? TWENTY-FOUR ?
I FELT AS IF my heart had been shot down in flames and crashed into the sea. Primarily, of course, for poor Mrs. Bannerman, but also, I must admit, for my own lost chances.
It was entirely my fault. I should have taken the opportunity to question her earlier about all those goings-on at Miss Bodycote’s in years past. She had certainly been there long enough to know where all—or at least most—of the bodies were buried, if I may put it in such a coarse way.
Those early morning hours in the chemistry laboratory before the academy was awake had allowed us to form bonds that could never have developed in a classroom or on the playing field.
Squandered, I thought. Utterly wasted.
Without putting myself in even more of a jam than I was in already, there was no way of questioning students or faculty.
But that had never stopped Flavia de Luce before.
“Trust no one,” Gremly had typed out on the Morse code sender. And Miss Fawlthorne had said the same—at least before she had contradicted herself.
Gremly, at least, was a member of the Nide, or so she had claimed. It was she, also, who had tipped me off about the first Mrs. Rainsmith. But she had distanced herself from me on the bus, and I knew, even without being told, that she did not want us to be seen together.
Who, then, could I trust?
Scarlett? I had asked her the cryptic pheasant question, but she, like Gremly, had recoiled with something that could only be fear.
Inspector Gravenhurst, I supposed, but it seemed unlikely he would share the results of his confidential investigations with a mere schoolgirl such as me.
Wallace Scroop came to mind, but I wrote him off almost immediately. He had spilled the beans about the ancient skull, but nothing more. If the truth be told, I had given him more information than he had given me—even if mine had turned out to be untrue. If Clarissa Brazenose, Wentworth, and Le Marchand were still alive, the information I had fed him was no more than a load of old horse hockey. I wondered if he knew?
At any rate, Wallace wouldn’t likely be in much of a mood to share further confidences.
Outside, it had begun to rain: not a downpour, but a cold drizzle which almost at once, due to condensation and the dropping temperature, began to fog the window.
I breathed heavily upon the glass, obscuring my view of the street, and creating a blank canvas upon which I could draw a whole new world with my forefinger.
I did it without even thinking: It came from somewhere deep inside.
Here was Bishop’s Lacey, and here, St. Tancred’s, with its churchyard. I sketched in a couple of little tombstones with my fingernail. Over here was the High Street, and Cow Lane, and Cobbler’s Lane, and Mrs. Mullet’s cottage.
Lord, how I missed her!
A warm tear ran down my cheek, matching to perfection a racing raindrop on the outside of the cold glass.
Here was her picket fence, and here her old rosebushes, which Alf kept trimmed to military standards. I almost began to sob as I etched in the clothesline, with someone’s shirts—Father’s, I realized with a shock—flapping wildly, sadly, in the fresh English breeze.
Laundry! Of course! What a fool I had been! I felt a stupid grin crawling like a fly across my face.
I wiped my eyes with the back of my hand and the wet window with my palm. No point in leaving clues behind, even if they were drawn in dampness.
Who was it—Daffy would know—that wanted “Here Lies One Whose Name Is Writ in Water” carved on his tombstone? Keats? Yeats?
I couldn’t remember—which was precisely what he wanted, wasn’t it?
It was Monday morning: washing day. The laundry would be opening early and I would be there—with bells on!
*
I let myself in and locked the door. In the early morning darkness, the laundry clanked and groaned as if it were a sleeping beast.
Kelly must have turned up late last night, or earlier this morning, to stoke the boilers, which were now hissing like a basket of angry asps. Already, the heat was almost unbearable. By midday, it would be killing.
I took the note I had written and placed it dead center on the table where Marge worked. She could hardly miss it.
It had caused me a considerable amount of thought and a considerable amount of blood. I hoped it was worth it.
Guided by the beacons of glowing pilot lights, I felt my way in the near darkness round the back of the main boiler to the ladder I had spotted on my earlier visits. Putting one hand on each rail and a foot on the bottom rung, I hauled myself up and began to climb.
A false dawn broke as I neared the frosted window at the top of the wall, where the sickly orange glow of a yard light seeped in among the panting pipes. I inhaled the acrid smell of hot steam.
At the top of the ladder I stepped off onto a walkway of perforated metal which spanned the room behind and above the boilers. Great valves—some painted red—sang away to themselves, like colorful barnacles on the hulk of a sunken liner.
An enormous duct, wrapped like King Tut in some kind of insulating material (asbestos, I hoped—otherwise it would be too hot) ran in an “L” shape down and across the laundry. I hauled myself cautiously up onto it, creeping wormlike along its length until I was directly above Marge’s worktable.
From this “coign of vantage” (as Shakespeare would have called it) I could not possibly be seen. I was tucked away, safely out of sight, high above my enemies like one of the swallows in the battlements of Macbeth’s castle.
… no jutty, frieze, buttress,
Nor coign of vantage, but this bird hath made
His pendant bed …
And here I would nest.
Daffy would be proud of me.
I tucked myself in and waited. The warm humidity and the gentle hissing of the steam duct made it seem as if I were a baby animal—a hippopotamus, perhaps, or an elephant, tucked up in contentment against her mother’s leathery skin, listening to her distant heartbeat and her long, slow breathing.
The heat must have caused me to fall asleep. I was jolted awake by a scream which began as a screech, then rose and fell, wailing in the air.
My eyes flew open, my blood already well on the way to curdling.
“What is it, Marge? What’s the matter?”
Sal’s voice.
“You look as if you’ve seen a ghost. Sit down, I’ll get a chair.”
I didn’t risk peering over the edge of the duct upon which I was lying. My uncanny powers of hearing would tell me all I needed to know.
A nauseating scraping of wood on concrete followed by a plump thump told me that Sal had fetched the chair and that Marge had dropped heavily into it.
A rustle of paper confirmed that Marge had handed my note to Sal.
There was a silence in the steam as words ceased, and a low moan began.
I was enjoying this, actually.
I pictured Sal’s eyes tracking hesitantly across the page, her lips moving as she read.
“What does it mean? One of you knows my killer?”
After hours of pondering, I had decided to crib the message of the Ouija board word for word. I could hardly have bettered it.
“Christ! It’s written in blood, Sal.” Marge had regained the power of speech.
“Fresh blood, too,” she added. “Hasn’t gone brown yet.”
I rubbed my thumb against the still-raw end of my forefinger, which I had pierced again and again with one of the despised embroidery needles from the personal kit I had been issued. It’s surprising how much blood it takes to write half-a-dozen words.