The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie

Frank Pemberton was Bob Stanley and Bob Stanley was “The Third Man,” so to speak. It was he who had murdered Horace Bonepenny in the cucumber patch at Buckshaw. I'd be willing to stake my life on it.

As everything fell into place my heart pounded as if it were about to burst.

There had been something fishy about Pemberton from the outset, and again this was something I had not thought about since Sunday at the Folly. It was something he had said… but what?

We had talked about the weather; we had exchanged names. He had admitted that he already knew who I was, that he had looked us up in Who's Who. Why would he need to do that when he had known Father for most of his life? Could that have been the lie that set my invisible antennae to twitching?

There had been his accent, I remembered. Slight, but still…

He had told me about his book: Pemberton's Stately Homes: A Stroll Through Time. Plausible, I suppose.

What else had he said? Nothing of any great importance, some load of twaddle about us being fellow castaways on a desert island. That we should be friends.

The bit of tinder that had been smoldering away in the back of my mind burst suddenly into flames!

"I trust we shall become fast friends."

His exact words! But where had I heard them before?

Like a ball on a rubber string my thoughts flew back to a winter's day. Although it had been still early, the trees outside the drawing-room window had gone from yellow to orange to gray; the sky from cobalt blue to black.

Mrs. Mullet had brought in a plate of crumpets and drawn the curtains. Feely was sitting on the couch looking at herself in the back of a teaspoon, and Daffy was stretched out across Father's old stuffed chair by the fire. She was reading aloud to us from Penrod, a book she had commandeered from the little shelf of childhood favorites which had been preserved in Harriet's dressing room.

Penrod Schofield was twelve, a year and some months older than I, but close enough to be of passing interest. To me, Penrod seemed to be Huckleberry Finn dragged forward in time to World War I and set down in some vaguely midwestern American city. Although the book was full of stables and alleys and high board fences and delivery vans which were, in those days, still drawn by horses, the whole thing seemed to me as alien as if it had taken place upon the planet Pluto. Feely and I had sat entranced through Daffy's readings of Scaramouche, Treasure Island, and A Tale of Two Cities, but there was something about Penrod which made his world seem as far removed from us in time as the last Ice Age. Feely, who thought of books in terms of musical signatures, said that it was written in the key of C major.

Still, as Daffy plodded through its pages, we had laughed once or twice, here and there, at Penrod's defiance of his parents and authority, but I had wondered at the time what there was about a troublesome boy that had captured the imagination, and possibly the love, of the young Harriet de Luce. Perhaps now I could begin to guess.

The most amusing scene, I remembered, had been the one in which Penrod was being introduced to the sanctimonious Reverend Mr. Kinosling, who had patted him on the head and said, “A trost we shall bick-home fawst frainds.” This was a kind of condescension with which I lived my life, and I probably laughed too loud.

The point, though, was that Penrod was an American book, written by an American author. It was not likely as well known here in England as it would have been abroad.

Could Pemberton—or Bob Stanley, as I now knew him to be—have come across the book, or the phrase, in England? It was possible, of course, but it seemed unlikely. And hadn't Father told me that Bob Stanley—the same Bob Stanley who was Horace Bonepenny's confederate—had gone to America and set up a shady dealing in postage stamps?

Pemberton's slight accent was American! An old Greyminsterian with just a touch of the New World.

What an imbecile I had been!

Another peek out the window showed me that Mrs. Fairweather was gone and Cow Lane was now empty. I left the book lying open on the table, slipped out the door, and made my way round the back of the Pit Shed to the river.

A hundred years ago the river Efon had been part of a canal system, although there was now little left of it but the towpath. At the foot of Cow Lane were a few rotting remnants of the pilings which had once lined the embankment, but as it flowed towards the church, the river's waters had swollen from their decaying confines to widen in places into broad pools, one of which was at the center of the low marshy area behind the church of St. Tancred.

I scrambled over the rotted lych-gate into the churchyard, where the old tombstones leaned crazily like floating buoys in an ocean of grass so long I had to wade through it as if I were a bather waist-deep at the seaside.