Alan Bradley - The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie

Three… four… my feet felt like stumps hacked off at the ankles.

Five…

Surely by now my head must be above the level of the pit, but if it was, the room was in darkness. There was no more than a faint bloodred glow from the windows in the folding door. It must be dark outside; I must have slept for hours.

As I tried to remember where the door was, there was a scrabbling in the pit. The beam of the torch arced madly across the ceiling and suddenly Pemberton was up the steps and upon me.

He threw his arms around me and squeezed until I couldn't breathe. I could hear the bones crackling in my shoulders and elbows.

I tried to kick him in the shins, but he was quickly overpowering me.

To and fro we went, across the room, like spinning tops.

"No!" he shouted, overbalancing, and fell backward into the pit, dragging me with him.

He hit the bottom with an awful thud and at the same instant I landed on top of him. I heard him gasp in the darkness. Had he broken his back? Or would he soon be on his feet again, shaking me like a rag doll?

With a sudden eruption of strength, Pemberton threw me off, and I went flying, facedown, into a corner of the pit. Like an inchworm, I wiggled my way up onto my knees, but it was too late: Pemberton had a fierce grip on my arm, and was dragging me towards the steps.

It was almost too easy: He squatted and grabbed the torch from where it had fallen, then reached out towards the stairs. I thought the syringe had been knocked to the floor, but it must have been the bottle I heard, for a moment later I caught a quick glimpse of the needle in his hand—then felt it pricking the back of my neck.

My only thought was to stall for time.

"You killed Professor Twining, didn't you?" I gasped. "You and Bonepenny."

This seemed to catch him unawares. I felt his grip relax ever so slightly.

"What makes you think that?" he breathed into my ear.

"It was Bonepenny on the roof," I said. "Bonepenny who shouted 'Vale!' He mimicked Mr. Twining's voice. It was you who dumped his body down the hole.”

Pemberton sucked air in through his nose. “Did Bonepenny tell you that?”

"I found the cap and gown," I said, "under the tiles. I figured it out myself."

"You're a very clever girl," he said, almost regretfully.

"And now you've killed Bonepenny the stamps are yours. At least, they would be if you knew where they were."

This seemed to infuriate him. He tightened his grip on my arm, again drilling the ball of his thumb into the muscle. I screamed in agony.

"Five words, Flavia," he hissed. "Where are the bloody stamps?"

In the long silence that followed, in the numbing pain, my mind took refuge in flight.

Was this the end of Flavia? I wondered.

If so, was Harriet watching over me? Was she sitting at this very moment on a cloud with her legs dangling over, saying, “Oh no, Flavia! Don't do this; don't say that! Danger, Flavia! Danger!”

If she was, I couldn't hear her; perhaps I was farther removed from Harriet than Feely and Daffy. Perhaps she had loved me less.

It was a sad fact that of Harriet's three children I was the only one who retained no real memories of her. Feely, like a miser, had experienced and hoarded seven years of her mother's love. And Daffy insisted that, even though she was hardly three when Harriet disappeared, she had a perfectly clear recollection of a slim and laughing young woman who dressed her up in a starched dress and bonnet, set her down on a blanket on a sunlit lawn, and took her photograph with a folding camera before presenting her with a gherkin pickle.

Another jab brought me back to reality—the needle was at my brain stem.

"The Ulster Avengers. Where are they?"

I pointed a finger to the corner of the pit where the handkerchief lay balled up in the shadows. As the beam of Pemberton's torch danced towards it, I looked away, then looked up, as the old-time saints were said to do when seeking for salvation.

I heard it before I saw it. There was a muffled whirring noise, as if a giant mechanical pterodactyl were flapping about outside the Pit Shed. A moment later, there was the most frightful crash and a rain of falling glass.

The room above us, beyond the mouth of the pit, erupted into brilliant yellow light, and through it clouds of steam drifted like little puffing souls of the departed.

Still rooted to the spot, I stood staring straight up into the air at the oddly familiar apparition that sat shuddering above the pit.

I've snapped, I thought. I've gone insane.

Directly above my head, trembling like a living thing, was the undercarriage of Harriet's Rolls-Royce.

Before I could blink, I heard the sound of its doors opening and feet hitting the floor above me.

Pemberton made a leap for the stairs, scrabbling up them like a trapped rat. At the top he paused, trying wildly to claw his way between the lip of the pit and the front bumper of the Phantom.

A disembodied hand appeared and seized him by the collar, dragging him up out of the pit like a fish from a pond. His shoes vanished into the light above me, and I heard a voice—Dogger's voice!—saying, “Pardon my elbow.”

There was a sickening crunch and something hit the floor above me like a sack of turnips.

I was still in a daze when the apparition appeared. All in white it was, slipping easily through the narrow gap between chrome and concrete before making its rapid, flapping descent down into the pit.

As it threw its arms around me and sobbed on my shoulder, I could feel the thin body shaking like a leaf.

"Silly little fool! Silly little fool!" it cried over and over, its raw red lips pressing into my neck.

"Feely!" I said, struck stupid with surprise, "you're getting oil all over your best dress!"

OUTSIDE THE PIT SHED, in Cow Lane, it was a fantasy: Feely was on her knees sobbing, her arms wrapped fiercely round my waist. As I stood there motionless, it was as if everything dissolved between us, and for a moment Feely and I were one creature bathing in the moonlight of the shadowed lane.

And then everyone in Bishop's Lacey seemed to materialize, coming slowly forward out of the darkness, clucking like aldermen at the torchlit scene, and at the gaping hole where the door of the Pit Shed had been; telling one another what they had been doing when the sound of the crash had echoed through the village. It was like a scene from that play Brigadoon , where the village comes slowly back to life for a single day every hundred years.

Harriet's Phantom, its beautiful radiator punctured by having been used as a battering ram, now stood steaming quietly in front of the Pit Shed and leaking water softly into the dust. Several of the more muscular villagers—one of them Tully Stoker, I noticed—had pushed the heavy vehicle backwards to allow Feely to lead me up out of the pit and into the fierce intensity and the glare of its great round headlamps.

Feely had got to her feet but was still clinging to me like a limpet to a battleship, babbling on excitedly.

"We followed him, you see. Dogger knew that you hadn't come home, and when he spotted someone prowling round the house."

These were more consecutive words than she had ever spoken to me in my entire lifetime, and I stood there savoring them a bit.

"He called the police, of course; then he said that if we followed the man. if we kept the headlamps off and kept well back.Oh, God! You should have seen us flying through the lanes!"

Good old silent Roller, I thought. Father was going to be furious, though, when he saw the damage.

Miss Mountjoy stood off to one side, pulling a woolen shawl tightly about her shoulders and glaring balefully at the splintered cavern where the door of the Pit Shed had been, as if such wholesale desecration of library property were beyond the last straw. I tried to catch her eye, but she looked nervously away in the direction of her cottage as if she'd had too much excitement for one evening and ought to be getting home.