The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie

Within half an hour, he had left Bonepenny for dead, his pockets and wallet rifled. But the Ulster Avengers had not been there: Bonepenny had not had the stamps upon his person after all.

Pemberton had committed his crime and then simply walked off into the night, across the fields to the Jolly Coachman at Doddingsley. The next morning, he had rolled up with much ado in a taxicab at the front door of the Thirteen Drakes, pretending he had just come down by rail from London. He would have to search the room again. Risky, but necessary. Surely the stamps must still be hidden there.

Parts of this sequence of events I had suspected for some time, and even though I hadn't yet put together the remaining facts, I had already verified Pemberton's presence in Doddingsley by my telephone call to Mr. Cleaver, the innkeeper of the Jolly Coachman.

In retrospect, it all seemed fairly simple.

I stopped thinking for a moment to listen to my breathing. It was slow and regular as I sat there with my head resting on my knees, which were still pulled up in an inverted V.

At this moment I thought of something Father had once told us: that Napoleon had once called the English “a nation of shopkeepers.” Wrong, Napoleon!

Having just come through a war in which tons of trinitrotoluene were dumped on our heads in the dark, we were a nation of survivors, and I, Flavia Sabina de Luce, could see it even in myself.

And then I muttered part of the Twenty-third Psalm for insurance purposes. One can never be too sure.

Now: the murder.

Again the dying face of Horace Bonepenny swam before me in the dark, its mouth opening and closing like a landed fish gasping in the grass. His last word and his dying breath had come as one: “Vale,” he had said, and it had floated from his mouth directly to my nostrils. And it had come to me on a wave of carbon tetrachloride.

There was no doubt whatsoever that it was carbon tetrachloride, one of the most fascinating of chemical compounds.

To a chemist, its sweet smell, although very transient, is unmistakable. It is not far removed in the scheme of things from the chloroform used by anesthetists in surgery.

In carbon tetrachloride (one of its many aliases) four atoms of chlorine play ring-around-a-rosy with a single atom of carbon. It is a powerful insecticide, still used now and then in stubborn cases of hookworm, those tiny, silent parasites that gorge themselves on blood sucked in darkness from the intestines of man and beast alike.

But more importantly, philatelists use carbon tetrachloride to bring out a stamp's nearly invisible watermarks. And Father kept bottles of the stuff in his study.

I thought back to Bonepenny's room at the Thirteen Drakes. What a fool I had been to think of poisoned pie! This wasn't a Grimm's fairy tale; it was the story of Flavia de Luce.

The pie shell was nothing more than that: just a shell. Before leaving Norway, Bonepenny had removed the filling, and stuffed in the jack snipe with which he planned to terrorize Father. That was how he'd smuggled the dead bird into England.

It wasn't so much what I had found in his room as what I hadn't found. And that, of course, was the single item that was missing from the little leather kit in which Bonepenny carried his diabetic supplies: a syringe.

Pemberton had come across the syringe and pocketed it when he rifled Bonepenny's room just before the murder. I was sure of it.

They were partners in crime, and no one would have known better than Pemberton the medical supplies that were essential to Bonepenny's survival.

Even if Pemberton had planned a different way of dispatching his victim—a stone to the back of the head or strangulation with a green willow withy—the syringe in Bonepenny's luggage must have seemed like a godsend. The very thought of how it was done made me shudder.

I could imagine the two of them struggling there in the moonlight. Bonepenny was tall, but not muscular. Pemberton would have brought him down as a cougar does a deer.

Out comes the hypodermic and into the base of Bonepenny's brain it goes. Just like that. It wouldn't take more than a second, and its effect would be almost instantaneous. This, I was certain, was the way in which Horace Bonepenny had met his death.

Had he ingested the stuff—and it would have been a near impossibility to force him to swallow it—a much larger quantity of the poison would have been required: a quantity which he would have promptly vomited.

Whereas five cc's injected into the base of the brain would be sufficient to bring down an ox.

The unmistakable fumes of the carbon tetrachloride would have been quickly transmitted to his mouth and nasal cavities as I had detected. But by the time Inspector Hewitt and his detective sergeants arrived, it had evaporated without a trace.

It was almost the perfect crime. In fact it would have been perfect if I had not gone down into the garden when I did.

I hadn't thought about this before. Was my continued existence all that stood between Frank Pemberton and freedom?