• EIGHT •
WHEN I OPENED MY eyes, there was daylight at my windows, although the sun had not yet risen. The hands of my brass alarm clock pointed sleepily to five-thirty.
Rats! I had slept straight through my intended midnight visit to the crypt. Now I should have to wait another twenty-four hours, by which time, the police would probably—
“Good morning, Miss Flavia,” said a voice at my elbow, and I nearly jumped out of my skin.
“Oh! Dogger! I didn’t know you were here. You startled me.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t intend to. I trust you slept well?”
By the slow, stiff way in which he was unfolding himself from the chair at my bedside, I knew that he had been sitting there all through the night.
“Very well, thank you, Dogger. I think I rather overdid things yesterday.”
“Indeed,” he agreed. “But I believe you are much improved this morning.”
“Thank you, yes.”
“In ten minutes I shall be breakfasting on tea and toast in the kitchen if you care to join me,” Dogger said.
“Bags I the crust!” I said, fully aware of what a tremendous honor it was to be asked.
When Dogger had gone, I washed my face and neatly rebraided my pigtails, going so far even to tie each one with a bit of fresh white (for Easter) ribbon. After Dogger’s sleepless night, the least I could do, I thought, was to look decent at the breakfast table.
We were seated in the kitchen, Dogger and I. The rest of the household was not yet awake, and Mrs. Mullet wouldn’t arrive from the village for another hour.
There had fallen between us what Dogger once referred to as “a companionable silence,” a little parcel of time during which neither of us felt any particular need to talk.
The only sound in the kitchen was the scratching of our knives on toast, and the slight ticking of the silver toaster as the little red snakes of its innards turned white bread to brown. It was quite wonderful, when you came to think of it: the way in which the red-hot electric element’s dry heat caused the bread’s sugars to interact with its amino acids, producing a whole new set of flavors. The Maillard reaction, it was called, after Louis-Camille Maillard, the French chemist who had made a study of toasting and suntanning.
As my teeth crunched into the tasty crust, I realized suddenly that toast eaten hot and fresh from the toaster is vastly superior in taste to toast brought to a distant table. Although there seemed to be a lesson here, I couldn’t for the moment think what it might be.
I was the first to break the silence.
“Have you ever heard of a person named Adam Sowerby?” I asked.
“An acquaintance of your father’s, I believe,” Dogger said. “Rather a well-known botanist nowadays. They were at school together.”
A friend of Father’s? Why hadn’t Adam told me so? Why had Father never mentioned his name?
“His work often takes him to old churches,” Dogger continued, not looking at me.
“I know,” I said. “He’s hoping to find old seeds in Saint Tancred’s tomb. He gave me a lift into the village yesterday.”
“Yes,” Dogger said, helping himself to another piece of toast and spreading the honey with surgical precision. “I watched you from an upstairs window.”
No one looked up as I entered the dining room. Father, Feely, and Daffy were sitting as they always sat, each in their own invisible compartment.
The only difference this morning was Feely’s appearance: Her face was chalky white, with purplish rims round her red eyelids. She had, without a doubt, spent the night grieving for the late Mr. Collicutt. I could almost smell the candles.
Evidently, she had not yet shared the news of his demise with Father. For some complicated reason she was keeping it to herself. Almost as if she were treasuring it.
A shiver of cold air told me I had just brushed shoulders with a ghost.
I slipped into my chair and lifted the lid of the patent food warmer. This morning’s main dish consisted of Mrs. Mullet’s Omelets Royale: those flat rubber pancakes of pale egg embedded with particles of red and green peppers and chunks of chutney, which, when Father was not present, we called “toad-on-the-road.”
I speared one of these squidlike monstrosities with my fork and passed it on a plate to Feely.
She covered her mouth with the palm of her hand, made a slight but still detectable retching noise, pushed back her chair, and hurried from the room.
I raised a quizzical eyebrow at Father as he looked up from The London Philatelist, but he was not to be distracted from his hobby. For a moment he listened to Feely’s retreating footsteps, as if hearing the baying of a distant hound, then went back to reading his journal.
“I met a friend of yours yesterday, Father,” I said. “His name is Adam Sowerby.”
Father came slowly up again out of the depths.
“Sowerby?” he said at last. “Wherever did you meet him?”
“Here,” I said. “At Buckshaw. In the forecourt. He has the most remarkable old Roller—full of plants.”
“Mmm,” Father said, and returned to reading about engravings of Queen Victoria’s head.
“He gave me a lift into the village,” I went on. “He’s here to look for ancient seeds when they open Saint Tancred’s tomb.”
Again Father surfaced. It was like carrying on a conversation with a deep-sea diver who resubmerged after every sentence.
“Sowerby, you say?”
“Yes, Adam Sowerby. Dogger says he’s an old friend of yours.”
Father closed his journal, removed his reading spectacles and tucked them into his waistcoat pocket. “An old friend? Yes, I daresay he is.”
“Speaking of Saint Tancred’s tomb, by the way,” I said casually, now that I had Father’s undivided attention, “Mr. Collicutt was found dead in it yesterday.”
Daffy’s head snapped up from her book. She had been listening all along.
“Colly?” she said. “Colly dead? Does Feely know?”
I nodded. I did not say that she had known since yesterday at breakfast. “He appeared to have been murdered.”
“Appeared?” Father asked instantly. I had to give him full marks for lightning-quick perception. “Appeared? Do you mean you were there? That you saw him—dead?”
“I discovered the body,” I said modestly.
Daffy’s jaw fell open like a hangman’s trap.
“Really, Flavia,” Father said. “This is simply too much.”
He fished out his spectacles, put them on, removed them, and put them on again. In the past, he had seemed rather proud of the corpses I had happened upon, but even corpses, I suppose, have their limit.
“Collicutt, you say? The organist chap? What’s he doing dead?”
It was a silly question, but also an excellent one.
Mrs. Mullet, who had come in from the kitchen as Father spoke, sniffed: “They say as ’ow ’e ’ad it comin’, that one. All them carryin’s-on in the churchyard. Turned into a sow by devils, ’e was, like them gaberdine swine in the Bible.”
Carryings-on in the churchyard? Whatever could she mean by that? When I talked to him in the tower, Mr. Haskins had mentioned mysterious lights seen floating in the churchyard by the ARP and the fire-watchers, but that had been years ago, during the war. Could these strange ceremonies, or whatever they were, still be taking place?
One thing of which I was almost certain which connected that remote past with the present was this: Since there was now only one mask left in the trunk, the gas mask strapped to poor dead Mr. Collicutt’s face must have come from that same wooden chest in the tower. There would surely have been more than one, originally.
In fact, I would be willing to bet my Bunsen burner that the two were identical.
Not that I was an expert on gas masks.
There was Daffy’s, of course, a gaily colored Mickey Mouse mask of red India rubber with a blue tin nozzle that had been issued to her when she was no more than three years old, and which she still kept hanging close at hand from its straps at the side of her looking glass.
“You never know,” she once told me, with rather an odd look on her face.
Then, too, there was that mask of early vintage which was kept in my laboratory in case of certain chemical accidents. It had been given personally to Uncle Tar not long before his death in 1928, by Winston Churchill, who was, at the time, chancellor of the exchequer. I had gleaned the details of their meeting from one of Uncle Tar’s extensive diaries, a volume of which I always kept at hand on my night table for gripping bedtime reading.