The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie

"And how was it? Dynamically speaking? They always have an alarming tendency to shout Gilbert and Sullivan, you know."

"Enlightening," I said.

"Aha! You must tell me in what fashion. Dear Arthur composed some of the most sublime music ever written in this sceptered isle: ‘The Lost Chord,’ for instance. G and S fascinate me to no end. Did you know that their immortal partnership was shattered by a disagreement about the cost of a carpet?”

I looked closely at him to see if he was pulling my leg, but he seemed in earnest.

"Of course I'm simply dying to pump you about the recent unpleasantness at Buckshaw, Flavia dear, but I know your lips are thrice sealed by modesty, loyalty, and legality—and not necessarily in that order, am I correct?"

I nodded my head.

"Your question of the oracle, then?"

"Were you at Greyminster?"

Max tittered like a little yellow bird. “Oh dear, no. No where quite so grand, I'm afraid. My schooling was on the Continent, Paris to be precise, and not necessarily indoors. My cousin Lombard, though, is an old Greyminsterian. He always speaks highly enough of the place—whenever he's not at the races or playing Oh Hell at Montfort's.”

"Has he ever mentioned the head, Dr. Kissing?"

"The stamp wallah? Why, dear girl, he seldom speaks of anything else. He idolized the old gentleman. Claims old Kissing made him what he is today—which isn't much, but still."

"I shouldn't think he's still alive? Dr. Kissing, I mean. He'd be very old, though, wouldn't he? I'm willing to bet everything I have that he's been dead for ages."

"Then you shall lose all your money!" said Max with a whoop. "Every blessed penny of it!"

ROOK'S END WAS TUCKED into the folds of a cozy bed formed by Squires Hill and the Jack O'Lantern, the latter a curious outcropping of the landscape which, from a distance, appeared to be an Iron Age tumulus but, upon approach, proved to be substantially larger and shaped like a skull.

I steered Gladys into Pooker's Lane, which ran along its jaw, or eastern edge. At the end of the lane, dense hedges bracketed the entrance to Rook's End.

Once past these ragged remnants of an earlier day, the lawns spread off to the east, west, and south, neglected and spiky. In spite of the sun, fingers of mist still floated in the shadows above the unkempt grass. Here and there the broad expanse of lawn was broken by one of those huge, sad beech trees whose massive boles and drooping branches always reminded me of a family of despondent elephants wandering lonely on the African veld.

Beneath the beeches, two antique ladies drifted in animated dialogue, as if competing for the role of Lady Macbeth. One was dressed in a diaphanous muslin nightgown, and a mobcap which seemed somehow to have escaped the eighteenth century, while her companion, enveloped in a cyanide blue tent dress, was wearing brass earrings the size of soup plates.

The house itself was what is often called romantically “a pile.” Once the ancestral home of the de Lacey family, from whom Bishop's Lacey took its name (and who were said to be very distantly related to the de Luces), the place had come down in the world in stages: from being the country house of an inventive and successful Huguenot linen merchant to what it was today, a private hospital to which Daffy would instantly have assigned the name Bleak House. I almost wished she were here.

Two dusty motorcars huddling together in the fore-court testified to the shortage of both staff and visitors. Dumping Gladys beside an ancient monkey puzzle tree, I picked my way up the mossy, pitted steps to the front door.

A hand-inked sign said Ring Plse., and I gave the enameled handle a pull. Somewhere inside the place a hollow clanking, like a cowbell Angelus, announced my arrival to persons unknown.

When nothing happened I rang again. Across the lawn, the two old ladies had begun to feign a tea party, with elaborate mincing curtsies, crooked fingers, and invisible cups and saucers.

I pressed an ear to the massive door, but other than an undertone, which must have been the sound of the building's breathing, I could hear nothing. I pushed the door open and stepped inside.

The first thing that struck me was the smell of the place: a mixture of cabbage, rubber cushions, dishwater, and death. Underlying that, like a groundsheet, was the sharp tang of the disinfectant used to swab the floors—dimethyl benzyl ammonium chloride, by the smell of it—a faint whiff of bitter almonds which was uncommonly like that of hydrogen cyanide, the gas that was used to exterminate killers in American gas chambers.

The entrance hall was painted a madhouse apple green: green walls, green woodwork, and green ceilings. The floors were covered with cheap brown linoleum so pitted with gladiatorial gouges that it might have been salvaged from the Roman Colosseum. Whenever I stepped on one of its pustulent brown blisters, the stuff let off a nasty hiss and I made a mental note to find out if color can cause nausea.