I made the motion of pulling a zipper across my lips.
“Oon ewdge?”
“Sorry, dear. I don’t know what you’re saying.”
I unfastened the zipper.
“Who else? The other Hobblers, I mean.”
“Well, I really shouldn’t say, but that Reggie Pettibone, for one. His wife, too. Reg’lar stuffed hat, she thinks she is, at the Women’s Institute, all Looey the Nineteenth, an’ that.”
“Her husband owns the antiques shop?”
Mrs. Mullet nodded her head gloomily, and I knew she was reliving the loss of her Army and Navy table.
“Thank you, Mrs. M,” I said. “I’m thinking of writing a paper on the history of Buckshaw. I shall mention you in the footnotes.”
Mrs. Mullet primped her hair with a forefinger as I walked to the kitchen door.
“You stay away from them lot, mind.”
LIKE SEVERAL OF THE shops in Bishop’s Lacey, Pettibone’s had a Georgian front with a small painted door squeezed in between a pair of many-paned bow windows.
I bicycled slowly past the place, then dismounted and strolled casually towards the shop, as if I had only just noticed it.
I put my nose to the glass, but the interior was too dim to see more than a stack of old plates on a dusty table.
Without warning, a hand came out of nowhere and hung something directly in front of my face—a hand-lettered cardboard sign.
CLOSED, it said, and the card was still swaying from its string as I made a dash for the door. I grabbed the knob, but at the same instant, the disembodied pair of hands seized it on the inside, trying desperately to keep it from turning—trying to drive home the bolt before I could gain entry.
But luck was on my side. My hearty shove proved stronger than the hands that were holding it closed, and I was propelled into the shop’s interior a little faster than I should have liked.
“Oh, thank you,” I said. “I thought you might be closed. It’s about a gift, you see, and—”
“We are closed,” said a cracked, tinny voice, and I spun round to find myself face to face with a peculiar little man.
He looked like an umbrella handle that had been carved into the shape of a parrot: beaked nose, white hair as tight and curly as a powdered wig, and red circles on each cheek as if he had just rouged them. His face was powder white and his lips too red for words.
He seemed to stand precariously on his tiny feet, swaying so alarmingly backwards and forwards that I had the feeling he was about to topple from his perch.
“We’re closed,” he repeated. “You must come back another time.”
“Mr. Pettibone?” I asked, sticking out a hand. “I’m Flavia de Luce, from Buckshaw.”
He didn’t have much choice.
“Pleased to meet you, I’m sure,” he said, taking two of my fingers in his miniature fist and giving them a faint squeeze. “But we’re closed.”
“It’s my father, you see,” I went on breathlessly. “Today’s his birthday, and we wanted to—my sisters and I, that is—surprise him. He’s expressed a great interest in something you have in your shop, and we’d hoped to—I’m sorry I’m so late, Mr. Pettibone, but I was folding bandages at the St. John’s Ambulance …”
I allowed my lower lip to tremble very slightly.
“And what is this … er … object?”
“A table,” I blurted. It was the first thing that came to mind, and a jolly good thing I’d thought of it. There must be dozens of tables in a place like this, and I’d be able to have a good old snoop round while searching for the right one.
“Could you … er … describe it?”
“Yes,” I said. “Of course. It has four legs and—a top.”
I could see that he was unconvinced.
“It’s for stamps, you see. Father’s a philatelist, and he needs something he can spread his work on … under a lamp. His eyes are not quite what they used to be, and my sisters and I—”
He was edging me towards the door.
“Oh—just a minute. I think that’s it,” I said, pointing to a rather sorry bit of furniture that was huddled in the gloom beneath an ormolu clock with plump-bellied pewter horses. By moving to touch it, I was six or eight feet deeper into the shop.
“Oh, no, this one’s too dark. I thought it was mahogany. No—wait! It’s this one over here.”
I had plunged well towards the back of the shop and into the shadows. With Pettibone bearing down upon me like a wolf upon the fold, I realized that I was now cut off from the door and freedom.
“What are you playing at?” he said, making a sudden grab for my arm. I leapt out of his reach.
Suddenly the situation had turned dangerous. But why? Was there something in the shop Pettibone didn’t want me to see? Did he suspect that I was on to his shady antiques dealings?
Whatever the cause of his aggressiveness, I needed to act quickly.
To my right, standing about a foot out from the wall, was a massive wardrobe. I slid behind it.
For a while, at least, I was safe. He was too big to squeeze behind the thing. I might not be able to come out, but I’d have a moment to plan my next move.
But then Pettibone was back with a broom. He shoved the bristles into my ribs—and pushed. I stood my ground.
Now he turned the broom around and began prodding at me furiously with the handle, like a man who has trapped a rat behind the kitchen cupboard.
“Ouch!” I cried out. “Stop! Stop it! You’re hurting me!”
Actually, he wasn’t, but I couldn’t let him know that. I was able to slip far enough along the wall that I was beyond reach of his broom.
As he came round the wardrobe to have a try from the other side, I slithered back to the far end.
But I knew I was trapped. This game of cat and mouse could go on all day.
Now the wardrobe had begun to move, its china casters squealing. Pettibone had put his shoulder to a corner and was shifting the thing out from the wall.
“Oh!” I shrieked. “You’re crushing me!”
The wall of wood stopped moving and there was a brief pause in his attack, during which I could hear him breathing heavily.
“Reginald!”
The voice—a woman’s—cut through the shop like a falling icicle. I heard him mutter something.
“Reginald, come up here at once! Do you hear me?”
“Hello upstairs!” I shouted. “It’s Flavia de Luce.”
There was a silence, and then the voice said, “Come up, Flavia. Reginald, bring the girl here.”
It was as if she’d said “fetch.”
I slipped out from behind the wardrobe, rubbing my elbows, and shot him a reproachful look.
His eyes strayed to a narrow staircase at the side of the shop, and before he could change his mind, I moved towards it.
I could have made a break for the door, but I didn’t. This could be my only chance at scouting out the place. “In for a penny, in for a pound,” as Mrs. Mullet was fond of saying.
I put my foot on the first step and began my slow trudge upstairs to whatever fate awaited me.
The room at the top came as a complete surprise. Rather than the rabbit’s warren of little cubicles I had imagined, the place was unexpectedly large. Obviously, all of the interior walls had been knocked out to form a spacious attic which was the same size as the shop beneath.
And what a contrast with the shop it was! There was no clutter up here: In fact, with one exception, the room was almost empty.
In the middle of the floor stood a great square bed hung with white linen, and in it, propped up by a wall of pillows, was a woman whose features might well have been chiseled from a block of ice. There was a faint bluish—or cyanotic—tinge to her face and hands which suggested, at first glance, that she might be the victim of either carbon monoxide or silver poisoning, but as I stared, I began to see that her complexion was colored not by poison, but by artifice.