woman, really, when you come to think of it,” he had said.
And suddenly I saw. One of his clocks had been stopped—stopped for precisely three minutes. The clock on the chimneypiece.
I moved slowly towards it, as one would stalk a bird. Its dark funereal case gave it the look of a Victorian horse-drawn hearse: all knobs and glass and black shellac.
I saw my hand reaching out, small and white in the shadowed room; felt my fingers touch its cold face; felt my thumb pop open the silver catch. Now the brass pendulum was right at my fingertips, swinging to and fro, to and fro with its ghastly tock-tocking. I was almost afraid to touch the thing. I took a deep breath and grabbed the pulsing pendulum. Its inertia made it squirm heavily in my hand for a moment, like a goldfish suddenly seized; like the telltale heart before it fell still.
I felt round the back of the weighted brass. Something was fastened there; something taped behind it: a tiny packet. I pulled at it with my fingers, felt it come free and drop into my hand. Even as I withdrew my fingers from the clock's internal organs I guessed what I was about to see… and I was right. There in my palm lay a little glassine envelope inside which, clearly visible, was a Penny Black postage stamp. A Penny Black with a hole in its center, such as might have been produced by the bill of a dead jack snipe. What was there about it that had frightened Father so?
I fished the stamp out for a better look. In the first place, there was Queen Victoria with a hole in her head. Unpatriotic, perhaps, but hardly enough to shake a grown man to his roots. No, there must be more.
What was it that set this stamp apart from any other of its kind? After all, hadn't the things been printed by the tens of millions, and all of them alike? Or were they?
I thought of the time that Father—in the interests of broadening our outlook—had suddenly announced that Wednesday evenings would henceforth be given over to a series of compulsory lectures (delivered by him) on various aspects of British Government. “Series A,” as he called it, was to be, predictably enough, on the topic “The History of the Penny Post.”
Daffy, Feely, and I had all brought notebooks to the drawing room and pretended to take notes while passing scraps of paper back and forth with scribbled messages to one another such as “Stamp Out Lectures” and “Let's Lick Boredom!”
Postage stamps, Father had explained, were printed in sheets of two hundred and forty; twenty horizontal rows of twelve, which was easy enough for me to remember since 20 is the atomic number for Calcium and 12 the number for Magnesium—all I had to do was think of CaMg. Each stamp on the sheet carried a unique two-letter identifier beginning with “AA” on the upper left stamp and progressing alphabetically from left to right until “TL” was reached at the right end of the twentieth, or bottom, row.
This scheme, Father told us, had been implemented by the Post Office to prevent forgeries, although it was not perfectly clear how this was to work. There had been rampant paranoia, he said, that dens of forgers would be toiling away day and night, from Land's End to John o'Groats, producing copies to bilk Her Victorian Majesty out of a penny per time.
I looked closely at the stamp in my hand. At the bottom, below Queen Victoria's head, was written its value: ONE PENNY. To the left of these words was the letter B, to their right, the letter H.
It looked like this: B ONE PENNY. H
'BH.' The stamp had come from the second row on the printed sheet, eighth column to the right. Two-eight. Was that significant? Aside from the fact that 28 was the atomic number for Nickel, I could think of nothing.
And then I saw it! It wasn't a number at all: It was a word!
Bonepenny! Not just Bonepenny, but Bonepenny, H.! Horace Bonepenny!
Impaled on the jack snipe's bill (Yes! Father's schoolboy nickname had been “Jacko”!), the stamp had served as calling card and death threat. A threat that Father had taken in and understood at first glance.
The bird's bill had pierced the Queen's head, but left the name of its sender in clear view for anyone who had the eyes to see.
Horace Bonepenny. The
I returned the stamp to its hiding place.
AT THE TOP OF THE HILL, a rotted wooden post—all that remained of an eighteenth-century gibbet—pointed two fingers in opposing directions. I could reach Hinley, I knew, by either taking the road to Doddingsley, or by following a somewhat longer, less traveled road that would take me through the village of St. Elfrieda's. The former would get me there more quickly; the latter, being more sparsely traveled, would offer less risk of being spotted in case someone reported me missing.
'Har-har-har!' I said, with vast irony. Who could care enough?
Still, I took the road to the right and pointed Gladys towards St. Elfrieda's. It was downhill all the way, and I made good speed. When I back pedaled, the Sturmey-Archer three-speed hub on Gladys's rear wheel gave off a noise like a den of enraged, venom-dripping rattlesnakes. I pretended they were right there behind me, striking at my heels. It was glorious! I hadn't felt in such fine form since the day I first produced, by successive extraction and evaporation, a synthetic curare from the bog arum in the Vicar's lily pond.
I put my feet up on the handlebars and gave Gladys her head. As we shot down the dusty hill, I yodeled a song into the wind:
''They call her the lass
With the delicate air!…’”
thirteen
AT THE BOTTOM OF OAKSHOTT HILL I SUDDENLY thought of Father and sadness came creeping back. Did they honestly believe he had murdered Horace Bonepenny? And if so, how? If Father had murdered him beneath my bedroom window, the deed had been done in utter silence. I could hardly imagine Father killing someone without raising his voice.
But before I could speculate further, the road leveled out before twisting off to Cottesmore and to Doddingsley Magna. In the shade of an ancient oak was a bus stop bench, upon which sat a familiar figure: an ancient gnome in plus fours, looking like a George Bernard Shaw who had shrunk in the wash. He sat there so placidly, his feet dangling four inches above the ground, that he might have been born on the bench and lived there all his life.
It was Maximilian Brock, one of our Buckshaw neighbors, and I prayed he hadn't seen me. It was whispered in
