Alan Bradley - The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie

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. For get 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."

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.