Of course I had wanted to tell Father exactly how Harriet’s will had come to be in my possession. I had wanted to make a clean breast of it—the whole scheme: my plans for Harriet’s resurrection and my surprise presentation of her, newly restored to life, to her grieving husband, to my grieving father.
What a scene it would have been!
But my well-meaning plan, alas, through no fault of my own, had been thwarted by those interfering killers from the Home Office.
Because of them, Harriet would now remain dead forever.
Father would realize from the document what I had done. I wouldn’t need to say a word.
I had no right, of course, to read my mother’s will, and I was glad I had not done so. I had realized that while staring at my own reflection in the looking glass. Her will was not mine to read.
I had removed it from its rather unpleasant wallet and put it into Father’s hands.
For better or for worse, I had done what I had done, and now there was no going back.
I had done the right thing and I would jolly well have to live with it.
TWENTY-THREE
HARRIET’S FUNERAL WAS NOW just hours away. There wasn’t a moment to lose.
I sauntered off across the Visto as if I was going for an aimless walk.
At the far corner of the ancient, overgrown lawn, Tristram Tallis, in blue coveralls and almost invisible in a cloud of blue smoke, was tinkering with the idling engine of Blithe Spirit. He waved a spanner in the air.
“If you’ve come for another hop, I’m afraid you’re out of luck,” he said as I reached his side.
“ ‘And he opened the bottomless pit,’ ” announced a loud, dramatic, and rather familiar voice, “ ‘and there arose a smoke out of the pit, as the smoke of a great furnace.’ ”
Adam Sowerby popped round from the other side of the aircraft. I hadn’t noticed he was there.
“ ‘And the sun and the air were darkened by reason of the smoke of the pit.’ The author of the Book of Revelation, whoever he might have been, was doubtless thinking of recalcitrant aero carburetors when he wrote those words.”
Adam was always spouting poetry. It oozed out of him like jam from a squeezed bun.
“Spare the child,” Tristram said, as if I wasn’t there.
The whole scene had an air of dreamlike unreality: the three of us standing on a ruined lawn in the blowing smoke of a ticking aero engine, and Adam all the while spewing poetic nonsense that would have made even the author of the Book of Revelation, whoever he might have been, fall gasping to the ground in helpless laughter.
Only Tristram seemed remotely real, even though, in his baggy coveralls and with the spanner in his hand, he reminded me of a court jester with a bladder on a stick.
Who was he, anyway? Beyond the fact that he had once come to Buckshaw to buy Blithe Spirit from Harriet, that he claimed to have fought in the Battle of Britain, and that Mrs. Mullet doted upon him, I knew nothing whatsoever about the man.
Was he really who he pretended to be? It had been my experience that strangers were not always truthful about their identity. Some seemed able to shrug it off as easily as a wet raincoat.
I was simply dying to ask Adam about his visit in the early hours to Rook’s End, but to risk doing so in front of Tristram could well turn out to be a bad mistake.
As if he were reading my mind, Adam gave me a sly wink behind the pilot’s back. I ignored it.
Tristram reached into the cockpit, and the propeller clattered to a standstill. “Fouled plug,” he announced. “Nothing to do with the carburetor. So much for Revelation, Sowerby.”
Adam shrugged. “I’m afraid the Apocalypse of John is rather slender on the subject of sparking plugs, unless of course, his ‘lightnings and thunderings’ and ‘seven lamps of fire burning before the throne’ foresaw the rotary aero engine, although that won’t quite do, will it? This old girl has four cylinders, not seven, and besides—”
I gave him such a look! Foolishness in a grown man, no matter how lighthearted, is disgusting.
There was more here than met the eye. I was sure of it. Why, on the morning of a funeral, would two houseguests be fiddling with an aeroplane on an out-of-the-way lawn and burbling bits of Revelation? It didn’t make any sense.
Was Tristram Tallis the tall man I had glimpsed at the window of my laboratory in the ciné film? Or could that man have been the one who was pushed under the train?
It might have been neither, and I could hardly ask. One of them was dead, and the other—well, the other, if he was who I suspected he might be, would hardly blurt out the truth to a mere girl, even if she was almost twelve years old.
And Adam Sowerby. It all came down to this: What was he doing in Bishop’s Lacey and for whom was he working? Was he here as a private investigator? Or as a friend of the family?
Until I knew the answers to these questions, I could trust neither of these two men.
As usual, I was on my own.
“If you’ll excuse me,” I said, “I have things to do.”