TEN
WHEN I TURNED THE key in the lock of my laboratory and stepped inside, I found Esmeralda perching contentedly on a nearby test-tube rack and Undine boiling an egg over a Bunsen burner.
“What are you doing in here?” I demanded. “How dare you! How did you get in?”
The place was becoming as peopled as Paddington Station.
“I came across the roofs,” she said cheerily, “and down that little staircase.” She pointed.
“Bugger!” I’m afraid I said, making a mental note to install a deadbolt.
“I needed to talk to you,” she said, before I could say something worse.
“Talk to me? Why ever would you want to do that?”
“Ibu said I was never to go to bed angry with anyone.”
“Well, what difference does that make? Besides, it isn’t bedtime yet.”
“No,” Undine agreed, “it isn’t. But Ibu sent me for my nap, and a nap counts as bed, doesn’t it?”
“I suppose it does,” I said grudgingly. “But what has that to do with me?”
“I’m cheesed off with you.” She pouted, planting her fists on her hips. “I have a bone to pick with you and I can’t possibly nap until we’ve had a jolly good chin-wag about it.”
“Chin-wag?”
“A powwow. A council of war.”
“And what,” I asked, making my voice drip with sarcasm, “have I done to deserve your displeasure?”
“You treat me like a child.”
“Well, you are a child.”
“Of course I am, but that’s hardly reason enough to treat me like one, do you see what I mean?”
“Yes, I think I do,” I admitted.
How Daffy is going to love talking to this curious, nitpicking little creature! I thought.
“What, in particular, have I done?” I was almost afraid to ask.
“You underestimate me,” she said.
I nearly chucked my kippers. “Underestimate you?”
“Yes, you set me at naught.”
“I beg your pardon?” I laughed. “Do you even know what that means?”
“Set me at naught. It means you disbelieved me. You disbelieved me about the saltwater crocodile and you disbelieved me again when I told you that Ibu and I were at the railway station this morning.”
“I did not!”
“Come off it, Flavia—admit it.”
“Well,” I said, “perhaps just a little …”
“See?” Undine crowed. “I told you so! I knew it!”
A sudden clever thought popped into my mind. Daffy had more than once accused me of possessing a certain low cunning, and she was right.
“When did you arrive at the station? Before or after the train?”
“Before—but only just. Ibu said, ‘Here it comes now’ as she was parking at the end of the platform.”
“Which end?” I asked, almost too casually.
“The far end. I don’t know my directions very well, but the end farthest from Buckshaw.”
“The south end,” I said. “The direction from which the train arrived.”
Undine nodded. “Near the luggage trolley.”
Now I knew she was telling the truth. Although there had been no luggage trolleys on the platform at Buckshaw Halt for years, someone had managed to rustle one up from somewhere for the occasion of Harriet’s sad return. Part of my mind had noticed it being piled high with the luggage of those strangers, whoever they may be, who had brought her body home.
“Let’s play a game,” I suggested brightly.
“Oh,” Undine said. “Yes, let’s. I adore games.”
“Do you know how to play Kim’s Game?”
“Of course,” she scoffed. “Ibu used to read to me from Kim at bedtime in Sembawang. She said it was a good fairy tale, even if Kipling was a goddamn Tory, and a jingoist to boot. He visited Sembawang, you know.”
“Jingoist?” She had caught me by surprise. It was likely that even Daffy didn’t know the meaning of the word.
“Yes, you know: like in the song.”
And she began to sing in a curiously sweet and innocent voice:
“We don’t want to fight but by jingo if we do,
“We’ve got the ships, we’ve got the men, we’ve got the money, too!
“Old England and Saint George!” she shrieked suddenly. “One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve!
“That’s the way the song ends,” she explained. “It’s all I can remember.”
I’ll admit it: I was out of my depth. I needed to get this conversation back under control.
“Kim’s Game,” I reminded her.
“Kim’s Game!” she cried, clapping her hands together with delight. “Twelve assorted objects are placed on a tray and covered with a silk scarf. We’ll have Dogger do it! Then he whisks away the scarf and we have sixty seconds to study the items. The scarf is replaced and we each write down the names of as many as we can. Whoever remembers the most wins. That will be me.”
There was no need for her to explain it to me. We had been made to play the wretched game to distraction on rainy evenings in Girl Guides—that is, until the night I had managed to smuggle a toad and a quite decent-sized adder under the silk.
As I have said before, elsewhere, that organization is not noted for its sense of humor, and I had found myself on that occasion being made to sit in the corner once again wearing Miss Delaney’s handmade but highly irregular “Crown of Thorns,” which may have been amusing to some but not to me.
“Exactly,” I said to Undine. “But just to keep things interesting, let’s play the game a different way this time.”
Undine clapped her hands happily again.
“Let’s pretend that the railway platform is the tray and that all the people on it are the objects we have to remember.”
“That’s not fair!” Undine protested. “I don’t know any of the people—except you and your family … and Mr. Churchill, of course. Ibu pointed you out.”
“You had quite a good view of us, then?”
My Daimler mind was firing on all twelve cylinders.
“Top hole!” she said. “Like a box at the pantomime.”
Something twisted inside me. It didn’t seem right that the arrival of my mother’s body at Buckshaw had been viewed by anyone, let alone this little twerp, as some kind of cheap music-hall entertainment.
“All right, then,” I said, holding myself in check. “I’ll begin. There was Aunt Felicity. She counts for one.”
“And the men in uniforms who lifted your mother from the train. That’s six—I’m winning!”
This was insane, I thought, but the game needed to go on.
“Father, Feely, Daffy, and me,” I said. “And Dogger, of course. Six all.”
“Not fair! I already counted the lot of you. Eleven to me!”
“Mrs. Mullet,” I said, “and her husband, Alf.”
“The vicar!” Undine shouted. “I knew him by his collar! Twelve ho!”
I counted on my fingers: “The woman with Aunt Felicity … the officer who saluted Father …
“The engine driver on the footplate,” I added with sudden inspiration, “the conductor, and the two guards on the van. That’s nine, plus Sheila and Flossie Foster and Clarence Mundy, the taxicab driver.”
Although I thought I had spotted Sheila and Flossie at the edge of the platform, I had picked Clarence’s name out of thin air. Undine would never know the difference.
“Tied at twelve,” I told her. “I’m finished. Last chance.”
Undine gnawed at her knuckles, her brow furrowed. “That man in the long coat!” she said, her face lighting up.
My heart stopped.
“What man in the long coat?” I managed, my voice trembling a little. “You’re making him up.”
“The one who was talking to Ibu!” she shouted. “I win!”
Her face was a little, round glowing orb, red with excited accomplishment.
I even smiled a little myself.