The Curious Case of the Copper Corpse
Alan Bradley
In which eleven-year-old Flavia de Luce, chemical connoisseur, is immersed in her element.
I was peering through the microscope at the tooth of an adder I had captured behind the coach house that very morning after church, when there came a light knock at the laboratory door.
“Excuse me, Miss Flavia,” Dogger said, “but there’s a letter for you. I shall leave it on the desk.”
And with that, he was gone. One of the things I love most about Father’s jack-of-all-trades is his uncanny sense of decency. Dogger knows instinctively when to come and when to go.
Curiosity, of course, got the better of me. I switched off the illuminator and reached for the butter knife I had pinched from the kitchen, which doubled for crumpets and correspondence.
The envelope was a plain one, with no distinctive markings: the sort sold in any stationer’s shop at eleven pence per hundred. There was no postmark—there wouldn’t be on a Sunday—which indicated that it had been shoved through the letter slot at the front door.
I sniffed it, then sliced it open.
Inside was a letter written in pencil on lined paper. That and the horrid scrawl suggested that the sender was a schoolboy.
Murder! it said. Come at once. Anson House, Greyminster, Staircase No. 3, and it was signed J. Haxton or Plaxton. The writer had pressed so hard that the pencil had snapped in the middle of his signature, which seemed to have been hastily completed with the broken bit of graphite squeezed between a grubby thumb and forefinger.
Murder, urgency, frenzy, fear: Who could resist? It was my cup of tea.
—
Gladys’s rubber tires hissed happily along the rainy road. My rapid pedaling had transformed the inside of my yellow mackintosh into a superheated tent, and I was now so soaked with perspiration that I might as well not have bothered: The rain would have been cooler.
Greyminster School was shrouded in mist. Acres of green lawns produced a ghostly, floating fog which gave only brief, unnerving glimpses of ancient stone and staring windows.
Father’s old school seemed to exist simultaneously in both past and present, as if all of its Old Boys, back to the year dot, were hovering somewhere in the wings. More dangerous than phantoms, however, was Ruggles, the nasty little porter who had accosted me on my last visit. I had not forgotten him, and it was unlikely that Ruggles had forgotten me.
I parked Gladys beneath a sign that said Faculty Bicycles Only, and went round the end of the building. The staircases, I remembered, were also accessible from the rear.
Staircase No. 3 was at the farthest corner of the building: a dark, narrow climb with black paneling and no windows. I made my way upward, trying to ascend in silence. The studies on the first landing were marked with white cards in holders: Lawson, Somerville, Henley. A fourth door revealed a cramped WC and bathtub. On the second floor, the doors were marked Wagstaffe, Baker, and Smith-Pritchard.
Up I climbed, into an increasing cloud of smells: boots, jam, ink, and unwashed shirts mingled with the unmistakable odors of brilliantine, leather dressing, and mislaid bits of baking, all with an underlying whiff of tobacco smoke.
The staircase ended at the top in near darkness. Only by putting my nose to the doors could I read the names of the last three occupants: Cosgrave, Parker, and Plaxton.
I had found my man—so to speak.
Before I could knock, the door came open just enough for a reddened eyeball to look me up and down. “Flavia de Luce?” a cracked voice asked, and I nodded. The opening widened to allow me to squeeze inside, and the door was closed instantly behind me.
I’ve seen frightened people in my life, but never one so terrified as the boy who stood before me. His face was the color of mildewed bread dough, his hands were trembling, and he looked as if he had been crying. “Did anyone see you?” he demanded.
“No.”
“Are you sure?”
“I said no, didn’t I?”
He nodded in obvious misery, and we were right back where we had started. Murder is not an easy subject to broach, and I realized that I needed to take it easy on this boy. He was, after all, not much older than me. “Where’s the corpse?” I asked.
He flinched, then brushed past me into the hall. The WC on this landing had a hand-printed note pinned to the door: OUT OF ORDER! NO ENTRY! which seemed excessive for a busted loo.
Standing well back, Plaxton mimed that I was to open the door. I held my breath and turned the knob.
The room was dim, lighted only by a small stained-glass window, whose diamond-shaped panes of violet and yellow gave to the scene a curious carnival air. Directly under the window was a bathtub, and in it was what I took at first to be a statue. “Is this a joke?” I asked. But the look on Plaxton’s face, and the way he covered his mouth with his hand—not to hide a mischievous grin, but to keep from vomiting—gave me my answer.
The thing in the tub was not a statue, but a man—a dead man, and a naked one at that. Save for his face, he seemed to have been carved out of copper.
“I’m sorry,” Plaxton whispered, averting his eyes. “This is probably no place for a girl.”
“Girl be blowed!” I snapped. “I’m here as a brain, not as a female.”
Plaxton actually took a step backward.
“Who is this?” I asked, still scarcely able to believe my eyes.
“Mr. Denning,” he replied. “The housemaster.”
I opened my mental notebook and began recording the scene.
The deceased reclined in the tub, as if—except for one remarkable detail—he had dozed off during a long, comfortable soak. Several inches from the top of the tub was a regular ring of blue scum, and at the foot, a cracked rubber stopper was still jammed into the drain hole. Whatever liquid had filled the tub had leaked out, and the porcelain was now completely dry.
I touched a finger to the residue and sniffed it. Copper sulfate: CuSO4. Unmistakable.
A look round the back of the tub showed me what I was already half expecting to see: an automobile battery. One of its lugs (the positive) was connected to a black rubber wire, its farther end bared and coiled in the bottom of the tub like a sleeping snake. The other lug (the negative) was connected to a similar length of wire, terminating in a large crocodile clip, which was clamped firmly to the corpse’s nose.
The chemical and electrical action had electroplated the man. Electrodeposition, to be precise.
Although I knew it was useless, I felt with two fingers for a carotid pulse, but there was none. Mr. Denning was decidedly defunct.
“Give me a hand,” I said, seizing the shoulder and pulling the body away from the back of the porcelain. It crackled, and a few chips fell into the bottom of the dry tub. A glance at the expanse of flesh, plated as it was with copper, told me that there were no bullet holes or knife wounds.
Plaxton hadn’t moved a muscle.
“Is he dead?” he asked, almost blubbering, his lower lip trembling terribly. I could have made any number of witty retorts, but something told me to control myself.
“Yes,” I said, and left it at that.
“I thought so,” Plaxton said. “That’s why I wrote you.” Which seemed an odd thing to say until you considered that the boy was still in some degree of shock.
“But why me?” I asked. “Why write instead of telephoning? For that matter, why didn’t you call the police?”
Plaxton went even pastier, if possible. “They’d think I killed him. I needed someone who could prove I didn’t. That’s why I wrote to you.”
“And did you? Kill him, I mean?”
“Of course I didn’t!” Plaxton hissed, getting a bit of color in his cheeks at last.
“Then who did?”