The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie

'Damn and blast!' I said, loudly enough to be heard in the greenhouse. I pretended to spot him there behind the glass.

'Oh, hullo, Dogger,' I said cheerily. 'Just the person I was looking for.'

He did not turn immediately, and I pretended to be scraping a bit of clay from the sole of my shoe until he recovered himself.

'Miss Flavia,' he said slowly. 'Everyone has been looking for you.'

'Well, here I am,' I said. Best to take over the conversation until Dogger was fully back on the rails.

'I was talking to someone in the village who told me about somebody I thought you might be able to tell me about.'

Dogger managed the ghost of a smile.

'I know I'm not putting that in the best way, but—'

'I know what you mean,' he said.

'Horace Bonepenny,' I blurted out. 'Who is Horace Bonepenny?'

At my words, Dogger began to twitch like an experimental frog whose spinal cord has been hooked up to a galvanic battery. He licked his lips and wiped madly at his mouth with a pocket handkerchief. I could see that his eyes were beginning to dim, winking out much as the stars do just before sunrise. At the same time, he was making a great effort to pull himself together, though with little success.

'Never mind, Dogger,' I said. 'It doesn't matter. For get it.'

He tried to get to his feet, but was unable to lift himself from the overturned pail.

'Miss Flavia,' he said, 'there are questions which need to be asked, and there are questions which need not to be asked.'

So there it was again: so like a law, these words that fell from Dogger's lips as naturally, and with as much finality, as if Isaiah himself had spoken them.

But those few words seemed utterly to have exhausted him, and with a loud sigh he covered his face with his hands. I wanted nothing more at that moment than to throw my arms round him and hug him, but I knew that he wasn't up to it. Instead, I settled for putting my hand on his shoulder, realizing even as I did so that the gesture was of greater comfort to me than it was to him.

'I'll go and get Father,' I said. 'We'll help you to your room.'

Dogger turned his face slowly round towards me, a chalky white mask of tragedy. The words came out of him like stone grating upon stone.

'They've taken him away, Miss Flavia. The police have taken him away.'

twelve

FEELY AND DAFFY WERE SITTING ON A FLOWERED DIVAN in the drawing room, wrapped in one another's arms and wailing like air-raid sirens. I had taken a few steps into the room to join in with them before Ophelia spotted me.

'Where have you been, you little beast?' she hissed, springing up and coming at me like a wildcat, her eyes swollen and as red as cycle reflectors. 'Everyone's been searching for you. We thought you'd drowned. Oh! How I prayed you had!'

Welcome home, Flave, I thought.

'Father's been arrested,' Daffy said matter-of-factly. 'They've taken him away.'

'Where?' I asked.

'How should we know?' Ophelia spat contemptuously. 'Wherever they take people who have been arrested, I expect. Where have you been?'

'Bishop's Lacey or Hinley?'

'What do you mean? Talk sense, you little fool.'

'Bishop's Lacey or Hinley,' I repeated. 'There's only a one-room police station at Bishop's Lacey, so I don't expect he's been taken there. The County Constabulary is at Hinley. So they've likely taken him to Hinley.'

'They'll charge him with murder,' Ophelia said, 'and then he'll be hanged!' She burst into tears again and turned away. For a moment I almost felt sorry for her.

I CAME OUT OF THE DRAWING ROOM and into the hallway and saw Dogger halfway up the west staircase, plodding slowly, step by step, like a condemned man ascending the steps of the scaffold.

Now was my chance!

I waited until he was out of sight at the top of the stairs, then slipped into Father's study and quietly locked the door behind me. It was the first time in my life I had ever been alone in the room.

One full wall was given over to Father's stamp albums, fat leather volumes whose colors indicated the reign of each monarch: black for Queen Victoria, red for Edward the Seventh, green for George the Fifth, and blue for our present monarch, George the Sixth. I remembered that a slim scarlet volume tucked between the green book and the blue contained only a few items—one each of the nine known variations of the four stamps issued bearing the head of Edward the Eighth before he decamped with that American woman.

I knew that Father derived endless pleasure from the countless and minute variations in his bits of confetti, but I did not know the details. Only when he became excited enough over some new tidbit of trivia in the latest issue of The London Philatelist to rhapsodize aloud at breakfast would we learn a little more about his happy, insulated world. Apart from those rare occasions, we were all of us, my sisters and me, babes in the wood when it came to postage stamps, while Father puttered on, mounting bits of colored paper with more fearsome relish than some men mount the heads of stags and tigers.

On the wall opposite the books stood a Jacobean sideboard whose top surface and drawers overflowed with