A Red Herring Without Mustard

As I pedaled along the road towards Bishop’s Lacey in my yellow mackintosh, I remembered what Dogger had said about visibility. In spite of the mist that hung like tatters of gray laundry over the soaked fields, I could probably be seen for miles. And yet, in another sense, because I was only eleven years old, I was wrapped in the best cloak of invisibility in the world.

I thought of the time Mrs. Mullet had taken me to see The Invisible Man. We had gone on the bus to Hinley to replace an Easter dress that I had ruined during a particularly interesting—but failed—experiment involving both sulfuric and hydrochloric acids.

After a sickening hour in Fashions by Eleanor, a shop in the high street whose windows were bandaged over with paper banners in dreadful shades of pink and aqua—“Latest Easter Frocks for Young Misses!” “New From London!” “Just in Time for Easter!”—Mrs. Mullet had taken pity on me and suggested a visit to a nearby A.B.C. tea shop.

There we had sat, for three quarters of an hour at a table in the window, watching people stroll by on the pavement outside. Mrs. M had become quite chatty and, forgetting perhaps that I wasn’t her friend Mrs. Waller, had let slip several things that, although they were not important at the time, would probably come in handy when I was older.

After the tea and the pastries, with most of the afternoon still ahead of us (“You was a real trouper about the frock, dear—in spite of them two witches with their tapes and pins!”), Mrs. M had decided to treat me to the cinema she had spotted in the narrow street beside the tea shop.

Because Mrs. Mullet had seen it years before, she talked all the way through The Invisible Man, nudging me in the ribs as she explained it to me minute by minute.

“ ’E can see them, like, but they can’t see ’im.”

Although I was amused at the mad scientist’s idea of injecting a powerful bleach to render himself invisible, what truly shocked me was the way he treated his laboratory equipment.

“It’s just a fill-um, dear,” Mrs. Mullet said, as I gripped her arm during the smashing of the glassware.

But all in all, I thought, looking back on it, the entertainment had not been a success. Invisibility was nothing new to me. It was an art I had been forced to learn from the day I took my first step.

Visible and invisible: the trick of being present and absent at the same time.

“Yaroo!” I shouted to no one in particular as I splashed past St. Tancred’s and into the high street.

At the far end of the village, I turned south. Through the rain I could just make out in the distance the Jack o’Lantern, a skull-shaped formation of rock that overhung my destination, Rook’s End.

I was now running parallel to and a half-mile due east of the Gully, and before many minutes had passed, I was gliding along the edge of one of the great lawns that stretched off in three directions.

I had been at Rook’s End once before to visit Father’s old schoolmaster, Dr. Kissing. On that occasion I had found him in the decaying solarium of the nursing home, and was not looking forward to setting foot in that particular mausoleum again today.

But much to my surprise, as I leapt off Gladys at the front door, there was the old gentleman himself sitting in a wheelchair beneath a large, gaily colored umbrella that had been set up on the lawn.

He waved as I plodded towards him through the wet grass.

“Ha! Flavia!” he said. “ ‘It can be no ill day which brings a young visitor to my gate.’ Horace, of course—or was it Catullus?”

I grinned as if I knew but had forgotten.

“Hello, Dr. Kissing,” I said, handing over the packet of Players I had filched from Feely’s lingerie drawer. Feely had bought the things to impress Dieter. But Dieter had joked her out of it. “No, thank you,” he said when she offered him the packet. “They ruin the chest,” and she had put the cigarettes away unopened. Feely was uncommonly proud of her chest.

“Ah,” Dr. Kissing said, producing a box of matches as if from nowhere and striking one expertly as he was still opening the packet of cigarettes. “How very kind of you to think of my one great weakness.”

He inhaled deeply, holding the smoke in his lungs for what seemed like an eternity. Then, letting it escape as he spoke, he gazed off into the distance, as if addressing someone else.

“Thus he ruins his Health, and his Substance destroys,

By vainly pursuing his fanciful Joys,

Till perhaps in the Frolick he meets with his Bane

And runs on the weapon by which he is slain.”

And runs on the weapon by which he was slain?

My blood chilled as he spoke the last line. Was he referring to his own smoking of cigarettes—or to the bizarre death of Brookie Harewood?

A conversation with Dr. Kissing was, I knew, a game of chess. There would be no shortcuts.

“The Hobblers,” I said, making the opening move.