“Dash it all!” I said. There was nothing I hated more than being interrupted when I was about to do something gratifying with chemicals.
I trudged down from the landing and flung open the door angrily.
There, looking down his nose at me, stood a chauffeur in livery: light chocolate coat with corded trim, flared breeches tucked into tall tan leather boots, a peaked cap, and a pair of limp brown leather gloves held a little too casually in his perfectly manicured hands.
I didn’t like his attitude, and, come to think of it, he probably didn’t like mine.
“De Luce?” he asked.
I stood motionless, waiting for decency.
“Miss de Luce?”
“Yes,” I said grudgingly, peering round his body as if there might be others like him hiding in the bushes.
The pantechnicon and vans had gone from the forecourt. A maze of snowy tracks told me that they had been moved round to the back of the house. In their place, idling silently in little gusts of snow, was a black Daimler limousine, polished, like a funeral coach, to an unearthly shine.
“Come in and close the door,” I said. “Father’s not awfully keen on snowdrifts in the foyer.”
“Miss Wyvern has arrived,” he announced, drawing himself to attention.
“But—” I managed, “they weren’t supposed to be here until noon …”
Phyllis Wyvern! My mind was spinning. With Father away, surely I couldn’t be expected to …
I’d seen her on the silver screen, of course, not just at the Gaumont, but also at the little backstreet cinema in Hinley. And once, also, when the vicar had hired Mr. Mitchell, who operated Bishop’s Lacey’s photo studio, to run The Rector’s Wife in St. Tancred’s parish hall, hoping, I suppose, that the story would arouse a feeling of sympathy in our parish bosoms for his rat-faced—and rat-hearted—wife, Cynthia.
Of course, it had no such effect. Despite the fact that the film was so old and scratched and full of splices that it sometimes made the picture leap about on the screen like a jumping jack, Phyllis Wyvern had been magnificent in the role of the brave and noble Mrs. Willington. At the end, when the lights came up, even the projectionist was in tears, although he’d seen the thing a hundred times before.
Nobody gave Cynthia Richardson a second look, though, and I had seen her afterwards, in the darkness, slinking home alone through the graveyard.
But how does one talk, face-to-face, with a goddess? What does one say?
“I’ll ring for Dogger,” I said.
“I’ll see to it, Miss Flavia,” said Dogger, already at my elbow.
I don’t know how he does it, but Dogger always appears at precisely the right instant, like one of those figures that pops out of the door on a Swiss clock.
And suddenly he was walking towards the Daimler, the chauffeur slipping and sliding in front of him, trying to be the first to take hold of the car’s door handle.
Dogger won.
“Miss Wyvern,” he said, his voice coming clearly to my ears on the cold air. “On behalf of Colonel de Luce, may I welcome you to Buckshaw? It’s a pleasure to have you with us. The Colonel has asked me to express his regrets that he is not here to greet you.”
Phyllis Wyvern took Dogger’s extended hand and stepped out of the car.
“Watch your step, miss. The footing is treacherous this morning.”
I could see her every breath distinctly on the cold air as she took Dogger’s arm and floated towards the front door. Floated! There was no other word for it. In spite of the slick walkway, Phyllis Wyvern floated towards me as if she were a ghost.
“We weren’t expecting you until noon,” Dogger was saying. “I regret that the walkways have not yet been fully shoveled and ashes put down.”
“Think nothing of it, Mr.—”
“Dogger,” Dogger said.
“Mr. Dogger, I’m just a girl from Golders Green. I’ve managed in snow before and, I expect I shall manage again.
“Oops!” She giggled, pretending to slip and smiling up at him as she clung to his arm.
I couldn’t believe how tiny she was, her head barely level with his chest.
She wore a tight-fitting black suit with a white blouse with a black and yellow Liberty scarf, and, despite the grayness of the day, her complexion was like cream in a summer kitchen.
“Hullo!” she said, stopping in front of me. “I’ve seen this face before. You’re Flavia de Luce, if I’m not mistaken. I was hoping you’d be here.”
I stopped breathing and I didn’t care.
“Your photo was in the Daily Mirror, you know. That dreadful business about Stonepenny, or Bonepenny, or whatever he was called.”
“Bonepenny,” I said. “Horace Bonepenny.”
I had given my assistance to the police in that case when they were completely stymied.
“That’s it,” she said, sticking out a hand and seizing mine as if we were sisters. “Bonepenny. I keep up paid subscriptions to the Police Gazette and True Crime, and I never miss so much as a single issue of the News of the World. I simply adore reading about all the great murderers: the Brides in the Bath … the Islington Mumbler … Major Armstrong … Dr. Crippen … the stuff of great drama. Makes you think, doesn’t it? What, after all, would life be without puzzling death?”
Exactly! I thought.
“And now I think we should go inside and not keep poor Mr. Dogger standing out here in the cold.”
I glanced quickly at Dogger, but his face was as reflective as a millpond.
As she brushed past me, I couldn’t help thinking: I’m breathing the same air as Phyllis Wyvern!
My nostrils were suddenly filled with her scent: the odor of jasmine.
It had probably been concocted in some perfumery, I thought, from phenol and acetic acid. Phenol, or “benzanol,” I recalled, had been discovered in the mid-seventeenth century by a German chemist named Johann Rudolf Glauber, although it was not actually isolated until nearly two hundred years later by one of his countrymen, Friedlieb Ferdinand Runge, who extracted it from coal tar and christened it “carbolic acid.” I had synthesized the extremely poisonous stuff myself by a process which involved the incomplete oxidation of benzene, and I remembered with pleasure that it was the most powerful embalming agent known to mankind: the stuff that is used whenever a body is required to last, and last, and last.
It was also to be found in certain of the Scotch whiskies.
Phyllis Wyvern had swept past me into the foyer and was now spinning round in a delighted circle.
“What a gloomy old place!” she said, clapping her hands together. “It’s perfect! Absolutely perfect!”
By now, the chauffeur had brought the luggage and was piling it inside the door.
“Just leave it there, Anthony,” she said. “Someone will see to it.”
“Yes, Miss Wyvern,” he replied, making a great show of coming to attention. He almost clicked his heels.
There was something vaguely familiar about him, but I couldn’t, for the life of me, think what.
He stood there for a long moment, perfectly still, as if he were expecting a tip—or was he waiting to be asked in for a drink and a cigar?
“You may go,” she announced rather abruptly and the spell was broken. In an instant he was no more than a member of the chorus in The Chocolate Soldier.
“Yes, Miss Wyvern,” he said, and as he turned away from her towards the door, I saw on his face a look of—what was it?—contempt?