The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie

"Colonel de Luce, a few words. in private if you please."

I watched Father closely, fearing he might faint again, but aside from a slight tightening of his knuckles on the handle of his walking stick, he seemed not at all surprised. He might even, I thought, have been preparing himself for this moment.

Dogger, meanwhile, had quietly sloped off into the house, perhaps to change his stiff old-fashioned collar and cuffs for the comfort of his gardening overalls.

Father looked round at us as if we were a gaggle of intrusive geese.

"Come into my study," he said to the Inspector, then turned and walked away.

Daffy and Feely stood gazing off into the middle distance as they are inclined to do when they don't know what to say. For a moment I thought of breaking the silence, but, on second thought, decided against it and walked away in a careless manner, whistling the “Harry Lime” theme from The Third Man.

Since it was Sunday, I thought it would be appropriate to go into the garden and have a look at the place where the body had lain. It would be, in a way, like those Victorian paintings of veiled widows crouching to place a handful of pathetic pansies—usually in a glass tumbler—upon the grave of their dead husband or mother. But somehow the thought made me sad, and I decided to skip the theatrics.

Without the dead man, the cucumber patch was oddly uninteresting, no more than a patch of greenery with here and there a broken stalk and something that looked suspiciously like the drag mark of a heel. In the grass, I could see the perforations where the sharp legs of Sergeant Woolmer's heavy tripod had pierced the turf.

I knew from listening to Philip Odell, the private eye on the wireless, that whenever there's a sudden and unexpected death, there's bound to be a postmortem, and I couldn't help wondering if Dr. Darby had yet had the body—as I had heard him remark to Inspector Hewitt—“up on the table.” But again, that was something I dared not ask, at least not just yet.

I looked up at my bedroom window. Reflected in it, so close I could almost touch them, images of plump white clouds floated by in a sea of blue sky.

So close! Of course! The cucumber patch was directly below my window!

Why, then, had I heard nothing? Everyone knows that the killing of a human being requires the exertion of a certain amount of mechanical energy. I forget the exact formula, although I know there is one. Force applied in a short span of time (for instance a bullet), makes a great deal of noise, whereas force applied more slowly may well make no noise at all.

What did this tell me? That if the stranger had been violently attacked, it had happened somewhere else, somewhere out of earshot. If he had been attacked where I found him, the killer had used a silent method: silent and slow since, when I found him, the man had been still, although barely, alive.

"Vale,” the dying man had said. But why would he say farewell to me? It was the word Mr. Twining had shouted before jumping to his death, but what was the connection? Was the man in the cucumbers trying to link his own death with that of Mr. Twining? Had he been there when the old man jumped? Had he been part of it?

I needed to think—and to think without distractions. The coach house was out of the question since I was now aware that, in times of trouble, I might well encounter Father sitting there in Harriet's Phantom. That left the Folly.

On the south side of Buckshaw, on an artificial island in an artificial lake, was an artificial ruin, in the shadow of which was a little Greek temple of lichen-stained marble. Now sunk deep in neglect and overgrown with nettles, there had been a time when it was one of the glories of England: a little cupola on four exquisitely slender legs that might have been a bandstand on Parnassus. Countless eighteenth-century de Luces had poled their guests out to the Folly on festive flower-strewn barges, where they had picnicked upon cold game and pastry as they watched the swans glide across the glassy water, and looked through quizzing-glasses at the hired hermit as he gaped and yawned at the doorway of his ivy-clad cave.

The island, the lake, and the Folly had been designed by Capability Brown (although this attribution had been brought into question more than once in the pages of Notes and Queries, which Father read avidly, but only in case matters of philatelic interest should crop up), and there was still in the library at Buckshaw a large red leather portfolio containing a signed set of the landscaper's original drawings. These inspired a little witticism on Father's part: “Let those other wise men live in their own folly,” he said.

There was a family tradition that it had been on a picnic at Buckshaw Folly that John Montague, the fourth Earl of Sandwich, invented the snack which was given his name when he first slapped cold grouse between two slices of bread while playing at cribbage with Cornelius de Luce.