The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie

'You killed Professor Twining, didn't you?' I gasped. 'You and Bonepenny.'

This seemed to catch him unawares. I felt his grip relax ever so slightly.

'What makes you think that?' he breathed into my ear.

'It was Bonepenny on the roof,' I said. 'Bonepenny who shouted 'Vale!' He mimicked Mr. Twining's voice. It was you who dumped his body down the hole.”

Pemberton sucked air in through his nose. “Did Bonepenny tell you that?”

'I found the cap and gown,' I said, 'under the tiles. I figured it out myself.'

'You're a very clever girl,' he said, almost regretfully.

'And now you've killed Bonepenny the stamps are yours. At least, they would be if you knew where they were.'

This seemed to infuriate him. He tightened his grip on my arm, again drilling the ball of his thumb into the muscle. I screamed in agony.

'Five words, Flavia,' he hissed. 'Where are the bloody stamps?'

In the long silence that followed, in the numbing pain, my mind took refuge in flight.

Was this the end of Flavia? I wondered.

If so, was Harriet watching over me? Was she sitting at this very moment on a cloud with her legs dangling over, saying, “Oh no, Flavia! Don't do this; don't say that! Danger, Flavia! Danger!”

If she was, I couldn't hear her; perhaps I was farther removed from Harriet than Feely and Daffy. Perhaps she had loved me less.

It was a sad fact that of Harriet's three children I was the only one who retained no real memories of her. Feely, like a miser, had experienced and hoarded seven years of her mother's love. And Daffy insisted that, even though she was hardly three when Harriet disappeared, she had a perfectly clear recollection of a slim and laughing young woman who dressed her up in a starched dress and bonnet, set her down on a blanket on a sunlit lawn, and took her photograph with a folding camera before presenting her with a gherkin pickle.

Another jab brought me back to reality—the needle was at my brain stem.

'The Ulster Avengers. Where are they?'

I pointed a finger to the corner of the pit where the handkerchief lay balled up in the shadows. As the beam of Pemberton's torch danced towards it, I looked away, then looked up, as the old-time saints were said to do when seeking for salvation.

I heard it before I saw it. There was a muffled whirring noise, as if a giant mechanical pterodactyl were flapping about outside the Pit Shed. A moment later, there was the most frightful crash and a rain of falling glass.

The room above us, beyond the mouth of the pit, erupted into brilliant yellow light, and through it clouds of steam drifted like little puffing souls of the departed.

Still rooted to the spot, I stood staring straight up into the air at the oddly familiar apparition that sat shuddering above the pit.

I've snapped, I thought. I've gone insane.

Directly above my head, trembling like a living thing, was the undercarriage of Harriet's Rolls-Royce.

Before I could blink, I heard the sound of its doors opening and feet hitting the floor above me.

Pemberton made a leap for the stairs, scrabbling up them like a trapped rat. At the top he paused, trying wildly to claw his way between the lip of the pit and the front bumper of the Phantom.

A disembodied hand appeared and seized him by the collar, dragging him up out of the pit like a fish from a pond. His shoes vanished into the light above me, and I heard a voice—Dogger's voice!—saying, “Pardon my elbow.”

There was a sickening crunch and something hit the floor above me like a sack of turnips.

I was still in a daze when the apparition appeared. All in white it was, slipping easily through the narrow gap between chrome and concrete before making its rapid, flapping descent down into the pit.

As it threw its arms around me and sobbed on my shoulder, I could feel the thin body shaking like a leaf.

'Silly little fool! Silly little fool!' it cried over and over, its raw red lips pressing into my neck.

'Feely!' I said, struck stupid with surprise, 'you're getting oil all over your best dress!'

OUTSIDE THE PIT SHED, in Cow Lane, it was a fantasy: Feely was on her knees sobbing, her arms wrapped fiercely round my waist. As I stood there motionless, it was as if everything dissolved between us, and for a moment Feely and I were one creature bathing in the moonlight of the shadowed lane.

And then everyone in Bishop's Lacey seemed to materialize, coming slowly forward out of the darkness, clucking like aldermen at the torchlit scene, and at the gaping hole where the door of the Pit Shed had been; telling one another what they had been doing when the sound of the crash had echoed through the village. It was like a scene from that play Brigadoon, where the village comes slowly back to life for a single day every hundred years.

Harriet's Phantom, its beautiful radiator punctured by having been used as a battering ram, now stood steaming quietly in front of the Pit Shed and leaking water softly into the dust. Several of the more muscular villagers—one of them Tully Stoker, I noticed—had pushed the heavy vehicle backwards to allow Feely to lead me up out of the pit and into the fierce intensity and the glare of its great round headlamps.

Feely had got to her feet but was still clinging to me like a limpet to a battleship, babbling on excitedly.