The Dead in Their Vaulted Arches (24 page)

There could be no half truths, no excuses, no evasion. No appeals to sympathy, no claims of ignorance, no sweeping of inconvenient facts under the carpet.

It was that breathtakingly simple. Really, it was.

I did not knock. I opened the door and walked in.

Father was standing silhouetted at the window, and how old he looked: how very, very old.

He had heard me come in, of course, but he did not turn. He might have been a carving in ebony of a dark shadow looking out over the lawn.

I went to his side and, without a word, handed him Harriet’s will.

And without a word he took it.

For a moment we stared at each other. It was the first time, I think, that I had ever looked my father in the eye.

And then I did what I needed to do.

I turned and walked out of the room.

Of course I had wanted to tell Father exactly how Harriet’s will had come to be in my possession. I had wanted to make a clean breast of it—the whole scheme: my plans for Harriet’s resurrection and my surprise presentation of her, newly restored to life, to her grieving husband, to my grieving father.

What a scene it would have been!

But my well-meaning plan, alas, through no fault of my own, had been thwarted by those interfering killers from the Home Office.

Because of them, Harriet would now remain dead forever.

Father would realize from the document what I had done. I wouldn’t need to say a word.

I had no right, of course, to read my mother’s will, and I was glad I had not done so. I had realized that while staring at my own reflection in the looking glass. Her will was not mine to read.

I had removed it from its rather unpleasant wallet and put it into Father’s hands.

For better or for worse, I had done what I had done, and now there was no going back.

I had done the right thing and I would jolly well have to live with it.

TWENTY-THREE

H
ARRIET
’
S FUNERAL WAS NOW
just hours away. There wasn’t a moment to lose.

I sauntered off across the Visto as if I was going for an aimless walk.

At the far corner of the ancient, overgrown lawn, Tristram Tallis, in blue coveralls and almost invisible in a cloud of blue smoke, was tinkering with the idling engine of
Blithe Spirit
. He waved a spanner in the air.

“If you’ve come for another hop, I’m afraid you’re out of luck,” he said as I reached his side.

“ ‘And he opened the bottomless pit,’
 ” announced a loud, dramatic, and rather familiar voice,
“ ‘and there arose a smoke out of the pit, as the smoke of a great furnace.’
 ”

Adam Sowerby popped round from the other side of the aircraft. I hadn’t noticed he was there.

“ 
‘And the sun and the air were darkened by reason of the
smoke of the pit.’
The author of the Book of Revelation, whoever he might have been, was doubtless thinking of recalcitrant aero carburetors when he wrote those words.”

Adam was always spouting poetry. It oozed out of him like jam from a squeezed bun.

“Spare the child,” Tristram said, as if I wasn’t there.

The whole scene had an air of dreamlike unreality: the three of us standing on a ruined lawn in the blowing smoke of a ticking aero engine, and Adam all the while spewing poetic nonsense that would have made even the author of the Book of Revelation, whoever he might have been, fall gasping to the ground in helpless laughter.

Only Tristram seemed remotely real, even though, in his baggy coveralls and with the spanner in his hand, he reminded me of a court jester with a bladder on a stick.

Who was he, anyway? Beyond the fact that he had once come to Buckshaw to buy
Blithe Spirit
from Harriet, that he claimed to have fought in the Battle of Britain, and that Mrs. Mullet doted upon him, I knew nothing whatsoever about the man.

Was he really who he pretended to be? It had been my experience that strangers were not always truthful about their identity. Some seemed able to shrug it off as easily as a wet raincoat.

I was simply dying to ask Adam about his visit in the early hours to Rook’s End, but to risk doing so in front of Tristram could well turn out to be a bad mistake.

As if he were reading my mind, Adam gave me a sly wink behind the pilot’s back. I ignored it.

Tristram reached into the cockpit, and the propeller
clattered to a standstill. “Fouled plug,” he announced. “Nothing to do with the carburetor. So much for Revelation, Sowerby.”

Adam shrugged. “I’m afraid the Apocalypse of John is rather slender on the subject of sparking plugs, unless of course, his ‘lightnings and thunderings’ and ‘seven lamps of fire burning before the throne’ foresaw the rotary aero engine, although that won’t quite do, will it? This old girl has four cylinders, not seven, and besides—”

I gave him
such
a look! Foolishness in a grown man, no matter how lighthearted, is disgusting.

There was more here than met the eye. I was sure of it. Why, on the morning of a funeral, would two houseguests be fiddling with an aeroplane on an out-of-the-way lawn and burbling bits of Revelation? It didn’t make any sense.

Was Tristram Tallis the tall man I had glimpsed at the window of my laboratory in the ciné film? Or could that man have been the one who was pushed under the train?

It might have been neither, and I could hardly ask. One of them was dead, and the other—well, the other, if he was who I suspected he might be, would hardly blurt out the truth to a mere girl, even if she
was
almost twelve years old.

And Adam Sowerby. It all came down to this: What was he doing in Bishop’s Lacey and for whom was he working? Was he here as a private investigator? Or as a friend of the family?

Until I knew the answers to these questions, I could trust neither of these two men.

As usual, I was on my own.

“If you’ll excuse me,” I said, “I have things to do.”

South I walked, towards the ornamental lake, until my direction was hidden by the brick wall of the kitchen garden. Then, slowly, I made my way back towards the east, working round the ornamental lake until I was safely hidden by the trees of the Palings. Then, across the little bridge to the Gully, and it wasn’t long before I was climbing Goodger Hill.

If it hadn’t been for the steepness of Goodger Hill and the Jack O’Lantern, I’d have brought Gladys. I thought of her sitting alone at home, wondering why I had forsaken her. Although Gladys loved nothing better than whizzing hell-for-leather down hills, she loathed being shoved up them. It made both of us cranky.

With a sigh, I trudged on towards my destination.

Set among acres of moldy grass and ancient beech trees, Rook’s End was a damp, subsiding monstrosity consisting on the outside of countless gables and on the inside of stale endless corridors.

A mushroom farm for humans
, I thought.

It was not the first time I had visited the place. I had, on several occasions in the past, found it necessary to consult with Dr. Kissing, and I must admit I was quite looking forward to seeing the old gentleman again.

I crunched across the gravel of the now empty forecourt and opened the front door. I thought it quite unlikely that anyone would be at the desk, and I was right.

The same silver bell sat beside the same smudged sign that read “Ring Plse.”

I didn’t bother.

From somewhere in the distance came the sound of many human voices and the clink of crockery. The air was sour with the smell of food prepared by the bucketful, the chiefest of which was cabbage and its derivative gases.

I knew that I would find Dr. Kissing where I always found him: at the far end of the narrow solarium.

The bubbling brown linoleum hissed and popped disgustingly beneath my shoes as I made my way across the vast, empty space.

From behind the high back of the familiar wicker bath chair, a silvery cord of cigarette smoke spiraled its way up towards a dark and distant ceiling.

“Hello, Flavia,” he said without turning round. He put down his
Times
with a faint rustle of paper.

I walked quickly into his field of view and gave him a polite peck on each cheek. His skin was as crisp and dry as must be one of those scrolls which have been found in a cave on the shore of the Dead Sea.

“You’ve come about your mother,” he said.

I remained silent.

“As I knew you would,” he added.

Dr. Kissing was not a person to beat about the bush.

Nor should I be, I decided.

“My father was here this morning,” I said. “Before sunrise.”

Dr. Kissing gazed at me coolly from amidst the rising cigarette smoke. In his mouse-colored dressing gown and
tasseled velvet smoking cap, he might have been one of those impossibly old Oriental idols sitting placidly in a cloud of incense that I had seen on the jackets of the thrillers at Foyle’s.

If I was going to enter into the game, I might as well show the full strength of my hand.

“So were Aunt Felicity and Adam Sowerby,” I added.

“Yes,” he said at last, but pleasantly. “So they were.”

“I saw their cars in the forecourt.”

“Did you indeed?”

“From
Blithe Spirit
. Harriet’s aeroplane. Her owner took me up for a ride.”

Dr. Kissing nodded knowingly as he stubbed out his cigarette and reached for another.

“You heard us?”

“The sound of a Gipsy Moth engine clattering away like a contented sewing machine in the skies above this scepter’d isle is one of the few remaining assurances in our changed world. The time, I believe, was five minutes before six and approximately a quarter hour after sunrise.”

Did nothing escape this aged hive of information?

“I am very sorry about your mother,” he said suddenly grave, and then, after a moment’s thought: “You must be especially brave today.”

He looked at me with his old, faded eyes, and I knew that this was the moment: the moment when I would have my only chance to do what I was planning to do, to say what I had come to say.

Dr. Kissing had ordered me to be brave, and so brave I must be.

I took a deep breath. “You’re the Gamekeeper, aren’t you?”