The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie

So the police knew! I could feel the excitement fizzing inside me like ginger beer, not because they had identified the victim, but because I had beaten them to it with one hand tied behind my back.

I allowed a smug look to flit across my face.

When the voices had faded, I used a bit of creeper for a screen and peeked over the top of the bricks. The inn yard was empty.

I vaulted over the wall, grabbed Gladys, and wheeled her furtively out into the empty High Street. Darting down Cow Lane, I retraced my tracks from earlier in the day by circling back behind the library, between the Thirteen Drakes, and along the rutted towpath beside the river, into Shoe Street, past the churchyard, and into the fields.

Bumpety-bump across the fields we went, Gladys and I. It was good to be in her company.

"Oh the moon shone bright on Mrs. Porter
And on her daughter
They wash their feet in soda water.”

It was a song Daffy had taught me, but only after exacting the promise that I would never sing it at Buckshaw. It seemed like a song for the great outdoors, and this was a perfect opportunity.

Dogger met me at the door.

"I need to talk to you, Miss Flavia," he said. I could see the tension in his eyes.

"All right," I said. "Where?"

"Greenhouse," he said, with a jerk of his thumb.

I followed him round the east side of the house and through the green door that was set into the wall of the kitchen garden. Once in the greenhouse, you might as well be in Africa; no one but Dogger ever set foot in the place.

Inside, open ventilation panes in the roof caught the afternoon sun, reflecting it down to where we stood among the potting benches and the gutta-percha hoses.

"What's up, Dogger?" I asked lightly, trying to make it sound a little bit—but not too much—like Bugs Bunny.

"The police," he said. "I have to know how much you told them about."

"I've been thinking the same thing," I said. "You first."

"Well, that Inspector. Hewitt. He asked me some questions about this morning."

"Me too," I said. "What did you tell him?"

"I'm sorry, Miss Flavia. I had to tell him that you came and woke me when you found the body, and that I went to the garden with you."

"He already knew that."

Dogger's eyebrows flew up like a pair of seagulls.

"He did?"

"Of course he did. I told him."

Dogger let out a long slow whistle.

"Then you didn't tell him about. that row. in the study?"

"Certainly not, Dogger! What do you take me for?"

"You must never breathe a word of that, Miss Flavia. Never!"

Now here was a pretty kettle of flounders. Dogger was asking me to conspire with him in withholding information from the police. Who was he protecting? Himself? Father? Or could it be me?

These were questions I could not ask him outright. I thought I'd try a different tack.

"Of course I'll keep quiet," I said. "But why?"

Dogger picked up a trowel and began shoveling black soil into a pot. He did not look at me, but his jaw was set at an angle that signaled clearly that he had made up his mind about something.

"There are things," he said at last, "which need to be known. And there are other things which need not to be known."

"Such as?" I ventured.

The lines of his face softened and he almost smiled.

"Buzz off," he said.

IN MY LABORATORY, I pulled the paper-wrapped packet from my pocket and carefully opened out the folds.

I gave a groan of disappointment: My cycling and wall climbing had reduced the evidence to little more than particles of pastry.

"Oh, crumbs," I said, not without a little pleasure in the aptness of my words. "Now what am I going to do?"

I put the feather carefully into an envelope, and slipped it into a drawer among letters belonging to Tar de Luce that had been written and replied to when Harriet was my age. No one would ever think of looking there, and besides, as Daffy once said, the best place to hide a glum countenance is onstage at the opera.

Even in its mutilated form, the broken pastry reminded me that I had not eaten all day. Supper at Buckshaw was, by some archaic statute, always prepared earlier by Mrs. Mullet and warmed over for our consumption at nine o'clock.

I was starved, hungry enough to eat a… well, to eat a slice of Mrs. Mullet's icky custard pie. Odd, wasn't it? She had asked me earlier, just after Father fainted, if I had enjoyed the pie… and I hadn't eaten any.

When I had gone through the kitchen at four in the morning—just before I stumbled upon that body in the cucumber vines—the pie had still been on the windowsill where Mrs. Mullet had left it to cool. And there had been a piece missing.

A piece missing indeed!

Who could have taken it? I remembered wondering about that at the time. It hadn't been Father or Daffy or Feely; they would rather eat creamed worms on toast than Mrs. Mullet's cussed custard.

Nor would Dogger have eaten it; he wasn't the sort of man who helped himself to dessert. And if Mrs. Mullet had given him the slice, she wouldn't have thought I ate it, would she?