The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie

Mrs. Mullet dropped him another curtsy and went to the door.

''It's funny,' I said to Alf, I said, 'You don't generally see jack snipes in England till September.' Many's the jack snipe I've turned on the spit and served up roasted on a nice bit of toast. Miss Harriet, God bless her soul, used to fancy nothing better than a nice—”

There was a groan behind me, and I turned just in time to see Father fold in the middle like a camp chair and slither to the floor.

I MUST SAY THAT Inspector Hewitt was very good about it. In a flash he was at Father's side, clapping an ear to his chest, loosening his tie, checking with a long finger for airway obstruction. I could see that he had not slept through his St. John Ambulance classes. A moment later he flung open the window, put first and fourth fingers to his lower lip, and let out a whistle I should have given a guinea to learn.

'Dr. Darby!' he shouted. 'Up here, if you please. Quickly! Bring your bag.'

As for me, I was still standing with my hand to my mouth when Dr. Darby strode into the room and knelt beside Father. After a quick one-two-three examination, he pulled a small blue vial from his bag.

'Syncope,' he said to Inspector Hewitt; to Mrs. Mullet and me, 'That means he's fainted. Nothing to worry about.'

Phew!

He unstoppered the glass, and in the few moments before he applied it to Father's nostrils, I detected a familiar scent: It was my old friend Ammon. Carb., Ammonium Carbonate, or, as I called it when we were alone together in the laboratory, Sal Volatile, or sometimes just plain Sal. I knew that the “ammon” part of its name came from ammonia, which was named on account of its being first discovered not far from the shrine of the god Ammon in ancient Egypt, where it was found in camel's urine. And I knew that later, in London, a man after my own heart had patented a means by which smelling salts could be extracted from Patagonian guano.

Chemistry! Chemistry! How I love it!

As Dr. Darby held the vial to his nostrils, Father gave out a snort like a bull in a field, and his eyelids flew up like roller blinds. But he uttered not a word.

'Ha! Back among the living, I see,' the doctor said, as Father, in confusion, tried to prop himself up on his elbow and look round the room. In spite of his jovial tone, Dr. Darby was cradling Father like a newborn baby. 'Wait a bit till you get your bearings. Just stay down on the old Axminster a minute.'

Inspector Hewitt stood gravely by until it was time to help Father to his feet.

Leaning heavily on Dogger's arm—Dogger had been summoned—Father made his way carefully up the staircase to his room. Daphne and Feely put in a brief appearance: no more, really, than a couple of blanched faces behind the banisters.

Mrs. Mullet, scurrying by on her way to the kitchen, stopped to put a solicitous hand on my arm.

'Was the pie good, luv?' she asked.

I'd forgotten the pie until that moment. I took a leaf from Dr. Darby's notebook.

'Um,' I said.

Inspector Hewitt and Dr. Darby had returned to the garden when I climbed slowly up the stairs to my laboratory. I watched from the window with a little sadness and almost a touch of loss as two ambulance attendants came round the side of the house and began to shift the stranger's remains onto a canvas stretcher. In the distance, Dogger was working his way round the Balaclava fountain on the east lawn, busily decapitating more of the Lady Hillingdons.

Everyone was occupied; with any luck, I could do what I needed to do and be back before anyone even realized I was gone.

I slipped downstairs and out the front door, pulled Gladys, my ancient BSA, from where she was leaning against a stone urn, and minutes later was pedaling furiously into Bishop's Lacey.

What was the name Father had mentioned?

Twining. That was it. “Old Cuppa.” And I knew precisely where to find him.

five

BISHOP LACEY'S FREE LIBRARY WAS LOCATED IN COW Lane, a narrow, shady, tree-lined track that sloped from the High Street down to the river. The original building was a modest Georgian house of black brick, whose photograph had once appeared in color on the cover of Country Life. It had been given to the people of Bishop's Lacey by Lord Margate, a local boy who had made good (as plain old Adrian Chipping) and had gone on to fame and fortune as the sole purveyor of BeefChips, a tinned bully beef of his own invention, to Her Majesty's Government during the Boer War.

The library had existed as an oasis of silence until 1939. Then, while closed for renovations, it had taken fire when a pile of painter's rags spontaneously combusted just as Mr. Chamberlain was delivering to the British people his famous “As long as war has not begun, there is always hope that it may be prevented” speech. Since the entire adult population of Bishop's Lacey had been huddled round one another's wireless sets, no one, including the six members of the volunteer fire department, had spotted the blaze until it was far too late. By the time they arrived with their hand-operated pumping engine, nothing remained of the place but a pile of hot ashes. Fortunately, all of the books had escaped, having been stored for protection in temporary quarters.

But with the outbreak of war then, and the general fatigue since the Armistice, the original building had never been replaced. Its site was now nothing more than a weed-infested patch in Cater Street, just round the corner from the Thirteen Drakes. The property, having been given in perpetuity to the villagers of Bishop's Lacey, could not be sold, and the once-temporary premises that housed its holdings had now become the Free Library's permanent home in Cow Lane.

As I turned off the High Street, I could see the library, a low box of glass-brick and tile, which had been erected in the 1920s to house a motorcar showroom. Several of the original enamel signs bearing the names of extinct motorcars, such as the Wolseley and the Sheffield-Simplex, were still attached to one of its walls below the roofline, too high up to have attracted the attention of thieves or vandals.

Now, a quarter century after the last Lagonda had rolled out of its doors, the building had fallen, like old crockery in the servant's quarters, into a kind of chipped and broken decrepitude.