Alan Bradley - The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie

The first thing that struck me was the smell of the place: a mixture of cabbage, rubber cushions, dishwater, and death. Underlying that, like a groundsheet, was the sharp tang of the disinfectant used to swab the floors—dimethyl benzyl ammonium chloride, by the smell of it—a faint whiff of bitter almonds which was uncommonly like that of hydrogen cyanide, the gas that was used to exterminate killers in American gas chambers.

The entrance hall was painted a madhouse apple green: green walls, green woodwork, and green ceilings. The floors were covered with cheap brown linoleum so pitted with gladiatorial gouges that it might have been salvaged from the Roman Colosseum. Whenever I stepped on one of its pustulent brown blisters, the stuff let off a nasty hiss and I made a mental note to find out if color can cause nausea.

Against the far wall, in a chromium wheelchair, an ancient man sat gazing straight up into the air, mouth agape, as if expecting an imminent miracle to take place somewhere near the ceiling.

Off to one side a desk, bare except for a silver bell and a smudged card marked Ring Plse ., hinted at some official, yet unseen, presence.

I gave the striker four brisk strokes. At each ting of the bell, the old man blinked violently, but did not take his eyes from the air above his head.

Suddenly, as if she had slipped through a secret panel in the woodwork, a wisp of a woman materialized. She wore a white uniform and a blue cap, under which she was busily poking limp strands of damp straw-colored hair with one of her forefingers.

She looked as if she had been up to no good, and knew perfectly well that I knew.

"Yes?" she said, in a thin but busy, standard-issue hospital voice.

"I've come to see Dr. Kissing," I said. "I'm his great-granddaughter."

"Dr. Isaac Kissing?” she asked.

"Yes," I said, "Dr. Isaac Kissing. Do you keep more than one?"

Without a word the White Phantom turned on her heel and I followed, through an archway into a narrow solarium which ran the entire length of the building. Half way along the gallery she stopped, pointed a thin finger like the third ghost in Scrooge , and was gone.

At the far end of the tall-windowed room, in the single ray of sunshine that penetrated the overhanging gloom of the place, an old man sat in a wicker bath chair, a halo of blue smoke rising slowly above his head. In disarray on a small table beside him, a heap of newspapers threatened to slide off onto the floor.

He was wrapped in a mouse-colored dressing gown—like Sherlock Holmes's, except that it was spotted like a leopard with burn holes. Beneath this was visible a rusty black suit and a tall winged celluloid collar of ancient vintage. His long, curling yellow-gray hair was topped with a pillbox smoking cap of plum-colored velvet, and a lighted cigarette dangled from his lips, its gray ashes drooping like a mummified garden slug.

"Hello, Flavia," he said. "I've been expecting you."

AN HOUR HAD PASSED: an hour during which I had come to realize truly, for the first time, what we had lost in the war.

We had not got off to a particularly good start, Dr. Kissing and I.

"I must warn you at the outset that I'm not at my best conversing with little girls," he announced.

I bit my lip and kept my mouth shut.

"A boy is content to be made into a civil man by caning, or any one of a number of other stratagems, but a girl, being disqualified by Nature, as it were, from such physical brutality, must remain forever something of a terra incognita . Don't you think?”

I recognized it as one of those questions which doesn't require an answer. I raised the corners of my lips into what I hoped was a Mona Lisa smile—or at least one that signaled the required civility.

"So you're Jacko's daughter," he said. "You're not a bit like him, you know."

"I'm told I take after my mother, Harriet," I said.

"Ah, yes. Harriet. What a great tragedy that was. How terrible for all of you."

He reached out and touched a magnifying glass that perched precipitously atop the glacier of newspapers at his side. With the same movement he pried open a tin of Players that lay on the table and selected a fresh cigarette.

"I do my best to keep up with the world as seen through the eyes of these inky scribblers. My own eyes, I must confess, having been fixed on the passing parade for ninety-five years, are much wearied by what they have seen.

"Still, I somehow manage to keep informed about such births, deaths, marriages, and convictions as transpire in our shire. And I still subscribe to Punch and Lilliput , of course.

"You have two sisters, I believe, Ophelia and Daphne?"

I confessed that such was the case.

"Jacko always had a flair for the exotic, as I recall. I was hardly surprised to read that he had named his first two offspring after a Shakespearean hysteric and a Greek pincushion."

"Sorry?"

"Daphne, shot by Eros with a love-deadening arrow before being transformed by her father into a tree."

"I meant the madwoman," I said. "Ophelia."

"Bonkers," he said, pressing out his cigarette butt in an overflowing ashtray and lighting another. "Wouldn't you agree?"

The eyes that looked out at me from his heavily lined face were as bright and beady as those of any teacher who had ever stood watch at a blackboard, pointer in hand, and I knew that I had succeeded in my plan. I was no longer a “little girl.” Whereas the mythical Daphne had been transformed into a mere laurel tree, I had become a boy in the lower Fourth.

"Not really, sir," I said. "I think Shakespeare meant Ophelia to be a symbol of something—like the herbs and flowers she gathers."

"Eh?" he said. "What's that?"

"Symbolic, sir. Ophelia is the innocent victim of a murderous family whose members are all totally self-absorbed. At least that's what I think."

"I see," he said. "Most interesting.

"Still," he added suddenly, "it was most gratifying to learn that your father retained enough of his Latin to name you Flavia. She of the golden hair."

"Mine is more of a mousy brown."

"Ah."

We seemed to have reached one of those impasses that litter so many conversations with the elderly. I was beginning to think he had fallen asleep with his eyes open.

"Well," he said at last, "you'd better let me have a look at her."

"Sir?" I said.

"My Ulster Avenger. You'd better let me have a look at her. You have brought her along, haven't you?”

"I—yes, sir, but how—?"

"Let us deduce," he said, as quietly as if he had said let us pray .

"Horace Bonepenny, onetime boy conjurer and longtime fraud artist, turns up dead in the garden of his old school chum, Jacko de Luce. Why? Blackmail is most likely. Therefore, let us suppose blackmail. Within hours, Jacko's daughter is ransacking newspaper archives at Bishop's Lacey, ferreting out reports of the demise of my dear old colleague, Mr. Twining, God rest his soul. How do I know this? I should think it obvious.”

"Miss Mountjoy," I said.

"Very good, my dear. Tilda Mountjoy indeed—my eyes and ears upon the village and its environs for the past quarter century."

I should have known it! Miss Mountjoy was a spook!

"But let us continue. On the last day of his life, the thief Bonepenny has chosen to take up lodgings at the Thirteen Drakes. The young fool—well, no longer young, but still a fool, for all that—then manages to get himself done in. I remarked once to Mr. Twining that that boy would come to no good end. I hesitate to point out that I was correct in my prognostication. There always was a whiff of sulphur about the lad.

"But I digress. Shortly after his launch into eternity, Bonepenny's room at the inn is rifled by a maiden fair whose name I dare not utter aloud but who now sits demurely before me, fidgeting with something in her pocket which can hardly be anything other than a certain bit of paper the shade of Dundee marmalade, upon which is printed the likeness of Her Late Majesty Queen Victoria, and bearing the check letters, TL. Quod erat demonstrandum . Q.E.D.”