A Red Herring Without Mustard

“ ’Ow I’ve wanted to tell the Colonel about it,” Mrs. Mullet went on quietly, “but I couldn’t. It’s not my place. To think of it lyin’ there in ’er studio all these years, an’ ’im not knowin’ it—it breaks my ’eart. It surely does—it breaks my ’eart.”

“It breaks mine, too, Mrs. M,” I said, and it was the truth.

As she pulled herself to her feet, her face still wet and red, something stirred in my memory.

Red.

Red hair … Timofey Bull … his mouth stuffed with sweets and the silver lobster pick in his hand.

“Danny’s pocket,” he’d said, when I asked him where he got it. “Danny’s pocket.”

And I had misheard him.

Daddy’s pocket!

Red and silver. This was what my dreams and my good sense had been trying to tell me!

I felt suddenly as if a snail were slowly crawling up my spine.

Could it be that Tom Bull was still in Bishop’s Lacey? Could he still be living secretly amid the smoke that blanketed his house in the Gully?

If so, it might well be he who’d been outside smoking as I crept with Gry past his house in the dark. Perhaps it was he who had watched from the wood as Inspector Hewitt and his men removed Brookie’s body from the Poseidon fountain—he who had removed the pick from Brookie’s nose when Porcelain and I—

Good lord!

And Timofey had found the lobster pick in his father’s pocket, which could only mean—

At that very instant, the gong in the foyer was rung, announcing supper.

“Better get along, dear,” Mrs. Mullet said, poking at her hair with a forefinger and giving her face a last swipe with her apron. “You know what your father’s like about promptness. We mustn’t keep ’im waitin’.”

“Yes, Mrs. Mullet,” I said.

TWENTY-EIGHT

THE HOUSEHOLD HAD BEEN summoned, and we all of us stood waiting in the foyer.

I understood at once that Father had decided to make an occasion of Porcelain’s presence in the house, perhaps, I thought, because he felt remorse for the way in which he had treated her grandparents. He still did not know, of course, about the tragic death of Johnny Faa.

I stood at the bottom of the stairs, a little apart from the others, taking in, as if for the first time, the sad splendor of the de Luce ancestral home.

There had been a time when Buckshaw rang with laughter, or so I’d been told, but quite frankly, I could not even imagine it. The house seemed to hold itself in stiff disapproval, reflecting only the sound of whispers—setting dim but rigid limits on the lives of all of us who lived within its walls. Other than Father’s gorgon sister, Aunt Felicity, who made annual expeditions in order to berate him, there had been no guests at Buckshaw for as long as I could remember.

Daffy and Feely stood with annoyingly perfect posture on either side of Father, both of them scrubbed to disgusting perfection, like the well-bred but rather dim daughters of the local squire in a drawing-room drama. Just wait till they saw Porcelain!

To one side, Dogger hovered, nearly invisible against the dark paneling, save for his white face and his white hair—like a disembodied head afloat in the gloom.

Glancing at his military wristwatch, Father made a slight involuntary frown, but covered it nicely by pulling out his handkerchief and giving his nose an unconvincing blow.

He was nervous!

We stood there in silence, each of us staring off in a different direction.

Precisely fifteen minutes after the gong had sounded, a door closed somewhere above, and we focused our attention upon the top of the staircase.

As Porcelain appeared, we gasped collectively, and Mrs. Mullet, who had just come from the kitchen, gave out a cry like a small nocturnal animal. I thought for a moment she was going to bolt.

Porcelain had not chosen from Daffy’s or Feely’s wardrobe. She was dressed in one of my mother’s most memorable outfits: the knee-length, flame-colored dress of orange silk chiffon that Harriet had worn to the Royal Aero Society Ball the year before her final journey. A photograph had been taken by the Times that evening as Harriet arrived at the Savoy—a photograph that created a stir that to this day has never been quite forgotten.

But it wasn’t just the dress: Porcelain had pulled her hair back in the same way that Harriet had done when she was riding to the hounds. She must have copied the style from the black-and-white photo on Harriet’s desk.

Because I had rifled my mother’s jewel box myself from time to time, I recognized at once the antique amber necklace that lay against Porcelain’s surprisingly well-developed bosom, and the stones that glittered on her fingers.

Harriet’s—all of them Harriet’s!

Porcelain paused on the top step and looked down at us with what I took at the time to be shyness, but later decided might well have been contempt.