by Alan Bradley
Adam sprang up onto the ledge and placed a foot on one of the upper rungs.
“Wish me luck,” he said, and taking the torch from Tommy, he began his descent.
“Adam—” the vicar said.
Adam stopped, already almost out of sight. He seemed surprised.
“Let us pray,” the vicar said, in a remarkably strong voice, and we all of us bowed our heads.
“Lord, Thou hast been our refuge, from one generation to another. Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever the earth and the world were made, Thou art God from everlasting, and the world without end. Thou turnest man back to the dust, and Thou sayest, ‘Return, ye children of men.’ For a thousand years in Thy sight are but as yesterday when it is past, and as a watch in the night. Amen.”
“Amen,” we echoed.
Adam’s face looked up at us quizzically, strangely pale in the light of the torch.
“Just in case,” the vicar said.
“Thank you,” Adam said quietly, and was gone.
I recognized the vicar’s words as being from the Order of the Burial of the Dead. Psalm 90. But why had he chosen them? Was he thinking of Saint Tancred? Of Adam? Of his lost Hannah?—or of himself?
The ladder trembled as Adam descended. I peered over the edge to watch as he pulled an elaborate flash unit from the bag. The shaft and even the chamber where we stood were soon illuminated by a series of white lightning flashes from the pit.
There wasn’t much to see from directly above. I was content to linger and listen. At first there was silence and an occasional muffled exclamation. And then Adam began to whistle.
I knew the tune at once. It was a song we had sung in Girl Guides, and its words went through my mind.
Pack up your troubles in your old kit bag, and smile, smile, smile.
While you’ve a lucifer to light your fag, smile boys, that’s the style …
A lucifer, of course, was a type of match used during the First World War, tipped with sulfur and a dried paste made up of phosphorus and potassium chlorate. It was also a nickname of Satan. And of Saint Tancred’s stolen diamond.
No one in the chamber above was smiling as the song urged us to do. The workmen looked uneasily at one another as if some great taboo had been broken by Adam’s whistle, which was still echoing eerily up from the pit.
“Adam …” the vicar called down.
“Sorry.” The word floated up from the grave and hung echoing in the air.
Was he whistling without thinking, or was there a message in his choice of song? If so, who was it meant for?
It was then that I became aware that several others had joined us in the crypt. One was a large man wearing a black suit, a clerical collar, and a look of stressed holiness.
The bishop. There could be no doubt about it.
“Your Grace,” the vicar said. “And Chancellor Ridley-Smith.”
He shook hands with each of them, neither with any real joy.
So this was Chancellor—or Magistrate—Ridley-Smith. Jocelyn’s father.
The first thing I noticed about him was that I had seen him before. He was the man in the photo presenting the trophy to Miss Tanty.
I studied him carefully.
A rigid man, I thought, with hard but watery brown eyes, which shifted sideways professionally, going constantly from one of us to another, like the carriage on a typewriter. The sockets in which they were mounted were round and staring, and I pitied at once all the accused who had ever been made to stand before him in the dock.
His brow was permanently wrinkled, like that of a person who had just got a whiff of something nasty, an impression that was heightened by the fact that he hadn’t a trace of eyebrows or eyelashes. His blotchy nose was flattened, as if he had boxed in his youth, but not very well.
A boozer, I decided.
Although he was not physically large, Magistrate Ridley-Smith’s very presence seemed to use up all the remaining air in the crypt, which was suddenly stifling.
He stood teetering on curiously tiny feet, glaring impatiently at his surroundings.
“Let’s get on with it, then,” he said in a remarkably hoarse, thick voice, pulling a half-hunter watch from his waistcoat pocket and consulting it with protruding lower lip. “Where are the remains?”
As he fumbled to put the watch away, I couldn’t help noticing that his wrist, like that of Mrs. Ridley-Smith in the photograph at Bogmore Hall, was peculiarly weak and floppy.
What was it Dogger had said? A classic case of lead poisoning.
Had the magistrate, in those long-ago days in India, been exposed to his wife’s toy soldiers?
“We haven’t brought them up yet,” the vicar said. “I thought it best if we waited until you—”
“Yes, well, then, you are keeping the Church, the Judiciary, and the Constabulary waiting. I suggest we proceed.”
By the Church, he meant the bishop; by the Judiciary, himself. Who on earth was representing the Constabulary?
And then I saw Inspector Hewitt. He was standing in the shadows behind the bishop. I smiled at him but he did not appear to have noticed me. His eyes were moving as coolly round the crypt as Magistrate Ridley-Smith’s. Perhaps even more coolly.
“Proceed,” the bishop odered, licking his lips.
At that very instant Adam’s head appeared at the top of the ladder, his chin just level with the stone edge of the saint’s grave. I was reminded for an instant of the head of John the Baptist.
“Right, then,” he said, destroying the illusion. “All clear below.”
“Who is this … man?” Magistrate Ridley-Smith demanded. “He oughtn’t to be mucking about down there. Who gave him permission?”
“We did,” the bishop said. “You may recall—”
But Magistrate Ridley-Smith was not listening. His face was a thundercloud.
“Come along, Martin,” he growled, and stepped clumsily out through the archway.
Martin, the fourth workman—Martin the silent one, Martin who had not spoken a word since I had first seen him—said in a flat, frayed voice, “Now we’re in for it.”
Five words. But that was all it took to set my mind spinning like a Catherine wheel, sending off showers of sparks in all directions.
That voice! I had heard it before. But where?
My sense of hearing had never let me down in the past and I did not expect it to do so now.
I replayed the man’s words in my mind. “Now we’re in for it.”
In a back room of my brain something went click, and I heard that same voice saying, “Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky … Franz Schubert … Swan Lake … Death and the Maiden.” It was the voice I had heard issuing from the concealed loudspeakers in Jocelyn’s room at Bogmore Hall.
Benson!
This otherwise silent workman was Jocelyn’s keeper! He had been sent here right from the very beginning to spy on the opening of Saint Tancred’s tomb!
I knew when I saw the side of his face on the staircase that I’d seen him before, but couldn’t think where. It had, of course, been right here in the crypt, where his silent presence in the shadows drew little attention.
Now he was leaving the stony chamber, shuffling away in his master’s footsteps.
As if to confirm what I already knew, Tommy said, “Ta-ta for now, Benson.”
“Yes, well, then,” the bishop said. “I propose we get on with it. It’s late. Easter is tomorrow. We have only a few hours left and much to do. Please inform us when the relics have been collected, Mr. Haskins, and we shall prepare the ossuary.”
Then he, too, was gone.
Adam climbed up onto the ledge, and sat with his legs dangling into the pit.
From somewhere down below came a wooden banging, and the ladder rattled against the stone edges.
“Hullo!” Adam said, looking down into the pit. “Something stirreth in the grave.”
Again the ladder shook, and a red face appeared, streaked with mud and surprised to see us.
> It was Sergeant Graves.
“Right you are, chief,” he said to Inspector Hewitt, pointing the beam of his torch back down the way he had come. “It goes right the way through from here to the churchyard.”
Brilliant, I wanted to say, but I kept my mouth shut. It was obvious that the other branch of the tunnel—the one I had not taken—led down into the actual tomb of Saint Tancred.
The sergeant scrambled up off the ladder and sat himself beside Adam on the edge, brushing the filth from his clothing.
The Inspector nodded, his face a mask. He did not say what must surely have been on his mind: that the sergeant’s passage like a pipe cleaner through the tomb had almost certainly destroyed traces of those who had looted it.
But then, too, so had my own explorations, so I decided to say nothing. Perhaps the Inspector didn’t even know about the Heart of Lucifer. Nor, perhaps, did the bishop or the chancellor.
I had once heard a saying that went like this: “Least said, soonest mended.”
I would keep my tongue tamed and my lip zipped. Never let it be said that Flavia de Luce was a blabbermouth.
But what was this? Inspector Hewitt had caught my eye and was motioning with a sideways jerk of his head and an upward rolling of his eyes, a message I could read as clearly as if it were a newspaper headline.
UPSTAIRS, it said. NOW.
We were strolling pleasantly in the long grass at the back of the churchyard, the Inspector and I.
“Your footprints are everywhere in that tunnel,” he said, pointing back toward Cassandra Cottlestone’s busy tomb.
I pretended surprise and bafflement. I could easily point out that there were plenty of people who wore plimsolls.
“Don’t bother,” he said. “We have your footprints on file.
“As well as your fingerprints,” he added.
“Well,” I said, “it’s a long story. There was a bat in an organ pipe and I was trying to find out how it got into the church. I was afraid it might be rabid. I didn’t want anything to happen to Feely. She’s engaged to be married, you know, and I was afraid—”
I flipped on the switch marked “Shuddering Sobs,” but nothing came.
Damnation! I used to be a dab hand at water on demand. What on earth was happening to me? Was I becoming hardened? Was this what being twelve was going to be like?
“Very commendable, I’m sure,” The inspector remarked. “And what did you discover while you were down the rabbit hole?”
When tears fail, I decided on the spot, dazzle them with details.
I rattled off a quite decent reply. “The tunnel leads from the Cottlestone tomb to the space where I found Mr. Collicutt’s body. There was another branch, but I didn’t follow it. There’s a stone that can be moved with iron handles. That’s how they dumped him there. He was murdered in the organ chamber and brought down either through the crypt or outdoors through the churchyard. By the footprints that were there before mine, I suspect there was more than one killer.”
“Anything else?” the Inspector asked.
“No,” I said, lying through my teeth.
How could I possibly even begin to tell him about Miss Tanty or Mad Meg, or Jocelyn Ridley-Smith, or Mrs. Battle, or even, for that matter, about Adam and the Heart of Lucifer?
As I had noted before, I needed to leave him something to discover for himself. It was only fair.
“Flavia—”
I loved it when he said my name.
“You must remember that there are dangerous killers on the loose.”
My heart accelerated.
Dangerous killers on the loose! The words which every amateur sleuth lives in eternal hope of hearing. Ever since I first heard them spoken on the wireless by Philip Odell in “The Case of the Missing Marbles,” I had longed for someone to say them to me. And now they had. “Dangerous killers on the loose!” I wanted to shake the Inspector’s hand.
“Yes,” I said. “I know. I’ll be careful.”
“It’s not just a matter of being careful. It’s a matter of life and death.”
“A matter of life and death!” That other great phrase! Perhaps even greater than “dangerous killers on the loose.”
My cup of crime runneth over, I thought.
“Flavia, you’re not paying attention to me.”
“Yes I am, Inspector,” I assured him. “I was just thinking how grateful I am that you warned me.”
“You’re to stay strictly away from the church. Do you understand?”
“But tomorrow is Easter!”
“You may attend with your family. That is all.”
That is all? Was I being dismissed? Chopped like a chambermaid who’d been surprised with her snout in the sherry?
He was already striding away through the long grass when I thought to call after him, “Inspector, how is Mrs. Hewitt?”
He did not stop and turn around. In fact he didn’t even slow his steps.
It was obvious he hadn’t heard me.
•TWENTY-FOUR•
I knew, don’t ask me how, even as I steered Gladys between the stone griffins of the Mulford Gates, that something else had gone wrong at Buckshaw.
It’s hard to explain, but it was as if the house were vanishing between heartbeats—as if it were being partially erased, and then restored, by the unseen artist who was drawing it.
I had never in my life experienced anything like this.
The avenue of chestnuts seemed never-ending. The harder I pedaled, the slower seemed my approach.
But at last I reached the front door and opened it.
“Hullo?” I called out, as if I were a traveler coming unexpectedly upon a witch’s cottage in the woods—as if I hadn’t lived here all my life. “Hullo? Anyone here?”
There was, of course, no answer.
They would be in the drawing room. They were always in the drawing room.
I raced into the west wing, my feet thudding along the carpets.
But the drawing room was empty.
I was standing puzzled in the doorway when something bumped behind me.
The sound must have come from Father’s study, one of the two rooms at Buckshaw that were off limits. The other was Harriet’s boudoir which, as I have said, Father had preserved as a memorial in which every scent bottle, every last nail file and powder puff was kept in precisely the same position as she had left it on that last day.
The boudoir was not to be entered under any circumstances, and Father’s study was to be entered only upon command.
I knocked and opened the door.
Dogger looked up, surprised. Hadn’t he heard me running in the hall?
“Miss Flavia,” he said, putting down a stamp album he had been about to place in a packing box.
The truth was, I had still not got over the shyness I had created by calling Dogger a pet name to his face, and at that moment, I thought that I might never, ever get over it.
“What’s wrong?” I asked. “Where is everybody?”
“I believe Miss Ophelia has gone to her room with a headache. Miss Daphne is sorting books in the library.”
I didn’t need to ask why. My heart sank.
“And Father?”
“The Colonel has gone, likewise, to his room.
“Dogger,” I blurted. “What’s wrong? I knew something was not right as soon as I came through the Mulford Gates. What is it?”
Dogger nodded. “You sense it, too, miss.”
Neither of us could find words and then Dogger said, “Colonel de Luce has received a telephone call.”
“Yes? From who?”
I was too edgy to say “From whom?”
“I’m afraid I can’t answer that,” Dogger said. “The calling party would not identify himself. He insisted on speaking directly, and only, to Colonel de Luce.”
“It’s the house, isn’t it?” I demanded. “Buckshaw has been sold.”
My bones were boiling. My soul was freezing. I was going to vomit.
; “I don’t know,” Dogger said. “The Colonel did not confide in me. I will admit that I thought as much myself.”
If I were anyone other than Flavia de Luce, I would have marched up to Father’s room and demanded an explanation. After all, it was my life, too, wasn’t it?
But I could feel myself growing older by the minute.
Admit it, Flavia, I thought. You simply don’t have what it takes to beard the lion in his den.
Which, for some odd reason, reminded me of Magistrate Ridley-Smith and his peculiar lionlike face.
“Dogger,” I asked, switching tracks like an emergency on the railway, “what would you say if I asked you about wasted thumb muscles, a drooping hand, and dragging feet?”
“I should say you’ve been at Bogmore Hall again,” Dogger answered, keeping a straight and proper face.
“And if I told you I hadn’t?”
“Then I should ask you for more details, miss.”
“And I should tell you that I had met someone who had all of those symptoms, as well as wide, round staring eyes, no eyebrows or eyelashes, a crumbled nose, a blotchy, brownish complexion, and the most awful frown.”
“And I should say, ‘Well done, Miss Flavia. A nicely observed description of facies leonina.—the so-called “lion face.”’ Would it be out of place for me to ask if this person had spent time in India?”
“Spot on, Dogger!” I crowed. “Spot … on! A classic case of lead poisoning, I believe.”
“No, miss,” Dogger said. “A classic case of Hansen’s disease.”
“Never heard of it,” I said.
“I daresay not,” said Dogger. “It is known more commonly as leprosy.”
Leprosy! That dread disease we had been warned against in Sunday school—that dread disease which Father Damien had contracted among the lepers of Molokai: the whitened, crusted, peeling skin, the blue ulcers, the rotted noses, the toes and fingers snapping off, and the face falling at the end into a sad and incurable wreckage. The lepers of Molokai to whom the pennies from our Sunday school collection boxes were regularly sent.
Leprosy! The secret fear of every girl and boy in the British Empire.