The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie

"Everything is a source of fun.
Nobody's safe, for we care for none!
Life is a joke that's just begun!
Three little maids from school!”

Wrapped up in the music, I threw myself into an overstuffed chair and let my legs dangle over the arm, the position in which Nature intended music to be listened to, and for the first time in days I felt the muscles in my neck relaxing.

I must have fallen into a brief sleep, or perhaps only a reverie—I don't know—but when I snapped out of it, Ko-Ko, the Lord High Executioner, was singing:

"He's made to dwell
In a dungeon cell—”

The words made me think at once of Father, and tears sprang up in my eyes. This was no operetta, I thought. Life was not a joke that's just begun, and Feely and Daffy and I were not three little maids from school. We were three girls whose father was charged with murder. I leaped up from the chair to switch off the wireless, but as I reached for the switch, the voice of the Lord High Executioner floated grimly from the loudspeaker:

"My object all sublime
I shall achieve in time
To let the punishment fit the crime—
The punishment fit the crime…”

Let the punishment fit the crime. Of course! Flavia, Flavia, Flavia! How could you not have seen?

Like a steel ball bearing dropping into a cut-glass vase, something in my mind went click, and I knew as surely as I knew my own name how Horace Bonepenny had been murdered.

Only one thing more (well, two things, actually; three at most) were needed to wrap this whole thing up like a box of birthday sweets and present it, red ribbons and all, to Inspector Hewitt. Once he heard my story, he would have Father out of the clink before you could say Jack Robinson.

MRS. MULLET WAS STILL IN THE KITCHEN with her hand up a chicken.

"Mrs. M," I said, "may I speak frankly with you?"

She looked up at me and wiped her hands on her apron.

"Of course, dear," she said. "Don't you always?"

"It's about Dogger."

The smile on her face congealed as she turned away and began fussing with a ball of butcher's twine with which she was trussing the bird.

"They don't make things the way they used to," she said as it snapped. "Not even string. Why, just last week I said to Alf, I said, 'That string as you brang home from the stationer's—'"

"Please, Mrs. Mullet," I begged. "There's something I need to know. It's a matter of life and death! Please!"

She looked at me over her spectacles like a churchwarden, and for the first time ever in her presence, I felt like a little girl.

"You said once that Dogger had been in prison, that he had been made to eat rats, that he was tortured."

"That's so, dear," she said. "My Alf says I ought not to have let it slip. But we mustn't ever speak of it. Poor Dogger's nerves are all in tatters."

"How do you know that? About the prison, I mean?"

"My Alf was in the army too, you know. He served for a time with the Colonel, and with Dogger. He doesn't talk about it. Most of 'em don't. My Alf got home safely with no more harm than troubled dreams, but a lot of them didn't. It's like a brotherhood, you know, the army; like one man spread out thin as a layer of jam across the whole face of the globe. They always know where all their old mates are and what's happened to 'em. It's eerie—psychic, like."

"Did Dogger kill someone?" I asked, point-blank.

"I'm sure he did, dear. They all did. It was their job, wasn't it?"

"Besides the enemy."

"Dogger saved your father's life," she said. "In more ways than one. He was a medical orderly, or some such thing, was Dogger, and a good one. They say he fished a bullet out of your father's chest, right next to the heart. Just as he was sewin' him up, some RAF bloke went off his head from shell shock. Tried to machete everyone in the tent. Dogger stopped him."

Mrs. Mullet pulled tight the final knot and used a pair of scissors to snip off the end of the string.

"Stopped him?"

"Yes, dear. Stopped him."

"You mean he killed him."

"Afterwards, Dogger couldn't remember. He'd been having one of his moments, you see, and—"

"And Father thinks it's happened again; that Dogger has saved his life again by killing Horace Bonepenny! That's why he's taking the blame!”

"I don't know, dear, I'm sure. But if he did, it would be very like the Colonel."

That had to be it; there was no other explanation. What was it Father had said when I told him Dogger, too, had overheard his quarrel with Bonepenny? “That is what I fear more than anything.” His exact words.

It was odd, really—almost ludicrous—like something out of Gilbert and Sullivan. I had tried to take the blame to protect Father. Father was taking the blame to protect Dogger. The question was this: Whom was Dogger protecting?