The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie

"Where does Miss Mountjoy live?"

Daffy looked blank.

"Miss Library Mountjoy," I added.

"I have no idea," Daffy said. "I haven't used the library in the village since I was a child."

Still wide-eyed, she peered at me over her glasses.

"I was thinking of asking her advice on becoming a librarian."

It was the perfect lie. Daffy's look became almost one of respect.

"I don't know where she lives," she said. "Ask Miss Cool, at the confectionery. She knows what's under every bed in Bishop's Lacey."

"Thanks, Daff," I said as she dropped down into an upholstered wing back chair. "You're a brick."

ONE OF THE CHIEF CONVENIENCES of living near a village is that, if required, you can soon be in it. I flew along on Gladys, thinking that it might be a good idea to keep a logbook, as aeroplane pilots are made to do. By now, Gladys and I must have logged some hundreds of flying hours together, most of them in going to and from Bishop's Lacey. Now and then, with a picnic hamper strapped to her black back-skirts, we would venture even farther afield.

Once, we had ridden all morning to look at an inn where Richard Mead was said to have stayed a single night in 1747. Richard (or Dick, as I sometimes referred to him) was the author of A Mechanical Account of Poisons in Several Essays. Published in 1702, it was the first book on the subject in the English language, a first edition of which was the pride of my chemical library. In my bedroom portrait gallery, I kept his likeness stuck to the looking-glass alongside those of Henry Cavendish, Robert Bunsen, and Carl Wilhelm Scheele, whereas Daffy and Feely had pinups of Charles Dickens and Mario Lanza respectively.

The confectioner's shop in the Bishop's Lacey High Street stood tightly wedged between the undertaker's premises on one side and a fish shop on the other. I leaned Gladys up against the plate-glass window and seized the doorknob.

I swore curses under my breath. The place was locked as tight as Old Stink.

Why did the universe conspire against me like this? First the closet, then the library, and now the confectioner's. My life was becoming a long corridor of locked doors.

I cupped my hands at the window and peered into the interior gloom.

Miss Cool must have stepped out or perhaps, like everyone else in Bishop's Lacey, was having a family emergency. I took the knob in both hands and rattled the door, knowing as I did so that it was useless.

I remembered that Miss Cool lived in a couple of rooms behind the shop. Perhaps she had forgotten to unlock the door. Older people often do things like that: they become senile and—

But what if she's died in her sleep? I thought. Or worse…

I looked both ways but the High Street was empty. But wait! I had forgotten about Bolt Alley, a dark, dank tunnel of cobblestones and brick that led to the yards behind the shops. Of course! I made for it at once.

Bolt Alley smelled of the past, which was said to have once included a notorious gin mill. I gave an involuntary shiver as the sound of my footsteps echoed from its mossy walls and dripping roof. I tried not to touch the reeking green-stained bricks on either side, or to inhale its sour air, until I had edged my way out into the sunlight at the far end of the passage.

Miss Cool's tiny backyard was hemmed in with a low wall of crumbling brick. Its wooden gate was latched on the inside.

I scrambled over the wall, marched straight to the door, and gave it a good banging with the flat of my hand.

I put my ear to the panel, but nothing seemed to be moving inside.

I stepped off the walk, waded into the unkempt grass, and pressed my nose to the bottom of the sooty window-pane. The back of a dresser was blocking my view.

In one corner of the yard was a decaying doghouse—all that was left of Miss Cool's collie, Geordie, who had been run over by a speeding motorcar in the High Street.

I tugged at the sagging frame until it pulled free of the mounded earth and dragged it across the yard until it was directly under the window. Then I climbed on top of it.

From the top of the doghouse it was only one more step up until I was able to get my toes on the windowsill, where I balanced precariously on the chipped paint, my arms and legs spread out like Leonardo da Vinci's Vitruvian Man, one hand hanging on tightly to a shutter and the other trying to polish a viewing port in the grimy glass.

It was dark inside the little bedroom, but there was light enough to see the form lying on the bed; to see the white face staring back at me, its mouth gaping open in a horrid “O.”

"Flavia!" Miss Cool said, scrambling to her feet, her words muffled by the window glass. "What on earth—?"