'You don't expect me to believe that story about the struggle and the dicky heart, do you? Because I don't. That isn't what killed Horace Bonepenny.'
'It was the pie, then!' I blurted out with sudden inspiration. 'He was poisoned by the pie!'
'Did you poison the pie?' he asked, almost grinning.
'No,' I admitted. 'But I wish I had.'
'It was quite an ordinary pie,' the Inspector said. 'I've already had the analyst's report.'
Quite an ordinary pie? This was the highest praise Mrs. Mullet's confections were ever likely to receive.
'As you've deduced,' he went on, 'Bonepenny did indeed indulge in a slice of pie several hours before his death. But how could you know that?'
'Who but a stranger would eat the stuff?' I asked, with just enough of a scoff in my voice to mask the sudden realization that I had made a mistake: Bonepenny hadn't been poisoned by Mrs. Mullet's pie after all. It was childish to have pretended that he had.
'I'm sorry I said that,' I told him. 'It just popped out. You must think me a complete bloody fool.'
Inspector Hewitt didn't reply for far too long. At last he said:
''Unless some sweetness at the bottom lie,
Who cares for all the crinkling of the pie?’
'My grandmother used to say that,' he added. 'What does it mean?' I asked.
'It means—well, here we are at Buckshaw. They're probably worried about you.'
'OH,” said Ophelia in her careless voice. “Have you been gone? We hadn't noticed, had we, Daff?”
Daffy was showing the prominent equine whites of her eyes. She was definitely spooked but trying not to let on.
'No,' she muttered, and plunged back into
Had they asked, I should have told them gladly about my visit with Father, but they did not. If there was to be any grieving for his predicament, I was not to be a part of it; that much was clear. Feely and Daffy and I were like three grubs in three distinct cocoons, and sometimes I wondered why. Charles Darwin had once pointed out that the fiercest competition for survival came from one's own tribe, and as the fifth of six children—and with three older sisters—he was obviously in a position to know what he was talking about.
To me it seemed a matter of elementary chemistry: I knew that a substance tends to be dissolved by solvents that are chemically similar to it. There was no rational explanation for this; it was simply the way of Nature.
It had been a long day, and my eyelids felt as if they'd been used for oyster rakes.
'I think I'll go to bed,' I said. 'G'night, Feely. G'night, Daffy.'
My attempt at sociability was greeted with silence and a grunt. As I was making my way up the stairs, Dogger materialized suddenly above me on the landing with a candleholder that might have been snapped up at an estate sale at Manderley.
'Colonel de Luce?' he whispered.
'He is well, Dogger,' I said.
Dogger nodded a troubled nod, and we each of us trudged off to our respective quarters.
eighteen
GREYMINSTER SCHOOL LAY DOZING IN THE SUN, AS if it were dreaming of past glories. The place was precisely as I had imagined it: magnificent old stone buildings, tidy green lawns running down to the lazy river, and vast, empty playing fields that seemed to give off silent echoes of cricket matches whose players were long dead.
I leaned Gladys against a tree in the side lane by which I had entered the grounds. Behind a hedgerow, a tractor stood ticking idly, its driver nowhere in sight.
The voices of choirboys came floating across the lawns from the chapel. In spite of the bright morning sunshine, they were singing:
'Softly now the light of day
Fades upon my sight away—”
I stood listening for a moment until suddenly they broke off. Then, after a pause, the organ started up again, peevishly, and the singers went back to the beginning.
As I walked slowly across the grass of what I'm sure Father would have called “the Quad,” the tall blank windows of the school stared down at me coldly and I had the sudden queer feeling an insect must have when it's placed under a microscope—the feeling of an invisible lens hovering, and something strange, perhaps, about the light.
Except for a single schoolboy dashing along and two black-gowned masters walking and talking with their heads together, the broad lawns and winding walkways of Greyminster were empty beneath a sky of deepest blue. The whole place seemed slightly unreal, like a grossly enlarged Agfacolor print: something you might see in one of those books with a name such as
That limestone pile on the east side of the Quad—the one with the clock tower—must be Anson House, I thought: Father's old digs.
As I approached it, I raised my hand to shield my eyes against the glare of the sky. It was from somewhere up there among the battlements and tiles that Mr. Twining had plummeted to his death on the cobbles below; those ancient cobbles which now lay no more than a hundred feet from where I was standing.
I strolled across the grass to have a look.
