• TWENTY-SIX •
A FRAIL FOG DRIFTED up from the river behind the church, floating like gray smoke among the graves, muffling the sound of the running water.
A churchyard in the March moonlight should be enough to give anyone the ging-gang-goolies, but not this girl.
After all, I had been here before.
I pounded my chest with both fists and breathed deeply of the morning’s damp air—a mixture of dank earth, wet grass, and old stone, with a slight aftertaste of fading flowers.
I could see why clergymen loved their jobs.
The ladies from the Altar Guild would soon be here, so I’d have to be quick about what I’d come to do. With any luck, I’d have perhaps an hour, or at most an hour and a half before they arrived with armloads of Easter lilies.
Not that I would need that long. My dream had helped the last bits of the puzzle to fall into place. Before the dream, although I’d had all the facts, I hadn’t seen how they fit together.
But now, as sure as shandygaff, I knew what I was going to find, and where I was going to find it.
I stepped into the porch and flicked on the torch, taking care to keep the beam focused on the floor. Seen from outside, the slightest glimmer on the stained-glass windows would make the church glow like a Tiffany lamp in the graveyard.
I opened the inner door and passed from the porch into the main body of the church, or, as Feely would have said, from the narthex into the nave. When it came to ecclesiastical architecture, Feely loved to toss around technical terms as if she were chatting over tea and lady-fingers with the Archbishop of Canterbury, or perhaps even the Pope. Did the Pope drink tea? I didn’t know, but I was sure Feely would be able to hold forth upon the subject until the cows came home with the cream.
I stood in the center aisle and listened.
The place was filled with that utter silence which only churches can have—a silence so vast, so timeless, and so loud that it hurts the ears, an echoing vacuum of negative sound.
Could it be the crying-out of the dead who lay stacked within the walls and in the crypt below? Were they lying in wait, as Daffy had once told me, to seize the midnight visitor and drag you down with them into their coffins where they would munch on your bones until the Last Judgment at which time they would spit them out and make haste for Heaven?
Stop it, Flavia! I thought.
Why did I allow my mind to fill with such utter rubbish? I had been here before in the night and had seen nothing worse than Miss Tanty.
Miss Tanty and Cynthia Richardson.
Now that I stopped to think about it, St. Tancred’s in the wee hours was almost as busy as Victoria Station at midday.
The boat train to Heaven.
Stop it, Flavia!
I was allowing the place to get on my nerves and I didn’t like it at all.
I moved up the aisle a step at a time—a slow procession of one.
Then suddenly, in my mind, perhaps to keep me company, Daffy was pacing along behind me, chanting in a solemn, hollow voice, “ ‘Let’s talk of graves, of worms and epitaphs …’ ”
Stop it, Flavia! Stop it at once!
With any luck I was just minutes away from success. Mere moments away from—
Something creaked.
Something wooden, by the sound of it.
I froze.
Listened …
Nothing.
This is ridiculous, I thought. Besides their stones, old churches are full of oak and elm. The timbers of the roof which arched above my head, the pews, the pulpit, the railings were all, once upon a time, trees in an English forest. They had once been alive—were, perhaps, still alive, settling, stretching their sinews in their sleep.
I moved up the aisle toward the organ, not daring to raise the torch’s beam to see if Saint Tancred was still dripping.
Splotches of colored moonlight came angling in through the windows, making the shadows all the darker.
Now I had reached the organ, its three keyboards gleaming in the darkness like a triple set of teeth.
Something creaked. Again.
Or was it something else?
I shifted the beam of the torch and the carved wooden imp grinned at me in the gloom.
I pressed my ear to the wooden panel and listened, but there was not the faintest sound from the organ chamber.
A twist of the imp’s chubby cheeks and the panel slid open.
I stepped inside.
Here I was again. The spot where Mr. Collicutt died—the spot where, unless I was sadly mistaken, Mr. Collicutt had hidden the Heart of Lucifer.
It was simply a matter of threading the facts together in the right order, like pearls on a string. Once that was done, the solution was not difficult. I could hardly wait to explain it all to Inspector Hewitt—to deliver it up as a goodwill offering with every last bow and every blessed ribbon tied beautifully in place.
He would, of course, share the details with his wife, Antigone, who would ring me up at once and invite me round to tea once again, in spite of my past social blunders.
She would remark on the brilliance of my solution and I would say that it was nothing.
The organ pipes rose all around me—thousands of them, it seemed, rank after rank like mountain peaks of tin and wood.
Each pipe had its mouth, a horizontal slit near the bottom through which it spoke, and I was as sure as I could be that into one of these, Mr. Collicutt had shoved the Heart of Lucifer.
The question had been: Which one?
I had spent hours sitting on the organ bench with Feely, watching as she pulled out the stops which gave the organ its voice: the Lieblich Bourdon, the Geigen Principal, the Contra Fagotto, the Gemshorn, the Voix Céleste, the Salicet, the Dulciana, and the Lieblich Gedact.
In which set of pipes would Mr. Collicutt have hidden the Heart of Lucifer?
Oddly enough, it had been the cast-off row of stop knobs in his bedroom that had first put the question into my head.
“Where would an organist hide a diamond?”
It was like a riddle, and like a riddle, the answer, once you saw it, was laughably obvious.
“In the Gemshorn!”
Feely had explained that the Gemshorn pipes were the ones that were meant to sound like flutes made from animal horns—the ones that looked to me like pygmy blowguns.
There must have been two dozen of the things, ranging in length from several feet to a couple of inches. The smallest ones were too small to conceal anything, their slots too narrow to shove anything inside.
I decided to begin with the largest pipe.
I inserted my first two fingers into its metal mouth and felt both upward and downward—above the slot and below it.
The inside of the pipe was as smooth as a tea canister.
Very well, then—on to the next.
I couldn’t hold back a smile as I worked. Feely had complained that the organ had been out of sorts for weeks but she had mistakenly blamed it on the weather.
But I knew otherwise.
Who would have thought that a hidden diamond was giving the poor, tired old instrument a frog in its throat?
Flavia de Luce, that’s who!
“Flavia, you rascal, you,” I whispered, and shoved my fingers into the mouth of the next pipe.
There’s an unwritten law of the universe which assures that the thing you seek will always be found in the last place you look. It applies to everything in life from lost socks to misplaced poisons, and it was certainly at work here.
The only pipe I hadn’t yet checked of the Gemshorn rank was the one farthest from the sliding panel through which I had entered the organ chamber.
I made a mighty stretch to reach it—said a silent prayer—and slid my hand into the slot.
My fingers touched something!
There was a lump inside the pipe—a dried lump, like a petrified prune.
I felt the thing, gently outlining its size and shape with my fingertips.
It was, perhaps, the size of a walnut, and about the same texture.
I wiggled it and with a hollow snap the thing came free and dropped into my hand.
Careful, I thought. Don’t let it fall down inside the pipe.
I worked the object slowly, carefully toward the slot until at last I was able to draw it out into the light of the torch.
What bitter disappointment!
It was nothing but a lump of old putty.
I wedged the torch between two of the organ pipes and, using the thumbs of both hands, dug my nails into the lump and split it open as if cracking an egg.