• TWENTY-EIGHT •
I FLEW OUT OF Miss Tanty’s house as if all the hunting hounds of Hell were at my heels, and perhaps they were.
Round the corner and into the high street I ran, and within a minute I was pounding on the door of PC Linnet’s cottage, part of which served as Bishop’s Lacey’s police station.
In a surprisingly short time, the tousle-haired constable was at the door, pulling on his blue uniform jacket, his brow wrinkled, his eyebrows raised into a pair of upward-pointing Vs.
“Miss Tanty’s house,” I shouted. “Quickly! Attempted murder!” Leaving the astonished constable standing on his doorstep, I dashed off in the opposite direction toward Dr. Darby’s surgery.
Would Miss Tanty still be in her kitchen when the police arrived? I had reason to believe she would. In the first place, the woman was in shock, and in the second, she was not constructed with sprinting in mind. And in the third, come to think of it, there was nowhere to hide. Bishop’s Lacey was not big enough for bolt-holes.
I was in luck. When I reached the surgery, Dr. Darby was already outside, using a pail and sponge to wash the mud and dust of a country practice from his bull-nosed Morris.
“Miss Tanty’s burned her hand,” I told him breathlessly. “Ether explosion! I’ve already applied cold ether and a potato poultice.”
Dr. Darby nodded wisely, as if this happened every morning before breakfast. As he ducked into the surgery for his bag, I was off again.
I could be there before him. Or so I thought.
But his Morris passed me even before I reached Cow Lane.
I overtook PC Linnet just as he reached Miss Tanty’s gate.
“Stay here,” he ordered, holding up a most official hand. “Outside,” he added, as if I might not have understood.
“But—”
“No buts,” he said. “This is now a crime scene. We have our orders.”
What did he mean by that? Had Inspector Hewitt specifically forbidden me access?
After all that I had done for him?
Constable Linnet vanished into the house before I could ask a single question.
A moment later, Miss Tanty began screaming again.
…
Father, Feely, and Daffy were walking along the road toward me as I came round the corner of the churchyard wall.
The heat from the ether explosion had left my face feeling as if it had been irradiated, but now, at least, I knew firsthand how Madame Curie must have felt.
My skirt and sweater were in ruins, my hair ribbons hanging in scorched remnants.
“Look at you!” Feely said. “Where have you been? You can’t possibly go into the church like that, can she, Father?”
Although Father glanced in my direction, I knew he was not really seeing me.
“Flavia,” was all he said, before looking sluggishly away and fixing his gaze on some far horizon of his own.
“I thought you were sick,” Daffy said.
Daffy was always the one to dredge up the incriminating details.
“I’m feeling much better now,” I said, remembering suddenly that I still had burned cork smudged around my eyes.
“Good morning, all,” said a voice behind me. It was Adam Sowerby. I hadn’t heard him pull up in his silent Rolls-Royce.
“What’s happened to you, then?” he asked. “Bit too much sun?”
I nodded. I could have hugged the man.
“I’ve just come from Dr. Darby’s surgery,” I said, which was true. “He says it’s nothing to worry about.” Which was a lie.
“Hmmm,” Adam said. “Well, I’m no doctor, I’m afraid, but I do have a few clever tricks up my sleeve from my wanderings up the Limpopo, and so forth. If it’s all right with you, Haviland,” he said, addressing Father, “I think we—”
Father nodded vaguely, not as if he had really heard, but as if he were trying to keep his head from rolling off his shoulders and into the dirt.
“Let’s get on with it,” Feely said. “I need to run through the anthem, and I’ve no time for …”
She waved a hand at me as if to add “this sort of thing.” She was anxious, I knew, to get at the organ. After all, today was her official debut on the bench.
Father was still staring vaguely off across the fields, but as Feely and Daffy marched off toward the church door, he followed slowly—almost obediently.
Daffy looked back over her shoulder at me as if I were a freak in the peep show.
What on earth, I wondered, could be happening with the sale of Buckshaw? I had been so busy with my own concerns I hadn’t even thought to ask.
Dared to ask.
But now, seeing Father so like a wraith had moved something somewhere deep inside me.
In a way, I was proud of him. Whatever devils were gnawing at his guts hadn’t kept him from his Easter duty. Somewhere inside, my father was a man who still had faith, and I hoped, for his sake, that it would be enough.
“This way,” Adam was saying, and he led me round the church, through the churchyard, past the still-slumbering Cassandra Cottlestone to the river bank. I shuddered slightly as I recalled that it was here, on this very spot, that I had once encountered the murderer of Horace Bonepenny. That had been almost a year ago, but it might as well have been in another life.
Adam scrambled down the damp bank and pulled out a cluster of daffodils by their roots.
“You’re getting your boots muddy,” I told him.
“So I am,” he said, glancing down, but he didn’t seem to care.
He climbed back up and fished a penknife from the pocket of his vest.
“Do you know what this is?” he asked, cutting a bulb into several slices.
“A daffodil,” I said.
“Besides that.”
“Narcissine,” I said. “In the roots. C16H17ON. Deadly poison. If someone crosses you, serve them boiled daffodil bulbs and pretend you thought they were onions.”
“Phew!” Adam whistled. “You certainly know your onions, don’t you?”
“Yes, I do,” I told him. “And my daffodils as well.”
He separated the cool slices of bulb and rubbed them gently, one at a time, on my face, singing as he worked:
“When daffodils begin to peer,
With, hey! the doxy over the dale,
Why, then comes in the sweet o’ the year,
For the red blood reigns in the winter’s pale.”