The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie

Getting slowly to his feet, he dusted off his hands, as if they had somehow been contaminated.

'I'll inform the Colonel,' he said.

'Shouldn't we call the police?' I asked.

Dogger ran his long fingers over his unshaven chin, as if he were mulling a question of earth-shattering consequence. There were severe restrictions on using the telephone at Buckshaw.

'Yes,' he said at last. 'I suppose we should.'

We walked together, too slowly, into the house.

Dogger picked up the telephone and put the receiver to his ear, but I saw that he was keeping his finger firmly on the cradle switch. His mouth opened and closed several times and then his face went pale. His arm began shaking and I thought for a moment he was going to drop the thing. He looked at me helplessly.

'Here,' I said, taking the instrument from his hands. 'I'll do it.'

'Bishop's Lacey two two one,' I said into the telephone, thinking as I waited that Sherlock might well have smiled at the coincidence.

'Police,' said an official voice at the other end of the line.

'Constable Linnet?' I said. 'This is Flavia de Luce speaking from Buckshaw.'

I had never done this before, and had to rely on what I'd heard on the wireless and seen in the cinema.

'I'd like to report a death,' I said. 'Perhaps you could send out an inspector?'

'Is it an ambulance you require, Miss Flavia?' he said. 'We don't usually call out an inspector unless the circumstances are suspicious. Wait till I find a pencil.'

There was a maddening pause while I listened to him rummaging through stationery supplies before he continued:

'Now then, give me the name of the deceased, slowly, last name first.'

'I don't know his name,' I said. 'He's a stranger.'

That was the truth: I didn't know his name. But I did know, and knew it all too well, that the body in the garden—the body with the red hair, the body in the gray suit—was that of the man I'd spied through the study keyhole. The man Father had—

But I could hardly tell them that.

'I don't know his name,' I repeated. 'I've never seen him before in my life.'

I had stepped over the line.

MRS. MULLET AND THE POLICE ARRIVED at the same moment, she on foot from the village and they in a blue Vauxhall sedan. As it crunched to a stop on the gravel, its front door squeaked open and a man stepped out onto the driveway.

'Miss de Luce,' he said, as if pronouncing my name aloud put me in his power. 'May I call you Flavia?'

I nodded assent.

'I'm Inspector Hewitt. Is your father at home?'

The Inspector was a pleasant-enough-looking man, with wavy hair, gray eyes, and a bit of a bulldog stance that reminded me of Douglas Bader, the Spitfire ace, whose photos I had seen in the back issues of The War Illustrated that lay in white drifts in the drawing room.

'He is,' I said, 'but he's rather indisposed.' It was a word I had borrowed from Ophelia. 'I'll show you to the corpse myself.'

Mrs. Mullet's mouth fell open and her eyes goggled. “Oh, good Lord! Beggin' your pardon, Miss Flavia, but, oh, good Lord!”

If she had been wearing an apron, she'd have thrown it over her head and fled, but she didn't. Instead, she reeled in through the open door.

Two men in blue suits, who, as if awaiting instructions, had remained packed into the backseat of the car, now began to unfold themselves.

'Detective Sergeant Woolmer and Detective Sergeant Graves,' Inspector Hewitt said. Sergeant Woolmer was hulking and square, with the squashed nose of a prizefighter; Sergeant Graves a chipper little blond sparrow with dimples who grinned at me as he shook my hand.

'And now if you'll be so kind,' Inspector Hewitt said.

The detective sergeants unloaded their kits from the boot of the Vauxhall, and I led them in solemn procession through the house and into the garden.

Having pointed out the body, I watched in fascination as Sergeant Woolmer unpacked and mounted his camera on a wooden tripod, his fingers, fat as sausages, making surprisingly gentle microscopic adjustments to the little silver controls. As he took several covering exposures of the garden, lavishing particular attention on the cucumber patch, Sergeant Graves was opening a worn leather case in which were bottles ranged neatly row on row, and in which I glimpsed a packet of glassine envelopes.

I stepped forward eagerly, almost salivating, for a closer look.

'I wonder, Flavia,' Inspector Hewitt said, stepping gingerly into the cucumbers, 'if you might ask someone to organize some tea?'

He must have seen the look on my face.

'We've had rather an early start this morning. Do you think you could manage to rustle something up?'