Or had I misread the word? Because the letters had blurred so quickly as they were heated, it might originally have read “Linz,” which was a city in Austria. I was quite sure of that because Feely had mentioned that Mozart wrote one of his best symphonies there at white heat—in just four days—for some old count or another. Was there a palace at Linz? It seemed more likely than Lens, but I would have to ask Daffy, who was more or less our household Inquire Within Upon Everything.
But what connection had Linz or Lens with Harriet? What possible message could those words contain?
It was evident—at least to me—that Harriet, having fallen into a glacial crevasse and knowing that all hope of rescue was gone, scrawled her last words in urine on the oilskin wallet in which she had placed her penciled will.
The treated surface would keep her writing crisp and sharp, at least until such time as some future investigator—I shivered at the thought that it was me—should warm the wallet and retrieve her message to the world.
But Lens palace?
It didn’t make sense.
Could it be a reference to a cinema? And if so, which one?
The Gaumont in London? The shabby little cinema off the High Street in Hinley could hardly be described as a picture palace, and besides, when you came to think of it, every cinema in the world had lenses in its projection machines.
It wasn’t likely that Harriet would leave so vague a clue as that, and although it was cryptic, it must have been meant to be decoded by somebody—somewhere.
The message must have been important to be worth going to so much trouble.
If you had only a couple of words left to you before you died, what would they be?
One thing was for certain: They would not be frivolous.
Perhaps it was an anagram—a simple rearrangement of letters: l-e-n-s-p-a-l-a-c-e.
I jotted down a few of the more obvious ones with my pencil: “claps an eel,” “canal sleep,” “lance leaps,” “sea nap cell,” and so on. It was easy to see that there were hundreds of possibilities, but none seemed promising. “Acne lapels,” for instance, was outright ridiculous.
I thought for a moment that it might be a simple substitution cipher, one of those parlor games in which A equals B and B equals C that our governess Miss Gurdy used to force us to play on rainy afternoons before the Troubles. But if Harriet’s message was worth writing in code, it would not be one so easily broken.
The obvious solution, of course, would be to show it to Aunt Felicity—the Gamekeeper herself. She would know how best to handle it.
And yet something was keeping me from doing so. I had handed over Harriet’s will to Father because it was the right thing to do. But this message from my mother was a different thing entirely.
Why?
It’s hard to put your finger on it. For one thing, the will was personal. It was meant to convey Harriet’s wishes—whatever they might have been—to her family. But an invisible message on the outside of a packet was aimed at someone else entirely.
That, at least, was my thinking.
And then, of course, there was the undeniable fact that I wanted to keep something for myself. I could easily give the packet to Inspector Hewitt and let him bask in the glory of cracking the code—if he was able to.
But wouldn’t that be, in a sense, giving away what little remained of my mother?
Quite honestly, I didn’t want to share Harriet’s last two words: not with Father, not with Aunt Felicity, not with the police—not with anyone. I felt that, in some weird way, the words, as they had taken form from nothingness in the heat of the Bunsen burner, were meant for me, that they were mine alone.
It may sound idiotic, but there it was.
I would tell no one.
I turned off the gas to the Bunsen burner and watched as the flame went out, leaving the room colder and somehow sadder than ever.
I pulled the bathrobe tightly round my neck and sat with my heels hooked on one of the stool’s rungs, thinking about what Aunt Felicity had told me.
Harriet had been making her way home by way of India and Tibet. Someone had betrayed her. She was followed.
On the glacier, she had fallen.
Or had she been pushed?
It was uncomfortably like what had happened to the man on the railway platform at Buckshaw Halt. Could it be a coincidence?
Or was it more than that?
Was Harriet to go to her grave a murder victim?
There was a polite knock on the door. I knew who it was even before I said “Come in.”
Dogger came slowly into the room.
“It’s time, Miss Flavia,” he said quietly.
I took a deep breath.
This was it.
The moment I had been dreading all my life.