A Red Herring Without Mustard: A Flavia de Luce Novel

Well done? … Well done?

Was this my father speaking? Or was one of the Old Gods merely using him as a ventriloquist’s dummy to deliver to me a personal commendation from Mount Olympus?

But no—Father was a most unlikely messenger. Not once in my eleven years could I recall him praising me, and now that he had done so, I hadn’t the faintest idea how to respond.

The Inspector extracted me from a sticky situation.

“Well done, indeed,” he said. “They tell me that in spite of the ferocity of the attack, she’s come out of it with no more than a fractured skull. At her age, of course …”

Father interrupted. “Dr. Darby rang up to express his commendations, Flavia, but Dogger told him you were sleeping. I took the message myself.”

Father on the telephone? I could hardly believe it! Father only allowed “the instrument,” as he called it, to be kept in the house with the express understanding that it be used only in the direst of emergencies: the Apocalypse, for instance.

But Dr. Darby was one of Father’s friends. In due course, I knew, the good doctor would be sternly lectured on his breach of household standing orders, but ultimately would live to tell the tale.

“Still,” Father said, his face clouding a little, “you’re going to have to explain what you were doing wandering round the Palings in the middle of the night.”

“That poor Gypsy woman,” I said, changing the subject. “Her tent burned down at the fete. She had nowhere to go.”

As I talked, I watched Father’s face for any sign of balking. Hadn’t he, after all, been the one who had driven Johnny Faa and his wife from the Buckshaw estate? Had he forgotten the incident? He was almost certainly not aware that his actions had caused the Gypsy’s husband to fall dead in the road, and I wasn’t about to tell him.

“I thought of the vicar’s sermon, the one about Christian charity—”

“Yes, yes, Flavia,” Father said. “Most commendable.”

“I told her she could camp in the Palings, but only for one night. I knew that you’d—”

“Thank you, Flavia, that’s quite enough.”

“—approve.”

Poor Father: outflanked, outgunned, and outwitted. I almost felt sorry for him.

He crooked a forefinger and touched the angled joint to each side of his clipped mustache in turn: right and then left—a kind of suppressed, nervous preening that had probably been practiced by military officers since time immemorial. I’d be willing to bet that if Julius Caesar had a mustache he knuckled it in precisely the same way.

“Inspector Hewitt would like a word with you. Because it concerns confidential information about individuals with whom I am not acquainted, I shall leave you alone.”

With a nod to the Inspector, Father left the room. I heard the door of his study open, and then close, as he sought refuge among his postage stamps.

“Now then,” the Inspector said, flipping open his notebook and unscrewing the cap of his Biro. “From the beginning.”

“I couldn’t sleep, you see,” I began.

“Not that beginning,” Inspector Hewitt said without looking up. “Tell me about the church fete.”

“I’d gone into the Gypsy’s tent to have my fortune told.”

“And did you?”

“No,” I lied.

The last thing on earth I wanted to share with the Inspector was the woman on the mountain—the woman who wanted to come home from the cold. Nor did I care to tell him about the woman that I was in the process of becoming.

“I knocked her candle over, and before I knew it, I … I …”

Much to my surprise, my lower lip was trembling at the recollection.

“Yes, we’ve heard about that. The vicar was able to provide us with a very good account, as was Dr. Darby.”

I gulped, wondering if anyone had reported how I’d hidden behind a pitch as the Gypsy’s tent burned to ashes.

“Poor girl,” he said tenderly. “You’ve had quite a series of shocks, haven’t you?”

I nodded.

“If I’d had any idea of what you’d already been through, I’d have taken you to the hospital directly.”

“It’s all right,” I said gamely. “I’ll be all right.”

“Will you?” the Inspector asked.

“No,” I said, struggling with tears.

And suddenly it all came pouring out: From the fete to the Palings, not forgetting the seething Mrs. Bull; from my frankly fabricated tale of awakening in the night to fret about the Gypsy woman’s welfare to my discovery of her