I folded the banknotes and pressed them back into the cigarette tin. Getting down onto my stomach again, I shoved the box back into the far corner behind one of the legs of the bed.
I pocketed the envelope and made for the door.
I tiptoed silently to the far end of the hall, stepped into the loo, pulled the chain and flushed … waited … pulled it again … and again, then slammed the door and sauntered casually down the stairs trying to look grateful.
“Well?” Mrs. Battle demanded, hands on hips.
I shook my head grimly.
“Nothing,” I said. “Feely is going to be devastated. Please promise you’ll keep this confidential.”
Mrs. Battle glared at me for a long moment, and then suddenly she softened. What might have been a smile flickered across her face.
“Believe it or not, I was young once,” she said. “I’ll not breathe a word.”
“Oh, thank you!” I told her.
“By the way,” I added, “is your niece at home? I’d like to thank her personally for her great kindness toward Miss Tanty. I know my sister greatly appreciates it, what with the choir, and so forth. Miss Tanty is such a treasure, don’t you think?”
“Florence is at work,” Mrs. Battle said, holding the door open for me. “I’ll give her the message.”
“Oh, yes,” I said, scrambling madly to gather every slightest scrap of information. “She’s housekeeper at Foster’s, isn’t she?”
It was a shot in the dark.
“Housekeeper?” She sniffed. “I should say not. Florence is private secretary to Magistrate Ridley-Smith.”
Home again, home again, jiggedy-jig. If it hadn’t been for Gladys, my feet would long ago have been worn down to the nubs.
In my laboratory, I took a torch from a drawer and went into the photographic darkroom which Uncle Tar had built in one corner.
Light-tight. Dark as pitch.
I flicked on the torch and pulled the envelope from my pocket.
In Mr. Collicutt’s bedroom, my fingertips had detected the faintest irregularity of the paper’s surface. Why, I had wondered, would someone remove a flap from an envelope used to carry money? The answer seemed obvious: to dispose of something that was written on it.
I placed the envelope faceup and laid the torch down flat on the worktable beside it. A bit of card narrowed the beam.
I now had a slit of light shining at a very low angle of illumination—a right angle, actually—across the paper. Any slight indentations should spring into view.
I took up a magnifying lens and bent closer.
Voilà! as Daffy would say.
The paper was old and of high quality, the sort used before the war for personal correspondence. Not at all the kind of cheap, thin, glazed stuff in which Father’s creditors now sent him their frequent bills.
The missing flap had been embossed with a crest or a monogram, and long storage in a press, or box, had transferred a slight impression to the envelope’s blank front.
Slight, yes, and very faint, but the monogram was just decipherable in the oblique beam of the torch:
QRS
Something Ridley-Smith.
Ridley-Smith, I wrote in my notebook. Ridley-Smith the father, not the son. What is the man’s first name?
Magistrate Ridley-Smith—Chancellor Ridley-Smith—had given, or sent, six hundred pounds in banknotes to Mr. Collicutt, who was said in the village to be too poor to have his handkerchiefs and surplices cleaned and pressed at the steam laundry.
Too much of a coincidence that Mrs. Battle’s niece, Florence, works for Ridley-Smith, I wrote. Perhaps she was unwittingly mixed up in this, too.
Perhaps all of them were.
Why on earth, I wondered, would one of His Majesty’s magistrates, a chancellor of the Church of England, give a village organist such an enormous sum, only to have it hidden under the bed? Whatever the money was meant for, why had Mr. Collicutt not deposited it safely in the bank?
The answer seemed obvious.
Someone was being secretly paid to do something.
But what?
I was just about to write down my suspicion when there was a light knock at the door. It was Dogger.
“Mr. Adam Sowerby wishes to see you, Miss Flavia. Shall I show him up?”
“Thank you, Dogger. Of course,” I replied, trying to keep my excitement in check until the door had closed. Adam Tradescant Sowerby, MA., FRHortS, etc., making a professional call upon Miss Flavia de Luce! Just fancy!
I closed my notebook and shoved it into a drawer, then flew to the darkroom to put away the torch and the envelope.
I had barely time to return to the window and hold a test tube of colored liquid up to the light—tea, as it happened—when the door opened and Dogger intoned, “Mr. Sowerby, Miss Flavia.”
I counted slowly to seven, then turned round.
“Come in,” I said. “How nice to see you again.”
Adam gave out a low whistle as he looked round at my laboratory.
“Good lord,” he said. “I had, of course, heard about your famous Closet of Chemistry, but I had no idea—”
“Very few do,” I said. “I try to keep it as private as possible.”
“Then I am very much privileged.”
“Yes, you are,” I told him.
No point in wasting time with false vanity when you possess the real thing.
He drifted over to my microscope.
“Ernst Leitz, by Jove,” he said. “And binocular, too. Very nice. Very nice indeed.”
I nodded graciously and kept my mouth shut. Let’s wait and see, I thought, what the cat’s brought home.
“I saw you at the church,” he said. “Quite ingenious, the way you rescued the vicar from those baying reporters.”
“You were there?” I asked, surprised.