The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie

I heard it before I saw it. There was a muffled whirring noise, as if a giant mechanical pterodactyl were flapping about outside the Pit Shed. A moment later, there was the most frightful crash and a rain of falling glass.

The room above us, beyond the mouth of the pit, erupted into brilliant yellow light, and through it clouds of steam drifted like little puffing souls of the departed.

Still rooted to the spot, I stood staring straight up into the air at the oddly familiar apparition that sat shuddering above the pit.

I've snapped, I thought. I've gone insane.

Directly above my head, trembling like a living thing, was the undercarriage of Harriet's Rolls-Royce.

Before I could blink, I heard the sound of its doors opening and feet hitting the floor above me.

Pemberton made a leap for the stairs, scrabbling up them like a trapped rat. At the top he paused, trying wildly to claw his way between the lip of the pit and the front bumper of the Phantom.

A disembodied hand appeared and seized him by the collar, dragging him up out of the pit like a fish from a pond. His shoes vanished into the light above me, and I heard a voice—Dogger's voice!—saying, “Pardon my elbow.”

There was a sickening crunch and something hit the floor above me like a sack of turnips.

I was still in a daze when the apparition appeared. All in white it was, slipping easily through the narrow gap between chrome and concrete before making its rapid, flapping descent down into the pit.

As it threw its arms around me and sobbed on my shoulder, I could feel the thin body shaking like a leaf.

"Silly little fool! Silly little fool!" it cried over and over, its raw red lips pressing into my neck.

"Feely!" I said, struck stupid with surprise, "you're getting oil all over your best dress!"

OUTSIDE THE PIT SHED, in Cow Lane, it was a fantasy: Feely was on her knees sobbing, her arms wrapped fiercely round my waist. As I stood there motionless, it was as if everything dissolved between us, and for a moment Feely and I were one creature bathing in the moonlight of the shadowed lane.

And then everyone in Bishop's Lacey seemed to materialize, coming slowly forward out of the darkness, clucking like aldermen at the torchlit scene, and at the gaping hole where the door of the Pit Shed had been; telling one another what they had been doing when the sound of the crash had echoed through the village. It was like a scene from that play Brigadoon, where the village comes slowly back to life for a single day every hundred years.

Harriet's Phantom, its beautiful radiator punctured by having been used as a battering ram, now stood steaming quietly in front of the Pit Shed and leaking water softly into the dust. Several of the more muscular villagers—one of them Tully Stoker, I noticed—had pushed the heavy vehicle backwards to allow Feely to lead me up out of the pit and into the fierce intensity and the glare of its great round headlamps.

Feely had got to her feet but was still clinging to me like a limpet to a battleship, babbling on excitedly.

"We followed him, you see. Dogger knew that you hadn't come home, and when he spotted someone prowling round the house."

These were more consecutive words than she had ever spoken to me in my entire lifetime, and I stood there savoring them a bit.

"He called the police, of course; then he said that if we followed the man. if we kept the headlamps off and kept well back.Oh, God! You should have seen us flying through the lanes!"

Good old silent Roller, I thought. Father was going to be furious, though, when he saw the damage.

Miss Mountjoy stood off to one side, pulling a woolen shawl tightly about her shoulders and glaring balefully at the splintered cavern where the door of the Pit Shed had been, as if such wholesale desecration of library property were beyond the last straw. I tried to catch her eye, but she looked nervously away in the direction of her cottage as if she'd had too much excitement for one evening and ought to be getting home.

Mrs. Mullet was there, too, with a short, roly-poly dumpling of a man visibly restraining her. This must be her husband, Alf, I thought: not at all the Jack Spratt I had imagined. Had she been by herself, Mrs. M would have dashed in and thrown her arms round me and cried, but Alf seemed to be more aware that public displays of familiarity were not quite right. When I gave her a vague smile, she dabbed at one of her eyes with a fingertip.

At that moment, Dr. Darby arrived upon the scene as casually as if he had been out for an evening stroll. In spite of his relaxed manner, I couldn't help noticing that he had brought his black medical bag. His surgery-cum-residence was just round the corner in the High Street, and he must have heard the crash of breaking wood and glass. He looked me over keenly from head to toe.

"Keeping well, Flavia?" he asked as he leaned in for a close look at my eyes.

"Perfectly well, thank you, Dr. Darby," I said pleasantly. "And you?"