South I walked, towards the ornamental lake, until my direction was hidden by the brick wall of the kitchen garden. Then, slowly, I made my way back towards the east, working round the ornamental lake until I was safely hidden by the trees of the Palings. Then, across the little bridge to the Gully, and it wasn’t long before I was climbing Goodger Hill.
If it hadn’t been for the steepness of Goodger Hill and the Jack O’Lantern, I’d have brought Gladys. I thought of her sitting alone at home, wondering why I had forsaken her. Although Gladys loved nothing better than whizzing hell-for-leather down hills, she loathed being shoved up them. It made both of us cranky.
With a sigh, I trudged on towards my destination.
Set among acres of moldy grass and ancient beech trees, Rook’s End was a damp, subsiding monstrosity consisting on the outside of countless gables and on the inside of stale endless corridors.
A mushroom farm for humans, I thought.
It was not the first time I had visited the place. I had, on several occasions in the past, found it necessary to consult with Dr. Kissing, and I must admit I was quite looking forward to seeing the old gentleman again.
I crunched across the gravel of the now empty forecourt and opened the front door. I thought it quite unlikely that anyone would be at the desk, and I was right.
The same silver bell sat beside the same smudged sign that read “Ring Plse.”
I didn’t bother.
From somewhere in the distance came the sound of many human voices and the clink of crockery. The air was sour with the smell of food prepared by the bucketful, the chiefest of which was cabbage and its derivative gases.
I knew that I would find Dr. Kissing where I always found him: at the far end of the narrow solarium.
The bubbling brown linoleum hissed and popped disgustingly beneath my shoes as I made my way across the vast, empty space.
From behind the high back of the familiar wicker bath chair, a silvery cord of cigarette smoke spiraled its way up towards a dark and distant ceiling.
“Hello, Flavia,” he said without turning round. He put down his Times with a faint rustle of paper.
I walked quickly into his field of view and gave him a polite peck on each cheek. His skin was as crisp and dry as must be one of those scrolls which have been found in a cave on the shore of the Dead Sea.
“You’ve come about your mother,” he said.
I remained silent.
“As I knew you would,” he added.
Dr. Kissing was not a person to beat about the bush.
Nor should I be, I decided.
“My father was here this morning,” I said. “Before sunrise.”
Dr. Kissing gazed at me coolly from amidst the rising cigarette smoke. In his mouse-colored dressing gown and tasseled velvet smoking cap, he might have been one of those impossibly old Oriental idols sitting placidly in a cloud of incense that I had seen on the jackets of the thrillers at Foyle’s.
If I was going to enter into the game, I might as well show the full strength of my hand.
“So were Aunt Felicity and Adam Sowerby,” I added.
“Yes,” he said at last, but pleasantly. “So they were.”
“I saw their cars in the forecourt.”
“Did you indeed?”
“From Blithe Spirit. Harriet’s aeroplane. Her owner took me up for a ride.”
Dr. Kissing nodded knowingly as he stubbed out his cigarette and reached for another.
“You heard us?”
“The sound of a Gipsy Moth engine clattering away like a contented sewing machine in the skies above this scepter’d isle is one of the few remaining assurances in our changed world. The time, I believe, was five minutes before six and approximately a quarter hour after sunrise.”
Did nothing escape this aged hive of information?
“I am very sorry about your mother,” he said suddenly grave, and then, after a moment’s thought: “You must be especially brave today.”
He looked at me with his old, faded eyes, and I knew that this was the moment: the moment when I would have my only chance to do what I was planning to do, to say what I had come to say.
Dr. Kissing had ordered me to be brave, and so brave I must be.
I took a deep breath. “You’re the Gamekeeper, aren’t you?”
Maddeningly, even though it was barely lighted, he stubbed his cigarette in the overflowing ashtray and selected another meticulously from the flat tin—not because he was nervous, but because he was in control, totally in control.
“Fetch that chair,” he said, pointing to an overstuffed horror in a corner.
I pushed the thing—which grated unnervingly on the rippled linoleum—into a position between Dr. Kissing and the window.
I seated myself demurely and waited.
“Let me tell you a story,” he began. “Let us pretend that, once upon a time, there was, somewhere in England, an ancient and ramshackle old rectory in which were brought together, in utmost secrecy, some of the greatest Brains that could be found in all the land.”
I grinned at the thought of all the rows and rows of brains, each in its own glass jar, lined up neatly on a shelf in some dim pantry.
“Is this a fairy tale?” I asked. “Or a true story?”
“The Official Secrets Act, even after all these years, still possesses a remarkably long and powerful arm. And so this must remain a fairy tale.”
“My sister Daffy says that, in one way or another, all fairy tales and myths are based on truth.”
“Your sister exhibits the hallmarks of a lady and a scholar,” he said. “And I predict that she will prosper. Now then—
“These Brains, as I shall call them—Brains with a capital B, for they deserve nothing less—were charged with breaking the codes of a faraway Emperor.”
“Was the Emperor wicked?” I asked.
“Of course he was—as all Emperors in all fairy tales must be. Otherwise there would be no point, would there? The evil Emperor, you see, is crucial to democracy.”
I didn’t see, but I tried to look as if I did.
“Let us suppose also that for many years, our far-flung monitoring stations had been gathering and recording all the coded radio transmissions from all the Emperor’s ships in all the oceans of the world, and all his ships of the air—and that there had been some little success in cracking one or two of his codes, but not all of them, of which there were many.”
“You’re talking about Japan, aren’t you?” We had listened to a remarkably similar discussion on the BBC Home Service during one of the compulsory “Wireless Nights” Father had laid on. Besides, everyone knew that of all the enemies with whom we had recently been at war, Japan was the only one with an Emperor.
Dr. Kissing ignored me and went on: “The problem was this: No sooner would we break a code than the Emperor would change it.”
“How did the Emperor know it had been broken?”
“Ah, Flavia! I am delighted to see that my hope in you has not been misplaced. How did he know, indeed!”
“Someone was informing him. A spy!”
I was proud of myself.
“A spy,” Dr. Kissing echoed. “A short, nasty word with long, nasty consequences.” He blew a small puff of smoke followed by an elongated gray-blue trumpet to illustrate his words. “And what if,” he asked, “what if this spy were to be one of our own—one of the highest among us—one who had even, so to speak, the ear of our King?”
“Treason!” I said, probably too loudly.
“Treason indeed. But what are we to do about it?”
“Stop him!”
“How?”
Dr. Kissing had pounced upon me like a cat. The answer to his question seemed obvious, but I found myself not wanting to put it into words.
“Well?”
“Well—kill him, I suppose.”
“Kill him.” Dr. Kissing repeated my words in a flat, matter-of-fact voice. “Just so. But ‘kill,’ as you will have observed, like ‘spy’ and ‘stop,’ is really just one more of those short but exceedingly troublesome words.”
“Well, capture him, anyway.”
“Precisely. Let us pretend, however, that this traitor, in this fairy tale of ours, is firmly entrenched in one of the far-off branches of our own Foreign Office. Let us further imagine that he also possesses impeccable credentials. What then?”
I thought long and hard before replying. “Bring him home to justice,” I said at last.
Father had lectured us on the subject of justice during one of his Wednesday lectures on the various aspects of British Government, and I thought I had quite a good grasp of the topic.
I was not sure I was happy with my solution, though, but I could not think of a better one. To be perfectly honest, I was becoming a little tired of Dr. Kissing’s imaginary story. No—not tired—I was becoming uneasy.
“How does it end, this fairy tale?”
Dr. Kissing took an eternity to answer. He removed his spectacles, produced a spotlessly white handkerchief from a pocket of his dressing gown, polished both lenses with fanatic intensity, put them on again, and with infuriating deliberation, chose another cigarette from the tin box.
“That … shall be up to you, Flavia,” he said at last.
There was a silence between us, which began comfortably enough, but all too quickly became unbearable.
I found myself getting up and walking to the window. I couldn’t believe it—I was behaving like Father!
This whole fairy-tale business needed thinking about. From my own chemical experiments, I was used to working with hypotheses, but this one seemed beyond me. There were simply too many variables; too many assumptions; too many meanings veiled in mystery.
Outside, beyond the windowpane, the ancient beeches squatted in green splendor. The madwomen who had danced among them on my previous visits were nowhere in sight.
There were no convenient distractions. I had to face up to reality. “You didn’t answer my question, Dr. Kissing. You’re the Gamekeeper, aren’t you?”
“No,” he said, suddenly and sadly—perhaps even a little reluctantly. “No, no … I am not.”
“Then who is?”
Much as I loved the old gentleman, I was becoming impatient with his diversions.
Dr. Kissing, almost unaware he was doing so, covered his lips with his right forefinger—and then his left.
His voice, when it came, was suddenly old, suddenly tired, and for the first time since I had met him, I feared for his life.
“That you must find out for yourself, Flavia,” he said, his voice as faint and far away as if it were no more than an echo of the wind.
“That, too, you must find out for yourself.”