A Red Herring Without Mustard

I couldn’t help but reflect that the last time I’d been in the parish hall, it had been on the occasion of Rupert Porson’s final puppet performance—on this same stage—of Jack and the Beanstalk. Poor Rupert, I thought, and a delicious little shudder shook my shoulders.

But this was no time for pleasantries—I had to keep my nose to the grindstone, so to speak.

I rejoined Father, Daffy, and Feely just as the front row of houselights was being switched off.

I will not bother quoting the vicar’s preliminary remarks about “the growing importance of film in the education of our young people,” and so forth. He did not mention either Brookie’s death or the attack upon Fenella, although this was perhaps neither the proper time or place to do so.

We were then plunged into a brief darkness, and a few moments later the first film flashed onto the screen—a black-and-white animated cartoon in which a chorus of horribly grinning cats in bowler hats bobbed up and down in unison, yowling “Ain’t We Got Fun?” to the music of a tinny jazz band.

Mercifully, it did not last long.

In the brief pause, during which the lights came up and the film was changed, I noticed that Mrs. Bull had arrived with Timofey and her toddler. If she saw me among the audience, she did not let on.

The next film, Saskatchewan: Breadbasket of the World, was a documentary that showed great harvesting machines creeping across the flat face of the Canadian prairies, then rivers of grain being poured into railway hopper cars, and the open hatches of waiting cargo ships.

At the end of it I craned my neck for a glimpse of Colin Prout—yes, there he was at the very back of the hall, returning my gaze steadily. I gave him a little wave, but he made no response.

The third film, The Maintenance of Aero Engines: Part III, must have been something left over from the war—a film that was being shown simply because it happened to be in the same box as the others. In the light reflected from the screen, I caught Father and Feely exchanging puzzled glances before settling down to look as if they were finding it terrifically instructive.

The final feature on the program was a documentary called The Versatile Lemon, which, aside from the narrator’s mentioning that lemons had once been used as an antidote to a multitude of poisons, was a crashing bore.

I watched it with my eyes shut.

The new moon was no more than a sliver of silver in the sky as we made our way homeward across the fields. Father, Daffy, and Feely had got slightly ahead, and I trudged along behind them, immersed in my own thoughts.

“Don’t dawdle, Flavia,” Feely said, in a patient, half-amused voice that drove me crazy. She was putting it on for Father.

“Squid!” I said, warping the word into a sneeze.

TWENTY-FOUR

MY SLEEP WAS TORN by images of silver. A silver horse in a silver glade chewed silver grass with silver teeth. A silver Man in the Moon shone in the sky above a silver caravan. Silver coins formed a cross in a corpse’s hand. A silver river glided.

When I awoke, my thoughts flew back at once to Fenella. Was she still alive? Had she regained consciousness? Porcelain claimed she had and the vicar said she hadn’t.

Well, there was only one way to find out.

“Sorry, old girl,” I said to Gladys in the gray dishwater light of the early morning, “but I have to leave you at home.”

I could see that she was disappointed, even though she managed to put on a brave face.

“I need you to stay here as a decoy,” I whispered. “When they see you leaning against the greenhouse, they’ll think I’m still in bed.”

Gladys brightened considerably at the thought of a conspiracy.

“If I look sharp, I can hare it cross-country and catch the first bus for Hinley this side of Oakshott Hill.”

At the corner of the garden, I turned, and mouthed the words, “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do,” and Gladys signaled that she wouldn’t.

I was off like a shot.

Mist hung in the fields as I flew across the plowed furrows, bounding gracefully from clod to clod. By catching the bus on a country road, I wouldn’t be seen by anyone except those passengers who were already on board, none of whom would pose much risk of reporting me to Father, since they were all heading for destinations away from Bishop’s Lacey.

Just as I climbed over the last fence, the Cottesmore bus hove into view, clattering and flapping its wings like a large, disheveled bird as it came jolting towards me along the lane.

It stopped with a rusty sigh, and a tendril of steam drifted up from its nickel radiator cap.

“Board!” said Ernie, the driver. “Step up. Step up. Mind your feet.”