“Someone has bet me I can’t earn it,” I said, just to sweeten the pot.

  “What is it, this badge?” Carl asked.

  “Oh, it’s like a scavenger hunt—only in the dark. You must get into a place like a castle or a fortress, and escape with something unique, like the flag, for instance, or a signboard or the headmistress’s shoe. It’s a game. It’s meant to teach resourcefulness and initiative. You know what resourcefulness and initiative are, don’t you, Carl?”

  “C’mon, Carl, give her a break,” Rinso said. “Smitty’s on guard duty tonight. He could let her in and out again and nobody’d be the wiser. Let the little girl earn her badge. They’ve been through a lot, these English. What do you say, Jeep?”

  Jeep said, “Well…”

  “C’mon, Jeep. You were a Boy Scout yourself, weren’t you? Back in Arkansas?”

  “For a while,” Jeep said.

  “And you must’ve had merit badges,” Carl persisted.

  “A few,” Jeep said.

  “What were they?”

  “Plumbing and Ornithology,” Jeep said.

  “Well, there you go,” Carl said. “What time shall we pick you up?”

  “It has to be after dark,” I said. “Otherwise, it doesn’t count.”

  “Harsh,” Rinso said.

  “Midnight would be perfect,” I said brightly, as if I had just thought of it.

  “See you at zero hours Zulu,” Carl said, letting in the clutch. Their three heads shot violently back—and then forward. It’s a wonder their spinal columns didn’t snap.

  Poop-poop went the tinny horn as they rode out of sight.

  I looked around, then let off a grin.

  This was going to be a piece of cake.

  * * *

  —

  Actually, it almost went off without a hitch. I prepared myself by relaxing in the evening on my bed. Although I couldn’t possibly visualize what was to come, I picked out a dramatic soundtrack: Grieg’s mighty Piano Concerto in A minor. As I dredged the disks out from under my bed, I was already humming the melody: a grand and haunting panorama of mountains, glaciers, and peaks to be scaled and conquered. In the hands of Clifford Curzon, the white keys were walrus tusks, while the black were the bleak and yet thrilling rocks and boulders of Norway’s remote mountain passes and fjords.

  I might have dozed a bit as Clifford scaled the harmonic heights, faced certain danger, and yet descended safely at the end in triumph, as he always managed to do. I had long ago selected this piece to be played at my funeral, with my sister Daffy at the keyboard and the London Philharmonic, brought in by special train for the occasion, fiddling and trumpeting like mad, and everyone shedding scalding tears for poor, dear, dead Flavia. This was classical music at its finest.

  When I awoke, it was half eleven: just time to find a black wool cardigan and a sturdy waterproof mackintosh. As I examined myself in the cracked cheval glass in the corner, I realized I looked like one of the black bishops from a chess set, but without the wound in my head. Miter! That was the proper name for a bishop’s hat, and although I knew it was thought by some to look like the fish of Christianity, it always looked to me like someone who had been attacked from one side by an axe murderer.

  · Seven ·

  In the Belly of the Beast

  I am shocked, even now, to see my own hand forming these words on the paper, as if I were being commanded—or is it bidden?—to write what I am told.

  Why should this chapter be given a title and set apart from the others?

  I haven’t the foggiest idea, but I do know that this part of my account is so deep, so dark, and so dense that it is completely unlike the others.

  I feel that I have been diminished, and yet at the same time magnified. I’m beginning to understand why people’s brains can sometimes become addled like eggnog, without their even noticing the change. One day you’re Flavia de Luce and the next you’re not, and presumably you will have to wait through patient eons, like an evolving caveman, to discover who it is you’re in the process of becoming.

  I know I’m not the girl I once was, but I’m not yet sure who I really am. Nor, when it comes right down to it, am I now even sure who I used to be. I’m like a tightrope walker teetering on the edge of some vast, but still invisible, abyss.

  It’s all so bloody frustrating!

  What happened that night at the American base at Leathcote was like a lightning bolt in the darkness, illuminating what had once been unseen and unsuspected, and I still cannot make out whether I’m the better for it or whether I’m accursed.

  To return to that scene makes my skin crawl, and yet at the same time fills me with a kind of glory that I can’t explain.

  But let me try anyway.

  It had been raining, the kind of cold, thin, persistent rain with occasional flashes of distant lightning that have for centuries licked the British into what we are: bold, defiant, and shaking in our soggy boots.

  Carl, as arranged, had picked me up at Buckshaw at midnight, and driven me, mostly in silence, to Leathcote. Was he having second thoughts? I wondered. Whatever the cause, he seemed subdued as we splashed and bounced between the dark hedgerows, glancing only occasionally round at me in the back seat of the jeep, as if disappointed each time that I was still there. He was already distancing himself from me.

  At the air base, he had seen me safely past the guardhouse, where we were waved swiftly through with a hooded torch by a silent black-caped figure I took to be their friend Smitty, or some other accomplice, then he dropped me in the shadows of the nearest building, which I guessed to be a hangar.

  It was almost too easy.

  Does “easy” often come before disaster? I am now inclined to think so, even if it smacks of superstition.

  “Remember,” Carl said. “We don’t know you. You’re on your own.

  “And don’t take any wooden nickels,” he added as I stepped down onto the puddled tarmac. Then suddenly his jeep jerked and growled away into the night.

  I don’t know how long I stood alone in darkness, pressing myself against the corner of the looming hangar, afraid to move and afraid to keep still. After what seemed like an eternity, the sound of wet tires on tarmac came to my ears.

  Was it Carl coming back, or had he abandoned me? Had he been discovered and forced to flee?

  Or was it the sentry: the dark-caped figure I had supposed to be Smitty?

  But what if it was someone else? Some other sentry?

  I forced myself to close my eyes. If he caught a glimpse of my whites, I’d have a quick bullet through the brain. Sentries, I remembered, were chosen for the excellence of their marksmanship and not for their loving kindness.

  I pressed more tightly up against the wall, hoping that would somehow help me blend with it. I prayed to whoever was listening that a sudden flash of lightning would not give me away.

  I also held my breath.

  The sound of footsteps suddenly stopped—came a bit closer—and stopped again.

  I didn’t dare open my eyes.

  “Who goes there?” asked a voice in the age-old challenge. It was an American accent.

  What was one to say? “It’s only me” seemed feeble and insufficient.

  “Who goes there?” the voice said again, in an impatient and even more demanding tone.

  “Friend,” I said almost instinctively, and opened my eyes, which were blinded instantly by the beam of a torch so intense it must have been powered by distilled sunlight.

  I threw my hands up to shield myself from the glare. I was thinking of begging for mercy when the light moved slowly downward from my eyes, and over my wet, bedraggled raincoat.

  I must have been a sight in this baggy, oversized outfit, which hung from my shoulders like a personal thundercloud. The smell of its synthetic resin was gagging me, as inside this makeshift tent, cold perspiration was already beginning to trickle down unpleasantly from my underarms toward my feet.

  The phrase “secret agent” crossed my mind, and in a parallel world nearby, I was already dead.

  “Advance to be recognized,” the sentry said, and I took a small step forward.

  I knew that the next step was to establish one’s credentials, and I almost said, “I’m a friend of Carl and Rinso,” but realized just in time that could put their necks in a noose, as well as mine.

  “My name is Flavia de Luce,” I said, speaking slowly and enunciating clearly. “I live at Buckshaw, in Bishop’s Lacey, and I am the daughter of Colonel Haviland de Luce.”

  There was a long silence, during which the beam of the torch moved back up to my face.

  “Please,” I said. “The light’s painful.”

  The beam hung on my face for a moment and then dropped to the ground.

  “Thank you,” I whispered. I still couldn’t see the face of the sentry.

  “State your business,” he said.

  There was no point in beating around the bush. Honesty was all I had on my side.

  “I’ve come to see someone,” I said.

  “Who?” he demanded, shifting the beam of the torch up to a point just under my chin. My breastbone began to heat.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  The sentry spun suddenly on the sole of his boot and made a quarter turn before slamming the other foot down with a frightful crash, which echoed instantly from the wall of the hangar.

  I almost leaped out of my skin.

  “Walk ahead of me,” he said. “To your left. Slow pace. Don’t try anything stupid.”

  “Left,” he said, touching my elbow with something hard and metallic, and it was only then I realized he had a weapon in his hand, and that it was pointed at me.

  I could see a glint of light reflected from the rainy tarmac on the underside of its barrel. Probably an M1, I thought. Carl had brought one of these to one of Feely’s musical soirees to be handed round and admired, and I remembered that it could fire up to fifty rounds a minute.

  “You can’t outrun ’em,” Carl had said, and I was grateful for his advice.

  Not that I had any intention of making a break for it. I was in the dark, in the rain, with an armed sentry whose face remained invisible.

  But I was almost there! I had almost reached my intended goal.

  I hadn’t planned, of course, on being caught; but that hadn’t been my fault.

  Sheer stupid chance had done me in, and I was counting on sheer stupid chance to set me free.

  I shuffled along from puddle to puddle, letting my shoulders hang limply. I didn’t want to look threatening.

  “Where are you taking me?” I asked. Surely, he couldn’t take offense at that.

  “You’ll see,” he said. “Keep moving.”

  I had visions of this nice young man sitting at home in his mother’s parlor in Plainville, Kansas, the Stars and Stripes on the wall and the Andrews Sisters on the wireless—radio, they called it—singing “Don’t Fence Me In.” The evening meal was on its way to the table and there was an apple pie browning and bubbling in the oven.

  “Where are you from?” I asked.

  “None of your business,” he said in a voice so flat my heart sank like a stone.

  Down the long dark side of a hangar we made our way, the only sounds our soggy feet on the hard tarmac.

  “Go right,” he said, and I obeyed.

  Now we were shuffling along the side of another hangar. I could smell the aeroplanes inside: a sharp but exciting mix of leather, aluminum, and high-octane aviation petrol. “Gas,” they called it. It wasn’t, of course, a gas at all, but a liquid—up until the very instant it vaporized and exploded in the cylinders of the mammoth motors that drove these machines through the night air to rain death and destruction on other people, other hangars, other lands.

  Where have these bombers been? I wondered. And what have they done?

  Don’t let it thrill you, Flavia, an inner voice said. It won’t be long before you will be required to find it sickening.

  “Halt!” the sentry said, slamming a booted foot down with an alarming noise. “Guardhouse,” he added, as if that would explain everything.

  I hadn’t spotted the guardhouse. Its blacked-out windows gave away nothing.

  “Inside,” he said, opening a door from which a flood of light caught me like an insect on the stage of an illuminating microscope.

  “Inside,” he repeated, and I tripped on the doorstep.

  I squinted against the light, even though it was dim. The room was small, the walls painted buff below and green above. It was divided into two areas by something resembling a wicket, with wire cage and a counter formed by a plain plank.

  In the corner, a small, overfired stove was almost incandescent. The room was suffocatingly hot.

  On a table was a green-hooded lamp, behind which a man in American army uniform sat smoking a cigar and swigging at a tin mug of what I guessed was coffee.

  He would be the good guy, I thought: the one in the white hat who played against the flinty exterior of the sentry.

  The man behind the desk—judging by the single bar on his shoulders, he was a lieutenant—began pulling out drawers, rifling through invisible papers. At last, he gave up his search and looked at me directly.

  “Trespassing on a military base is a very serious matter,” he said.

  “Yes, sir,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

  “Are you?” he asked, his gaze suddenly piercing.

  “No,” I admitted.

  “Then why lie?” he asked with a wave of his cigar that he might have learned from a Noël Coward comedy.

  “I am trying to get up the courage to tell the truth,” I said.

  He crushed the cigar savagely in an ashtray and snatched up a pen, which he held at the ready over a blank sheet of paper.

  “Well, out with it.” He raised his eyebrows into expectant inverted Vs.

  “Yes, sir,” I said. “I was thinking that myself.”

  “Well?”

  Now his eyes had become gimlets.

  “Well, sir…I was looking for someone.”

  He put down the pen and touched the corner of his mouth with an index finger, as if stifling a smile.

  “Unusual place and time to be looking for somebody, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, sir. I suppose it is.”

  “Well, tell me who it is. This person you’re looking for, I mean.”

  As he touched the corner of his mouth again and picked up the pen, I noticed that his fingernails were bitten to the quick.

  Here was a person I could relate to.

  This was the moment of truth. I had a choice: Either tell him the facts or play the innocent and slink away defeated. I would never get this chance again.

  “Please, sir,” I said, nodding toward the sentry. “May we be alone, sir?”

  “A…lone?” He stretched the word out as if it were a rubber band.

  “If you please, sir.”

  He chewed at his lip for a moment.

  “I think I heard a dog barking,” he said to the sentry. “Better check on it.”

  “Yes, sir!”

  The sentry clicked his heels and made an elaborately geometric exit.

  “Now then, who are you looking for?”

  “Well, I don’t know his name for certain, sir—”

  He threw down his pen. I had gone too far.

  “He goes by Colonel Crane, but some people call him Asterion.”

  There was silence. A vast silence. The universe held its breath.

  The lieutenant looked at me as if I had just told him that the Houses of Parliament and all their inhabitants had been hoovered up by a flying saucer.

  “Don’t say that name!” he hissed, leaping to his feet. “That name must never, ever, be spoken aloud. Got it?”

  I nodded.

  “God in Heaven!” he whispered, getting up from his desk and crossing to the blackout blinds, which he lifted an inch to peer anxiously out into the night.

  “Who did you say you were? What’s your name?”

  “I didn’t say, sir. I told the sentry—the guard—that I’m Flavia de Luce, that I live at Buckshaw, in Bishop’s Lacey, and that I’m the daughter of Colonel Haviland de Luce.”

  “God in Heaven!” he said again, this time louder. “And what brought you here?”

  I decided to test my theory and see how he responded. “I’m looking into the death of a Major Greyleigh. He was murdered. I believe his killer may have been acting on the orders of the person named Asteri—”

  “No!” he shouted. “I told you.”

  Sorry, I mouthed.

  He ran his fingers through his hair, picked up his cigar, and put it down again. “And what makes you think that—that this particular person is here?”

  “Logic,” I said. “Because he can’t be anywhere else.”

  “Look,” he said. “I’m going to close my eyes and count to twenty, slowly. When I open them again you will be gone. We’ll forget about the trespass. We’ll pretend it never happened. You’ll put the whole thing out of your mind, and we’ll all be happier in the morning. I’ll even throw in a driver and a ride home in a jeep. Wouldn’t that be something?”

  “No, sir,” I said. “I’ve ridden in a jeep several times before, and so have most of my friends. And I can’t leave until I speak to As—to that person who mustn’t be mentioned.”

  The lieutenant let out such a long heavy breath, it might have been the death sigh of a dragon.

  He picked up a pen and scribbled a short note on a piece of paper. It couldn’t have been more than ten lines.

  He went to the door, opened it, and handed the folded note to the sentry, who had been lurking suspiciously close to the door all the while. With a few whispered words, the messenger was on his way.