A Red Herring Without Mustard

Only when Sergeant Woolmer had fetched a bit of tarpaulin from his kit and covered Brookie’s body did the men seem to think of sheltering themselves. Although it provided precious little protection, Dr. Darby held his black medical bag above his head and stood there motionless, looking miserable in the rain.

Inspector Hewitt had unfolded a small transparent raincoat and slipped it on over his saturated clothing. It seemed like something that a chambermaid might wear, and I wondered if his lovely wife, Antigone, had slipped it into his pocket for emergencies such as this.

Sergeant Woolmer stood stolid in the downpour, as if his bulk were protection enough against the wind and rain, while Sergeant Graves, who was the only one of the four small enough to do so, had tucked himself comfortably under the lowest bowl of the fountain on the downwind side, where he squatted as dry as a duck.

Then suddenly, as quickly as it had begun, the storm was over. The dark cloud was now drifting off to the east as the sun reappeared and the birds renewed their interrupted songs.

Sergeant Woolmer removed the waterproof covering with which he had draped his camera, and began photographing the fountain from every imaginable angle. As he began his close-ups, an ambulance came into view, teetering its way across the rough ground between the Palings and the Trafalgar Lawn.

After a few words with the driver, Dr. Darby helped shift Brookie’s shrouded body onto a stretcher, then climbed into the passenger’s seat.

As the ambulance bumped slowly away, swerving to avoid the half-buried statuary, I noticed that a rainbow had appeared. An eerie yellow light had come upon the landscape, making it seem like some garish painting by a madman.

On the far side of the Trafalgar Lawn, at the edge of the trees, something moved. I swiveled a bit and refocused quickly, just in time to see a figure vanish into the wood.

Another poacher, I thought, watching the police; not wanting to be seen.

I made a slow sweep of the tree trunks, but whoever had been there was gone.

I found the ambulance again with the binoculars, and watched until it vanished behind a distant hedge. When it was lost to view, I climbed down from the stool and locked up the laboratory.

If I wanted to search Brookie’s digs before the police got there, I’d have to get cracking.

TEN

THE ONLY PROBLEM WAS this: I hadn’t the faintest idea where Brookie lived.

I could have made another visit to the telephone closet, I suppose, but in Buckshaw’s foyer I was risking an encounter with Father, or worse—with Daffy or Feely. Besides, it seemed most unlikely that a ne’er-do-well such as Brookie would be listed in the directory.

Rather than risk being caught, I slipped stealthily into the picture gallery, which occupied nearly the entire ground floor of the east wing.

An army of de Luce ancestors gazed down upon me as I passed, in whose faces I recognized, uncomfortably, aspects of my own. I wouldn’t have liked most of them, I thought, and most of them wouldn’t have liked me.

I did a cartwheel just to show them that I didn’t care.

Still, because the old boy deserved it, I gave Uncle Tar’s portrait a brisk Girl Guide salute, even though I’d been drummed out of that organization, quite unfairly I thought, by a woman with no sense of humor whatsoever. “Honestly, Miss Pashley,” I’d have told her, had I been given half a chance, “the ferric hydroxide was only meant to be a joke.”

At the far end of the gallery was a box room which, in Buckshaw’s glory days, had been used for the framing and repair of the portraits and landscapes that made up my family’s art collection.

A couple of deal shelves and the workbench in the room were still littered with dusty tins of paint and varnish whose contents had dried out at about the same time as Queen Victoria, and from which brush handles stuck up here and there like fossilized rats’ tails.

Everyone but me seemed to have forgotten that this room had a most useful feature: a sashed window that could be raised easily from both inside and out—and all the more so since I had taken to lubricating its slides with lard pinched from the pantry.

On the outside wall, directly below the window casing and halfway to the ground, a brick had half crumbled away—its slow decay encouraged somewhat, I’ll admit, by my hacking at it with one of Dogger’s trowels: a perfect foothold for anyone who wished to leave or get back into the house without attracting undue attention.

As I scrambled out the window and climbed to the ground, I almost stepped on Dogger, who was on his knees in the wet grass. He got to his feet, lifted his hat, and replaced it.

“Good afternoon, Miss Flavia.”

“Good afternoon, Dogger.”

“Lovely rain.”

“Quite lovely.”

Dogger glanced up at the golden sky, then went on with his weeding.