At a quarter past two in the morning, the road was a ribbon of moonlight, just as it was in Mr. Noyes’s poem “The Highwayman.” In my long, dark, winter churchgoing coat, I might have been the highwayman himself, except for the fact that I was riding a bicycle and wasn’t planning to end up dead like a dog on the highway.
“Bundle up warm,” Mrs. Mullet was forever telling me, and this time, I was taking her advice. In heavy brown stockings and a woolen sweater underneath my Sunday coat, I was as warm as toast, perfectly kitted out for a descent into the underworld.
The cold air of the early morning rushed past my face and a hunting owl swooped low across the road in front of me. I wanted to shout “Yaroo!” but I didn’t dare risk it. You never know who’s listening in the darkness.
I pulled the torch from my pocket and carried out a quick test. Rather than beaming it onto the road and making my presence known for miles around, I shoved the lens end into my mouth and clicked the switch. I was rewarded with a rich red glow from my puffed-out cheeks. It was working.
To anyone abroad at this forsaken hour, such as poachers, I would look like the skull of a ghastly jack-o’-lantern floating along the road to Bishop’s Lacey, with hollow black eyes and a head lit from within by an unearthly fire.
I swiveled my head from side to side and glared horribly into the ditches.
Legends would spring up: “The Huntsman from Hell,” they would tell their children in hushed voices, and claim that they had even heard the hoofbeats of a ghostly horse.
They would warn them against stealing sweets and telling lies.
Although it was pleasant to tell myself such tales, part of me knew that I was only doing it to fight off fear.
Who knew what horrors I would find in that dank, earthy passage beneath the church? It wasn’t so much the thought of undead spirits that troubled me as much as the knowledge that a killer was still on the loose in Bishop’s Lacey.
At this early hour, there would be no police at the scene of the crime: nobody to rescue me if I got myself into a jam.
The churchyard, when I got to it, was like the nerve-jangling illustrations in one of Daffy’s Gothic novels: all sunken shadows, tombstones leaning like broken teeth, and everywhere that eerie graveyard moss which has an almost invisible luminescent glow of stale greenish-blue in the cold light of a nearly full March moon.
I parked Gladys on the north side of Cassandra Cottlestone’s tomb and gave her leather seat a pat. The silver glint of her handlebars reminded me of a frightened horse showing the whites of its eyes.
“Keep a sharp lookout,” I whispered. “I’ll be right back.”
The mound of earth and the tarpaulin looked much as I had left them. As nearly as I could tell by moonlight, there were no new footprints, no fresh impressions of official boots.
So far, so good, I thought.
I worked my way under the tarpaulin, let my feet dangle in empty air for a few seconds—then dropped into the grave.
As before, my nostrils were pinched instantly by the stink, but this time I had decided to switch it off in my brain.
Little danger now of having the light of my torch spotted, so I clicked it on and turned my attention to the heavy wooden door.
I had brought with me one of my favorite lock-picking tools: a set of my wire dental braces which I had ruined forever last summer by putting them to good use for a similar purpose at Greyminster School. Those and a bent pickle fork—which nobody, I hoped, would ever miss—were all that a person would ever need to open nearly every lock in Christendom.
The problem was that this lock was rusty. It couldn’t be too badly oxidized, I thought, since, if my theory was correct, it had been used at least as recently as six weeks ago. Still, the stupid thing was stuck.
Where was I going to find a decent lubricating oil in the bottom of a reeking tomb at two-thirty in the morning?
The answer came to me almost as quickly as the question.
There is an unsaturated hydrocarbon with the molecular formula of C30H50 and the unlovely name of “squalene,” which is found in yeast, olive oil, fish eggs, the liver of certain sharks, and the skin of the human nose.
Because of its extremely high viscosity, it has been used by clockmakers to oil cogs, by butlers to polish ebony, by burglars to lubricate revolvers, and by smokers to baby the bowls of their favorite pipes.
Good old, jolly old everyday nose oil to unstick a good old, jolly old everyday mortise lock.
The door itself had been banged together from heavy planks and I could still see the marks of the chisel with which the lock had been roughly installed. It was of the warded type, which opens with a skeleton key.
A piece of cake.
I raked a thumbnail across the side of my nose and wiped the oily deposit onto one end of my mangled braces. Holding the torch between a hunched shoulder and my chin, I inserted the hooked end of the wire into the keyhole and jiggered it about until I judged the wards and levers had been sufficiently lubricated.
Then, after pushing and pulling the hooked end of my improvised lock-pick in and out until it was lined up with the levers, I gave it a sudden twist.
At first … nothing. Resistance. And then … a satisfying click!
I turned the knob and the door swung open with a hollow groan.
I stepped over the rough wooden sill and into the tunnel.
Dank and acrid are the two words that best describe the smell of the place. I was now about five or six feet beneath the surface, and from this point onward, the tunnel sloped downward toward the church. Whoever had dug it, I supposed, had wanted to get well below the graveyard’s grisly contents.
I was well aware, as I moved slowly along, that the earth above my head and on both sides contained all that remained of Bishop’s Lacey’s dead, most of whose bones had long ago leached and whose fluids had seeped over the centuries into the spongy soil.
One of the vicar’s sermons popped unexpectedly into my mind: the one about how we are the clay and the Lord our potter—a lesson that only now was coming vividly to life here in this country churchyard. Everywhere I looked, bone fragments of the dead, like broken bits of kitchen crockery, reflected whitely in the beam of my torch.
It was as astonishing a display as any of the three-dimensional geological exhibits in the Science Museum.
Hold on, Flavia, I thought: This is not the time to be thinking about the wonders of putrefaction.
I made my way slowly along the tunnel, going deeper into the earth with every step. Underground, the distance seemed much farther than it did in the churchyard above. Surely by now I must be close to the foundation of the church.
Perhaps the tunnel didn’t lead to the church—perhaps it was taking me off in a different direction altogether.
But no—I had been moving in a straight line, at least, as far as I could tell.
Now the tunnel’s floor began rising quite steeply. Ahead was what looked like a stone archway.
And another locked door.
This lock was older and much more difficult to pick. The mechanism was more massive—heavier—more stiff—and almost impossible to move with the thin wire of my braces.
I congratulated myself on bringing the pickle fork as a backup.
A bit more squalene from my nose, a bit of twiddling the lock’s wards with my mouthware, a couple of deft twists with the cutlery and—Bob’s your uncle!—the levers lifted and the door swung inward.
I was no longer in the tunnel.
Now, I found myself in a low stone chamber which was obviously part of the crypt.
Iron sconces on the walls had once held torches: massive blotches of black soot on the ceiling, probably hundreds of years old, showed that flaming brands had once been used.
The walls were scratched with names and initials: D.C., R.O.; Playfayre; Madrigall, Wenlock: some of them ancestors of families who still lived in Bishop’s Lacey.
Not a de Luce among the lot.
At the back of the chamber was what I took at first to be a hole: a rectangle of darkness about five feet above the floor. I shone the torch into it, but could not see far. I wasn’t tall enough.
Luckily, someone had made a makeshift stepping-stone of broken granite—old tombstones, perhaps—directly beneath the opening.
Even without the footprints which were everywhere in the dust, it was clear that this opening had been used quite recently.