A Red Herring Without Mustard

The very best people are like that. They don’t entangle you like flypaper.

Gladys’s tires hummed happily as we shot past St. Tancred’s and into the high street. She was enjoying the day as much as I was.

Ahead on my left, a few doors from the Thirteen Drakes, was Reggie Pettibone’s antiques shop. I was making a mental note to pay it a visit later when the door flew open and a spectacled boy came hurtling into the street.

It was Colin Prout.

I swerved to avoid hitting him, and Gladys went into a long shuddering slide.

“Colin!” I shouted as I came to a stop. I had very nearly taken a bad tumble.

But Colin had already crossed the high street and vanished into Bolt Alley, a narrow, reeking passage that led to a lane behind the shops.

Needless to say, I followed, offering up fresh praise for the invention of the Sturmey-Archer three-speed shifter.

Into the lane I sped, but Colin was already disappearing round the corner at the far end. A few seconds more, having taken a roughly circular route, and he would be back in the high street.

I was right. By the time I caught sight of him again, he was cutting into Cow Lane, as if the hounds of Hell were at his heels.

Rather than following, I applied the brakes.

Where Cow Lane ended at the river, I knew, Colin would veer to the left and follow the old towpath that ran behind the Thirteen Drakes. He would not risk going to ground anywhere along the old canal for fear of being boxed in behind the shops.

I turned completely round and went back the way I’d come, making a broad sweeping turn into Shoe Street, where Miss Pickery, the new librarian, lived in the last cottage. I braked, dismounted, and, leaning Gladys against her fence, climbed quickly over the stile and crept into position behind one of the tall poplars that lined the towpath.

Just in time! Here was Colin hurrying towards me, and all the while looking nervously back over his shoulder.

“Hello, Colin,” I said, stepping directly into his path.

Colin stopped as if he had walked into a brick wall, but the shifting of his pale eyes, magnified like oysters by his thick lenses, signaled that he was about to make a break for it.

“The police are looking for you, you know. Do you want me to tell them where you are?”

It was a bald-faced lie: one of my specialties.

“N-n-n-no.”

His face had gone as white as tissue paper, and I thought for a moment he was going to blubber. But before I could tighten the screws, he blurted out: “I never done it, Flavia! Honest! Whatever they think I done, I didn’t.”

In spite of his tangle of words I knew what he meant. “Didn’t do what, Colin? What is it you haven’t done?”

“Nothin’. I ’aven’t done nothin’.”

“Where’s Brookie?” I asked casually. “I need to see him about a pair of fire irons.”

My words had the desired effect. Colin’s arms swung round like the vanes on a weathercock, his fingers pointing north, south, west, east. He finally settled on the latter, indicating that Brookie was to be found somewhere beyond the Thirteen Drakes.

“Last time I seen him ’e was unloading ’is van.”

His van? Could Brookie have a van? Somehow the idea seemed ludicrous—as if the scarecrow from The Wizard of Oz had been spotted behind the wheel of a Bedford lorry—and yet …

“Thanks awfully, Colin,” I told him. “You’re a wonder.”

With a scrub at his eyes and a tug at his hair, he was over the stile and up Shoe Street like a whirling dervish. And then he was gone.

Had I just made a colossal mistake? Perhaps I had, but I could hardly carry out my inquiries with someone like Colin drooling over my shoulder.

Only then did a cold horror of an idea come slithering across my mind. What if—

But no, if there’d been blood on Colin’s clothing, I’d surely have noticed it.

As I walked back to retrieve Gladys, I was taken with a rattling good idea. In all of Bishop’s Lacey there were very few vans, most of which were known to me on sight: the ironmonger’s, the butcher’s, the electrician’s, and so forth. Each one had the name of its owner in prominent letters on the side panels; each was unique and unmistakeable. A quick ride up the high street would account for most of them, and a strange van would stand out like a sore thumb.

And so it did.

A few minutes later I had pedaled a zigzag path throughout the village without any luck. But as I swept round the bend at the east end of the high street, I could hardly believe my eyes.

Parked in front of Willow Villa was a disreputable green van that, although its rusty panels were blank, had Brookie Harewood written all over it.