A lucifer, of course, was a type of match used during the First World War, tipped with sulfur and a dried paste made up of phosphorus and potassium chlorate. It was also a nickname of Satan. And of Saint Tancred’s stolen diamond.
No one in the chamber above was smiling as the song urged us to do. The workmen looked uneasily at one another as if some great taboo had been broken by Adam’s whistle, which was still echoing eerily up from the pit.
“Adam …” the vicar called down.
“Sorry.” The word floated up from the grave and hung echoing in the air.
Was he whistling without thinking, or was there a message in his choice of song? If so, who was it meant for?
It was then that I became aware that several others had joined us in the crypt. One was a large man wearing a black suit, a clerical collar, and a look of stressed holiness.
The bishop. There could be no doubt about it.
“Your Grace,” the vicar said. “And Chancellor Ridley-Smith.”
He shook hands with each of them, neither with any real joy.
So this was Chancellor—or Magistrate—Ridley-Smith. Jocelyn’s father.
The first thing I noticed about him was that I had seen him before. He was the man in the photo presenting the trophy to Miss Tanty.
I studied him carefully.
A rigid man, I thought, with hard but watery brown eyes, which shifted sideways professionally, going constantly from one of us to another, like the carriage on a typewriter. The sockets in which they were mounted were round and staring, and I pitied at once all the accused who had ever been made to stand before him in the dock.
His brow was permanently wrinkled, like that of a person who had just got a whiff of something nasty, an impression that was heightened by the fact that he hadn’t a trace of eyebrows or eyelashes. His blotchy nose was flattened, as if he had boxed in his youth, but not very well.
A boozer, I decided.
Although he was not physically large, Magistrate Ridley-Smith’s very presence seemed to use up all the remaining air in the crypt, which was suddenly stifling.
He stood teetering on curiously tiny feet, glaring impatiently at his surroundings.
“Let’s get on with it, then,” he said in a remarkably hoarse, thick voice, pulling a half-hunter watch from his waistcoat pocket and consulting it with protruding lower lip. “Where are the remains?”
As he fumbled to put the watch away, I couldn’t help noticing that his wrist, like that of Mrs. Ridley-Smith in the photograph at Bogmore Hall, was peculiarly weak and floppy.
What was it Dogger had said? A classic case of lead poisoning.
Had the magistrate, in those long-ago days in India, been exposed to his wife’s toy soldiers?
“We haven’t brought them up yet,” the vicar said. “I thought it best if we waited until you—”
“Yes, well, then, you are keeping the Church, the Judiciary, and the Constabulary waiting. I suggest we proceed.”
By the Church, he meant the bishop; by the Judiciary, himself. Who on earth was representing the Constabulary?
And then I saw Inspector Hewitt. He was standing in the shadows behind the bishop. I smiled at him but he did not appear to have noticed me. His eyes were moving as coolly round the crypt as Magistrate Ridley-Smith’s. Perhaps even more coolly.
“Proceed,” the bishop ordered, licking his lips.
At that very instant Adam’s head appeared at the top of the ladder, his chin just level with the stone edge of the saint’s grave. I was reminded for an instant of the head of John the Baptist.
“Right, then,” he said, destroying the illusion. “All clear below.”
“Who is this … man?” Magistrate Ridley-Smith demanded. “He oughtn’t to be mucking about down there. Who gave him permission?”
“We did,” the bishop said. “You may recall—”
But Magistrate Ridley-Smith was not listening. His face was a thundercloud.
“Come along, Martin,” he growled, and stepped clumsily out through the archway.
Martin, the fourth workman—Martin the silent one, Martin who had not spoken a word since I had first seen him—said in a flat, frayed voice, “Now we’re in for it.”
Five words. But that was all it took to set my mind spinning like a Catherine wheel, sending off showers of sparks in all directions.
That voice! I had heard it before. But where?
My sense of hearing had never let me down in the past and I did not expect it to do so now.
I replayed the man’s words in my mind. “Now we’re in for it.”
In a back room of my brain something went click, and I heard that same voice saying, “Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky … Franz Schubert … Swan Lake … Death and the Maiden.” It was the voice I had heard issuing from the concealed loudspeakers in Jocelyn’s room at Bogmore Hall.
Benson!
This otherwise silent workman was Jocelyn’s keeper! He had been sent here right from the very beginning to spy on the opening of Saint Tancred’s tomb!
I knew when I saw the side of his face on the staircase that I’d seen him before, but couldn’t think where. It had, of course, been right here in the crypt, where his silent presence in the shadows drew little attention.
Now he was leaving the stony chamber, shuffling away in his master’s footsteps.
As if to confirm what I already knew, Tommy said, “Ta-ta for now, Benson.”
“Yes, well, then,” the bishop said. “I propose we get on with it. It’s late. Easter is tomorrow. We have only a few hours left and much to do. Please inform us when the relics have been collected, Mr. Haskins, and we shall prepare the ossuary.”
Then he, too, was gone.
Adam climbed up onto the ledge, and sat with his legs dangling into the pit.
From somewhere down below came a wooden banging, and the ladder rattled against the stone edges.
“Hullo!” Adam said, looking down into the pit. “Something stirreth in the grave.”
Again the ladder shook, and a red face appeared, streaked with mud and surprised to see us.
It was Sergeant Graves.
“Right you are, chief,” he said to Inspector Hewitt, pointing the beam of his torch back down the way he had come. “It goes right the way through from here to the churchyard.”
Brilliant, I wanted to say, but I kept my mouth shut. It was obvious that the other branch of the tunnel—the one I had not taken—led down into the actual tomb of Saint Tancred.
The sergeant scrambled up off the ladder and sat himself beside Adam on the edge, brushing the filth from his clothing.
The Inspector nodded, his face a mask. He did not say what must surely have been on his mind: that the sergeant’s passage like a pipe cleaner through the tomb had almost certainly destroyed traces of those who had looted it.
But then, too, so had my own explorations, so I decided to say nothing. Perhaps the Inspector didn’t even know about the Heart of Lucifer. Nor, perhaps, did the bishop or the chancellor.
I had once heard a saying that went like this: “Least said, soonest mended.”
I would keep my tongue tamed and my lip zipped. Never let it be said that Flavia de Luce was a blabbermouth.
But what was this? Inspector Hewitt had caught my eye and was motioning with a sideways jerk of his head and an upward rolling of his eyes, a message I could read as clearly as if it were a newspaper headline.
UPSTAIRS, it said. NOW.