The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie

beginning to have an effect. I read again through my list of suspects and thought until my head throbbed.

I was getting nowhere. I decided at last to go outside, sit in the grass, inhale some fresh air, and turn my mind to something entirely different: I would think about nitrous oxide, for example, N₂O, or laughing gas: something that Buckshaw and its inhabitants were sorely in need of.

Laughing gas and murder seemed strange bedfellows indeed, but were they really?

I thought of my heroine, Marie-Anne Paulze Lavoisier, one of the giants of chemistry, whose portrait, with those other immortals, was stuck up on the mirror in my bedroom, her hair like a hot-air balloon, her husband looking on adoringly, not seeming to mind her silly coiffure. Marie was a woman who knew that sadness and silliness often go hand in hand. I remembered that it was during the French Revolution, in her husband Antoine's laboratory—just as they had sealed all of their assistant's bodily orifices with pitch and beeswax, rolled him up in a tube of varnished silk, and made him breathe through a straw into Lavoisier's measuring instruments—at that very moment, with Marie-Anne standing by making sketches of the proceedings, the authorities kicked down the door, burst into the room, and hauled her husband off to the guillotine.

I had once told this grimly amusing story to Feely.

'The need for heroines is generally to be found in the sort of persons who live in cottages,' she had said with a haughty sniff.

But this was getting nowhere. My thoughts were all higgledy-piggledy, like straws in a haystack. I needed to find a catalyst of some description as, for example, Kirchoff had. He had discovered that starch boiled in water remained starch but when just a few drops of sulphuric acid were added, the starch was transformed into glucose. I had once repeated the experiment to reassure myself that this was so, and it was. Ashes to ashes; starch to sugar. A little window into the Creation.

I went back into the house, which now seemed strangely silent. I stopped at the drawing room door and listened, but there was no sound of Feely at the piano or of Daffy flipping pages. I opened the door.

The room was empty. And then I remembered that my sisters had talked at breakfast about walking into Bishop's Lacey to post Father the letters that each of them had written. Aside from Mrs. Mullet, who was off in the depths of the kitchen, and Dogger, who was upstairs resting, I was, perhaps for the first time in my life, alone in the halls of Buckshaw.

I switched on the wireless for company, and as the valves warmed up, the room was filled with the sound of an operetta. It was Gilbert and Sullivan's Mikado, one of my favorites. Wouldn't it be lovely, I had once thought, if Feely, Daffy, and I could be as happy and carefree as Yum-Yum and her two sisters?

'Three little maids from school are we,

Pert as a schoolgirl well can be,

Filled to the brim with girlish glee,

Three little maids from school!”

I smiled as the three of them sang:

'Everything is a source of fun.

Nobody's safe, for we care for none!

Life is a joke that's just begun!

Three little maids from school!”

Wrapped up in the music, I threw myself into an overstuffed chair and let my legs dangle over the arm, the position in which Nature intended music to be listened to, and for the first time in days I felt the muscles in my neck relaxing.

I must have fallen into a brief sleep, or perhaps only a reverie—I don't know—but when I snapped out of it, Ko-Ko, the Lord High Executioner, was singing:

'He's made to dwell

In a dungeon cell—”

The words made me think at once of Father, and tears sprang up in my eyes. This was no operetta, I thought. Life was not a joke that's just begun, and Feely and Daffy and I were not three little maids from school. We were three girls whose father was charged with murder. I leaped up from the chair to switch off the wireless, but as I reached for the switch, the voice of the Lord High Executioner floated grimly from the loudspeaker:

'My object all sublime

I shall achieve in time

To let the punishment fit the crime—

The punishment fit the crime…”

Let the punishment fit the crime. Of course! Flavia, Flavia, Flavia! How could you not have seen?

Like a steel ball bearing dropping into a cut-glass vase, something in my mind went click, and I knew as surely as I knew my own name how Horace Bonepenny had been murdered.

Only one thing more (well, two things, actually; three at most) were needed to wrap this whole thing up like a box of birthday sweets and present it, red ribbons and all, to Inspector Hewitt. Once he heard my story, he would have Father out of the clink before you could say Jack Robinson.

MRS. MULLET WAS STILL IN THE KITCHEN with her hand up a chicken.

'Mrs. M,' I said, 'may I speak frankly with you?'

She looked up at me and wiped her hands on her apron.

'Of course, dear,' she said. 'Don't you always?'

'It's about Dogger.'

The smile on her face congealed as she turned away and began fussing with a ball of butcher's twine with which she was trussing the bird.

'They don't make things the way they used to,' she said as it snapped. 'Not even string. Why, just last week I said to Alf, I said, 'That string as you brang home from the stationer's—''

'Please, Mrs. Mullet,' I begged. 'There's something I need to know. It's a matter of life and death! Please!'

She looked at me over her spectacles like a churchwarden, and for the first time ever in her presence, I felt like a little girl.

'You said once that Dogger had been in prison, that he had been made to eat rats, that he was tortured.'