Mrs. Battle’s boardinghouse, an ancient structure of warped, weathered clapboards and peeling paint, stood in a rutted yard on the south side of the road, halfway between St. Tancred’s and the Thirteen Drakes. In earlier times it had been a public house, the Adam and Eve, its name and the words “Ales & Stouts” still faintly visible in faded letters above the door. The whole place sagged in the middle like a serpent and had a general air of dampness.
I knocked and waited.
Nothing happened and I knocked again.
Still nothing.
Perhaps, I thought, as with the butcher’s shop in Nether-Wolsey, the owner was in the garden.
I strolled casually round the back as if I were a rather dopey tourist who had lost her way.
The area behind the house was like an archaeological dig: heaps of sand like giant hedgehogs, their backs bristling with shovels. Everywhere were untidy piles of boards and bags of cement. Everywhere broken rocks were strewn about as if in a temper tantrum by a baby giant.
The home of George Battle’s stonemasonry business.
I peeped into a dim shed which stood to one side. More cement, a wooden box of trowels, an old-fashioned sloping desk with accounting books and inkwells, a row of pegs upon which hung various pieces of black rubber rainwear, an electric ring and enamel teakettle, and a blanket flung into the corner which might once have been lain upon by a long-dead dog.
No point in snooping too much, I thought. Someone might be watching from a back window of the house.
I shoved my hands into the pockets of my cardigan, looked up at the sky as if carelessly checking the weather, and sauntered, whistling, back round to the front door.
I knocked again … and again. A regular volley of knocks.
After what seemed like an hour, heavy footsteps came lumbering toward the door and a lace curtain fluttered in one of the side windows.
An eye peered out and then withdrew.
After another painfully long moment, the cracked china doorknob turned slowly through a few degrees and the door swung inward to reveal a long tunnel of darkness that led away almost to infinity, ending in a small scrap of distant daylight somewhere at the back of the house.
“Well?”
The voice came from somewhere in the gloom.
“Mrs. Battle?” I said. “I’m Flavia de Luce, from Buckshaw. May I come in?”
Ask and ye shall receive, I had been told to believe, but it didn’t work. It’s difficult for the average person to refuse such a direct request, but Mrs. Battle was obviously not an average person.
“Why?” she demanded.
“It’s about Mr. Collicutt,” I said. “Actually, it’s rather private. I’d prefer to discuss it indoors where we can’t be overheard.”
Step two: Insinuate that your message is both secret and juicy.
“Well …” she said, wavering.
“I don’t want anyone to see me here,” I said, lowering my voice and looking back over both shoulders as if checking for eavesdroppers.
“Come,” she commanded, and a fleshy hand from the shadows behind the door beckoned me into the gloom.
After the bright light of the outdoors it took several seconds for my eyes to adjust to the darkness, but when they did, I found myself face-to-face with the lady of the house. Or at least half face-to-face. The other half was still hidden in shadows behind the door.
Although I had seen Mrs. Battle now and then about the village, it had always been at something of a distance, and I had never actually spoken to the woman. Up close, she was larger than I remembered, and more red-faced.
“Well?”
“Actually …” I said, using the word a second time.
The word “actually,” like its cousin “frankly,” should, by itself, be a tip-off to most people that what is to follow is a blatant lie—but it isn’t.
“Actually …” I said again, “it’s about my sister Feely. Ophelia, I mean.”
“Yes?”
The eye widened a little in the gloom. So far, so good. I had rehearsed the entire conversation in my mind as I pedaled to the village from Buckshaw.
I shifted from foot to foot, glancing uneasily about the dark-paneled hallway as if in fear of being overheard.
“She’s … she’s getting married, you see, and there are certain letters …”
Daffy had once read us a French novel in which this was the plot.
I held my breath and strained to make my face red, although my effort was probably wasted in the darkness.
“Mr. Collicutt—” I began to explain.
“Letters, is it?” Mrs. Battle said. “I see. And you want them back.”
Just like that!
I bit my lip and nodded my head.
“For your sister.”
I nodded again, trying to remember how to look desolate.
“Very sweet,” she said. “Very touching. You must love her.”
I brushed away an imaginary tear and wiped my finger elaborately on my skirt.
That did it.
“Not that it will do much good,” she went on, waving a hand at the dark staircase. “The police have already had a good root through everything.”
“Oh, no!” I said. “Feely will simply die.”
I had an odd feeling even as I spoke the words.
Nobody ever simply dies.
Mr. Collicutt, for instance, had met his death at the hands of a couple of killers—I was now sure of it—and had been dragged, gas-masked (or had the mask been put on later?) through the churchyard, through the much-trampled grave of Cassandra Cottlestone, through a dank and earthy tunnel, to be dumped in the tomb of a long-dead saint.
Nothing simple about that.
“Turned everything upside down, Inspector Whatsis and his lot. Haven’t had the heart to straighten up. Whole thing has been such a—”
“Frightful shock,” I put in.
“Taken the words right out of my mouth,” she said.
“Frightful shock.”
I let a few moments pass in silence so that we could bond to each other as sisters in sorrow.
“I hope you’re feeling better,” I told her. “Miss Tanty told me you’ve been a regular saint in driving her to her appointments. You have a very large heart, Mrs. Battle.”
“Yes. Since you put it that way, I suppose I do.”
Not even Saint Francis de Sales, whose dying word was “Humility,” could have refused a compliment like that.
“I had a touch of the megrims that day,” she went on without being prompted. “I hated to let her down but Florrie—that’s my niece—offered to run her over since she didn’t start work till noon that day.
“ ‘No, Florrie,’ Crispin—Mr. Collicutt, I mean—told her. ‘I need to have a word with the woman anyway. You deserve your half-day, and I shall be back well before noon.’ ”
“The woman?” I asked. “Did he always refer to Miss Tanty as ‘the woman’?”
Mrs. Battle’s eyes slowly came round and lighted on mine.
“No,” she said. “He didn’t. Not always.”
Was this, I wondered, “the rather odd comment” the vicar had mentioned?
“Gosh, it must have been a worry for both you and Florence—having your car go missing like that, I mean. As well as Mr. Collicutt, of course.”
“Car never went missing,” she said. “He never took it. Not far, anyway. Florrie found it parked in front of the church.”
“Huh,” I said in a bored voice.
Then I let out a sigh.
“The letters …” I said, almost apologetically.
She waved a hand toward the stairs.
“First door left,” she said. “At the top.”
I found myself creeping slowly up the dark staircase as if points were being given for silence, even though the fourth and seventh steps groaned horribly. The first door on the left was so small and so close to the top of the stairs that I almost missed it.
I turned the china doorknob and stepped into Mr. Collicutt’s bedroom.
I suppose I had been expecting something spacious. Having been accustomed to the stadium-sized bedrooms at Buckshaw, this tiny space beneath the eaves came as something of a shock. It was as if a few feet of attic had been banged into an extra bedroom for an emergency, and no one afterward had ever quite got round to putting things back the way they were. An altogether peculiar room.
But what a room!
It was full to bursting with organ pipes. Like the rats in “The Pied Piper of Hamelin,” they were everywhere: great pipes, small pipes, lean pipes, brawny pipes, brown pipes, black pipes, gray pipes, tawny pipes, grave old plodders, gay young friskers, fathers, mothers, uncles—a thicket of wood, tin, zinc, lead, and brass—a maze of leaning tubes and cylinders. Racks of stops, like ribs of beef in the butcher’s window, each with its name engraved on an ivory disk: Trumpet, Gemshorn, Violin, Nason Flute, Rohrflöte, Bourdon, and a handful of others. Wedged into a corner beneath a sloping ceiling was a pitifully small bed, neatly made.
For a sudden spinning moment I thought I was back inside the organ chamber at St. Tancred’s—the chamber where Mr. Collicutt had been murdered.
A wooden tea chest, standing on end, served as a desk, and on it was an untidy pile of papers. I climbed over something which might have been a diapason and picked up the top sheet, which was covered with tiny, antlike handwriting—what Daffy would have called “miniscule.”
The Coming-to-light of the 1687 Renatus Harris Organ at Braxhampstead With an Account of its Restoration, it said. This was underlined twice in red ink, and beneath it was written, by Crispin Savoy Collicutt, Mus. B., F.R.C.O.
After that, in black, and in another hand, someone had added the word Deceased.