“Pass the toast, please,” Daffy said, as quietly and politely as if she were addressing a stranger in an A.B.C. tea shop: as if the last eleven years of my life hadn’t happened.
“They’re having a new badminton court at Fosters’,” Feely remarked suddenly to no one in particular. “Sheila’s going to use the old one to park her Daimler.”
Father grunted, but I could tell he was no longer listening.
“She’s such a saucy stick,” Feely went on. “She had Copley bring out little dishes of dessert onto the south lawn, but instead of ices she served snails—escargots! We ate them raw, like oysters, as the cinema stars do. It was ever so amusing.”
“You’d better be careful,” I said. “The snail gatherers sometimes pick up leeches by mistake. If you swallow a leech, it will eat its way out of your stomach from the inside.”
Feely’s face drained slowly, like a washbasin.
“There was something in The Hinley Chronicle,” I added helpfully, “three weeks ago, if I remember correctly, about a man from St. Elfrieda’s—not that far from here, really—who swallowed a leech and they had to—”
But Feely had scraped back her chair and fled.
“Are you provoking your sister again, Flavia,” Father asked, looking up from his journal, but leaving a forefinger on the page to mark his place.
“I was trying to discuss current events,” I said. “But she doesn’t seem much interested.”
“Ah,” Father said, and went back to reading about plate flaws in the 1840 tuppenny blue.
With Father present at the table, we were at least semi-civilized.
I made my escape with surprisingly little difficulty.
Mrs. Mullet was in the kitchen torturing the corpse of a chicken with a ball of butcher’s twine.
“No good roastin’ ’em ’less you truss properly,” she said. “That’s what Mrs. Chadwick up at Norton Old Hall used to tell me, and she ought to know. She was the one that learned me—mind you that was back in the days of Lady Rex-Wells, long before you was born, dear. ‘Truss ’em up three-times-three,’ she used to say, ‘and you’ll never have to rake out your oven.’ What are you laughin’ at, miss?”
A nervous titter had escaped me as a sudden image—of being tied up in a similar way by my own flesh and blood—had flashed across my mind.
The very thought of it reminded me that I had not yet taken my revenge. Certainly, there had been my little leech joke, but that was a mere warm-up: no more than a prelude to vengeance. The fact was that I had simply been too busy.
As Mrs. M slid the doomed bird into the maw of the open Aga, I took the opportunity to pinch a pot of strawberry jam from the pantry.
“Three-times-three,” I said with an awful grimace and a horrid wink at Mrs. Mullet, as if I were giving the password of a secret society—one in which she and I were the only members. At the same time, I gave her a Winston Churchill “V for Victory” sign with my right hand, to divert attention from the jam jar in my left.
Safely back upstairs, I opened the bedroom door as quietly as possible. There was no need to disturb Porcelain. I would leave a note telling her that I’d be back later, and that was all. No need to say where I was going.
But no note was necessary: The bed was perfectly made and Porcelain was gone.
Confound her! I thought. Hadn’t she understood that she was to keep to my room and out of sight? I thought I had made that perfectly clear, but perhaps I hadn’t.
Where was she now? Wandering the halls of Buckshaw—where she would surely be caught? Or had she returned to the caravan in the Palings?
I’d been intending to accompany her to the police station in Bishop’s Lacey so that she could make her presence known to Constable Linnet. By being on the spot, I’d be not only doing my duty, but putting myself in the perfect position to overhear anything that passed between Porcelain and the police. PC Linnet would, in turn, inform his superiors in Hinley, who would pass the word to Inspector Hewitt. And I’d be the recipient of his grateful thanks.
It could have been so simple. Damn the girl!
Back through the kitchen I trudged with a second-degree wink to Mrs. Mullet and a muttered “Three-times-three.”
Gladys was waiting by the garden wall and Dogger was in the greenhouse, intent upon his work.
But as I pedaled away, I was aware of his eyes upon my back.
Malden Fenwick lay to the east of Bishop’s Lacey, not far beyond Chipford.
Although I had never been there before, the place had a familiar look: and no wonder. “The Prettiest Village in England,” as it was sometimes called, had been photographed almost to distraction. Its Elizabethan and Georgian cottages, thatched and timbered, with their hollyhocks and diamond-paned windows, its duck pond and its tithe barn had appeared not just in hundreds of books and magazines, but as the setting for several popular films, such as Honey for Sale and Miss Jenks Goes to War.
“Trellis Terraces,” Daffy called it.
This was the place where Brookie Harewood’s mother lived and had her studio, although I hadn’t the faintest idea which of the cottages might be hers.
A green charabanc was parked in front of The Bull, its passengers spilling forth into the high street, cameras at the ready, fanning out in every direction with dangling arms, like a gaggle of gunfighters.
Several elderly villagers, caught out-of-doors in their gardens, began furtively fluffing up their hair or straightening their ties even as shutters began to click.
I parked Gladys against an ancient elm and walked round the coach.
“Good morning,” I said to a lady in a sun hat, as if I were helping to organize the tea. “Welcome to Malden Fenwick. And where are you from?”
“Oh, Mel,” she said, turning to a man behind her, “listen to her accent! Isn’t she adorable? We’re from Yonkers, New York, sweetheart. I’ll bet you don’t know where that is.”
As a matter of fact, I did: Yonkers was the home of Leo Baekeland, the Belgian chemist who had accidentally discovered polyoxybenzylmethylenglycolanhydride, better known as Bakelite, while working to produce a synthetic replacement for shellac which, until Baekeland came along, had been made from the secretions of the lac beetle.
“Oh, yes,” I said. “I think I’ve heard of Yonkers.”
I attached myself to Mel, who was busily arming his camera as he strolled off towards a wash-painted cottage, dragging along behind him, with slack bones and downcast eyes, a sulking daughter who looked fed to the gills with transatlantic travel.
Shifting from foot to foot, I waited as he fired off a couple of shots of a white-haired woman in tweeds who was perched precariously on a ladder, deadheading a climbing rosebush.
As Mel wandered off in search of new memories, I lingered for a moment at the gate pretending to admire the garden and then, as if awakening from a partial trance, put on my best attempt at an American accent.
“Say,” I called out, pointing to the village green. “Isn’t this where whatsername lives? The painter lady?”
“Vanetta Harewood. Glebe Cottage,” the woman said cheerily, waving her secateurs. “Last one on the right.”
It was so easy I was almost ashamed of myself.
So that was her name: “Vanetta.” Vanetta Harewood. It certainly had the right ring to it for someone who painted the gentry with their hounds and horses.
Barging in on a freshly bereaved mother was not, perhaps, in the best of taste, but there were things I needed to know before the police knew them. I owed as much to Fenella Faa, and to a lesser degree, to my own family. Why, for instance, had I found Vanetta Harewood’s son in the drawing room at Buckshaw in the middle of the night, just before he was murdered?
I didn’t expect his mother knew the answer to that, but mightn’t she give me some scrap of information that would allow me to find it out for myself?