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

“How do you do?” Father said after an almost imperceptible pause, then sticking out his hand at once, rather than waiting for her to do so first. He was obviously flustered.

Porcelain came forward a couple of halting steps and gave him a single shake: up-down.

“Lovely weather we’ve been having,” Father went on, “when it isn’t raining, of course.”

I saw my opportunity and I took it.

“It was Porcelain’s grandmother, Mrs. Faa, who was attacked in the Gully,” I said.

What seemed like an eternity of shadows fled across Father’s face.

“I was saddened to hear of that,” he said at last. “But I’m given to believe she’s going to make a splendid recovery.”

Neither of them knowing what to say next, they stood there staring fixedly at each other, and then Father said, “You’ll join us for supper, of course?”

You could have knocked me down with a moth-eaten feather!

Dear old Father! How I admired him. Generations of breeding and his natural gallantry had turned what might have been a sticky situation into a perfect triumph, and my bedroom, rather than the anticipated field of battle, had suddenly become a reception chamber.

Porcelain lowered her eyelids to signal assent.

“Good!” Father exclaimed. “That’s settled, then.”

He turned to me. “Mrs. Mullet returned not ten minutes ago to retrieve her purse. Left it in the pantry. If she’s still here, I’ll ask her if she wouldn’t mind—I believe she might still be in the kitchen.”

And with that, he was gone.

“Crikey!” Porcelain said.

“Quick,” I told her. “There’s not a minute to lose! You’ll probably want to have a wash-up and change into something more … fresh.”

She’d been wearing Fenella’s dowdy black outfit for days, and looked, to be perfectly frank, like a Covent Garden flower seller.

“My things won’t fit you,” I said, “but Daffy’s or Feely’s will.”

I beckoned her to follow, then led her through the creaking upstairs corridors.

“That’s Daffy’s room,” I said, pointing, when we reached the west wing of the house. “And that’s Feely’s. Help yourself—I’m sure they won’t mind. See you at supper. Come down when the gong is struck.”

I don’t know what makes me do these things, but secretly, I could hardly wait to see how my sisters reacted when Porcelain came down for supper in one of their favorite frocks. I hadn’t really had the chance to pay them back properly for the humiliation in the cellars. My jiggered looking glass had backfired horribly, but now, suddenly, out of the blue, dear old Fate had given me a second chance.

Not only that but Mrs. M had turned up unexpectedly in the kitchen, which presented a perfect opportunity to ask her the question that might well stamp this case “Closed.”

I flew down the stairs and skipped into the kitchen.

Hallelujah! Mrs. Mullet was alone.

“Sorry to hear you forgot your purse,” I said. “If I’d known sooner, I could have brought it to you. It would have been no trouble at all.”

This was called “storing up credits,” and it operated on the same principle as indulgences in the Roman Catholic Church, or what the shops in London called “the Lay-away Plan.”

“Thank you, dear,” Mrs. M said, “but it’s just as well I come back. The Colonel’s asked me to set a few things on the table, and I don’t mind, really, seein’ as it’s Alf’s lodge night, and I wouldn’t have much to do anyway but knit and train the budgerigar. We’re teachin’ it to say ‘Eee, it was agony, Ivy!’ You should ’ear it, dear. Alf says it’s ever so ’umorous.”

As she spoke, she bustled about the kitchen, preparing to serve supper.

I took a deep breath and made the leap.

“Was Brookie Harewood a Hobbler?” I asked

“Brookie? I’m sure I couldn’t tell you, dear. All I knows is, last time I seen ’im slinkin’ round the church, I told the vicar ’e’d best lock up the communion plate. That’s what I said: ‘You’d best lock up the communion plate before it goes pop like a weasel.’ ”

“What about Edward Sampson? Do you know anything about him?”

“Ted Sampson? I should say I do! Reggie’s half brother, ’e is, a reg’lar bad bun, that one. Owns that salvage yard in East Finchin’, and Alf says there’s more’n old tin goes through them gates. I shouldn’t be tellin’ you this, dear. Tender ears, and all that.”

I was filling in the blanks nicely. Pettibone and Company, under cover of a quiet shop, an out-of-the-way salvage yard, and an eccentric religion, were operating an antiques theft and forgery ring. Although I had suspected this for some time, I had not seen, until now, how all of it fitted together.

Essentially, Brookie stole, Edward copied, and Reginald sold treasures removed from stately homes. The ingenious twist was this: After the original objects were copied, they were returned to their owners, so that they would seldom, if ever, be missed.

Or were the originals replaced with the copies? I had not yet had time to find that out, but when I did, I would begin by making a chemical analysis of Sally Fox and Shoppo’s metallic content. I had originally intended to begin with the de Luce lobster pick I had found in the hands of Timothy—or was it really “Timofey”—Bull. But the demands on my time had made that impossible.

With his gob full of sweets, Timofey had been very difficult to understand.

I smiled as I recalled the child mucking in the lane.

“Danny’s pocket,” he had replied when I’d asked him where he got his pretty digger. In retrospect, he was almost cute.

“And Mrs. Bull, of course. Is she a Hobbler, too?”

“I couldn’t say,” Mrs. Mullet said. “I’ve been told Tilda Mountjoy was one of ’em, but I never heard it said that Margaret Bull was, even though them two is as thick as thieves! Them ’Obblesr goes traipsin’ round to one another’s ’ouses of a Sunday to sing their ’ymns, and shout, and roll about on the floor as if they was tryin’ to smother a fire in their unmentionables, and God knows what all else.”

I tried to picture Miss Mountjoy rolling around on the floor in the grips of religious ecstasy, but my imagination, vivid as it is, was not up to it.

“They’re a rum lot,” Mrs. M went on, “but there’s not a one of ’em would let Margaret Bull through their front gate. Not in a month o’ Sundays! Not anymore.”

“Why not?”

“Somethin’ ’appened when that baby of ’ers got took. She was never the same after—not that she was much of a marvel before—”

“What about her husband?”

“Tom Bull? ’E took it real hard. Nearly killed ’im, they say. ’E went off not long after, and my friend Mrs. Waller said ’is wife told ’er, in confidence, mind, that ’e wouldn’t be comin’ back.”

“Maybe he went off to find work. Dogger says a lot of men have done that since the end of the war.”

“ ’E had work enough. Worked for Pettibone’s brother-in-law.”

“Ted Sampson?”

“The very one we was talkin’ about. A foundryman, Tom Bull was, and a good one, so they say, even though ’e’d ’ad ’is troubles with the police. But when that baby girl o’ ’is got took, somethin’ ’appened, inside, like, and ’e went off ’is ’ead. Not long after, it were, ’e was up and gone.”

How I longed to blurt out to her that the body of Tom Bull’s baby daughter had been found in the Palings, but I dared not breathe a word. The news had not yet reached the village, and I didn’t want to be accused of leaking information that the police would sooner keep to themselves—at least for the time being.

“You’d better run along and clean up for dinner, dear,” Mrs. Mullet said suddenly, breaking in upon my train of thought. “The Colonel says you’re ’avin company to supper, so ’e won’t want to see dirty ’ands at the table.”

I held my tongue. In ordinary circumstances, I should have lashed out against such an impertinent remark, but today I had a new weapon.

“Quite right, Mrs. M,” I heard myself saying, as I trotted instantly and obediently to the door.

Here I paused, turned dramatically, and then in my best innocent-as-a-lamb voice, said, “Oh, by the way, Mrs. Mullet, Vanetta Harewood showed me her portrait of Harriet.”

The clatter of dishes stopped, and for a few moments there was a stony silence in the kitchen.

“I knew this day would come,” Mrs. Mullet said suddenly in an odd voice; the voice of a stranger. “I’ve been ’alf expectin’ it.”

She collapsed suddenly into a chair at the table, buried her face in her apron, and dissolved into a miserable sobbing.

I stood by helplessly, not quite knowing what to do.

At last, I pulled out the chair opposite, sat down at the table, and watched her weep.

I had a special fascination with tears. Chemical analyses of my own and those of others had taught me that tears were a rich and a wonderful broth, whose chief ingredients were water, potassium, proteins, manganese, various yeasty enzymes, fats, oils, and waxes, with a good dollop of sodium chloride thrown in, perhaps for taste. In sufficient quantities, they made for a powerful cleanser.

Not so very different, I thought, from Mrs. Mullet’s chicken soup, which she flung at even the slightest sniffle.

By now, Mrs. M had begun to subside, and she said, without removing the apron from her face: “A gift, it was. She wanted it for the Colonel.”

I reached out across the table and placed my hand on her shoulder. I didn’t say a word.

Slowly, the apron came down, revealing her anguished face. She took a shuddering breath.

“She wanted to surprise ’im with it. Oh, the trouble she went to! She was ever so ’appy. Bundlin’ up you lot of angels and motorin’ over to Malden Fenwick for your sittin’s—’avin’ that ’Arewood woman come ’ere to Buckshaw whenever the Colonel was away. Bitter cold, it was. Bitter.”

She mopped at her eyes and I suddenly felt ill.

Why had I ever mentioned the painting? Had I done it for no reason other than to shock Mrs. Mullet? To see her response? I hoped not.

“ ’Ow I’ve wanted to tell the Colonel about it,” Mrs. Mullet went on quietly, “but I couldn’t. It’s not my place. To think of it lyin’ there in ’er studio all these years, an’ ’im not knowin’ it—it breaks my ’eart. It surely does—it breaks my ’eart.”

“It breaks mine, too, Mrs. M,” I said, and it was the truth.

As she pulled herself to her feet, her face still wet and red, something stirred in my memory.

Red.

Red hair … Timofey Bull … his mouth stuffed with sweets and the silver lobster pick in his hand.

“Danny’s pocket,” he’d said, when I asked him where he got it. “Danny’s pocket.”

And I had misheard him.

Daddy’s pocket!

Red and silver. This was what my dreams and my good sense had been trying to tell me!

I felt suddenly as if a snail were slowly crawling up my spine.

Could it be that Tom Bull was still in Bishop’s Lacey? Could he still be living secretly amid the smoke that blanketed his house in the Gully?

If so, it might well be he who’d been outside smoking as I crept with Gry past his house in the dark. Perhaps it was he who had watched from the wood as Inspector Hewitt and his men removed Brookie’s body from the Poseidon fountain—he who had removed the pick from Brookie’s nose when Porcelain and I—

Good lord!

And Timofey had found the lobster pick in his father’s pocket, which could only mean—

At that very instant, the gong in the foyer was rung, announcing supper.

“Better get along, dear,” Mrs. Mullet said, poking at her hair with a forefinger and giving her face a last swipe with her apron. “You know what your father’s like about promptness. We mustn’t keep ’im waitin’.”

“Yes, Mrs. Mullet,” I said.

TWENTY-EIGHT

THE HOUSEHOLD HAD BEEN summoned, and we all of us stood waiting in the foyer.

I understood at once that Father had decided to make an occasion of Porcelain’s presence in the house, perhaps, I thought, because he felt remorse for the way in which he had treated her grandparents. He still did not know, of course, about the tragic death of Johnny Faa.

I stood at the bottom of the stairs, a little apart from the others, taking in, as if for the first time, the sad splendor of the de Luce ancestral home.

There had been a time when Buckshaw rang with laughter, or so I’d been told, but quite frankly, I could not even imagine it. The house seemed to hold itself in stiff disapproval, reflecting only the sound of whispers—setting dim but rigid limits on the lives of all of us who lived within its walls. Other than Father’s gorgon sister, Aunt Felicity, who made annual expeditions in order to berate him, there had been no guests at Buckshaw for as long as I could remember.

Daffy and Feely stood with annoyingly perfect posture on either side of Father, both of them scrubbed to disgusting perfection, like the well-bred but rather dim daughters of the local squire in a drawing-room drama. Just wait till they saw Porcelain!

To one side, Dogger hovered, nearly invisible against the dark paneling, save for his white face and his white hair—like a disembodied head afloat in the gloom.

Glancing at his military wristwatch, Father made a slight involuntary frown, but covered it nicely by pulling out his handkerchief and giving his nose an unconvincing blow.

He was nervous!

We stood there in silence, each of us staring off in a different direction.

Precisely fifteen minutes after the gong had sounded, a door closed somewhere above, and we focused our attention upon the top of the staircase.

As Porcelain appeared, we gasped collectively, and Mrs. Mullet, who had just come from the kitchen, gave out a cry like a small nocturnal animal. I thought for a moment she was going to bolt.

Porcelain had not chosen from Daffy’s or Feely’s wardrobe. She was dressed in one of my mother’s most memorable outfits: the knee-length, flame-colored dress of orange silk chiffon that Harriet had worn to the Royal Aero Society Ball the year before her final journey. A photograph had been taken by the Times that evening as Harriet arrived at the Savoy—a photograph that created a stir that to this day has never been quite forgotten.

But it wasn’t just the dress: Porcelain had pulled her hair back in the same way that Harriet had done when she was riding to the hounds. She must have copied the style from the black-and-white photo on Harriet’s desk.

Because I had rifled my mother’s jewel box myself from time to time, I recognized at once the antique amber necklace that lay against Porcelain’s surprisingly well-developed bosom, and the stones that glittered on her fingers.

Harriet’s—all of them Harriet’s!

Porcelain paused on the top step and looked down at us with what I took at the time to be shyness, but later decided might well have been contempt.