A Red Herring Without Mustard

“The very one. Why, it was no more than this morning I saw her in the Gully—headed for the Palings, she was, just as bold as brass. They still go there to do things with the water—poison it, for all I know.”

“But wait,” I said. “Miss Mountjoy can’t be a Hobbler—she goes to St. Tancred’s.”

“To spy, most likely!” Mrs. Mullet snorted. “She told my friend Mrs. Waller it was on account of the organ. The ’Obblesr got no organs, you know—don’t ’old by ’em. ‘I do love the sound of a good organ well played,’ she told Mrs. Waller, who told it to me. Tilda Mountjoy’s an ’Obbler born and bred, as was ’er parents before ’er. It’s in the blood. Don’t matter whose collection plate she puts ’er sixpences in, she’s an ’Obbler from snoot to shoes, believe you me.”

“You saw her in the Gully?” I asked, making mental notes like mad.

“With my own eyes. Since that Mrs. Ingleby come into her troubles I’ve been havin’ to stretch my legs for eggs. All the way out to Rawlings, now, though I must say they’re better yolks than Ingleby’s. It’s all in the grit, you know—or is it the shells? ’Course once I’m all the way out there, it makes no sense to go traipsin’ all the way back round, does it? So it’s into the Gully I go, eggs and all, and take a shortcut through the Palings. That’s when I seen her, just by Bull’s bonfires, she was—no more’n a stone’s throw ahead of me.”

“Did she speak to you?”

“Ho! Fat chance of that, my girl. As soon as I seen who it was I fell back and sat on a bank and took my shoe off. Pretended I’d got a stone in it.”

Obviously, Mrs. M had been walking in the same direction as Miss Mountjoy, and was about to overtake her—just like the person who was walking to St. Ives.

“Good for you!” I said, clapping my hands together with excitement and shaking my head in wonder. “What a super idea.”

“Don’t say ‘super,’ dear. You know the Colonel doesn’t like it.”

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.”

SEVENTEEN

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?”