Darby’s footprints and the tire tracks left by his car had already lightened somewhat, the impressions of my every step lay black and fresh in the wet, silvery grass of the glade, leading straight back to the caravan’s door.
“I had to make water,” I said. It was the classic female excuse, and no male in recorded history had ever questioned it.
“I see,” the Inspector said, and left it at that.
Later, I would have a quick piddle behind the caravan for insurance purposes. No one would be any the wiser.
A silence had fallen, each of us waiting, I think, to see what the other would say. It was like a game: First one to speak is the Booby.
It was Inspector Hewitt.
“You’ve got goose-bumps,” he said, looking at me attentively. “Best go sit in the car.”
He had already reached the far side of the bridge before he turned back. “There’s a blanket in the boot,” he said, and then vanished in the shadows.
I felt my temper rising. Here was this man—a man in an ordinary business suit, without so much as a badge on his shoulder—dismissing me from the scene of a crime that I had come to think of as my very own. After all, hadn’t I been the first to discover it?
Had Marie Curie been dismissed after discovering polonium? Or radium? Had someone told
It simply wasn’t fair.
A crime scene, of course, wasn’t exactly an atom-shattering discovery, but the Inspector might at least have said “Thank you.” After all, hadn’t the attack upon the Gypsy taken place within the grounds of Buckshaw, my ancestral home? Hadn’t her life likely been saved by my horseback expedition into the night to summon help?
Surely I was entitled to at least a nod. But no—
“Go and sit in the car,” Inspector Hewitt had said, and now—as I realized with a sinking feeling that the law doesn’t know the meaning of the word “gratitude”—I felt my fingers curling slowly into involuntary fists.
Even though he had been on the scene for no more than a few moments, I knew that a wall had already gone up between the Inspector and myself. If the man was expecting cooperation from Flavia de Luce, he would bloody well have to work for it.
SIX
THE NERVE OF THE man!
I resolved to tell him nothing.
In the glade, across the humpbacked bridge, I could see his shadow moving slowly across the curtained window of the caravan. I imagined him stepping carefully between the bloodstains on the floor.
To my surprise the light was extinguished, and moments later the Inspector came walking back across the bridge.
He seemed surprised to see me standing where he had left me. Without a word, he walked to the boot, took out a tartan blanket, and wrapped it round my shoulders.
I yanked the thing off and handed it back to him. To my surprise, I noticed that my hands were shaking.
“I’m not cold, thank you very much,” I said icily.
“Perhaps not,” he said, wrapping the blanket round me once again, “but you’re in shock.”
With a hand on my shoulder and another on my arm, Inspector Hewitt walked me to the car and held open the door. I dropped into the seat like a stone, and suddenly I was shaking like a leaf.
“We’d better get you home,” he said, climbing into the driver’s seat and switching on the ignition. As a blast of hot air from the car’s heater engulfed me, I wondered vaguely how it could have warmed up so quickly. Perhaps it was a special model, made solely for the police … something intentionally designed to induce a stupor. Perhaps …
And I remember nothing more until we were grinding to a stop on the gravel sweep at Buckshaw’s front entrance. I had no recollection whatever of having been driven back through the Gully, along the high street, past St. Tancred’s, and so to Buckshaw. But here we were, so I must have been.
Dogger, surprisingly, was at the door—as if he had been waiting up all night. With his prematurely white hair illuminated from behind by the lights of the foyer, he seemed to me like a gaunt Saint Peter at the pearly gates, welcoming me home.
“I could have walked,” I said to the Inspector. “It was no more than a half mile.”
“Of course you could,” Inspector Hewitt said. “But this trip is at His Majesty’s expense.”
Was he teasing me? Twice in the recent past the Inspector had driven me home, and upon one of those occasions he had made it clear that when it came to petrol consumption the coffers of the King were not bottomless.
“Are you sure?” I asked, oddly fuddled.
“Straight out of his personal change purse.”
As if in a dream, I found myself plodding heavily up the steps to the front door. When I reached the top, Dogger fussed with the blanket round my shoulders.
