lying in a pool of her own blood in the caravan, I left out not a single detail.
Except Brookie Harewood, of course.
I was saving him for myself.
It was a magnificent performance, if I do say so. As I had been forced to learn at a very young age, there’s no better way to mask a lie—or at least a glaring omission—than to wrap it in an emotional outpouring of truth.
During it all, Inspector Hewitt’s Biro fairly flew over the pages, getting every scrap of it down for the record.
Perhaps he would dictate them to his wife, Antigone. I had met her not long before at a puppet show in the parish hall. Would she remember me?
In my mind I could see her seated at a typewriter at the kitchen table in their tastefully decorated cottage, her back ramrod straight in a position of perfect posture, her fingers hovering eagerly over the keys. She would be wearing hooped earrings, and a silk blouse of oyster gray.
“Flavia de Luce?” she would be saying, her large, dark eyes looking up at her husband. “Why, isn’t she that charming girl I met at St. Tancred’s, dear?”
Inspector Hewitt’s eyes would crinkle at the corners.
“One and the same, my love,” he would tell her, shaking his head at the memory of me. “One and the same.”
We had reached the end of my statement, the point at which the Inspector himself had arrived upon the scene in the Palings.
“That will do for now,” he said, flipping closed his notebook and shoving it into the inside pocket of his jacket. “I’ve asked Sergeant Graves to come round later to take your fingerprints. Quite routine, of course.”
I wrinkled my brow, but secretly I couldn’t have been more delighted. The dimpled detective sergeant with his winks and grins had come to be one of my favorites among the Hinley Constabulary.
“I expect they’ll be all over everything,” I said helpfully. “Mine and Dr. Darby’s.”
“And those of the Gypsy woman’s attacker,” he might have added, but he did not. Rather, he stood up and stuck his hand out to be shaken, as formally as if he were being received at a royal garden party.
“Thank you, Flavia,” he said. “You’ve been of great assistance … as always.”
As always? Was the Inspector twitting me?
But no—his handshake was firm and he looked me straight in the eye.
I’m afraid I smirked.
SEVEN
“DOGGER!” I SAID. “THEY’RE coming to take my fingerprints!”
Dogger looked up from the vast array of silverware he was polishing on the kitchen table. For just a moment his face was a complete blank, and then he said, “I trust they will be returned to you in good order.”
I blinked. Was Dogger making a joke? I hoped desperately that he was.
Dogger had suffered the most awful privations in the Far East during the war. His mind now seemed sometimes to consist of no more than a crazy tangle of broken suspension bridges joining the past with the present. If he had ever made a joke before, I had never heard of it. This, then, could be a momentous occasion.
“Oh! Ha ha ha.” I laughed too loudly. “That’s very good, Dogger. Returned to me in good order … I must remember to tell that one to Mrs. Mullet.”
I had no intention whatever of sharing this precious moment with our cook, but sometimes flattery does not know when to stop.
Dogger formed a faint smile as he returned a fish fork to the cutlery chest and selected another. The de Luce silverware was kept in a dark folding cabinet which, when opened, presented a remarkable array of fish forks, toddy ladles, mote spoons, marrow scoops, lobster picks, sugar nips, grape shears, and pudding trowels, all arranged in steps, like so many silvery salmon leaping up the stony staircase of a whisky-colored stream somewhere in Scotland.
Dogger had lugged this heavy box to the kitchen table for the ritual cleaning of the cutlery, a seemingly endless task that occupied a great deal of his time, and one that I never tired of watching.
Mrs. Mullet loved to tell about how, as a child, I had been found on top of the table playing with the dolls I had contrived by clothing a family of sterling silver forks in folded napkins. Their identical faces—long noses and round cheeks—were just barely suggested by the engraved
“The Mumpeters,” I had called them: Mother Mumpeter, Father Mumpeter, and the three little Mumpeter girls, all of whom—even though they were burdened with three or four legs each—I had made to walk and dance and sing gaily upon the tabletop.
I could still remember Grindlestick, the three-legged waif I had fashioned from a pickle fork (which Father referred to as a trifid), who performed the most amazing acrobatics until I jammed one of her legs in a crack and broke it off.
“Better than the ’ippodrome, it were,” Mrs. M would tell me as she wiped away a tear of laughter. “Poor little tyke.”
I still don’t know if she meant Grindlestick or me.
Now, as I watched him at his work, I wondered if Dogger had known about the Mumpeters. It was likely that
