“Them tradesmen don’t give a flick,” Mrs. Mullet said disgustedly, her arms white to the elbows with flour. “Really, they don’t. One day it’s a fly in the clotted cream, and the next it’s a—well, you really don’t want to know, dear. But one thing’s as clear as dishwater. If you lets ’em get away with it, there’s never any tellin’ what they’ll bring round next time. Keep quiet about a toothpick in today’s butter and next thing you know you’ll be findin’ a doorknob in the cottage cheese. I don’t like it, dear, but it’s the way of the world.”
How on earth, I wondered, could I bring the conversation around from tradesmen to Brookie Harewood without seeming to do so?
“Perhaps we should eat more fish,” I suggested. “Some of the fishermen in the village sell it fresh from their creels. Brookie Harewood, for instance.”
Mrs. Mullet looked at me sharply. “Hmph! Brookie Harewood! He’s no more than a poacher. I’m surprised the Colonel hasn’t run him off the Palings. Them are your fish he’s sellin’ at the cottage gates.”
“I suppose he has to earn a living.”
“Livin’?” She bristled, giving the great mound of bread dough an extra pummel. “He don’t need to make a livin’ no more than Grace’s goose. Not with that mother of his over in Malden Fenwick sendin’ him reg’lar checks to stay away. He’s a layabout, plain and simple, that one is, and a rascal to boot.”
“A remittance man?” I asked.
Daffy had once told me about the black-sheep son of our neighbors, the Blatchfords, who was paid to keep well away in Canada. “Two pounds ten shillings per mile per year,” she said. “He lives in the Queen Charlotte Islands to maximize his pension.”
“Mittens man or not, he’s no good, and that’s a fact,” said Mrs. Mullet. “He’s managed to get in with a bad lot.”
“Colin Prout?” I suggested, thinking of the way Brookie had bullied the boy at the fête.
“Colin Prout’s no more than Brookie Harewood’s spare fingers, or so I’ve ’eard. No, I was talkin’ about Reggie Pettibone an’ that lot what ’as the shop in the ’igh street.”
“The antiques place?”
Pettibone’s Antiques & Quality Goods was just a few doors west of the Thirteen Drakes. Although I had passed it often, I had never been inside.
Mrs. Mullet sniffed.
“Antiques, my sitter!” she exclaimed. “Sorry, dear, but that’s ’ow I feels about it. That Reggie Pettibone give us two pounds six and three last year for a table me and Alf bought new at the Army and Navy when first we was married. Three weeks later we spots it in ’is window with silver knobs and fifty-five guineas on it! And a sign what says ‘Georgian Whist Table by Chippendale.’ We knew it was ours because Alf reckernized the burn mark on the leg where ’e raked it with an ’ot poker whilst ’e was tryin’ to fish out a coal what ’ad popped out of the grate and rolled under it when our Agnes was just a mite.”
“And Brookie’s in with Pettibone?”
“I should say he is. Thick as thieves. Tight as the jaws off a nutcracker, them two.”
“What does his mother think of that, I wonder?”
“Pfaw!” Mrs. Mullet said. “A fat lot she cares about ’im. ’Er with ’er paints and brushes! She does the ’orses and ’ounds crowd, you know—that lot o’ swells. Charges ’em a pretty penny, too, I’ll wager. Brookie and ’is under’anded ways ’as brought ’er nothin’ but shame. To my mind, she don’t rightly care what ’e gets ’isself up to so long as ’e keeps clear of Malden Fenwick.”
“Thank you, Mrs. M,” I said. “I enjoy talking to you. You always have such interesting stories to tell.”
“Mind you, I’ve said nothing,” she said in an undertone, raising a finger. “My lips are sealed.”
And in rather an odd way, there was truth in what she said. Since I first came into the room I had been waiting for her to ask me about the Gypsy, or why the police had turned up at Buckshaw, but she had done neither. Was it possible she didn’t know about either of these events?
It seemed unlikely. Mrs. M’s recent chin-wag at the kitchen door with the milk-float man was likely to have resulted in more swapping of intelligence than a chin-wag between Lord Haw-Haw and Mata Hari.
I was already across the kitchen with my hand on the door when she said it: “Don’t go wandering too far off, dear. That nice officer—the one with the dimples—will be round soon to ’ave your fingerprints.”
Curse the woman! Was she eavesdropping from behind every closed door at Buckshaw? Or was she truly clairvoyant?
“Oh, yes,” I replied lamely. “Thanks for reminding me, Mrs. M. I’d almost forgotten about him.”
The doorbell rang as I came through the passage beneath the stairs. I put on a sprint but Feely beat me to it.
I skidded to a stop on the foyer’s checkerboard tiles just as she swung open the front door to reveal Detective Sergeant Graves standing on the doorstep, small black box in hand and his jaw already halfway to the ground.
I have to admit that Feely had never looked more beautiful: From her salmon-colored silk blouse to her sage green mohair sweater (both of which, as I knew from my own snooping expeditions, she had pinched from Harriet’s dressing room), from her perfect honey-colored hair to her sparkling blue eyes (having, of course, left her black-rimmed spectacles, as she always did, stuffed behind the pillows on the chesterfield), she was a close-up from a Technicolor cinema film.
She had planned this, the hag!
“Sergeant Graves, I presume?” she said in a low, husky voice—one I had never heard her use before. “Come in. We’ve been expecting you.”
We? What in the old malarkey was she playing at?
“I’m Flavia’s sister, Ophelia,” she was saying, extending a coral-encrusted wrist and a long white hand that made the Lady of Shalott’s fingers look like meathooks.
I could have killed her!
What right did Feely have to insert herself, without so much as a by-your-leave, between me and the man who had come to Buckshaw expressly to take my fingerprints? It was unforgiveable!
Still, I mustn’t forget that I’d had more than one daydream in which the chipper little sergeant married my older sister and lived in a flower-choked cottage where I would be able to drop in for afternoon tea and happy professional chats about criminal poisoners.
Sergeant Graves had finally recovered enough of his wits to say “Yes,” and bumble his way into the foyer.
“Would you like a cup of tea and a biscuit, Sergeant?” Feely asked, managing to suggest in her tone that the poor dear was overworked, dog-tired, and malnourished.
“I am quite thirsty, come to think of it,” he managed with a bashful grin. “And hungry,” he added.
Feely stepped back and ushered him towards the drawing room.
I followed like a neglected hound.
“You may set up your gear here,” Feely told him, indicating a Regency table that stood near a window. “How dreadfully trying the life of a police officer must be. All firearms and criminals and hobnail boots.”
Sergeant Graves had the good grace not to slug her. In fact, he seemed to be enjoying himself.
“It is a hard life, Miss Ophelia,” he said, “at least most of the time.”
His dimpled grin suggested that this was one of the easier moments.
“I’ll ring for Mrs. Mullet,” Feely said, reaching for a velvet pull that hung near the mantelpiece, and which probably hadn’t been used since George the Third was foaming at the mouth. Mrs. M would have kidney failure when the bell in the kitchen went off right above her head.
“What about the dabs?” I asked. It was a term I had picked up from Philip Odell, the private eye on the wireless. “Inspector Hewitt will be dead keen on having a squint at them.”
Feely laughed a laugh like a tinkling silver bell. “You must forgive my little sister, Sergeant,” she said. “I’m afraid she’s been left alone too much.”
Left alone? I almost laughed out loud! What would the sergeant say if I told him about the Inquisition in the Buckshaw cellars? About how Feely and Daffy had trussed me up in a smelly potato sack and flung me onto the stony floor?
“Dabs it is, then,” said the sergeant, opening the clasps and flinging open his kit. “I suppose you’ll be wanting to have a dekko at the chemicals and so forth,” he added, giving me a wink.
If I’d had my way, he’d have been sanctified on the spot: Saint Detective Sergeant Graves. Come to think of it, I didn’t even know his given name, but now was not the time to ask.
“This,” he said, extracting the first of two small glass bottles, “is fingerprint powder.”
“Mercury-based, I assume? Fine enough to give good definition to the loops and whorls, and so on?”
This, too, I had learned from Philip Odell. It had stuck in my mind because of its chemical connection.
The sergeant grinned and pulled out the second bottle, this one darker than the first.
“Go on,” he said. “See if you can guess this one.”
Guess? I thought. The poor deluded man!