A Red Herring Without Mustard: A Flavia de Luce Novel

There was a silence, and then the voice said, “Come up, Flavia. Reginald, bring the girl here.”

It was as if she’d said “fetch.”

I slipped out from behind the wardrobe, rubbing my elbows, and shot him a reproachful look.

His eyes strayed to a narrow staircase at the side of the shop, and before he could change his mind, I moved towards it.

I could have made a break for the door, but I didn’t. This could be my only chance at scouting out the place. “In for a penny, in for a pound,” as Mrs. Mullet was fond of saying.

I put my foot on the first step and began my slow trudge upstairs to whatever fate awaited me.

The room at the top came as a complete surprise. Rather than the rabbit’s warren of little cubicles I had imagined, the place was unexpectedly large. Obviously, all of the interior walls had been knocked out to form a spacious attic which was the same size as the shop beneath.

And what a contrast with the shop it was! There was no clutter up here: In fact, with one exception, the room was almost empty.

In the middle of the floor stood a great square bed hung with white linen, and in it, propped up by a wall of pillows, was a woman whose features might well have been chiseled from a block of ice. There was a faint bluish —or cyanotic—tinge to her face and hands which suggested, at first glance, that she might be the victim of either carbon monoxide or silver poisoning, but as I stared, I began to see that her complexion was colored not by poison, but by artifice.

Her skin was the color of skim milk. Her lips, like those of her husband (I presumed that the parrot-man was her husband) were painted a startling red, and, as if she were a leftover star from the silent cinema, her hair hung down around her face in a mass of silver ringlets.

Only when I had taken in the details of the room and its occupant did I allow my attention to shift to the bed itself: an ebony four-poster with its posts carved into the shape of black angels, each of them frozen into position like a sentry in his box at Buckingham Palace.

Several mattresses must have been piled one atop the other to give the thing its height, and a set of wooden steps had been constructed at the bedside, like a ladder beside a haystack.

Slowly, the icy apparition in the bed lifted a lorgnette to her eyes and regarded me coolly through its lenses.

“Flavia de Luce, you say? One of Colonel de Luce’s daughters—from Buckshaw?”

I nodded.

“Your sister Ophelia has performed for us at the Women’s Institute. A remarkably gifted player.”

I should have known! This landlocked iceberg was a friend of Feely’s!

Under any other circumstances, I’d have said something rude and stalked out of the room, but I thought better of it. The investigation of murder, I was beginning to learn, can demand great personal sacrifice.

Actually, the woman’s words were true. Feely was a first-rate pianist, but there was no sense going on and on about it.

“Yes,” I said, “she’s quite talented.”

Until then I had been unaware that Reginald was close behind me, standing on the stairs just one or two steps from the top.

“You may go, Reginald,” the woman said, and I turned to watch him descend, in uncanny silence, to the shop below.

“Now then,” she said. “Speak.”

“I’m afraid I owe you and Mr. Pettibone an apology,” I said. “I told him a lie.”

“Which was?”

“That I’d come to buy a table for Father. What I really wanted was an opportunity to ask you about the Hobblers.”

“The Hobblers?” she said with an awkward laugh. “Whatever makes you think I’d know anything about the Hobblers? They haven’t existed since the days of powdered wigs.”

In spite of her denial, I could see that my question had caught her off guard. Perhaps I could take advantage of her surprise.

“I know that they were founded in the seventeenth century by Nicodemus Flitch, and that the Palings, at Buckshaw, have played an important role in their history, what with baptisms, and so forth.”

I paused to see how this would be received.

“And what has this to do with me?” she asked, putting down the lorgnette and then picking it up again.

“Oh, somebody mentioned that you belonged to that … faith. I was talking to Miss Mountjoy, and she—”

True enough—I had been talking to Miss Mountjoy. As long as I didn’t actually say that she’d told me, I’d be guilty of no great sin. Other than one of omission, perhaps. Feely was always going on and on about sins of commission and omission until your eyes were left spinning like fishing lures.

“Tilda Mountjoy,” she said, after a long pause. “I see … tell me more.”

“Well, it’s just that I’ve been making a few notes about Buckshaw’s history, you know, and as I was going through some old papers in Father’s library, I came across some quite early documents.”

“Documents?” she demanded. “What kind of documents?”