A Red Herring Without Mustard: A Flavia de Luce Novel

Rather than risk being caught, I slipped stealthily into the picture gallery, which occupied nearly the entire ground floor of the east wing.

An army of de Luce ancestors gazed down upon me as I passed, in whose faces I recognized, uncomfortably, aspects of my own. I wouldn’t have liked most of them, I thought, and most of them wouldn’t have liked me.

I did a cartwheel just to show them that I didn’t care.

Still, because the old boy deserved it, I gave Uncle Tar’s portrait a brisk Girl Guide salute, even though I’d been drummed out of that organization, quite unfairly I thought, by a woman with no sense of humor whatsoever. “Honestly, Miss Pashley,” I’d have told her, had I been given half a chance, “the ferric hydroxide was only meant to be a joke.”

At the far end of the gallery was a box room which, in Buckshaw’s glory days, had been used for the framing and repair of the portraits and landscapes that made up my family’s art collection.

A couple of deal shelves and the workbench in the room were still littered with dusty tins of paint and varnish whose contents had dried out at about the same time as Queen Victoria, and from which brush handles stuck up here and there like fossilized rats’ tails.

Everyone but me seemed to have forgotten that this room had a most useful feature: a sashed window that could be raised easily from both inside and out—and all the more so since I had taken to lubricating its slides with lard pinched from the pantry.

On the outside wall, directly below the window casing and halfway to the ground, a brick had half crumbled away—its slow decay encouraged somewhat, I’ll admit, by my hacking at it with one of Dogger’s trowels: a perfect foothold for anyone who wished to leave or get back into the house without attracting undue attention.

As I scrambled out the window and climbed to the ground, I almost stepped on Dogger, who was on his knees in the wet grass. He got to his feet, lifted his hat, and replaced it.

“Good afternoon, Miss Flavia.”

“Good afternoon, Dogger.”

“Lovely rain.”

“Quite lovely.”

Dogger glanced up at the golden sky, then went on with his weeding.

The very best people are like that. They don’t entangle you like flypaper.

Gladys’s tires hummed happily as we shot past St. Tancred’s and into the high street. She was enjoying the day as much as I was.

Ahead on my left, a few doors from the Thirteen Drakes, was Reggie Pettibone’s antiques shop. I was making a mental note to pay it a visit later when the door flew open and a spectacled boy came hurtling into the street.

It was Colin Prout.

I swerved to avoid hitting him, and Gladys went into a long shuddering slide.

“Colin!” I shouted as I came to a stop. I had very nearly taken a bad tumble.

But Colin had already crossed the high street and vanished into Bolt Alley, a narrow, reeking passage that led to a lane behind the shops.

Needless to say, I followed, offering up fresh praise for the invention of the Sturmey-Archer three-speed shifter.

Into the lane I sped, but Colin was already disappearing round the corner at the far end. A few seconds more, having taken a roughly circular route, and he would be back in the high street.

I was right. By the time I caught sight of him again, he was cutting into Cow Lane, as if the hounds of Hell were at his heels.

Rather than following, I applied the brakes.

Where Cow Lane ended at the river, I knew, Colin would veer to the left and follow the old towpath that ran behind the Thirteen Drakes. He would not risk going to ground anywhere along the old canal for fear of being boxed in behind the shops.

I turned completely round and went back the way I’d come, making a broad sweeping turn into Shoe Street, where Miss Pickery, the new librarian, lived in the last cottage. I braked, dismounted, and, leaning Gladys against her fence, climbed quickly over the stile and crept into position behind one of the tall poplars that lined the towpath.

Just in time! Here was Colin hurrying towards me, and all the while looking nervously back over his shoulder.

“Hello, Colin,” I said, stepping directly into his path.

Colin stopped as if he had walked into a brick wall, but the shifting of his pale eyes, magnified like oysters by his thick lenses, signaled that he was about to make a break for it.

“The police are looking for you, you know. Do you want me to tell them where you are?”

It was a bald-faced lie: one of my specialties.

“N-n-n-no.”

His face had gone as white as tissue paper, and I thought for a moment he was going to blubber. But before I could tighten the screws, he blurted out: “I never done it, Flavia! Honest! Whatever they think I done, I didn’t.”

In spite of his tangle of words I knew what he meant. “Didn’t do what, Colin? What is it you haven’t done?”