Darbies? Daffy had obviously been paying more attention to Philip Odell than she let on.
“What about Sergeant Woolmer?” I asked. “Is he here, too?”
“Of course he is,” Feely said. “Dieter helped them shovel through the drifts.”
“Dieter? Is he back?”
“He’s thinking of going in for a police inspector,” Daffy said. “They told him they couldn’t have got through to Buckshaw without him.”
“What about Ned?” I asked, seized with a sudden thought. “What about Carl?”
Feely had more swains than Ulysses’s wife, Penelope, had suitors—I like “swains” better than “suitors” because it sounds like “swine”—all of whom, through some strange quirk of fate, had now turned up at Buckshaw at the same time.
Ned … Dieter … Carl … Detective Sergeant Graves. Every one of them, God only knows why, was smitten silly with my stupid sister.
How long would it be before they began slugging it out?
“Ned and Carl have volunteered to help clear the forecourt. The vicar’s organized a snow-shoveling party.”
“But why?” I asked.
It didn’t make sense. If all the roads were closed, what use was it clearing a way to the front door?
“Because,” said Aunt Felicity’s voice behind me, “it is a well-known fact that more than two men shut up together in an enclosed space for more than an hour constitute a hazard to society. If unpleasantness is to be avoided, they must be made to go outdoors and work off their animal spirits.”
I smiled at the thought of Bunny Spirling and the vicar taking up snow shovels to work off their animal spirits, but I kept my mouth shut. I also wondered if Aunt Felicity had heard about Phyllis Wyvern.
“Besides,” she added, “the hearse will be required to remove the remains. They can hardly drag her off by dogsled.”
Which answered my question. It also raised another.
The stairs from the laboratory were narrow and steep. No one had been up here for years, I thought, but me.
At the top, a door opened onto the roof—or, at least was supposed to open onto the roof. I struggled with the bolt until it suddenly shot free, pinching my fingers. But now the door itself was stuck shut, probably piled high on the other side with a drift of snow. I put my shoulder against it and pushed.
With the peculiar grunting sound that snow makes when it doesn’t want to be budged, the door opened grudgingly about an inch.
I was being resisted by millions of tiny crystals, I knew, but the strength of their chemical bonds was enormous. If all of us could be like snow, I thought, how happy we should be.
Another shove—another slow inch. And then another.
After what seemed like a very long struggle, I was able to squeeze myself between the door and its frame and step out onto the roof.
I was instantly up to my knees in snow.
Shivering, I clutched my cardigan up about my chin and waded to the battlements, the back of my mind ringing with all of Mrs. Mullet’s dire warnings about pneumonia and keeping one’s chest warm.
“She wasn’t outside more’n a minute,” she had told me, wide-eyed, speaking of Mrs. Milne, the butcher’s wife. “Just long enough to ’ang the baby’s nappies on the line—that’s all it took. By four o’clock she ’ad a cough, by seven ’er ’ead was as ’ot as the Arab desert, and by the time the sun come up she was in a box and stiff as a board. Pneumonia, it was. There’s nothin’ else as’ll snatch you off like pneumonia. Makes you drown in your own juices.”
From up here on the roof, I could look out to the east, the rolling countryside one vast unbroken blanket of snow, dazzling in its whiteness. Had there been footprints, I could have easily spotted them at once, but there were none.
In spite of the freezing wetness that was puddling in my shoes, I forced myself to clomp my way to the north front, where I stood shivering, peering down into the forecourt.
Dieter’s tractor stood, like Eeyore, covered with snow—a gray form huddled beneath a white blanket. Beside it was the blue Vauxhall, which I recognized at once as Inspector Hewitt’s.
In the forecourt, the vicar’s crew, in coats, gloves, and galoshes, were digging bravely away at the drifts, their every breath visible on the frigid air. They had managed to clear a parking area somewhat smaller than a tennis court, and even that, with the persistence of the wind, had begun to fill in again with blown fingers of the granular drifts.
There was also a narrow passage in the middle of the drive, packed tightly on either side with layers of snow. Here and there the prints of chains were still clearly visible, and in the middle of the path, tire tracks that led directly to the parked Vauxhall. It was easy enough to deduce that the police had commandeered a wrecker with a snowplow fastened to the front, to clear their way from the village.
Apart from the shadowy blue ribbon that was the plowed path winding away to the north, all of the approaches to Buckshaw were one vast expanse of untrodden white.
With my back to the wind, the south battlement was only slightly warmer than the north. Below me, beside the kitchen garden, the snow-draped vans and lorries of Ilium Films stood huddled like a small circus in winter. Narrow trails had been trodden out between them, and I watched as a man in uniformed livery came out of the kitchen door and picked his way precariously towards one of the smaller vans. It was Anthony, Phyllis Wyvern’s chauffeur. I had forgotten all about him.
I leaned as far over the battlement as I possibly could, peering along the side of the house. Yes, there was the radiator of the black Daimler, just poking out into view. It seemed to be tucked up beside a buried flower bed. As I leaned forward another inch to see if anyone was sitting in it, I dislodged a clump of snow, which plummeted down and fell with a whump onto the Daimler’s roof.
“Bugger!” I said under my breath.
Anthony stopped suddenly, turned, looked up, and saw me. There followed one of those peculiar moments when strangers lock eyes with each other, too far apart to speak, but too close to pretend it hadn’t happened. I was wondering what would be appropriate to call out to him—condolences or Christmas wishes?—when he turned away and teetered off towards the trailer.
Those leather riding boots must be treacherous in snow, I thought.
As I made my way back towards the door, I looked up at the towering chimney pots and lightning rods of Buckshaw, which rose up from their sturdy bases, rank upon rank, like organ pipes of brick and iron and pottery, the chimneys of the kitchen and the north and west wings sending up wind-torn tatters of smoke into the leaden sky.
I thought with a delicious shiver—half pleasure and half fear—that before the night was out I would be scaling those ragged pinnacles for a rendezvous with Saint Nicholas—an experiment whose outcome might well determine the future course of my life.
Would chemistry put paid to Christmas? Or would I, tomorrow morning, find a fat, infuriated elf caught fast and cursing among the chimney pots?
I must admit that part of me was hoping for the legend.
There were times when I felt as if I were standing astride a cold ocean—one foot in the New World and one foot in the Old. As they drifted relentlessly apart, I was in danger of being torn up the middle.
The hordes in the foyer were beginning to show their fatigue. They’d been here for the better part of twenty-four hours, and it was apparent that patience was wearing thin.
Everywhere I looked there were dark circles under tired eyes and the crowded quarters had become filled with an air of staleness.
I had noticed on other occasions that overcrowding, even in a spacious place, makes one feel like a different person. Perhaps, I thought, whenever we began to breathe the breath of others, when the spinning atoms of their bodies began to mingle with our own, we took on something of their personality, like crystals in a snowflake. Perhaps we became something more, yet something lesser than ourselves.
I would jot down this interesting observation in my notebook at the first opportunity.
Those people who had slept flat on the tiled floor were still rubbing their bones, staring balefully at the lucky souls who had staked out corners in which they could prop themselves up with their backs to the wall. Maximilian Brock had erected a wall of books around his little patch of tiled turf, and I couldn’t help wondering where he had found them. He must have raided the library during the hours of darkness.