• SEVEN •
I MUST HAVE HAD the wind knocked out of me. For what seemed like ages, but was in fact probably no more than a few seconds, I’m sure I lay there in a daze.
And then the smell. Oh, the smell!
It was like being hit in the nose with a brick.
My nostrils felt suddenly raw, as if they were being forcibly bored out with a brace and bit.
I clapped a hand to my nose and scrambled to my knees, but that only made things worse. I realized instantly that the smelly sludge which I had just smeared onto my face was all that remained of Cassandra Cottlestone and her neighbors.
I knew that the instant life ends, the human body begins to consume itself in a most efficient manner. Our own bacteria transform us with remarkable swiftness into gas bags containing methane, carbon dioxide, hydrogen sulfide, and mercaptan, to name just a few. Although I had for some time been making notes toward a future work to be called De Luce on Decomposition, I had not had until that moment any real, so to speak, firsthand experience.
Now, I was learning quickly that the stuff acts as smelling salts.
I leapt to my feet, gagging, and fell back against a hard stone wall.
As my eyes became accustomed to the darkness, I saw that the opening through which I had fallen was actually no larger than the entrance to a fox’s den. In the weak light, I could see that the walls of the tomb were all of crumbling stone.
Except for a few bits of rubble on the floor, the rectangular cavern was empty. On the side opposite the hole, set into the wall, was a small but surprisingly ordinary-looking wooden door.
I took hold of the knob and gave it a turn. The door was locked.
In other circumstances, I would have taken a handy bit of wire and picked the lock—an art which Dogger had taught me in exchange for helping him clean flowerpots in the greenhouse during one long winter.
“It’s all in the fingers,” he used to say. “You must learn to listen to your fingertips.”
Unfortunately, a person who has just tumbled headfirst into a grave is ill equipped with tools of the lock-picking trade. I had once improvised by removing my braces and forming the wire into a passable pick, but today I was not wearing them.
I could, in a pinch, crawl out of the grave and beg Gladys’s permisson to borrow one of her spokes. But with the place crawling with police, it was more than likely I would be spotted and the game would be up.
So far, it seemed as if Inspector Hewitt’s men had been kept so busy in the crypt that they had not yet discovered this end of the hidden tunnel.
I pressed an ear against the door and listened intently. The acute sense of hearing which I had inherited from Harriet was seldom more useful than painful, but this was one such occasion.
On the other side of the door there was nothing but silence: no burly policemen trampling their way along the tunnel in search of its origin.
I gave the door one last powerful tug, but it barely moved. Someone meant to keep someone out, I thought.
Or to keep someone in.
I would need to come back at night: back to the churchyard with a hooded torch and dressed all in black.
It would need to be done quickly. Tonight. If I was lucky, I would be one step ahead of the police.
For now, all that remained was to climb out of this stinking pit and get home to Buckshaw for a bath. My clothing would probably have to be burned.
I went to the hole, reached up, grasped its edge, and gave a great upward leap, my toes pedaling like mad against the wall for traction.
For an instant, my fingers touched the ledge at the bottom of the monument, but I couldn’t quite catch hold of it.
I fell back into the muck. If I had been just an inch or two taller …
I could see only one solution—other than screaming for help, of course, and I certainly didn’t want to do that.
With filthy fingers I untied my laces and removed my shoes and socks. Shoving one of the socks into one of the shoes to give it additional thickness, I used the other to tie the shoes together, soles outermost, into a makeshift rubber brick. This I positioned tightly against the stone wall and stepped on top of it.
I took a deep breath, prayed to Saint Tancred to give wings to my heels—and made a mighty leap.
This time, my fingers caught the marble ledge easily, and with feet furiously paddling behind me, I rose up out of the grave.
Standing there in the grass, staring at me in shock, her face as white as a shroud, her open mouth a black “O,” was Cynthia Richardson, the vicar’s wife.
I suppose I should have said something polite: uttered some comforting reassurance. But I didn’t.
I don’t know what must have been running through her mind at the sight of this filthy, black-faced, foul-smelling apparition that suddenly came clawing its way up out of the grave under her very nose, but at that particular instant, I didn’t care. I did what any sensible girl would do under the circumstances. I took to my heels.
Any thoughts I might have had of washing off the worst of the crud in the river behind the church were set aside.
Oh, Flavia! I thought. Oh, Flavia!
And then in one of those blinding flashes of inspiration that come from fear of punishment, I remembered that I had left my mackintosh on a hook in the tower room. With any luck I could retrieve it without being spotted. Yes, that was it! I would wear it home to conceal the filthy rags that my clothing had become.
At the corner of the tower, I shot back a glance at Cynthia, who was still standing frozen as I had left her, as white as all the rest of the boneyard angels.
I edged slowly along the tower wall, my back pressed tightly against the stones. A quick peep round the corner revealed Sergeant Woolmer sitting with his behind on the back seat of the Vauxhall, his feet outside in the grass. He was writing in his notebook.
Trying to make myself paper-thin, I slipped round the corner and darted in at the door. If anyone was in the porch, I was sunk.
But Fate was on my side. The porch was empty and the church beyond lay in dim silence. The police were obviously still going about their work in the crypt.
I tiptoed up the winding stone staircase and stepped into the chamber at the top. My mackintosh was hanging exactly as I had left it.
I folded it into as flat and compact a bundle as possible and shoved it under what was left of my sweater. No point in catching anyone’s eye with a fluorescent yellow coat which simply screamed for attention.
If I ran into anyone on my way out, I would simply wrap my arms tightly round my tummy and concoct some sort of story. Stomach pain, for instance. I would blame it on Mrs. Mullet’s Hasty Pudding.
Down the winding stairs I crept … stopping at every step to listen.
Sergeant Woolmer was still absorbed in his notebook, and I flitted out the door and round the corner of the tower in a wink. Even though it is considered unlucky to do so, I worked my way counterclockwise (“widdershins,” as Daffy calls it) round the church, pausing before I attempted the north side. But the coast was clear. Cynthia Richardson was gone.
Gladys was basking happily in the sun, and I wheeled her slowly through the churchyard, dodging from tombstone to tombstone, westward and south, along the winding riverbank. My normally drab cardigan and skirt, further camouflaged with splotches and smears of grave mud, should make me nearly invisible among the weathered monuments. When we reached the stone wall that marked the boundary, I lifted Gladys over and set her down gently on the other side, and moments later, we were spinning happily home along the road to Buckshaw.