The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie

The Inspector strolled over to the bookcase, fetched down a bound volume of the Proceedings of the Chemical Society for 1907, and blew a cloud of dust from the top of the spine. He leafed idly through its pages, as if looking for what to say next.

"You know," he said, "there is nothing my wife, Antigone, detests more than shopping. She told me once that she'd rather have a tooth filled than spend half an hour shopping for a leg of mutton. But shop she must, like it or not. It's her fate, she says. To dull the experience, she sometimes buys a little yellow booklet called You and Your Stars.

"I have to admit that up until now I've scoffed at some of the things she's read out to me at breakfast, but this morning my horoscope said, and I quote, 'Your patience will be tried to the utmost.' Do you suppose I could have been misjudging these things, Flavia?"

"Please!" I said, giving the word a gimlet twist.

"Twenty-four hours," he said, "and not a minute more."

And suddenly it all came gushing out, and I found myself babbling on about the dead jack snipe, Mrs. Mullet's really quite innocent (although inedible) custard pie, my rifling of Bonepenny's room at the inn, my finding of the stamps, my visits to Miss Mountjoy and Dr. Kissing, my encounters with Pemberton at the Folly and in the churchyard, and my captivity in the Pit Shed.

The only part I left out was the bit about my poisoning Feely's lipstick with an extract of poison ivy. Why confuse the Inspector with unnecessary details?

As I spoke, he made an occasional scribble in a little black notebook, whose pages, I noticed, were filled with arrows and cryptic signs that might have been inspired by an alchemical formulary of the Middle Ages.

"Am I in that?" I asked, pointing.

"You are," he said.

"May I have a look? Just a peek?"

Inspector Hewitt flipped the notebook shut. “No,” he said. “It's a confidential police document.”

"Do you actually spell out my name, or am I represented by one of those symbols?"

"You have your very own symbol," he said, shoving the book into his pocket. "Well, it's time I was getting along."

He stuck out a hand and gave me a firm handshake. “Good-bye, Flavia,” he said. “It's been… something of an experience.”

He went to the door and opened it.

"Inspector."

He stopped and turned.

"What is it? My symbol, I mean."

"It's a P,” he said. “Capital P.”

"A P?” I asked, surprised. “What does P stand for?”

"Ah," he said, "that's best left to the imagination."

DAFFY WAS IN THE DRAWING ROOM, sprawled full-length on the carpet, reading The Prisoner of Zenda.

"Are you aware that you move your lips when you read?" I asked.

She ignored me. I decided to risk my life.

"Speaking of lips," I said, "where's Feely?"

"At the doctor's," she said. "She had some kind of allergic outbreak. Something she came in contact with."

Aha! My experiment had succeeded brilliantly! No one would ever know. As soon as I had a moment to myself, I'd record it in my notebook:

I let out a quiet snort. Daffy must have heard it, for she rolled over and crossed her legs.

"Don't think for a moment you've got away with it," she said quietly.

"Huh?" I said. Innocent puzzlement was my specialty.

"What witch's brew did you put in her lipstick?"

"I haven't the faintest what you're talking about," I said.

"Have a peek at yourself in the looking-glass," Daffy said. "Watch you don't break it."

I turned and went slowly to the chimneypiece where a cloudy leftover from the Regency period hung sullenly reflecting the room.

I bent closer, peering at my image. At first I saw nothing other than my usual brilliant self, my violet eyes, my pale complexion: but as I stared, I began to notice more details in the ravaged mercury reflection.

There was a splotch on my neck. An angry red splotch! Where Feely had kissed me!

I let out a shriek of anguish.

"Feely said that before she'd been in the pit five seconds she'd paid you back in full."

Even before Daffy rolled over and went back to her stupid sword story, I had come up with a plan.

ONCE, WHEN I WAS ABOUT NINE, I had kept a diary about what it was like to be a de Luce, or at least what it was like to be this particular de Luce. I thought a great deal about how I felt and finally came to the conclusion that being Flavia de Luce was like being a sublimate: like the black crystal residue that is left on the cold glass of a test tube by the violet fumes of iodine. At the time, I thought it the perfect description, and nothing has happened over the past two years to change my mind.

As I have said, there is something lacking in the de Luces: some chemical bond, or lack of it, that ties their tongues whenever they are threatened by affection. It is as unlikely that one de Luce would ever tell another that she loved her as it is that one peak in the Himalayas would bend over and whisper sweet nothings to an adjacent crag.