The gymnasium was an echoing canyon with a floor on several levels. It had once been a chapel, with towering stone arches, sunken aisles, gilded organ pipes, and quaint grottoes, but now the saints and martyrs in the stained-glass windows had nothing better to look down upon than a clutter of vaulting horses, parallel bars, climbing ropes, and rings suspended on chains: remarkably like the torture chamber in a castle I had once toured in Girl Guides.
I felt even more cold and naked and doltish in the square-necked navy gym slip than I had the first time, as if I were the village idiot in a smock—or a cowering pawn on someone else’s chessboard.
A shrill whistle blew as I entered and instructions were shouted. “Left arm upward … right arm forward … stretch! Right arm forward … left arm upward … stretch. Head forward … bend … stretch! Head left sideways … bend … stretch!”
I must be honest about the fact that I’m made extremely uneasy by excessive noise, and that I do not care for shouted instructions. If I’d been meant to be a sheep, I reasoned, I’d have been born with wool instead of skin.
I swarmed up a wooden ladder; dropped heavily to the mat; gave out a little cry of agony; winced in the direction of Miss Puddicombe, the games mistress; hooked my leg at an awkward angle as if to check for a broken bone; massaged my calf; and limped off to my room to get rid of the clown outfit.
We’d deal with the paperwork later.
I was blessed to have been born with an excellent sense of direction so that, even in the bath or the WC, I always have a fairly good idea of which way’s north.
Standing in the street outside Miss Bodycote’s, I could have gone either north or south but decided to strike off north because it was my favorite direction. North lay the North Pole, which seemed so much closer here in Canada than it had at Buckshaw. Too far north, I knew, and you run out of trees and into polar bears, but there seemed little chance of that with trams—sorry, streetcars—clanging away at the end of the block.
But I soon reconsidered. I was supposed to be thinking about my disobedience, but instead I found myself realizing that in street upon changing street of nearly identical houses, I might well become lost. I was, after all, in a strange city—face it, Flavia: in a strange country. Who knew what unsuspected dangers lurked just round the next corner?
A woman in a pink knitted hat came running out of a house whose windows upstairs were covered with bedsheets and an unfamiliar flag.
“Are you lost?” she called out, after no more than a glance at me.
Could it be so obvious that I was a stranger?
I smiled at her (no point in aggravating the natives), turned on my heel, and went back the way I had come.
It didn’t take much thinking to realize that there was much greater safety in sticking to the busier streets.
Follow the tram lines, my instinct was whispering into my ear.
A few minutes later I found myself once more in front of Miss Bodycote’s, from which a buzz of busy voices floated to my ears. It was good to be outdoors. It was good to be alone.
I marched off to the south until I saw a Danforth Avenue street sign, at which point I turned my face toward the west.
It is a remarkable fact, and one not often commented upon, how hard it is to walk upon pavement after a lifetime of village streets and country lanes. Before I had gone a mile I made a pretext of stopping at what appeared to be a greengrocer’s shop for a bottle of ginger beer.
“Your money’s no good here, dear,” the elderly woman behind the counter said after examining and handing me back my shilling. “Tell you what—I’ll give you a bottle of cold pop just for the pleasure of hearing you talk. You have such a lovely accent. Go ahead, say something.”
I did not like thinking of myself as having an accent: It was everyone else who had one.
“Thank you,” I said. But I knew, even as I spoke, that “thank you” was not enough to pay for a drink.
“No, something decent,” she said. “Give us a song—or some poe-try.”
Other than a couple of comic verses about chemistry, which didn’t seem appropriate to the occasion, the only poem that I could remember was one I had heard a couple of little girls chanting as they skipped rope in Cow Lane, back home in Bishop’s Lacey, which seemed now like a remembered scene from a previous life.
I launched into it before shame could make me change my mind, and bolt. Striking a demure pose with my hands clasped at my waist, I began:
“Poor Little Leo
Was sunk by a torpedo
They brought him back in a Union Jack
From over the bounding sea-o.
Poor little Leo
He lost his life in Rio
They brought him back in a Union Jack
From over the bounding sea-o.”
“That’s lovely, dear,” the woman said, reaching into a cooling cabinet and handing over a frosty bottle of Orange Crush. “I had a nephew Leo once. He wasn’t sunk by a torpedo, but he did move to Florida. What do you think about that?”
I smiled because it seemed the proper thing to do.
I was already on the street, strolling quickly away, when the words of the stupid rhyme came flooding back into my head: “They brought him back in a Union Jack …”
Why did they seem so familiar? It took a moment for the penny to drop.
Brought him back in a Union Jack—just like the body that had fallen out of the chimney!
Could there possibly be a connection?
Was someone—some unknown killer—murdering his victims according to the skipping rhymes of schoolchildren, in the way that Miss Christie has written about?
Daffy had told me about the mysteries based upon nursery rhymes, railway guides, and so forth, but was it even remotely possible that a Canadian killer had decided to copy those methods?
The very thought of it both excited and chilled me. On the one hand, I might well have part of the solution already in hand, but on the other, the killer could still be at large, and not far away.
I’m afraid I wasn’t getting far with reflecting upon my disobedience. Miss Fawlthorne would almost certainly quiz me when I got back to the academy, and I’d need to have some kind of acceptable penitence prepared. But a body in the chimney isn’t something that falls into your lap every day, and I needed now to give it my undivided attention. All the nitpicking at Miss Bodycote’s had been so distracting that the flag-wrapped corpse had been forced to climb into the backseat, as it were.
By now I was crossing a tall limestone bridge or viaduct, which crossed a broad valley. I hauled myself up by the elbows on the rail and peered over the side at the muddy brown water that seeped sluggishly along far below. It was a long way down, and the very thought of it made my stomach feel ticklish.
I walked on, unwilling or unable to turn round and go back to captivity.
Captivity! Yes, that was it—I was the tiger caged in a zoo, longing to be returned home to its jungle. Perhaps I could escape, as tigers were occasionally reported to do in the newspapers.
In fact, I was already out, wasn’t I?