Read The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie Page 12


  “I know well enough who you are,” she said. “You’re Flavia Sabina Dolores de Luce—Jacko’s youngest daughter.”

  “You know he’s my father?!” I gasped.

  “Of course I know, girl. A person of my age knows a great deal.”

  Somehow, before I could stop it, the truth popped out of me like a cork from a bottle.

  “The ‘Dolores’ was a lie,” I said. “I sometimes fabricate things.”

  She took a step towards me.

  “Why are you here?” she asked, her voice a harsh whisper.

  I quickly plunged my hand into my pocket and fished out the bag of sweets.

  “I brought you some acid drops,” I said, “to apologize for my rudeness. I hope you’ll accept them.”

  A shrill wheezing sound, which I took to depict a laugh, came out of her.

  “Miss Cool’s recommendation, no doubt?”

  Like the village idiot in a pantomime, I gave half a dozen quick, bobbing nods.

  “I was sorry to hear about the way your uncle—Mr. Twining—died,” I said, and I meant it. “Honestly I was. It doesn’t seem fair.”

  “Fair? It certainly was not fair,” she said. “And yet it was not unjust. It was not even wicked. Do you know what it was?”

  Of course I knew. I had heard this before, but I was not here to debate her.

  “No,” I whispered.

  “It was murder,” she said. “It was murder, pure and simple.”

  “And who was the murderer?” I asked. Sometimes my own tongue took me by surprise.

  A rather vague look floated across Miss Mountjoy’s face like a cloud across the moon, as if she had spent a lifetime preparing for the part and then, center stage in the spotlight, had forgotten her lines.

  “Those boys,” she said at last. “Those loathsome, detestable boys. I shall never forget them; not for all their apple cheeks and schoolboy innocence.”

  “One of those boys is my father,” I said quietly.

  Her eyes were somewhere else in time. Only slowly did they return to the present to focus upon me.

  “Yes,” she said. “Laurence de Luce. Jacko. Your father was called Jacko. A schoolboy sobriquet, and yet even the coroner called him that. Jacko. He said it ever so softly at the inquest, almost caressingly—as if all the court were in thrall with the name.”

  “My father gave evidence at the inquest?”

  “Of course he testified—as did the other boys. It was the sort of thing that was done in those days. He denied everything, of course, all responsibility. A valuable postage stamp had been stolen from the headmaster’s collection, and it was all, ‘Oh no, sir, it wasn’t me, sir!’ As if the stamp had magically sprouted grubby little fingers and filched itself!”

  I was about to tell her “My father is not a thief, nor is he a liar,” when suddenly I knew that nothing I could say would ever change this ancient mind. I decided to take the offensive.

  “Why did you walk out of church this morning?” I asked.

  Miss Mountjoy recoiled as if I had thrown a glass of water in her face. “You don’t mince words, do you?”

  “No,” I said. “It had something to do with the Vicar’s praying for the stranger in our midst, didn’t it? The man whose body I found in the garden at Buckshaw.”

  She hissed through her teeth like a teakettle. “You found the body? You?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Then tell me this—did it have red hair?” She closed her eyes, and kept them closed awaiting my reply.

  “Yes,” I said. “It had red hair.”

  “For what we have received may the Lord make us truly thankful,” she breathed, before opening her eyes again. It seemed to me not only a peculiar response, but somehow an unchristian one.

  “I don’t understand,” I said. And I didn’t.

  “I recognized him at once,” she said. “Even after all these years, I knew who he was as soon as I saw that shock of red hair walking out of the Thirteen Drakes. If that hadn’t been enough, his swagger, that overweening cockiness, those cold blue eyes—any one of those things—would have told me that Horace Bonepenny had come back to Bishop’s Lacey.”

  I had the feeling that we were slipping into deeper waters than I knew.

  “Perhaps now you can see why I could not take part in any prayer for the repose of that boy’s—that man’s—rancid soul.”

  She reached out and took the bag of acid drops from my hand, popping one into her mouth and pocketing the rest.

  “On the contrary,” she continued, “I pray that he is, at this very moment, being basted in hell.”

  And with that, she walked into her dank Willow Villa and slammed the door.

  Who on earth was Horace Bonepenny? And what had brought him back to Bishop’s Lacey?

  I could think of only one person who might be made to tell me.

  AS I RODE UP THE AVENUE of chestnuts to Buckshaw, I could see that the blue Vauxhall was no longer at the door. Inspector Hewitt and his men had gone.

  I was wheeling Gladys round to the back of the house when I heard a metallic tapping coming from the greenhouse. I moved towards the door and looked inside. It was Dogger.

  He was sitting on an overturned pail, striking the thing with a trowel.

  Clang … clang … clang … clang. In the way the bell of St. Tancred’s tolls for the funeral of some ancient in Bishop’s Lacey, it went on and on, as if measuring the strokes of a life. Clang … clang … clang … clang …

  His back was to the door, and it was obvious that he did not see me.

  I crept away towards the kitchen door where I made a great and noisy ado by dropping Gladys with a loud clatter on the stone doorstep. (“Sorry, Gladys,” I whispered.)

  “Damn and blast!” I said, loudly enough to be heard in the greenhouse. I pretended to spot him there behind the glass.

  “Oh, hullo, Dogger,” I said cheerily. “Just the person I was looking for.”

  He did not turn immediately, and I pretended to be scraping a bit of clay from the sole of my shoe until he recovered himself.

  “Miss Flavia,” he said slowly. “Everyone has been looking for you.”

  “Well, here I am,” I said. Best to take over the conversation until Dogger was fully back on the rails.

  “I was talking to someone in the village who told me about somebody I thought you might be able to tell me about.”

  Dogger managed the ghost of a smile.

  “I know I’m not putting that in the best way, but—”

  “I know what you mean,” he said.

  “Horace Bonepenny,” I blurted out. “Who is Horace Bonepenny?”

  At my words, Dogger began to twitch like an experimental frog whose spinal cord has been hooked up to a galvanic battery. He licked his lips and wiped madly at his mouth with a pocket handkerchief. I could see that his eyes were beginning to dim, winking out much as the stars do just before sunrise. At the same time, he was making a great effort to pull himself together, though with little success.

  “Never mind, Dogger,” I said. “It doesn’t matter. Forget it.”

  He tried to get to his feet, but was unable to lift himself from the overturned pail.

  “Miss Flavia,” he said, “there are questions which need to be asked, and there are questions which need not to be asked.”

  So there it was again: so like a law, these words that fell from Dogger’s lips as naturally, and with as much finality, as if Isaiah himself had spoken them.

  But those few words seemed utterly to have exhausted him, and with a loud sigh he covered his face with his hands. I wanted nothing more at that moment than to throw my arms round him and hug him, but I knew that he wasn’t up to it. Instead, I settled for putting my hand on his shoulder, realizing even as I did so that the gesture was of greater comfort to me than it was to him.

  “I’ll go and get Father,” I said. “We’ll help you to your room.”

  Dogger turned his face slowly round towards me, a chalky
white mask of tragedy. The words came out of him like stone grating upon stone.

  “They’ve taken him away, Miss Flavia. The police have taken him away.”

  twelve

  FEELY AND DAFFY WERE SITTING ON A FLOWERED DIVAN in the drawing room, wrapped in one another’s arms and wailing like air-raid sirens. I had taken a few steps into the room to join in with them before Ophelia spotted me.

  “Where have you been, you little beast?” she hissed, springing up and coming at me like a wildcat, her eyes swollen and as red as cycle reflectors. “Everyone’s been searching for you. We thought you’d drowned. Oh! How I prayed you had!”

  Welcome home, Flave, I thought.

  “Father’s been arrested,” Daffy said matter-of-factly. “They’ve taken him away.”

  “Where?” I asked.

  “How should we know?” Ophelia spat contemptuously. “Wherever they take people who have been arrested, I expect. Where have you been?”

  “Bishop’s Lacey or Hinley?”

  “What do you mean? Talk sense, you little fool.”

  “Bishop’s Lacey or Hinley,” I repeated. “There’s only a one-room police station at Bishop’s Lacey, so I don’t expect he’s been taken there. The County Constabulary is at Hinley. So they’ve likely taken him to Hinley.”

  “They’ll charge him with murder,” Ophelia said, “and then he’ll be hanged!” She burst into tears again and turned away. For a moment I almost felt sorry for her.

  I CAME OUT OF THE DRAWING ROOM and into the hallway and saw Dogger halfway up the west staircase, plodding slowly, step by step, like a condemned man ascending the steps of the scaffold.

  Now was my chance!

  I waited until he was out of sight at the top of the stairs, then slipped into Father’s study and quietly locked the door behind me. It was the first time in my life I had ever been alone in the room.

  One full wall was given over to Father’s stamp albums, fat leather volumes whose colors indicated the reign of each monarch: black for Queen Victoria, red for Edward the Seventh, green for George the Fifth, and blue for our present monarch, George the Sixth. I remembered that a slim scarlet volume tucked between the green book and the blue contained only a few items—one each of the nine known variations of the four stamps issued bearing the head of Edward the Eighth before he decamped with that American woman.

  I knew that Father derived endless pleasure from the countless and minute variations in his bits of confetti, but I did not know the details. Only when he became excited enough over some new tidbit of trivia in the latest issue of The London Philatelist to rhapsodize aloud at breakfast would we learn a little more about his happy, insulated world. Apart from those rare occasions, we were all of us, my sisters and me, babes in the wood when it came to postage stamps, while Father puttered on, mounting bits of colored paper with more fearsome relish than some men mount the heads of stags and tigers.

  On the wall opposite the books stood a Jacobean sideboard whose top surface and drawers overflowed with what seemed to be no end of philatelic supplies: stamp hinges, perforation gauges, enameled trays for soaking, bottles of fluid for revealing watermarks, gum erasers, stock envelopes, page reinforcements, stamp tweezers, and a hooded ultraviolet lamp.

  At the end of the room, in front of the French doors that opened onto the terrace, was Father’s desk: a partner’s desk the size of a playing field, which might once have seen service in Scrooge and Marley’s counting house. I knew at once that its drawers would be locked—and I was right.

  Where, I wondered, would Father hide a stamp in a room full of stamps? There wasn’t a doubt in my mind that he had hidden it—as I would have done. Father and I shared a passion for privacy, and I realized he would never be so foolish as to put it in an obvious place.

  Rather than look on top of things, or inside things, I lay flat on the floor like a mechanic inspecting a motorcar’s undercarriage, and slid round the room on my back examining the underside of things. I looked at the bottoms of the desk, the table, the wastepaper basket, and Father’s Windsor chair. I looked under the Turkey carpet and behind the curtains. I looked at the back of the clock and turned over the prints on the wall.

  There were far too many books to search, so I tried to think of which of them would be least likely to be looked into. Of course! The Bible!

  But a quick riffle through King James produced no more than an old church leaflet and a mourning card for some dead de Luce from the time of the Great Exhibition.

  Then suddenly I remembered that Father had plucked the Penny Black from the bill of the dead snipe and put it in his waistcoat pocket. Perhaps he had left it there, meaning to dispose of it later.

  Yes, that was it! The stamp wasn’t here at all. What an idiot I was to think it would be. The entire study, of course, would be at the very top of the list of too-obvious hiding places. A wave of certainty washed over me and I knew, with what Feely and Daffy incorrectly call “female intuition,” that the stamp was somewhere else.

  Trying not to make a sound, I turned the key and stepped out into the hall. The Weird Sisters were still going at it in the drawing room, their voices rising and falling between notes of anger and grief. I could have listened at the door, but I chose not to. I had more important things to do.

  I went, silent as a shadow, up the west staircase and into the south wing.

  As I expected, Father’s room was in near-darkness as I stepped inside. I had often glanced up at his windows from the lawn and seen the heavy drapes pulled tightly shut.

  From inside, it possessed all the gloom of a museum after hours. The strong scent of Father’s colognes and shaving lotions suggested open sarcophagi and canopic jars that had once been packed with ancient spices. The finely curved legs of a Queen Anne washstand seemed almost indecent beside the gloomy Gothic bed in the corner, as if some sour old chamberlain were looking on dyspeptically as his mistress unfurled silk stockings over her long, youthful legs.

  Even the room’s two clocks suggested times long past. On the chimneypiece, an ormolu monstrosity, its brass pendulum, like the curved blade in “The Pit and the Pendulum,” tock-tocking away the time and flashing dully at the end of each swing in the subdued lighting of the room. On the bedside table, an exquisite little Georgian clock stood in silent disagreement: Her hands were at 3:15, his at 3:12.

  I walked down the long room to the far end, and stopped.

  Harriet’s dressing room—which could be entered only through Father’s bedroom—was forbidden territory. Father had brought us up to respect the shrine that he had made of it the day he learned of her death. He had done this by making us believe, even if we were not told so outright, that any violation of his rule would result in our being marched off in single file to the end of the garden, where we would be lined up against the brick wall and summarily shot.

  The door to Harriet’s room was covered with green baize, rather like a billiard table stood on end. I gave it a push and it swung open with an uneasy silence.

  The room was awash in light. Through the tall windowpanes on three of its sides poured torrents of sunshine, diffused by endless swags of Italian lace, into a chamber that might have been a stage-setting for a play about the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. The dresser top was laid out with brushes and combs by Fabergé, as if Harriet had just stepped into the adjoining room for a bath. Lalique scent bottles were ringed with colorful bracelets of Bakelite and amber, while a charming little hotplate and a silver kettle stood ready to make her early morning tea. A single yellow rose was wilting in a vase of slender glass.

  On an oval tray stood a tiny crystal bottle containing no more than a drop or two of scent. I picked it up, removed the stopper, and waved it languidly under my nose.

  The scent was one of small blue flowers, of mountain meadows, and of ice.

  A peculiar feeling passed over me—or, rather, through me, as if I were an umbrella remembering what it felt like to pop open in the rain. I looked at the label and saw that
it bore a single word: Miratrix.

  A silver cigarette case with the initials H. de L. lay beside a hand mirror whose back was embossed with the image of Flora, from Botticelli’s painting Primavera. I had never noticed this before in prints from the original, but Flora looked hugely and happily pregnant. Could this mirror have been a gift from Father to Harriet while she was pregnant with one of us? And if so, which one: Feely? Daffy? Me? I thought it unlikely that it was me: A third girl would hardly have been a gift from the gods—at least so far as Father was concerned.

  No, it was probably Ophelia the Firstborn—she who seemed to have arrived on earth with a mirror in her hand … perhaps this very one.

  A basket chair at one of the windows made a perfect spot for reading and here, within arm’s reach, was Harriet’s own little library. She had brought the books back from her school days in Canada and summers with an aunt in Boston: Anne of Green Gables and Jane of Lantern Hill were next-door neighbors to Penrod and Merton of the Movies, while at the far end of the shelf leaned a dog-eared copy of The Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk. I had not read any of them, but from what I knew of Harriet, they were probably all of them books about free spirits and renegades.

  Nearby, on a small round table, was a photo album. I lifted the cover and saw that its pages were of black pulpy paper, the captions handwritten below each black-and-white snapshot in chalky ink: Harriet (Age 2) at Morris House; Harriet (Age 15) at Miss Bodycote’s Female Academy (1930—Toronto, Canada); Harriet with Blithe Spirit, her de Havilland Gypsy Moth (1938); Harriet in Tibet (1939).

  The photos showed Harriet growing from a fat cherub with a mop of golden hair, through a tall, skinny, laughing girl (with no perceptible breasts) dressed in hockey gear, to a film star with blond bangs, standing, like Amelia Earhart, with one hand resting negligently on the rim of Blithe Spirit’s cockpit. There were no photographs of Father. Nor were there any of us.

  In every photograph, Harriet’s features were those of a woman whose design has been arrived at by taking those of Feely, Daffy, and me and shaking them in a jar before reassembling them into this grinning, confident, yet endearingly shy adventuress.