TWELVE
PORCELAIN WAS SLEEPING THE sleep of the dead. I had worried in vain.
I stood looking down at her as she lay on my bed in much the same position as when I had left her. The dark swatches under her eyes seemed to have lightened, and her breathing was almost imperceptible.
Two seconds later there was a flurry of furious motion and I was pinned to the bed with Porcelain’s thumbs pressing into my windpipe.
“Fiend!” I thought she hissed.
I struggled to get free but I couldn’t move. Bright stars were bursting in my brain as I clawed at her hands. I wasn’t getting enough oxygen. I tried to pull away.
But I was no match for her. She was bigger and stronger than me, and already I could feel myself becoming languid and uncaring. How easy it would be to give in …
But no!
I stopped trying to fight her hands and instead took hold of her nose with my thumb and forefinger. With my last remaining strength I gave it a most vicious twist.
“Flavia!”
She seemed suddenly surprised to see me—as if we were old friends who had met unexpectedly in front of a lovely Vermeer in the National Gallery.
Her hands withdrew themselves from my throat, but still I couldn’t seem to breathe. I rolled off the bed and onto the floor, seized with a fit of coughing.
“What are you doing?” she demanded, looking round in puzzlement.
“What are you doing?” I croaked. “You’ve crushed my windpipe!”
“Oh, God!” she said. “How awful. I’m sorry, Flavia—really I am. I was dreaming I was in Fenella’s caravan and there was some horrid … beast! … standing over me. I think it was—”
“Yes?”
She looked away from me. “I … I’m sorry. I can’t tell you.”
“I’ll keep it to myself. I promise.”
“No, it’s no good. I mustn’t.”
“All right, then,” I said. “Don’t. In fact, I forbid you to tell me.”
“Flavia—”
“No,” I said, and I meant it. “I don’t want to know. Let’s talk about something else.”
I knew that if I bided my time, whatever it was that Porcelain was withholding would come spilling out like minced pork from Mrs. Mullet’s meat grinder.
Which reminded me that I hadn’t eaten for ages.
“Are you hungry?” I asked.
“Starving. You must have heard my tummy rumbling.”
I hadn’t, but I pretended I had, and nodded wisely.
“Stay here. I’ll bring something from the kitchen.”
Ten minutes later I was back with a bowl of food nicked from the pantry.
“Follow me,” I said. “Next door.”
Porcelain looked round wide-eyed as we entered my chemical laboratory. “What is this place? Are we supposed to be in here?”
“Of course we are,” I told her. “It’s where I do my experiments.”
“Like magic?” she asked, glancing around at the glassware.
“Yes,” I said. “Like magic. Now then, you take these …”
She jumped at the pop of the Bunsen burner as I put a match to it.
“Hold them over the flame,” I said, handing her a couple of bangers and a pair of nickel-plated test tube clamps. “Not too close—it’s exceedingly hot.”
I broke six eggs into a borosilicate evaporating dish and stirred them with a glass rod over a second burner. Almost immediately the laboratory was filled with mouthwatering aromas.
“Now for toast,” I said. “You can do two slices at a time,” I said. “Use the tongs again. Do both sides, then turn them inside out.”
By necessity, I had become quite an accomplished laboratory chef. Once, just recently, when Father had banished me to my room, I had even made myself a spotted dick by steaming suet from the larder in a wide-neck Erlenmeyer flask. And because water boils at only 212 degrees Fahrenheit, while nylon doesn’t melt until it is heated to 417 degrees, I had verified my theory that one of Feely’s precious stockings would make a perfect pudding bag.
If there’s anything more delicious than a sausage roasted over an open Bunsen burner, I can’t imagine what it might be—unless it’s the feeling of freedom that comes of eating it with the bare fingers and letting the fat fall where it may. Porcelain and I tore into our food like cannibals after a missionary famine, and before long there was nothing left but crumbs.
As two cups of water came to the boil in a glass beaker, I took down from the shelf where it was kept, alphabetically, between the arsenic and the cyanide, an apothecary jar marked Camellia sinensis.
“Don’t worry,” I said. “It’s only tea.”
Now there fell between us one of those silences that occur when two people are getting to know each other: not yet warm and friendly, but neither cold nor wary.
“I wonder how your gram is doing?” I said at last. “Fenella, I should say.”
“Well enough, I expect. She’s a hard old bird.”
“Tough, you mean.” Her answer had surprised me.
“I mean hard.”
She deliberately let go of the glass test tube she’d been toying with and watched it shatter on the floor.
“But she’ll not be broken,” she said.
I begged to differ but I kept my mouth shut. Porcelain had not seen her grandmother, as I had, sprawled in a pool of her own blood.
“Life can kill you, but only if you let it. She used to tell me that.”
“You must have loved her awfully,” I said, realizing even as I spoke that I made it sound as if Fenella were already dead.
“Yes, sometimes very much,” Porcelain said reflectively, “—and sometimes not at all.”
She must have seen my startled reaction.
“Love’s not some big river that flows on and on forever, and if you believe it is, you’re a bloody fool. It can be dammed up until nothing’s left but a trickle …”
“Or stopped completely,” I added.
She did not reply.
I let my gaze wander out the window and across the Visto and I thought about the kinds of love I knew, which were not very many. After a while I thought about Brookie Harewood. Who had hated him enough to kill him, I wondered, and hang him from Poseidon’s trident? Or had Brookie’s death come about through fear rather than hate?
Well, whatever the case, Brookie would be laid out on a wheeled trolley in Hinley by now, and someone—his next of kin—would have been asked to identify the body.
As an attendant in a white coat lifted the corner of a sheet to reveal Brookie’s dead face, a woman would step forward. She would gasp, clap a handkerchief to her mouth, and quickly turn her head away.
I knew how it was done: I’d seen it in the cinema.
And unless I missed my bet, the woman would be his mother: the artist who lived in Malden Fenwick.
But perhaps I was wrong: Perhaps they would spare a mother the grief. Perhaps the woman who was stepping forward was just a friend. But no—Brookie didn’t seem the type to have ladies as friends. Not many women would fancy spending their nights sneaking about the countryside in rubber boots and handling dead fish.
I was so wrapped up in my thoughts that I hadn’t heard Porcelain begin speaking.
“—but never in summer,” she was saying. “In summer she’d chuck all that and take to the roads with Johnny Faa, and not a penny between them. Like a couple of kids, they were. Johnny was a tinker when he was younger, but he’d given it up for some reason he would never explain. Still, he made friends easily enough, and his way with a fiddle meant that he spoke every language under the sun. They lived on whatever Fenella could get by telling the fortunes of fools.”
“I was one of those fools,” I told her.
“Yes,” Porcelain said. She was not going to spare my feelings.
“Did you travel with them?” I asked.
“Once or twice when I was younger. Lunita didn’t much like me being with them.”
“Lunita?”
“My mother. She was their only child. Gypsies like large families, you know, but she was all they had. Their hearts were broken in half when she ran off with a Gajo—an Englishman from Tunbridge Wells.”
“Your father?”