A Red Herring Without Mustard: A Flavia de Luce Novel

By the time I reached Pauper’s Well at the top of Denham Rise, I was panting like a dog. I dismounted and, leaning Gladys against the stone casing of the well, dropped to my knees for a drink.

Pauper’s Well was not so much a well as a natural spring: a place where the water gurgled up from some underground source, and had done so since before the Romans had helped themselves to an icy, refreshing swig.

Spring water, I knew, was a remarkable chemical soup: calcium, magnesium, potassium, iron, and assorted salts and sulphates. I grabbed the battered old tin cup that hung from a chain, scooped it full of the burbling water, and drank until I thought I could feel my bones strengthening.

With the water still dribbling down my chin, I stood up and looked out over the countryside. Behind me, spread out like a handkerchief for a doll’s picnic, was Bishop’s Lacey. Through it, this side of the high street, the river Efon wound its lazy way round the village before ambling off to the southwest and Buckshaw.

Now, almost two weeks into the harvest, most of the countryside had traded its intense summer green for a paler, grayish shade, as if Mother Nature had nodded off a little, and let the colors leak away.

In the distance, like a black bug crawling up the hillside, a tractor dragged a harrow across a farmer’s field, the buzz of its engine coming clearly to my ears.

From up here, I could see the Palings to the south, a green oasis at a bend in the river. And there was Buckshaw, its stones glowing warmly in the sunlight, as if they had been cut from precious citrine and polished by a master’s hand.

Harriet’s house, I thought, although for the life of me I don’t know why. Something was welling up in my throat. It must have been something in the well water. I took Gladys from her resting place and shoved off towards East Finching.

From this point on, the journey was all downhill. After a couple of jolly good pumps to get up speed, I put my feet up on the handlebars, and Gladys and I with the wind in our teeth came swooping like a harrier down the dusty road and into East Finching’s high street.

Unlike its neighbors, Malden Fenwick and Bishop’s Lacey, East Finching was not a pretty bit of Ye Olde England. No half-timbered houses here—no riot of flowers in cottage gardens. Instead, the word that came to mind was “grubby.”

At least half the shops in the high street had boarded-up windows, while those that were apparently still in business had rather a sad and defeated look.

In the window of a tobacconist’s shop on the corner, a crooked sign advertised: Today’s Papers.

A bell above the door gave out a harsh jangle as I stepped inside, and a gray-haired man with old-fashioned square spectacles looked up from his newspaper.

“Well?” he said, as if I had surprised him in his bath.

“Excuse me,” I said. “I wonder if you can help me? I’m looking for Mr. Sampson—Edward Sampson. Could you tell me where he lives?”

“What you want with him, then? Selling biscuits, are you?”

His mouth broke into a ghastly grin, revealing three horrid teeth which appeared to be carved from rotted wood.

It was the same thing, more or less, that the abominable Ursula had said to me at Vanetta Harewood’s door: a bad joke that was doing the rounds of the countryside, the way bad jokes do.

I held my tongue.

“Selling biscuits, are you?” he said again, like a music hall comic beating a joke to death.

“Actually, no,” I said. “Mr. Sampson’s parents are buried in St. Tancred’s churchyard, in Bishop’s Lacey, and we’re setting up a Graves Maintenance Fund. It’s the war, you see … We thought that perhaps he’d like to—”

The man stared at me skeptically over his spectacles. I was going to have to do better than this.

“Oh, yes—I almost forgot. I also bring thanks from the vicar and the ladies of the Women’s Institute—and the Altar Guild—for Mr. Sampson’s help with the fete on Saturday. It was a smashing success.”

I think it was the WI and the Altar Guild that did it. The tobacconist wrinkled his nose in disgust, hitched his spectacles a little higher, and jabbed his thumb towards the street.

“Yellow fence,” he said. “Salvage,” and went back to his reading.

“Thank you,” I said. “You’re very kind.”

And I almost meant it.

The place was hard to miss. A tall wooden fence, in a shade of yellow that betrayed the use of war surplus aviation paint, sagged inwards and outwards along three sides of a large property.

It was evident that the fence had been thrown up in an attempt to hide from the street the ugliness of the salvage business, but with little effect. Behind its boards, piles of rusting metal scrap towered into the air like heaps of giant jackstraws.

On the fence tall red letters, painted by an obviously amateur hand, spelled out: SAMPSON—SALVAGE—SCRAP IRON BOUGHT—BEST PRICES—MOTOR PARTS.

An iron rod leant against the double gates, holding them shut. I put my eye to the crack and peered inside.

Maddeningly, there wasn’t much to see—because of the angle, my view was blocked by a wrecked lorry that had been overturned and its wheels removed.