Alan Bradley - The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie

"Q.E.D." I said, and without a word I pulled the glassine envelope from my pocket and held it out to him. With trembling hands—though whether they trembled from age or excitement I could not be certain—and using the tissue-thin paper as makeshift tweezers, he peeled back the flaps of the envelope with his nicotine-stained fingers. As the orange corners of the Ulster Avengers came into view, I could not help noticing that his nicotine-stained fingertips and the stamps were of a nearly identical hue.

"Great Scott!" he said, visibly shaken. "You've found AA. This stamp belongs to His Majesty, you know. It was stolen from an exhibition in London just weeks ago. It was in all the papers."

He shot me an accusing look over his spectacles, but his gaze was drawn away almost at once to the bright treasures that lay in his hands. He seemed to have forgotten I was in the room.

"Greetings, my old friends," he whispered, as if I weren't there. "It's been far too long a time." He took up the magnifying glass and examined them closely, one at a time. "And you, my cherished little TL: What a tale you could tell.”

"Horace Bonepenny had both of them," I volunteered. "I found them in his luggage at the inn."

"You rifled his luggage?" Dr. Kissing asked, without looking away from the magnifying glass. "Phew! The Constabulary will hardly caper in delight upon the village green when they hear of that. nor will you, I'll wager."

"I didn't exactly rifle his luggage," I said. "He had hidden the stamps under a travel sticker on the outside of a trunk."

"With which, of course, you just happened to be idly fiddling when out they tumbled into your hands."

"Yes," I said. "That's precisely how it happened."

"Tell me," he said suddenly, swinging round to look me in the eye, "does your father know you're here?"

"No," I said. "Father's been charged with the murder. He's under arrest in Hinley."

"Good Lord! Did he do it?"

"No, but everyone seems to think he did. For a while, even I thought so myself."

"Ah," he said. "And what do you think now?"

"I don't know," I said. "Sometimes I think one thing and sometimes another. Everything's such a muddle."

"Everything is always a muddle just before it settles in. Tell me this, Flavia: What is it that interests you above all else in the universe? What is your one great passion?"

"Chemistry," I said in less than half a heartbeat.

"Well done!" said Dr. Kissing. "I've put that same question to an army of Hottentots in my time, and they always prattle on about this and that. Babble and gush, that's all it is. You, by contrast, have put it in a word."

The wicker creaked horribly as he half twisted round in his chair to face me. For an awful moment I thought his spine had crumbled.

"Sodium nitrite," he said. "Doubtless you are acquainted with sodium nitrite."

Acquainted with it? Sodium nitrite was the antidote for cyanide poisoning, and I knew it in all its various reactions as well as I know my own name. But how had he known to choose it as an example? Was he psychic?

"Close your eyes," Dr. Kissing said. "Imagine you are holding in your hand a test tube half-filled with a thirty percent solution of hydrochloric acid. To it, you add a small amount of sodium nitrite. What do you observe?"

"I don't need to close my eyes," I said. "It becomes orange . orange and turbid."

"Excellent! The color of these wayward postage stamps, is it not? And then?"

"Given time, twenty or thirty minutes perhaps, it clears."

"It clears. I rest my case."

As if a great weight had been lifted from my shoulders, I grinned a stupid grin.

"You must have been a wizard teacher, sir," I said.

"Yes, so I was. in my day.

"And now you've brought my little treasure home to me," he said, glancing at the stamps again.

This was something I hadn't counted upon; something I hadn't really thought through. I had meant only to discover if the owner of the Ulster Avenger was still alive. After that, I would hand it over to Father, who would surrender it to the police, who would, in due course, see that it was restored to its rightful owner. Dr. Kissing spotted my hesitation at once.

"Let me pose another question," he said. "What if you had come here today and found that I'd hopped the twig, as it were; flown off to my eternal reward?"

"You mean died, sir?"

"That's the word I was fishing for: died. Yes."

"I suppose I should have given your stamp to Father."

"To keep?"

"He'd know what to do with it."

"I should think that the best person to decide that is the stamp's owner, wouldn't you agree?"

I knew that the answer was “yes” but I couldn't say it. I knew that, more than anything, I wanted to present the stamp to Father, even though it wasn't mine to give. At the same time, I wanted to give both stamps to Inspector Hewitt. But why?

Dr. Kissing lighted another cigarette and gazed out the window. At length, he plucked one of the stamps from the folder and handed me the other.

"This is AA," he said. " It is not mine; it don't belong to me , as the old song says. Your father may do with it as he wishes. It is not my place to decide.”

I took the Ulster Avenger from him and wrapped it carefully in my handkerchief.

"On the other hand, the exquisite little TL is mine. Mine own, without the shadow of a doubt.”

"I expect you'll be happy to be sticking it back into your album, sir," I said with resignation, slipping its mate into my pocket.

"My album?" He gave a croaking laugh that ended in a cough. "My albums are, as dear, dead Dowson put it, gone with the wind."

His old eyes turned towards the window, gazing without seeing at the lawn outside where the two old ladies still fluttered and pirouetted like exotic butterflies beneath the sun-dappled beeches.

"It's from his Non Sum Qualis Eram Bonae Sub Regno Cynarae . Perhaps you know it?”

I shook my head. “It's very beautiful,” I said.

"To remain sequestered in such a place as this," Dr. Kissing said with a broad sweep of his arm, “for all its dowdy decrepitude is, as you will appreciate, a most ruinous financial undertaking.”

He looked at me as if he had made a joke. When I offered no response, he pointed to the table.

"Fetch out one of those albums. The uppermost, I think, will do."

I now noticed for the first time that there was a shelf wedged in below the tabletop, upon which were two thick bound albums. I blew off the dust and handed him the top one.

"No, no. open it yourself."

I opened the book to the first page, which contained two stamps: one black, the other red. By the slight marks of gummy residue and the ruled lines, I could see that the page had once been filled. I turned to the next page… and the next. All that remained of the album was a gutted hulk: a sparse, ravaged thing that even a schoolboy might have hidden away in shame.

"The cost, you see, of housing a beating heart. One disposes of one's life one little square at a time. Not much of it left, is there?"

"But the Ulster Avenger!" I said. "It must be worth a fortune!"

"Indeed," said Dr. Kissing, glancing once more through the magnifier at his treasure.

"One reads in novels," he said, "of the reprieve that comes when the trap's already sprung; of the horse whose heart stops an inch past the finish line." He chuckled dryly, and pulled out a handkerchief to wipe his eyes. "'Too late! Too late! the maiden cried'—and all that. 'Curfew shall not ring tonight!'