A Red Herring Without Mustard

With a hand on my shoulder and another on my arm, Inspector Hewitt walked me to the car and held open the door. I dropped into the seat like a stone, and suddenly I was shaking like a leaf.

“We’d better get you home,” he said, climbing into the driver’s seat and switching on the ignition. As a blast of hot air from the car’s heater engulfed me, I wondered vaguely how it could have warmed up so quickly. Perhaps it was a special model, made solely for the police … something intentionally designed to induce a stupor. Perhaps …

And I remember nothing more until we were grinding to a stop on the gravel sweep at Buckshaw’s front entrance. I had no recollection whatever of having been driven back through the Gully, along the high street, past St. Tancred’s, and so to Buckshaw. But here we were, so I must have been.

Dogger, surprisingly, was at the door—as if he had been waiting up all night. With his prematurely white hair illuminated from behind by the lights of the foyer, he seemed to me like a gaunt Saint Peter at the pearly gates, welcoming me home.

“I could have walked,” I said to the Inspector. “It was no more than a half mile.”

“Of course you could,” Inspector Hewitt said. “But this trip is at His Majesty’s expense.”

Was he teasing me? Twice in the recent past the Inspector had driven me home, and upon one of those occasions he had made it clear that when it came to petrol consumption the coffers of the King were not bottomless.

“Are you sure?” I asked, oddly fuddled.

“Straight out of his personal change purse.”

As if in a dream, I found myself plodding heavily up the steps to the front door. When I reached the top, Dogger fussed with the blanket round my shoulders.

“Off to bed with you, Miss Flavia. I’ll be along with a hot drink directly.”

As I trudged exhausted up the curving staircase, I could hear quiet words being exchanged between Dogger and the Inspector, but could not make out a single one of them.

Upstairs, in the east wing, I walked into my bedroom and without even removing His Majesty’s tartan blanket, fell facedown onto my bed.

I was gazing at a cup of cocoa on my night table.

As I focused on the thick brown skin that had formed upon its surface like ice on a muddy pond, something at the root of my tongue leapt like a little goat and my stomach turned over. There are not many things that I despise, but chiefest among them is skin on milk. I loathe it with a passion.

Not even the thought of the marvelous chemical change that forms the stuff—the milk’s proteins churned and ripped apart by the heat of boiling, then reassembling themselves as they cool into a jellied skin—was enough to console me. I would rather eat a cobweb.

Of course by now the cocoa would be as cold as ditch water. For various complicated reasons reaching back into my family’s past, Buckshaw’s east wing was, as I have said, unheated, but I could hardly complain. I occupied this part of the house by choice, rather than by necessity. Dogger must have—

Dogger!

In an instant the whole of the previous day’s events came storming into my consciousness like a wayward crash of thunder, and like those fierce sharp bolts of lightning that are said to strike upwards from the earth to the sky, so did these thoughts arrive in curiously reversed order: first, Inspector Hewitt and Dr. Darby, the Gully, and then the blood—the blood!—my sisters, Daffy and Feely, the Gypsy and Gry, her horse, and finally the church fête—all of these tumbling in upon one another in tattered but nevertheless sharply etched detail.

Had I been hit by lightning? Was that why I felt so curiously electrified: like a comb rubbed with tissue paper?

No, that wasn’t it—but something in my mind was evading itself.

Oh, well, I thought, I’ll turn over and go back to sleep.

But I couldn’t manage it. The morning sun streaming in at the windows was painful to look at, and my eyes were as gritty as if someone had pitched a bucket of sand into them.

Perhaps a bath would buck me up. I smiled at the thought. Daffy would be dumbstruck if she knew of my bathing without being threatened. “Filthy Flavia,” she called me, at least when Father wasn’t around.

Daffy herself loved nothing better than to subside into a steaming tub with a book, where she would stay until the water had gone cold.

“It’s like reading in one’s own coffin,” she would say afterwards, “but without the stench.”

I did not share her enthusiasm.

A light tapping at the door interrupted these thoughts. I wrapped myself tightly in the tartan blanket and, like a penguin, waddled across the room.

It was Dogger, a fresh cup of steaming cocoa in his hand.

“Good morning, Miss Flavia,” he said. He did not ask how I was feeling, but nonetheless, I was aware of his keen scrutiny.

“Good morning,” I replied. “Please put it on the table. Sorry about the one you brought last night. I was too tired to drink it.”

With a nod, Dogger swapped the cups.