The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie

I took a surreptitious peek at Feely who, in spite of the fact that her lips looked like something you might see on a fishmonger's barrow, had attracted the attentions of Ned who was sitting behind her, leaning forward over her shoulder, his own lips pursed, begging a kiss. But each time Daffy flitted down from the balcony to the mezzanine below in the role of Romeo (looking, with his pencil-thin mustache, more like David Niven in A Matter of Life and Death than a noble Montague), Ned would leap to his feet with a volley of applause punctuated by fierce two-fingered whistles as Feely, unmoved, popped Mint Imperial after Mint Imperial into her open mouth, gasping suddenly as Romeo burst into Juliet's marbled tomb:

For here lies Juliet, and her beauty makes

This vault a feasting presence full of light.

Death, lie thou there—

I woke up. Damnation! Something was running over my feet: something wet and furry.

'Dogger!' I tried to scream, but my mouth was full of a wet mess. My jaws were aching and my head felt as if I had just been dragged from the chopping block.

I kicked out with both feet and something scuttered through the loose papers with an angry chittering noise.

A water rat. The pit was likely swarming with the things. Had they been nibbling at me while I slept? The very thought of it made me cringe.

I pulled myself upright and leaned back against the wall, my knees beneath my chin. It was too much to expect that the rats would nibble at my bonds as they did in fairy tales. They'd more than likely gnaw my knuckles to the bone and I'd be powerless to stop them.

Stow it, Flave, I thought. Don't let your imagination run away with you.

There had been several times in the past, at work in my chemical laboratory or lying in bed at night, when I unexpectedly caught myself thinking, “You are all alone with Flavia de Luce,” which sometimes was a frightening thought and sometimes not. This was one of the scarier occasions.

The scurrying noises were real enough; something was rummaging about in the papers in the corner of the pit. If I moved my legs or my head, the sounds would cease for a moment, and then begin again.

How long had I been asleep? Had it been hours or minutes? Was it still daylight outside, or was it now dark?

I remembered that the library would be closed until Thursday morning, and today was only Tuesday. I could be here for a good long while.

Someone would report me missing, of course, and it would probably be Dogger. Was it too much to hope that he would catch Pemberton in the act of burgling Buckshaw? But even if he was caught, would Pemberton tell them where he had hidden me away?

Now my hands and feet were growing numb and I thought of old Ernie Forbes, whose grandchildren were made to pull him along the High Street on a little wheeled float. Ernie had lost a hand and both feet to gangrene in the war, and Feely once told me that he had to be—

Stop it, Flave! Stop being such a monstrous crybaby!

Think of something else. Think of anything.

Think, for instance, of revenge.

twenty-five

THERE ARE TIMES—ESPECIALLY WHEN I'M CONFINED—that my thoughts have a tendency, like the man in Stephen Leacock's story, to ride madly off in all directions.

I'm almost ashamed to admit to the things that crossed my mind at first. Most of them involved poisons, a few involved common household utensils, and all of them involved Frank Pemberton.

My mind flew back to our first encounter at the Thirteen Drakes. Although I had seen his taxi pull up at the front door, and had heard Tully Stover shout at Mary that Mr. Pemberton had arrived early, I had not actually laid eyes on the man himself. That did not take place until Sunday, at the Folly.

Although there had been several odd things about Pemberton's sudden appearance at Buckshaw, I really hadn't had time to think about them.

In the first place, he hadn't arrived in Bishop's Lacey until hours after Horace Bonepenny had expired in my face. Or had he?

When I looked up and saw Pemberton standing at the edge of the lake, I had been taken by surprise. But why? Buckshaw was my home: I had been born and lived there every minute of my life. What was so surprising about a man standing at the edge of an artificial lake?

I could feel an answer to that question nibbling at the hook I'd lowered into my subconscious. Don't look straight at it, I thought, think of something else—or at least pretend to.

It had been raining that day, or had just begun to rain. I had looked up from where I was sitting on the steps of the little ruined temple and there he was, across the water on the south side of the lake: the southeast side, to be precise. Why on earth had he made his appearance from that direction?

That was a question to which I had known the answer for quite some time.

Bishop's Lacey lay to the northeast of Buckshaw. From the Mulford Gates, at the entrance to our avenue of chestnut trees, the road ran in easy twists and turns, more or less directly into the village. And yet Pemberton had appeared from the southeast, from the direction of Doddingsley, which lay about four miles across the fields. Why then, in the name of Old Stink, I had wondered, would he choose to come that way? The choices had seemed limited, and I had quickly jotted them down in my mental notebook:

If (as I suspected) Pemberton was the murderer of Horace Bonepenny, could he have been, as all murderers are said to be, drawn back to the scene of the crime? Had he perhaps left something behind? Something like the murder weapon? Had he returned to Buckshaw to retrieve it?

Because he had already been to Buckshaw the night before, he knew the way across the fields and wanted to avoid being seen. (See 1 above)

What if on Friday, the night of the murder, Pemberton, believing that Bonepenny was carrying the Ulster