Alan Bradley - A Red Herring Without Mustard - A Flavia de Luce Novel

Feely’s bedroom, by contrast, was like something out of the cinema. The walls were covered with a delicate floral pattern (moss roses, I think) and the tall windows were bracketed with yards of lace.

A four-poster with embroidered curtains was dwarfed by the room, and stood almost unnoticed in a corner.

To the left of the windows, in pride of place, was a particularly fine Queen Anne dresser, whose curved legs were as slender and delicate as those of the ballet dancers in the paintings of Degas. Above it, on the wall, was fastened a monstrous dark-framed looking glass, too large by far for the dainty legs that stood beneath. The effect was rather Humpty Dumpty–ish: like an obscenely oversized head on a body with leprechaun legs.

I used Feely’s hairbrush to prop open the Bible on the dresser top. From the tire repair kit, I extracted a tin of magnesium silicate hydroxide, better known as French chalk. The stuff was meant to keep a freshly patched inner tube from sticking to the inside of the rubber tire, but this was not the application I had in mind.

I dipped one of Feely’s camel-hair makeup brushes into the French chalk and, with one last glance at the Bible for reference, wrote a short message across the mirror’s surface in bold letters: Deuteronomy 28:27 .

That done, I pulled a handkerchief from my pocket and gently dusted away the words that I had written. I blew the excess chalk from where it had fallen on the dresser top, and wiped up the few traces that had drifted to the floor.

It was done! The rest of my plan was guaranteed.

It would unfold itself through the inexorable laws of chemistry, without my having to lift a finger.

When Feely next parked herself in front of the mirror and leaned in for a closer look at her ugly hide, the moisture of her warm breath would make visible the words that I had written on the glass. Their message would spring boldly into view:

Deuteronomy 28:27

Feely would be terror-stricken. She would run to look up the passage in the Bible. Actually, she might not: Since it had to do with personal grooming, she might already have the verse off by heart. But if she did have to search it out, this is what she would find:

The LORD shall smite thee with the boils of Egypt, and with the emerods, and with the scurvy, and with the itch, whereof thou canst not be healed .

As if the boils weren’t bad enough, “emerods” were hemorrhoids, the perfect added touch, I thought.

And if I knew my sister, she wouldn’t be able to resist reading the rest of the verse:

The LORD shall smite thee with madness, and with blindness, and with astonishment of heart; and thou shalt grope at noonday, as the blind gropeth in darkness, and thou shalt not prosper in thy ways: and thou shalt be only oppressed and spoiled alway, and there shall be none to save thee .

Feely would toss up her marmalade!

Having seen the message materialize before her very eyes, she’d believe it to be a telegram from God, and—by the Old Harry!—would she be sorry!

I could see it now: She’d fling herself down and grovel on the carpet, begging forgiveness for the rotten way she’d treated her little sister.

Later, she would appear at the dinner table, haunted, haggard, and shocked into silence.

I chortled as I skipped down the staircase. I could barely wait.

At the bottom, in the foyer, stood Inspector Hewitt.

FIFTEEN

THE INSPECTOR DID NOT look happy.

Dogger, who had only just let him in, closed the door silently, and vanished in the way he does.

“You should think about opening an auxiliary police station here at Buckshaw,” I said affably, trying to cheer him up. “It would certainly save on petrol.”

The Inspector was not amused.

“Let’s have a chat,” he said, and I had the impression that he was not entirely attempting to put me at my ease.

“Of course. I am at your disposal.”

I was capable of being gracious when I felt like it.

“About your discovery at the fountain—” he began.

“Brookie Harewood, you mean? Yes, that was awful, wasn’t it.”

The Inspector seemed startled.

Damn! Ten seconds into the game and I had already made a serious misstep.

“You know him, then?”

“Oh, everyone knows Brookie,” I said, recovering quickly. “He’s one of the village characters. At least—he was.”

“Someone you knew?”

“I’ve seen him about. Here and there, you know. In the village. That sort of thing.”

I was sewing an invisible seam between truth and untruth, a skill of which I was especially proud. One of the tricks of the trade when doing this is to volunteer fresh information before your questioner has time to ask another. So I went on:

“I had returned to the Palings, you see, because I was worried about Gry. Gry is the name of the Gypsy woman’s horse. I wanted to make sure he had food.”

This was not entirely true: Gry could have survived for weeks by nibbling the grass in the glade, but noble motives can never be questioned.

“Very commendable,” Inspector Hewitt said. “I had asked Constable Linnet to lay on some hay.”

I had a quick vision of PC Linnet producing an egg in the straw, but I banished it from my mind to keep from grinning.

“Yes, I noticed that when I got there,” I said. “And of course, I met Porcelain. She told me you had tracked her down in London.”

As I spoke, the Inspector produced a notebook, flipped it open, and began to write. I’d better watch my step.

“I didn’t think she’d be safe in the caravan. Not with whoever attacked her gram still wandering about. I insisted she come back with me to Buckshaw, and it was on our way here that we came across the body.”

I didn’t say “Brookie’s body” because I didn’t want to seem too chummy with him, which could only lead to more questions about our prior acquaintance.

“What time was that?”

“Oh, let me see—you were here when I got up, just around breakfast time—that was at about nine-thirty, I should say.”

The Inspector riffled back several pages in his notebook and nodded. I was on the right track.

“After that, Sergeant Graves came straightaway to take my fingerprints—ten-thirty—perhaps eleven?

“At any rate,” I went on, “Constable Linnet should be able to tell you what time I called to report it, which couldn’t have been much more than ten or fifteen minutes after we discovered the body in the fountain.”

I was stalling—treading water, delaying the time when he would inevitably ask about my so-called assault on Fenella. I decided to leap into the breach.

“Porcelain thinks I attacked her gram,” I said bluntly.

Inspector Hewitt nodded. “Mrs. Faa is very disoriented. It often happens with injuries to the head. I thought I’d made that quite clear to the granddaughter, but perhaps I’d best have another word—”

“No!” I said. “Don’t do that. It doesn’t matter.”

The Inspector looked at me sharply, then made another scribble in his notebook.

“Are you putting another P beside my name?”

It was a saucy question, and I was sorry as soon as I asked it. Once, during an earlier investigation, I had seen him print a capital P beside my name in his notebook. Maddeningly, he had refused to tell me what it meant.

“It’s not polite to ask,” he said with a slight smile. “One must never ask a policeman his secrets.”

“Why not?”

“For the same reason I don’t ask you yours.”