The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie

I stepped out the back door. The police and the coroner had gone, and taken the body with them, and the garden now seemed strangely empty. Dogger was nowhere in sight, and I sat down on a low section of the wall to have a bit of a think.

Had Ned left the dead snipe on the doorstep as a token of his love for Ophelia? She certainly seemed convinced of it. If it had been Ned, where did he get the thing?

Two and a half seconds later, I grabbed Gladys, threw my leg over her saddle, and, for the second time that day, was flying like the wind into the village.

Speed was of the essence. No one in Bishop's Lacey would yet know of the stranger's death. The police would not have told a soul—and nor had I.

Not until Mrs. Mullet finished her scrubbing and walked to the village would the gossip begin. But once she reached home, news of the murder at Buckshaw would spread like the Black Death. I had until then to find out what I needed to know.

7

AS I SKIDDED TO A STOP AND LEANED GLADYS AGAINST a pile of weathered timbers, Ned was still at work in the inn yard. He had finished with the beer barrels and was now showily unloading cheeses the size of millstones from the back of a parked lorry.

"Hoy, Flavia," he said as he saw me, jumping at the opportunity to stop work. "Fancy some cheese?"

Before I could answer he had pulled a nasty-looking jackknife from his pocket and sliced off a slab of Stilton with frightening ease. He cut one for himself and tucked into it on the spot with what Daphne would call “noisy gusto.” Daphne is going to be a novelist, and copies out into an old account book phrases that strike her in her day-to-day reading. I remembered “noisy gusto” from the last time I snooped through its pages.

"Been home?" Ned asked, looking at me with a shy sideways glance. I saw what was coming. I nodded.

"And how's Miss Ophelia? Has the doctor been round?"

"Yes," I said. "I believe he saw her this morning."

Ned swallowed my deception whole.

"Still green then, is she?"

"More of a yellow than before," I said. "A shade more sulphuric than cupric."

I had learned that a lie wrapped in detail, like a horse pill in an apple, went down with greater ease. But this time, as soon as I said it, I knew that I had overstepped.

"Haw, Flavia!" Ned said. "You're making sport of me."

I let him have my best slow-dawning country-bumpkin smile.

"You've caught me out, Ned," I said. "Guilty, as charged."

He gave me back a weird mirror image of my grin. For a fraction of a second I thought he was mocking me, and I felt my temper begin to rise. But then I realized he was honestly pleased to have puzzled me out. This was my opportunity.

"Ned," I said, "if I asked you a terrifically personal question, would you answer it?"

I waited as this sunk in. Communicating with Ned was like exchanging cabled messages with a slow reader in Mongolia.

"Of course I'd answer it," he said, and the roguish twinkle in his eye tipped me off to what was coming next. "'Course, I might not say the truth."

When we'd both had a good laugh, I got down to business. I'd start with the heavy artillery.

"You're frightfully keen on Ophelia, aren't you?"

Ned sucked his teeth and ran a finger round the inside of his collar. “She's a right nice girl, I'll give her that.”

"But wouldn't you like to settle down with her one day in a thatched cottage and raise a litter of brats?"

By now, Ned's neck was a rising column of red, like a thick alcohol thermometer. In seconds he looked like one of those birds that inflate its gullet for mating purposes. I decided to help him out.

"Just suppose she wanted to see you but her father wouldn't allow it. Suppose one of her younger sisters could help."

Already his ruddy crop was subsiding. I thought he was going to cry.

"Do you mean it, Flavia?"

"Honest Injun," I said.

Ned stuck out his calloused fingers and gave my hand a surprisingly gentle shake. It was like shaking hands with a pineapple.

"Fingers of Friendship," he said, whatever that meant.

Fingers of Friendship? Had I just been given the secret handshake of some rustic brotherhood that met in moonlit churchyards and hidden copses? Was I now inducted, and would I be expected to take part in unspeakably bloody midnight rituals in the hedgerows? It seemed like an interesting possibility.

Ned was grinning at me like the skull on a Jolly Roger. I took the upper hand.

"Listen," I told him. "Lesson Number One: Don't leave dead birds on the loved one's doorstep. It's something that only a courting cat would do."

Ned looked blank.

"I've left flowers once or twice, hopin' she'd notice," he said. This was news to me; Ophelia must have whisked the bouquets off to her boudoir for mooning purposes before anyone else in the household spotted them.

"But dead birds? Never. You know me, Flavia. I wouldn't do a thing like that."

When I stopped to think about it for a moment, I knew that he was right; I did and he wouldn't. My next question, though, turned out to be sheer luck.