The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie

"Still," he added suddenly, "it was most gratifying to learn that your father retained enough of his Latin to name you Flavia. She of the golden hair."

"Mine is more of a mousy brown."

"Ah."

We seemed to have reached one of those impasses that litter so many conversations with the elderly. I was beginning to think he had fallen asleep with his eyes open.

"Well," he said at last, "you'd better let me have a look at her."

"Sir?" I said.

"My Ulster Avenger. You'd better let me have a look at her. You have brought her along, haven't you?”

"I—yes, sir, but how—?"

"Let us deduce," he said, as quietly as if he had said let us pray.

"Horace Bonepenny, onetime boy conjurer and longtime fraud artist, turns up dead in the garden of his old school chum, Jacko de Luce. Why? Blackmail is most likely. Therefore, let us suppose blackmail. Within hours, Jacko's daughter is ransacking newspaper archives at Bishop's Lacey, ferreting out reports of the demise of my dear old colleague, Mr. Twining, God rest his soul. How do I know this? I should think it obvious.”

"Miss Mountjoy," I said.

"Very good, my dear. Tilda Mountjoy indeed—my eyes and ears upon the village and its environs for the past quarter century."

I should have known it! Miss Mountjoy was a spook!

"But let us continue. On the last day of his life, the thief Bonepenny has chosen to take up lodgings at the Thirteen Drakes. The young fool—well, no longer young, but still a fool, for all that—then manages to get himself done in. I remarked once to Mr. Twining that that boy would come to no good end. I hesitate to point out that I was correct in my prognostication. There always was a whiff of sulphur about the lad.

"But I digress. Shortly after his launch into eternity, Bonepenny's room at the inn is rifled by a maiden fair whose name I dare not utter aloud but who now sits demurely before me, fidgeting with something in her pocket which can hardly be anything other than a certain bit of paper the shade of Dundee marmalade, upon which is printed the likeness of Her Late Majesty Queen Victoria, and bearing the check letters, TL. Quod erat demonstrandum. Q.E.D.”

"Q.E.D." I said, and without a word I pulled the glassine envelope from my pocket and held it out to him. With trembling hands—though whether they trembled from age or excitement I could not be certain—and using the tissue-thin paper as makeshift tweezers, he peeled back the flaps of the envelope with his nicotine-stained fingers. As the orange corners of the Ulster Avengers came into view, I could not help noticing that his nicotine-stained fingertips and the stamps were of a nearly identical hue.

"Great Scott!" he said, visibly shaken. "You've found AA. This stamp belongs to His Majesty, you know. It was stolen from an exhibition in London just weeks ago. It was in all the papers."

He shot me an accusing look over his spectacles, but his gaze was drawn away almost at once to the bright treasures that lay in his hands. He seemed to have forgotten I was in the room.

"Greetings, my old friends," he whispered, as if I weren't there. "It's been far too long a time." He took up the magnifying glass and examined them closely, one at a time. "And you, my cherished little TL: What a tale you could tell.”

"Horace Bonepenny had both of them," I volunteered. "I found them in his luggage at the inn."

"You rifled his luggage?" Dr. Kissing asked, without looking away from the magnifying glass. "Phew! The Constabulary will hardly caper in delight upon the village green when they hear of that. nor will you, I'll wager."

"I didn't exactly rifle his luggage," I said. "He had hidden the stamps under a travel sticker on the outside of a trunk."

"With which, of course, you just happened to be idly fiddling when out they tumbled into your hands."

"Yes," I said. "That's precisely how it happened."

"Tell me," he said suddenly, swinging round to look me in the eye, "does your father know you're here?"

"No," I said. "Father's been charged with the murder. He's under arrest in Hinley."

"Good Lord! Did he do it?"

"No, but everyone seems to think he did. For a while, even I thought so myself."

"Ah," he said. "And what do you think now?"

"I don't know," I said. "Sometimes I think one thing and sometimes another. Everything's such a muddle."

"Everything is always a muddle just before it settles in. Tell me this, Flavia: What is it that interests you above all else in the universe? What is your one great passion?"

"Chemistry," I said in less than half a heartbeat.

"Well done!" said Dr. Kissing. "I've put that same question to an army of Hottentots in my time, and they always prattle on about this and that. Babble and gush, that's all it is. You, by contrast, have put it in a word."

The wicker creaked horribly as he half twisted round in his chair to face me. For an awful moment I thought his spine had crumbled.

"Sodium nitrite," he said. "Doubtless you are acquainted with sodium nitrite."