A Red Herring Without Mustard

“I knocked her candle over, and before I knew it, I … I …”

Much to my surprise, my lower lip was trembling at the recollection.

“Yes, we’ve heard about that. The vicar was able to provide us with a very good account, as was Dr. Darby.”

I gulped, wondering if anyone had reported how I’d hidden behind a pitch as the Gypsy’s tent burned to ashes.

“Poor girl,” he said tenderly. “You’ve had quite a series of shocks, haven’t you?”

I nodded.

“If I’d had any idea of what you’d already been through, I’d have taken you to the hospital directly.”

“It’s all right,” I said gamely. “I’ll be all right.”

“Will you?” the Inspector asked.

“No,” I said, struggling with tears.

And suddenly it all came pouring out: From the fête to the Palings, not forgetting the seething Mrs. Bull; from my frankly fabricated tale of awakening in the night to fret about the Gypsy woman’s welfare to my discovery of her lying in a pool of her own blood in the caravan, I left out not a single detail.

Except Brookie Harewood, of course.

I was saving him for myself.

It was a magnificent performance, if I do say so. As I had been forced to learn at a very young age, there’s no better way to mask a lie—or at least a glaring omission—than to wrap it in an emotional outpouring of truth.

During it all, Inspector Hewitt’s Biro fairly flew over the pages, getting every scrap of it down for the record. He must have studied one of the shorthand methods, I thought idly as he scribbled. Later, he would expand these notes into a longer, neater, more legible form.

Perhaps he would dictate them to his wife, Antigone. I had met her not long before at a puppet show in the parish hall. Would she remember me?

In my mind I could see her seated at a typewriter at the kitchen table in their tastefully decorated cottage, her back ramrod straight in a position of perfect posture, her fingers hovering eagerly over the keys. She would be wearing hooped earrings, and a silk blouse of oyster gray.

“Flavia de Luce?” she would be saying, her large, dark eyes looking up at her husband. “Why, isn’t she that charming girl I met at St. Tancred’s, dear?”

Inspector Hewitt’s eyes would crinkle at the corners.

“One and the same, my love,” he would tell her, shaking his head at the memory of me. “One and the same.”

We had reached the end of my statement, the point at which the Inspector himself had arrived upon the scene in the Palings.

“That will do for now,” he said, flipping closed his notebook and shoving it into the inside pocket of his jacket. “I’ve asked Sergeant Graves to come round later to take your fingerprints. Quite routine, of course.”

I wrinkled my brow, but secretly I couldn’t have been more delighted. The dimpled detective sergeant with his winks and grins had come to be one of my favorites among the Hinley Constabulary.

“I expect they’ll be all over everything,” I said helpfully. “Mine and Dr. Darby’s.”

“And those of the Gypsy woman’s attacker,” he might have added, but he did not. Rather, he stood up and stuck his hand out to be shaken, as formally as if he were being received at a royal garden party.

“Thank you, Flavia,” he said. “You’ve been of great assistance … as always.”

As always? Was the Inspector twitting me?

But no—his handshake was firm and he looked me straight in the eye.

I’m afraid I smirked.

SEVEN

“DOGGER!” I SAID. “THEY’RE coming to take my fingerprints!”

Dogger looked up from the vast array of silverware he was polishing on the kitchen table. For just a moment his face was a complete blank, and then he said, “I trust they will be returned to you in good order.”

I blinked. Was Dogger making a joke? I hoped desperately that he was.

Dogger had suffered the most awful privations in the Far East during the war. His mind now seemed sometimes to consist of no more than a crazy tangle of broken suspension bridges joining the past with the present. If he had ever made a joke before, I had never heard of it. This, then, could be a momentous occasion.

“Oh! Ha ha ha.” I laughed too loudly. “That’s very good, Dogger. Returned to me in good order … I must remember to tell that one to Mrs. Mullet.”

I had no intention whatever of sharing this precious moment with our cook, but sometimes flattery does not know when to stop.

Dogger formed a faint smile as he returned a fish fork to the cutlery chest and selected another. The de Luce silverware was kept in a dark folding cabinet which, when opened, presented a remarkable array of fish forks, toddy ladles, mote spoons, marrow scoops, lobster picks, sugar nips, grape shears, and pudding trowels, all arranged in steps, like so many silvery salmon leaping up the stony staircase of a whisky-colored stream somewhere in Scotland.

Dogger had lugged this heavy box to the kitchen table for the ritual cleaning of the cutlery, a seemingly endless task that occupied a great deal of his time, and one that I never tired of watching.