been for Gladys, my feet would long ago have been worn down to the nubs.

  In my laboratory, I took a torch from a drawer and went into the photographic darkroom which Uncle Tar had built in one corner.

  Light-tight. Dark as pitch.

  I flicked on the torch and pulled the envelope from my pocket.

  In Mr. Collicutt’s bedroom, my fingertips had detected the faintest irregularity of the paper’s surface. Why, I had wondered, would someone remove a flap from an envelope used to carry money? The answer seemed obvious: to dispose of something that was written on it.

  I placed
the envelope faceup and laid the torch down flat on the worktable beside it. A bit of card narrowed the beam.

  I now had a slit of light shining at a very low angle of illumination—a right angle, actually—across the paper. Any slight indentations should spring into view.

  I took up a magnifying lens and bent closer.

  Voila! as Daffy would say.

  The paper was old and of high quality, the sort used before the war for personal correspondence. Not at all the kind of cheap, thin, glazed stuff in which Father’s creditors now sent him their frequent bills.

  The missing flap had been embossed with a crest or a monogram, and long storage in a press, or box, had transferred a slight impression to the envelope’s blank front.

  Slight, yes, and very faint, but the monogram was just decipherable in the oblique beam of the torch:

  QRS

  Something Ridley-Smith.

  Ridley-Smith, I wrote in my notebook. Ridley-Smith the father, not the son. What is the man’s first name?

  Magistrate Ridley-Smith—Chancellor Ridley-Smith—had given, or sent, six hundred pounds in banknotes to Mr. Collicutt, who was said in the village to be too poor to have his handkerchiefs and surplices cleaned and pressed at the steam laundry.

  Too much of a coincidence that Mrs. Battle’s niece, Florence, works for Ridley-Smith, I wrote. Perhaps she was unwittingly mixed up in this, too.

  Perhaps all of them were.

  Why on earth, I wondered, would one of His Majesty’s magistrates, a chancellor of the Church of England, give a village organist such an enormous sum, only to have it hidden under the bed? Whatever the money was meant for, why had Mr. Collicutt not deposited it safely in the bank?

  The answer seemed obvious.

  Someone was being secretly paid to do something.

  But what?

  I was just about to write down my suspicion when there was a light knock at the door. It was Dogger.

  “Mr. Adam Sowerby wishes to see you, Miss Flavia. Shall I show him up?”

  “Thank you, Dogger. Of course,” I replied, trying to keep my excitement in check until the door had closed. Adam Tradescant Sowerby, MA., FRHortS, etc., making a professional call upon Miss Flavia de Luce! Just fancy!