The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie

"Who but a stranger would eat the stuff?" I asked, with just enough of a scoff in my voice to mask the sudden realization that I had made a mistake: Bonepenny hadn't been poisoned by Mrs. Mullet's pie after all. It was childish to have pretended that he had.

"I'm sorry I said that," I told him. "It just popped out. You must think me a complete bloody fool."

Inspector Hewitt didn't reply for far too long. At last he said:

"'Unless some sweetness at the bottom lie,

Who cares for all the crinkling of the pie?’

"My grandmother used to say that," he added. "What does it mean?" I asked.

"It means—well, here we are at Buckshaw. They're probably worried about you."

"OH,” said Ophelia in her careless voice. “Have you been gone? We hadn't noticed, had we, Daff?”

Daffy was showing the prominent equine whites of her eyes. She was definitely spooked but trying not to let on.

"No," she muttered, and plunged back into Bleak House. Daffy was, if nothing else, a rapid reader.

Had they asked, I should have told them gladly about my visit with Father, but they did not. If there was to be any grieving for his predicament, I was not to be a part of it; that much was clear. Feely and Daffy and I were like three grubs in three distinct cocoons, and sometimes I wondered why. Charles Darwin had once pointed out that the fiercest competition for survival came from one's own tribe, and as the fifth of six children—and with three older sisters—he was obviously in a position to know what he was talking about.

To me it seemed a matter of elementary chemistry: I knew that a substance tends to be dissolved by solvents that are chemically similar to it. There was no rational explanation for this; it was simply the way of Nature.

It had been a long day, and my eyelids felt as if they'd been used for oyster rakes.

"I think I'll go to bed," I said. "G'night, Feely. G'night, Daffy."

My attempt at sociability was greeted with silence and a grunt. As I was making my way up the stairs, Dogger materialized suddenly above me on the landing with a candleholder that might have been snapped up at an estate sale at Manderley.

"Colonel de Luce?" he whispered.

"He is well, Dogger," I said.

Dogger nodded a troubled nod, and we each of us trudged off to our respective quarters.

18

GREYMINSTER SCHOOL LAY DOZING IN THE SUN, AS if it were dreaming of past glories. The place was precisely as I had imagined it: magnificent old stone buildings, tidy green lawns running down to the lazy river, and vast, empty playing fields that seemed to give off silent echoes of cricket matches whose players were long dead.

I leaned Gladys against a tree in the side lane by which I had entered the grounds. Behind a hedgerow, a tractor stood ticking idly, its driver nowhere in sight.

The voices of choirboys came floating across the lawns from the chapel. In spite of the bright morning sunshine, they were singing:

"Softly now the light of day
Fades upon my sight away—”

I stood listening for a moment until suddenly they broke off. Then, after a pause, the organ started up again, peevishly, and the singers went back to the beginning.

As I walked slowly across the grass of what I'm sure Father would have called “the Quad,” the tall blank windows of the school stared down at me coldly and I had the sudden queer feeling an insect must have when it's placed under a microscope—the feeling of an invisible lens hovering, and something strange, perhaps, about the light.

Except for a single schoolboy dashing along and two black-gowned masters walking and talking with their heads together, the broad lawns and winding walkways of Greyminster were empty beneath a sky of deepest blue. The whole place seemed slightly unreal, like a grossly enlarged Agfacolor print: something you might see in one of those books with a name such as Picturesque Britain.

That limestone pile on the east side of the Quad—the one with the clock tower—must be Anson House, I thought: Father's old digs.

As I approached it, I raised my hand to shield my eyes against the glare of the sky. It was from somewhere up there among the battlements and tiles that Mr. Twining had plummeted to his death on the cobbles below; those ancient cobbles which now lay no more than a hundred feet from where I was standing.

I strolled across the grass to have a look.

Disappointingly, there were no bloodstains. Of course there wouldn't be, not after all these years. Those would have been washed away as soon as was decently possible—quite likely even before Mr. Twining's broken body had been laid to whatever passed for rest.

Other than of their constant wearing down by two hundred years of privileged feet, these cobbles told no tales. Tucked tightly in along the stone walls of Anson House, the walk was scarcely six feet wide.