The Dead in Their Vaulted Arches (23 page)

Everyone from family to the vicar and his wife had tried to dissuade her, but all in vain. Feely was as steely cold in her stubborn resolve as only a wispy-looking musician can be.

Daffy, cocooned in some kind of comic, musty Victorian mourning outfit, was helping herself to another kipper. Her acid glance defied me to say anything.

When she was like this, even Father knew better than to risk a single word.

Aunt Felicity sat at the middle of the table, well apart from both groups, humming mindlessly to herself like a hive of distant bees.

Adam gave me the tiniest of nods before resuming his quiet conversation with Tristram, who did not give me so much as a glance. It was as if our early morning flight had
been merely a dream—and perhaps it had. Perhaps it had never happened.

A time traveler, materializing at our breakfast table from some far future, would have supposed that Mrs. Mullet was the only one of us who was flesh and blood with the deceased.

Mrs. M, to be perfectly honest, looked a wreck. Her face was flushed, her eyes brimming with unshed tears, and her hair sticking out like jackstraws.

She fished a kipper and a couple of bangers from their serving dishes and placed them on my plate. Her lips were even more tightly pressed together than they had been before—as if they were now additionally secured by C-clamps.

She said not a word, and I realized in that instant how deep was her despair.

I reached out to touch her hand but she was already gone.

Breakfast broke up with no more than a few hushed words exchanged between the two guests at the foot of the table.

I excused myself and left the room. I would go to my laboratory and try to set down in my notes the confusion that was in my mind.

I was no more than halfway across the foyer when the doorbell rang. Dogger appeared from nowhere, as he often does so uncannily, and swung the heavy door back on its hinges.

Two delivery men in overalls, their arms filled with flowers, stood waiting. Behind them, on the gravel sweep,
their van, open at the back, overflowed with bouquets, wreaths, and carpeted arrangements of carnations, cornflowers, arum lilies, and forget-me-nots all nestled in beds of Queen Anne’s lace. There were gladioli, peonies, and roses; marigolds, chrysanthemums, and irises.

It was as if the gardens of Heaven had been raided and the plunder delivered to our door with more than enough flowers to overflow the foyer.

In spite of the early hour, a fresh queue of mourners had already formed, snaking round the van and making a straggling half circle in the forecourt.

As the men spat on their hands and began the long job of moving the flowers into the house, Dogger produced a small notebook from his vest pocket and began carefully cataloging the names of the senders, which he read from the pasteboard cards attached to each arrangement.

It was as if all the world had known Harriet, and all the world in mourning had sent their floral tributes.

“Sorry about your mother,” a voice said at my ear. “Rotten bad luck. I should have hoped it would turn out better than this.”

I spun round, knowing already that it was Adam Sowerby, or, to give him the whole McGillicuddy—as it was so prominently printed on his card, which I still had tucked away in the pages of a recent notebook:

He was, of course, something of a fraud. While working in the guise of an archaeological botanist, retrieving and coaxing back into germination the seeds of plants and flowers thought to be long extinct, the man was actually an inquiry agent, or—to put it more plainly—a private detective.

When he learned of my recent successes, he had tried to recruit me as his partner in criminal investigation, but I had quickly discovered that the man took more than he gave. Worse than that, he had point-blank refused to tell me whom he was working for.

Since Adam was an old friend of Father’s, there wasn’t much that I could do to keep him off my pitch, but there was no law that said I had to cooperate.

“It must have been a very great shock,” he said, still talking, even though I hadn’t been listening.

I nodded and headed for the staircase.

“As must have been that poor bloke at the station.”

I stopped in my tracks. How did Adam know about that? Had he been there?

I thought he had only arrived last night. Had he already been in consultation with the police?

I could hardly believe that Inspector Hewitt would confide in a private inquiry agent—and a private inquiry agent from London, at that!

Of course, by now, the circumstances of the stranger’s death must be the talk of the village. Perhaps that was why some of the mourners had looked at me so oddly. Adam might well have stopped and been given the goods at Bert Archer’s petrol station or at the Thirteen Drakes. Or might
he have heard the grisly details from someone here at Buckshaw?

If that was the case, the burning question was—from whom?

Who else in the house had seen what happened on the railway platform? If Inspector Hewitt, out of sympathy for the family, had delayed his questioning of the household’s inhabitants, who else had witnessed the murder?

Who else was keeping silent?

“All right,” I said, turning round reluctantly. “Tell me what you know.”

There are people who are able to deflect direct questions as easily as a duck sheds water, and Adam, I knew, was one of them.

“Terence Alfriston Tardiman, bachelor, of 3A Campden Gardens, Notting Hill Gate, London, W8, aged thirty-seven.”

Adam’s frankness surprised me.

“How do you know that?”

“No magic involved,” he said. “I’d been following him for five days. This time.”

“What do you mean ‘this time’? Have you followed him before?”

Adam nodded. “Off again, on again, gone again, Finnegan. It’s been going on for years.”

I hadn’t the faintest idea what he was referring to, but I pretended I did.

“Who was he?” I asked. “Other than his name.”

“That’s what I’ve been trying to discover,” Adam said. “As Mr. Churchill once so aptly put it, Tardiman was a
riddle inside a mystery wrapped in an enigma. And now that he’s dead, more so than ever.”

“Mr. Churchill was at the station,” I found myself saying. “He spoke to me.”

Oh, fluff!
I had blurted it out without thinking.

“Winnie quite often likes to insert himself at the heart of the action,” Adam told me. “Rather like Alfred Hitchcock’s cameo appearances in his own films, but somewhat more risky.

“What did he have to say?” he added casually.

“Just that he was sorry,” I said.

I was certainly not going to tell him that Mr. Churchill had asked:
“And have you, also, acquired a taste for pheasant sandwiches, young lady?”

With Inspector Hewitt and his men of the Hinley Constabulary and Adam Tradescant Sowerby (Inquiries) on the case, I knew instinctively to keep certain information to myself.

That I had let slip the fact that Mr. Churchill had spoken to me was troubling. I would need to be far more discreet in future.

I was trying to think of a way to remove myself from this dangerous conversation when someone laid a large hand on my shoulder.

It was the vicar, Denwyn Richardson, and behind him stood his wife, Cynthia.

“Dearest Flavia,” he said. “We’ve been looking for you everywhere. I’ve spoken to your father, of course, but—I told him we were sorry not to have traveled with you to Buckshaw from the station yesterday, but what with poor
Mrs. Dainty being taken so suddenly, and everything being consequently at sixes and sevens, to say nothing of the fact that our telephone at the rectory chose that moment to—well, how very, very sorry we are that things have come to such a—”

Cynthia brushed past him and wrapped me in such a tight and quaking hug that I thought my bones would surely shatter.

We had had our battles, Cynthia and I, and it was only recently that I had learned of the tragic death, seven years ago Christmas, of their daughter, Hannah.

Hannah had been four years old, my exact age at the time, when she fell beneath the wheels of a train at Doddingsley station. She had been laid to rest in a so-far unmarked grave in the churchyard of St. Tancred’s, and the villagers had begun a conspiracy of silence to shield the Richardsons from grief and guilt. The little girl had darted away from her father on that tragic long-ago Christmas, and he had blamed himself.

The trembling of Cynthia’s embrace became a chill as I realized what a harsh reminder the death of Terence Tardiman must be to them: that whole ghastly nightmare on the railway platform brought back to life and shoved in their faces, as it were.

I felt my tears coming, and before I could stop them, they were dribbling down Cynthia’s neck. Rather than pulling away, though, she was now hugging me all the harder.

How sorry I suddenly felt for this poor little woman: this poor unfortunate little creature upon whom I had wasted
so much hatred over the years. What kind of life did she have, when you stop to think about it? All of her days and nights were given over to visiting the sick, arranging flowers for the church, chairing meetings of this committee and that, booking the parish hall, cooking three meals a day for her husband, typing up and printing handbills and posters on a hectograph or churning out church bulletins on a Banda machine, to say nothing of managing her husband’s timetable, mending his clothes, starching his surplices, running the church library, and listening to the troubles of everyone in Bishop’s Lacey.

Being married to a man who dressed himself in vestments was no holiday camp.

She didn’t seem to want to let me go. The hug went on until I thought to say, “Oh! I’m sorry, I must be hurting you.”

At that point we both gave a little laugh and released our life-and-death grip on each other.

Adam, meanwhile, had wandered away and was critically inspecting the funeral flowers. I was dying to ask him what he thought, but I didn’t dare.

Dogger had now admitted those from the head of the queue, and the long trudge up the stairs to Harriet’s boudoir had resumed. It would go on until just after noon, when preparations for departure would begin.

I could only hope and pray that those officious creatures from the Home Office had thought to stop the dripping.

I took my leave of the Richardsons and climbed the stairs to the east wing. In the top corridor, I knew instantly that I was not alone.

There is a vibration in the air that is not a sound and not a smell but more a
feeling
in the atmosphere that signals without fail the presence of another.

I flung open the door of my bedroom and marched inside, but no one was there. Then the laboratory. Except for Esmeralda, it, too, was empty.

Down the hall I crept on tiptoe, taking great care to avoid the squeaky floorboard in front of the nook. I put my hand on the knob of Angels—and threw open the door.

Undine was standing on the laboratory stool, the oilcloth wallet in her hand. She had fished it out of its hiding place behind the baggy wallpaper.

“You lied to me,” she said, wide-eyed with indignation. “You told me you were watering plants.”

I have to give the girl credit. Not only had she found the hidden wallet, but she had manufactured a remarkably good response when I caught her red-handed. It was exactly the kind of thing I might have thought of myself. Someday I might even tell her that—but not now.

I marched smartly across the room and snatched the packet from her hands. “You little beast!” I said. “Is this how you repay kindness?”

“You crept up on me,” Undine pouted. “Ibu
said
you were devious.”

“Ibu did, did she? Did she say anything else?”

“Yes. She told me to keep an eye on you.”

Keep an eye on me! That was the last straw.

“Tell me something, Undine,” I said. “Do you know how to say ‘buzz off’ in Malay?”

“Berambus.”

“Excellent!
Berambus!
”

“Are you dismissing me?” she asked.

“You’re a very perceptive child,” I said, shoving her out the door. “Now tallyho, and don’t come back.”

“Brute!” Undine said, getting in the last word, as I somehow knew she would. “Ibu was right.”

I gave her the response she deserved: I crossed my eyes horribly and stuck out my tongue at her.

“Ain’t you beautiful!” She giggled, and then she was gone.

Beautiful? It was the first time anyone had called me that—even as an insult.

I examined my image in one of the dusty, peeling mirrors that hung in the dim hall.

If I were a painting
, I thought,
it would be called
Girl in Black
and would probably be by one of those artists such as the American Whistler
.

I was little more than a white face staring out at myself from a gloomy background, the only spot of color my eyes.

It made me feel so old, so sad, so much a part of the house, so much a de Luce.

The face was, of course, Harriet’s face. Father had told me recently that I wasn’t just
like
Harriet, but that I
was
Harriet.

I didn’t even have a face to call my own.

It was in that moment, looking at myself staring back at myself, that something somewhere deep inside went
click
—as if the universe, and I with it, had, like a grandfather clock, moved on to the next cog of a clunking wooden gear.

I can’t explain it any more clearly than that. One instant I was plain old Flavia de Luce, and the next instant—
click
—I was plain old Flavia de Luce, but with a difference. For all the tea in China, I couldn’t say what the difference was, but only that a distinct change had taken place.

And I knew in that instant what I must do.

With my heart in my mouth—this wasn’t going to be easy; in fact, it was going to be the most difficult moment of my entire life—I made my way to the west wing. The long line of mourners was still shuffling slowly across the foyer and up the stairs. Most of them averted their eyes as I pardoned my way through the queue and made for Father’s study.