His eyes met mine, his face expressionless. It was impossible to tell what he was thinking.
I don’t know what made me do it, but it must have been some primitive memory that caused me, without even thinking, to raise three fingers to my lips and blow him a kiss.
And then I went out the door.
Now I was back in the small chamber, the dusty curtains dragging across my face like the cobweb of some obscene, mammoth spider. I fought free of them and shot back the bolt of the outside door. There had been a bolt, after all.
Hold on, though!
Would Benson be lying in wait on the other side? Catching an intruder red-handed would be a real feather in his cap.
Keeping my eye well back from the glass porthole, I moved my head slowly from side to side, viewing the outer room piece by piece, yard by yard.
It was empty.
I eased the door open and was stepping through it when I heard the sound of footsteps. A moment later, seen through the banisters, a head appeared. An oddly familiar head.
Someone was coming up the stairs! A man.
There was nowhere to hide. It was too late.
Good job I hadn’t yet closed the door behind me. I dodged back into the cubicle and quietly eased the bolt shut.
Had he seen me?
I couldn’t get back into Jocelyn’s room—the inner door had locked behind me. I was stuck in the dark, airless space between the two doors: trapped among the moldering velvet curtains.
A key scratched at the lock.
The dust was eating at my nostrils like black pepper—I could feel it. I was going to sneeze.
I pinched my nose between thumb and forefinger and tried to breathe through my mouth as I huddled into the corner behind the door, shrinking back, trying to make myself as small as possible.
The door opened, jamming me against the wall, crushing the air out of my lungs.
There was a pause—and then the sound of a key in the second lock.
I couldn’t breathe. I was going to suffocate.
Then suddenly the pressure eased as the outer door was closed.
I was now locked into the cubicle with the man. He was so close I could smell his breath. Tobacco and kippers.
There was a shuffling, and the curtains billowed.
“Open the door, will you?” he called out loudly, almost in my ear. “I’ve got a tray.”
There was a banging, as if he were kicking at the inner door with his toe.
After an eternity, a bolt clicked back.
“Benson?” Jocelyn’s voice called through the door.
“Who else did you think it was,” the man growled.
“The king of Siam?”
And then he was gone and I was alone in the stuffy cubicle.
I counted to three and slid open the bolt of the outer door, which I left ajar behind me as I made for the top of the stairs.
Fourteen, fifteen, sixteen: Down the stone steps I flew as if the hounds of Hades were barking at my backside. I counted the treads as they flew by beneath my feet. Now I was at the landing. Twenty-two, twenty-three, twenty-four—two at a time—twenty-six. Across the foyer and out the front door, and only then, I think, did I begin to breathe.
Gladys was where I had left her, leaning against the crumbling stone railing. Esmeralda was pecking at the bottom of the crate, absorbed in her own thoughts.
As I pedaled away, I risked a glance back over my shoulder at the upper windows. They were empty.
No face at the window. No Jocelyn, and thankfully, no Benson.
I knew that I had seen him somewhere before as soon as I saw him coming up the stairs.
The problem was this—I could not for the life of me remember where.
• TWELVE •
THE SUN WAS ALREADY far down in the west as I pedaled home to Buckshaw.
Father, I knew, would be furious. He demanded that all of us, with no exceptions, no excuses, be seated, properly dressed, and on time for the evening meal. Now, because of my tardiness (“tardiness” is one of those ten-shillings-sixpence words that Daffy loves to fling at me), Mrs. Mullet would have been kept late, and Father, who had been trying desperately to slash expenses by reducing her working hours, would be on the hook for additional overtime.
Even before I reached the Mulford Gates I knew that something was wrong. A knot of people had gathered in the road at the turn-in.
Had there been an accident?
I put on such a burst of speed that I was forced to jam on both hand brakes and come skidding to an undignified sideways stop to avoid hitting them.
Still astride Gladys, but with both feet on the ground, I came waddling over toward the group. I could scarcely believe my eyes.
Father, Feely, Daffy, Dogger, and Mrs. Mullet stood in a ragged semicircle. Not one of them even looked at me.
The center of their attention was a man in an undersized vest with a tight celluloid collar and watery, protruding eyes who was pounding a sign into the ground with a sledgehammer.
FOR SALE, it said, in awful black letters.
DOOM! DOOM! DOOM! the hammer went, and every blow was a stake through my heart.
Buckshaw for sale! I couldn’t believe it!
There had been threats, of course, and Father in the past had warned us that he was losing his long battle with the government department he once referred to in a lighter moment as “His Majesty’s Leeches.” But somehow we had always muddled through; something had always turned up.
Just a few months ago, for instance, a First Quarto of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet had come to light in our library, but because his own initials and Harriet’s had been entwined in ink in the front of the book—a memorial to their courtship—Father had refused to part with it.
The actor Desmond Duncan had besieged him with one outrageous offer after another, but Father had brushed them aside. The British Museum had then been enlisted to make a combined proposal that would probably have bought the whole town of Stratford-upon-Avon right down to the last swan.
But Father wouldn’t budge.
And now it had come to this.
There were times when I wanted to shake Father: wanted to pick him up by his lapels and shake him until the feathers flew out.
“You stubborn fool!” I wanted to shout into his face.
And then, as reason seeped back into my overheated brain, I would realize how much alike we were: that my father angered me the most when he was most like me.
It didn’t make the slightest bit of sense, but there it was.
And now here we were, all of us standing round in the road like yokels at the fair, watching a stranger pound a signboard into our ancestral earth.
It was only then, as I realized that my family, every last one of them, had been drawn out of doors and had walked the considerable distance along the avenue of chestnuts from the house to the Mulford Gates to watch a bailiff seize our property, that the gravity of the situation hit home.
It was the first time I could remember us ever being truly together.
And there we stood: we de Luces all grim as death, Dogger looking on, his jaw muscles tense, and Mrs. Mullet in tears.
“ ’Tisn’t right,” she muttered, shaking her head. “ ’Tisn’t right at all.”
She was the only one to speak.
After a time, Father moved slowly off toward the house, followed by Feely and Daffy, then Dogger.
The bailiff, his work finished, dusted his hands and threw his sledgehammer into the boot of a muddy Anglia that was parked at the roadside. Moments later, he was gone.
Mrs. Mullet and I stood there silently together in the darkening world.
“Your supper’s in the warming oven, dear,” she said, then turned and walked away, ever so slowly, in the direction of Bishop’s Lacey.
Later, in my bedroom, I was sitting hunched up among the pillows picking at my plate, tossing the occasional tinned pea to Esmeralda on the floor, when there came a light tapping at the door.
&
nbsp; It was Dogger.
“I’ve brought some bread and water for your friend,” he said, putting down one of the two bowls he was carrying onto the floor.
“Her name is Esmeralda,” I said. “They were going to kill her.”
With Dogger, there was no need for long, detailed explanations. He understood things as quickly and as easily as if he absorbed them through his skin.
“A very fine example of a Buff Orpington,” he said, tossing her a bread crumb. “Are you not, Esmeralda?”
Esmeralda pounced upon the crumb and it vanished. Dogger threw her another.
“She wouldn’t eat,” I said. “I tried her with some of my corn.”
“She may be broody,” Dogger said. “Certain varieties are more inclined than others to go broody in the spring.”
“What’s broody?” I asked. I’d never heard the word.
“It means being short-tempered and with a strong inclination to sit on one’s nest,” Dogger said.
“Like Father,” I blurted. I couldn’t help myself.
Dogger threw another fat crumb to Esmeralda. “A very strong breed, the Buff Orpington,” he said. “Very British. The Queen is said to be very fond of them. She keeps a flock at Windsor Castle, I believe.”
“Perhaps we could go in for chickens at Buckshaw!” I said with sudden inspiration. “We could knock together some cages in the coach house and sell eggs at the market in Malden Fenwick. It would be jolly good fun.”
“I’m afraid it will take more than chickens,” Dogger said, with a long sigh, and then, after what seemed like an eternal pause he added, “No, I’m afraid that chickens are not enough.”
“But what’s to be done?” I asked.
“We must pray, Miss Flavia. That’s all that’s left.”
“Good idea,” I said. “I’ll pray before I go to sleep tonight that nobody sees the ‘For Sale’ sign. Then, first thing in the morning, I shall go out and chop it into kindling wood.”
“That would do no good,” Dogger said. “The notice will appear in all the papers.”
“Perhaps if we prayed to Saint Tancred …” I said, my mind bubbling with ideas. “After all, he is our patron saint. Do you think it will hurt that we’re not Anglicans?”
“No,” Dogger said. “In Tancred’s day there was no Church of England. He was as Roman Catholic as ever you could wish for.”
“Are you sure?” I asked.
“Quite sure.”
“Then it’s settled. I shall be there when they open his tomb and pray for Buckshaw before anyone else has a chance to stick in a request.”
Which brought me, with something of a jar, back to the church’s crypt and the dead Mr. Collicutt.
Last night, I had slept through my opportunity to revisit the churchyard and to explore the tunnel which connected the church with the tomb of Cassandra Cottlestone.
Was it now too late? Had the police already discovered the secret passage? Or had they overlooked it in their rush to find the murderer?
There was only one way to find out.
“Good night, Dogger,” I said, making a counterfeit yawn. “A good sleep will help me get an early start.”
I didn’t say how early.
At a quarter past two in the morning, the road was a ribbon of moonlight, just as it was in Mr. Noyes’s poem “The Highwayman.” In my long, dark, winter churchgoing coat, I might have been the highwayman himself, except for the fact that I was riding a bicycle and wasn’t planning to end up dead like a dog on the highway.
“Bundle up warm,” Mrs. Mullet was forever telling me, and this time, I was taking her advice. In heavy brown stockings and a woolen sweater underneath my Sunday coat, I was as warm as toast, perfectly kitted out for a descent into the underworld.
The cold air of the early morning rushed past my face and a hunting owl swooped low across the road in front of me. I wanted to shout “Yaroo!” but I didn’t dare risk it. You never know who’s listening in the darkness.
I pulled the torch from my pocket and carried out a quick test. Rather than beaming it onto the road and making my presence known for miles around, I shoved the lens end into my mouth and clicked the switch. I was rewarded with a rich red glow from my puffed-out cheeks. It was working.
To anyone abroad at this forsaken hour, such as poachers, I would look like the skull of a ghastly jack-o’-lantern floating along the road to Bishop’s Lacey, with hollow black eyes and a head lit from within by an unearthly fire.
I swiveled my head from side to side and glared horribly into the ditches.
Legends would spring up: “The Huntsman from Hell,” they would tell their children in hushed voices, and claim that they had even heard the hoofbeats of a ghostly horse.
They would warn them against stealing sweets and telling lies.
Although it was pleasant to tell myself such tales, part of me knew that I was only doing it to fight off fear.
Who knew what horrors I would find in that dank, earthy passage beneath the church? It wasn’t so much the thought of undead spirits that troubled me as much as the knowledge that a killer was still on the loose in Bishop’s Lacey.
At this early hour, there would be no police at the scene of the crime: nobody to rescue me if I got myself into a jam.
The churchyard, when I got to it, was like the nerve-jangling illustrations in one of Daffy’s Gothic novels: all sunken shadows, tombstones leaning like broken teeth, and everywhere that eerie graveyard moss which has an almost invisible luminescent glow of stale greenish-blue in the cold light of a nearly full March moon.
I parked Gladys on the north side of Cassandra Cottlestone’s tomb and gave her leather seat a pat. The silver glint of her handlebars reminded me of a frightened horse showing the whites of its eyes.
“Keep a sharp lookout,” I whispered. “I’ll be right back.”
The mound of earth and the tarpaulin looked much as I had left them. As nearly as I could tell by moonlight, there were no new footprints, no fresh impressions of official boots.
So far, so good, I thought.
I worked my way under the tarpaulin, let my feet dangle in empty air for a few seconds—then dropped into the grave.
As before, my nostrils were pinched instantly by the stink, but this time I had decided to switch it off in my brain.
Little danger now of having the light of my torch spotted, so I clicked it on and turned my attention to the heavy wooden door.
I had brought with me one of my favorite lock-picking tools: a set of my wire dental braces which I had ruined forever last summer by putting them to good use for a similar purpose at Greyminster School. Those and a bent pickle fork—which nobody, I hoped, would ever miss—were all that a person would ever need to open nearly every lock in Christendom.
The problem was that this lock was rusty. It couldn’t be too badly oxidized, I thought, since, if my theory was correct, it had been used at least as recently as six weeks ago. Still, the stupid thing was stuck.
Where was I going to find a decent lubricating oil in the bottom of a reeking tomb at two-thirty in the morning?
The answer came to me almost as quickly as the question.
There is an unsaturated hydrocarbon with the molecular formula of C30H50 and the unlovely name of “squalene,” which is found in yeast, olive oil, fish eggs, the liver of certain sharks, and the skin of the human nose.
Because of its extremely high viscosity, it has been used by clockmakers to oil cogs, by butlers to polish ebony, by burglars to lubricate revolvers, and by smokers to baby the bowls of their favorite pipes.
Good old, jolly old everyday nose oil to unstick a good old, jolly old everyday mortise lock.
The door itself had been banged together from heavy planks and I could still see the marks of the chisel with which the lock had been roughly installed. It was of the warded type, which opens with a skeleton key.
A piece of cake.
I raked a thumbnail across the side of my nose and wiped the oily dep
osit onto one end of my mangled braces. Holding the torch between a hunched shoulder and my chin, I inserted the hooked end of the wire into the keyhole and jiggered it about until I judged the wards and levers had been sufficiently lubricated.
Then, after pushing and pulling the hooked end of my improvised lock-pick in and out until it was lined up with the levers, I gave it a sudden twist.
At first … nothing. Resistance. And then … a satisfying click!
I turned the knob and the door swung open with a hollow groan.
I stepped over the rough wooden sill and into the tunnel.
Dank and acrid are the two words that best describe the smell of the place. I was now about five or six feet beneath the surface, and from this point onward, the tunnel sloped downward toward the church. Whoever had dug it, I supposed, had wanted to get well below the graveyard’s grisly contents.
I was well aware, as I moved slowly along, that the earth above my head and on both sides contained all that remained of Bishop’s Lacey’s dead, most of whose bones had long ago leached and whose fluids had seeped over the centuries into the spongy soil.
One of the vicar’s sermons popped unexpectedly into my mind: the one about how we are the clay and the Lord our potter—a lesson that only now was coming vividly to life here in this country churchyard. Everywhere I looked, bone fragments of the dead, like broken bits of kitchen crockery, reflected whitely in the beam of my torch.
It was as astonishing a display as any of the three-dimensional geological exhibits in the Science Museum.
Hold on, Flavia, I thought: This is not the time to be thinking about the wonders of putrefaction.
I made my way slowly along the tunnel, going deeper into the earth with every step. Underground, the distance seemed much farther than it did in the churchyard above. Surely by now I must be close to the foundation of the church.
Perhaps the tunnel didn’t lead to the church—perhaps it was taking me off in a different direction altogether.
But no—I had been moving in a straight line, at least, as far as I could tell.
Now the tunnel’s floor began rising quite steeply. Ahead was what looked like a stone archway.