A Red Herring Without Mustard

Then, too, there had been Brookie’s tale about the restless Gray Lady of Buckshaw. I still hadn’t decided if he’d been having me on about the so-called legend, but there’d been simply no time to look into it on my own.

I must admit, though, that these nibblings of the supernatural at the base of my brain were more than a little unnerving.

“Why didn’t you tell me this before?”

“Oh, I don’t know, everything’s so confusing. Part of me didn’t trust you enough. And I knew that you no more trusted me.”

“I wasn’t sure about your clothes,” I told her. “I wondered why you had to wash them in the river.”

“Yes, you put that in your notebook, didn’t you? You thought I might have been soaked with Fenella’s blood.”

“Well, I …”

“Come on, Flavia, admit it. You thought I’d bashed in Fenella’s skull … to … to … inherit the caravan, or something.”

“Well, it was a possibility,” I said with a grin, hoping it would be infectious.

“The fact of the matter is,” she said, giving her hair a toss, then winding and unwinding a long strand of it round a forefinger, “that women away from home sometimes feel the urge to rinse out a few things.”

“Oh,” I said.

“If you’d taken the trouble to ask me, I’d have told you.”

Even if it wasn’t meant as such, I took this as an invitation to ask blunt questions.

“All right,” I said. “Then let me ask you this: When the man in the caravan was leaning over you in your dream, did you notice anything besides his hair?”

I thought I knew the answer, but I didn’t want to put words in her mouth.

Porcelain knitted her brows and pursed her lips. “I don’t think so—I … wait! There was something else. It was so ghastly I must have forgotten it when you woke me so suddenly.”

I leaned forward eagerly.

“Yes?” I said. Already my pulse was beginning to race.

“Fish!” she said. “There was the most awful reek of dead fish. Ugh!”

I could have hugged her. I could have put my arm around her waist and—if it hadn’t been for that curious stiffness in the de Luce blood that keeps me on an invisible tether—danced her round the room.

“Fish,” I said. “Just as I thought.”

Already, my mind was a flask at the boil, the largest bubbles being: Brookie Harewood and his reeking creel, Ursula Vipond and her decaying willow withies, and Miss Mountjoy with her lifetime supply of cod-liver oil.

The problem was this: Not a single one of them had red hair.

So far, the only redheads in my investigation were the Bulls: Mrs. Bull and the two little Bulls. The little ones were out of the question—they were far too young to have attacked Fenella or murdered Brookie.

Which left the obnoxious Mrs. B who, in spite of her other failings, did not, to the best of my knowledge, smell of fish. If she did, Mrs. Mullet couldn’t have resisted mentioning it.

Fish or no fish, though, Mrs. Bull had an obvious grievance against Fenella, whom she believed to have kidnapped her baby.

But whoever left the fishy smell hanging about the caravan was not necessarily the same person who fractured Fenella’s skull with the crystal ball.

And whoever had done that had not necessarily murdered Brookie.

“I’m glad I don’t think as hard as you do,” Porcelain said. “Your eyes go all far away and you look like someone else—someone older. It’s quite frightening, actually.”

“Yes,” I said, even though this was news to me.

“I’ve tried to,” she said, “but it just doesn’t seem to work. I can’t think who would want to harm Fenella. And that man—the one we found hanging from the fountain—whoever would want to kill him?”

That was the question. Porcelain had put her finger on it.

The whole thing came down to what Inspector Hewitt would call “motive.” Brookie was an embarrassment to his mother and had stolen from Miss Mountjoy. As far as I knew, he had no connection with the Pettibones, other than the fact that he provided them with stolen goods. It would be odd indeed if those two old curios had murdered him. Without her husband’s help, Mrs. Pettibone could never have manhandled Brookie’s body into the position in which Porcelain and I had found it. Even with her husband’s help—old Pettibone was so frail—they’d have needed a motorized crane.

Or the assistance of their friend Edward Sampson, who owned acres of rusting machinery in East Finching.

“I can think of only one person,” I said.

“And who might that be?”

“I’m afraid I can’t tell you.”

“So much for trust,” she said in a flat voice.

“So much for trust.”

It hurt me to cut her off in that way, but I had my reasons, one of which was that she might be forced to spill the beans to Inspector Hewitt. I couldn’t have anyone interfering when I was so close to a solution.

Another was that Brookie’s killer and Fenella’s attacker were still at large, and I couldn’t possibly put Porcelain at risk.

She was safe enough here at Buckshaw, but how long could I keep her presence a secret?

That’s what I was thinking about when there came a light tap on the door.

“Yes?” I called out.

A moment later, Father walked into the room.

“Flavia—” he began, then stopped in his tracks.