“I came away without my money,” I said. “I’ll bring it to you as soon as I can.”
“Not from around here, are you?” the woman asked, walking toward me.
“No, but not far,” I said, waving a vague hand toward the north.
“Haven’t I seen you before?” she asked, close enough now to peer into my face.
It was at that moment that I was struck with a brilliant thought: Tell the truth. Yes, that was it—tell the truth. What did I have to lose?
“Perhaps you have,” I told her. “My name is Flavia de Luce.”
“Of course,” she said. “I should have known. The blue eyes, the—”
She stopped as if she had run into a stone wall.
“Yes?”
“We used to take poultry to Buckshaw,” she said slowly, “to Mrs. Mullet. I suppose she’s long gone?”
“No,” I said. “She’s still with us.
“Fortunately,” I was quick enough to add.
“But that was years ago,” the woman said. “Years ago. Before— But tell me, what brings you to Nether-Wolsey?”
“I’m looking for a woman named Hetty. I don’t know her last name, but she’s—”
“Patsy Pickery’s sister.”
Patsy? Was “Patsy” Miss Pickery’s name?
I put my hand in front of my mouth to suppress a smile.
“Yes,” I said. “That’s the one. Patsy Pickery’s sister.”
I enjoyed pronouncing the name, the way it rolled off my tongue in a limping rhyme: “Pat-sy Pickery’s sister.”
“Gone,” she said. “She’s took the kids and gone. Lived right across the road next the petrol station till Rory belted her once too often and she took the kids and— What do you want with her, anyway?”
“I wanted to ask her a question.”
“Maybe I can answer it.”
“It’s about Bogmore Hall,” I said, and I could see the woman’s face closing even before the words were out of my mouth.
“Keep clear of Bogmore Hall,” she warned. “It’s not the kind of place for someone like you.”
Someone like me? Whatever could she mean by that?
“There’s something I need to discuss with Mr. Ridley-Smith, the magistrate.”
“Got yourself into some kind of trouble, have you?” she asked, closing one eye like Popeye.
“No, not really.”
“Well, all the same—don’t go hanging round. Things aren’t right up there, if you take my meaning.” Her finger came, almost automatically, it seemed, to her head.
“The Ridley-Smiths, you mean? The crocodile? The man who was made of glass?”
The woman snorted. “Made of glass my fanny!” she said. “You listen to me. There are things that are worse than glass and crocodiles. You keep away from that place.”
She waved her hand toward what I guessed was the southwest.
“All right,” I said. “Thank you. I will.”
As I turned and went back into the shop, she was not far behind me.
“I’ll be back for the chicken as soon as I can,” I told her over my shoulder.
I was already in the street with a foot on one of Gladys’s pedals when the woman came scurrying out of the shop, a wooden crate in her hands. Through its slats, the brown hen was craning her neck in all directions, her yellow eyes glaring fiercely out at this vast new and unsuspected world.
“Her name’s Esmeralda,” she said, hurriedly strapping the crate to Gladys’s rear carrier.
“The money—” I began.
But before I could finish, the woman had scurried back into the shop and slammed the door.
To the south of Nether-Wolsey, the road ran gently downhill. To the west, another rose steeply to a prominent ridge which brooded like a single dark eyebrow over the village. It might well have been an old hill fort.
This was the direction the woman had indicated as she warned me about Bogmore Hall. It couldn’t be far away.
I turned to the west.
After a while the rising road became steeper and steeper, and was now little more than a stony path. Even in first gear Gladys was wobbling dangerously. I climbed off and shoved her slowly ahead of me up the steep slope.
As I came up out of a deep cutting onto a flat plateau, there was no doubt that the dark Gothic pile ahead of me was Bogmore Hall. A crazy conglomeration of spiky gables gave it the look of a bundle of ancient lances shoved carelessly, points uppermost, into an oversized umbrella stand.
Cut off from the rest of the world, the house stood in the middle of a sea of wild grass from which protruded mossy chunks of broken stone which might once have been the cherubs and nymphs of urns and fountains. A chubby white arm stuck up out of the earth like a dead baby trying to escape its grave.
Windows without curtains stared at me blankly, and the idea crept into my head that I was being watched by more than glass. A worn block of stone served as a doorstep, as if renovations had been begun in another century and then abandoned.
It seemed rather a rum place for a magistrate to live.
I leaned Gladys against a ruined railing and tugged at the rusty bellpull. Although I could not hear it, I knew that somewhere in the depths of the house a bell would be jangling.
Nobody, of course, answered.