I was as safe as houses.

  There is a method for searching cars, and I followed it to a T.

  First, I walked round the vehicle and stopped behind it, admiring as I went. Then I squatted, out of sight—twice—once to look as if I were picking up something I had dropped, and the second time to do the dirty work.

  I was now on my knees, searching the glove box and looking under the seats.

  Nothing aside from a road map—which I examined, in vain, for pencil markings—a box of paper facial tissues (with nothing hidden in or under them), and a small brass compass.

  Standing up, I stretched, as if I were becoming bored, and stared off into the distance for a few moments. Then, turning again to the Morgan, I leaned over and shoved my hand under the folded top and into the boot.

  My fingers came into contact at once with a slightly sticky packet: oilcloth, by the feel of it, and quite heavy.

  I hauled it out and turned my back to the house. With trembling fingers I opened the flaps.

  Curses! It was a motorist’s tool roll: everything needed, from spanners for removing wheels to a lever for removing tires and a Dunlop kit for repairing punctures, which included rubber cement, dusting chalk, and a wicked looking awl, whose use was not immediately evident—at least, to me.

  For a couple of ladies traveling alone, it was probably a wise weapon kept comfortably concealed.

  I wondered what else might be tucked away in the boot. I shoved the repair kit back to where I judged it to have been, stretching my arm to its limit—reaching into the far corner of the luggage space.

  Something seized my wrist like an iron vise.

  A guttural voice snarled, “What the devil do you think you’re playing at?”

  One reads occasionally of persons whose kidneys have almost fallen out from shock, and I can now vouch for the truth of what I had, up until now, taken to be old wives’ tales.

  My guts went numb. There’s no better way to describe it.

  My wrist was firmly clamped beneath the folded canvas car top, and something was shaking it like a dog shakes a rat. No matter how hard I pulled, I couldn’t break free.

  I was about to commit the one unforgivable offense for a de Luce, which was to burst into tears, when there came from the car boot an unmistakable giggle.

  A giggle that was all too familiar.

  “Did I frighten you, Flavia?”

  My wrist was suddenly set free, and my first impulse was to brain the child.

  And yet, at the same time, I was so overjoyed to see Undine’s idiotic face grinning out at me from the depths of the Morgan that my impulses were instantly neutralized: like mixing an acid with an alkali. What could I say? What could I do?

  “No, you didn’t frighten me,” I replied. “I knew you were in there all along. Now, come with me. Everyone is simply livid with you, including me. Mrs. Mullet’s called the police. Whatever were you thinking?”

  Undine began unfolding herself and clambered from the boot, clutching in one hand the magnifying glass she had taken from Buckshaw.

  “That’s mine!” I protested, when I saw the powerful lens. “You stole it from my laboratory! I thought you’d taken the one from the library.”

  The little rotter had found the laboratory key I had hidden so cleverly in the hollow doorknob.

  “Oh, piffle,” Undine said. “The one in the library is a joke. Not nearly powerful enough for a professional. I needed something with sufficient magnification for fingerprints and fibers.”

  Fingerprints and fibers! I almost laughed aloud.

  “And did you find any?” I asked.

  “No,” Undine said with a jerk of her thumb, “but there’s a dead rat in the boot.”

  “One of yours?” I asked, even though sarcasm was probably lost on this pudding-headed mooncalf.

  “No. It was there all along.”

  “All along?” I asked. “What do you mean, all along? How long have you been in there?”

  “All day,” Undine answered. “I’m a very patient person.”

  “Listen,” I told her, “I’ve got to get you home. We shall call in at the police station on the way and tell Constable Linnet you’re safe. Then we’ll decide what we’re going to do with you.”

  “Meaning punishment?” Undine asked. “Am I to be forced to walk the plank?”

  “It depends,” I said, which was all I could come up with on the spot without wracking my brains to ribbons.

  · NINETEEN ·

  AS IT HAPPENED, WE didn’t need to make a stop at the police station. I had no sooner set Gladys’s wheels beyond the churchyard wall, with Undine clinging happily on behind, than Constable Linnet himself appeared.

  The constable had chosen to take the shortcut across the fields from Buckshaw, rather than using the slightly longer lane, and as a result, looked red, shaken, and peevish.

  He flagged us down and hauled out his notebook.

  “Is this the child who was reported lost?” he asked. He knew perfectly well it was, but he apparently needed to go through the official rigmarole as if he were a clockwork copper.

  Well, two can play at that game, I decided.

  “Constable Linnet, this is Undine de Luce. Miss de Luce. Undine, this is police constable number thirty-seven, Linnet.”

  I wasn’t quite sure if this was the way in which such an introduction was formally to be made, but I didn’t give a fig if it was or not.

  “How-do-you-do, sir,” Undine said, offering her hand. “I’m very happy to make your acquaintance.”

  I was ridiculously proud of her. Whatever else she may be, Undine had been properly brought up.

  The constable shook two of her fingers as a gesture of goodwill and returned to his notebook, where he made a squiggle.

  “And where did you locate her?”

  “At the vicarage,” I told him.

  “And your name?”

  At least six hilarious replies came to mind, but I settled for rolling my eyes up toward heaven.

  “Flavia Sabina de Luce.”

  He duly wrote it down. “And she is unharmed?”

  What did he mean, “unharmed”? What could possibly befall Undine at the vicarage?

  “She’s perfectly fine, Constable,” I said.

  He snapped closed his notebook and placed the pencil in his breast pocket. “I’ll complete my paperwork at the station. You’d better take the little girl straight home. They’ll be worried about her.”

  “No need for any paperwork,” I said. “She’s safe and sound.”

  I didn’t want my doings part of a police report.

  “Nonetheless,” said Constable Linnet, and pushed off on his bicycle.

  Undine watched his departure through the magnifying glass. I was grateful she hadn’t flourished it in his face.

  “How went the investigation?” I asked.

  “Mostly a slosh.” Undine frowned. “No fingerprints, no footprints, no clues. Other than this.”

  She reached into her pocket and produced a paper bag, which she reached round and waved under my nose. The remains of her sandwich, I supposed.

  “What’s in it?” I asked.

  “A rat!” she shrieked in my ear. “I told you I found a rat. Did you forget?”

  “No,” I said, “but you needn’t wave it in my face. It might be carrying the bubonic plague.”

  “I hope so,” Undine said, enthusiastically, and we rode home in silence.

  * * *

  —

  Having delivered Undine up to Mrs. Mullet for a stern lecture on responsibility and the necessity of always reporting one’s whereabouts in a world filled with kidnappers, I carried the paper bag upstairs and knocked at Dogger’s door.

  “Undine has been found,” I told him at once, to ease his mind. “She was at the vicarage. The Missioners were there, too, so I was able to kill two birds with one stone. Speaking of killing, Undine was hiding in their Morgan. She found a rat in the boot: very appropriate, don’t you think, since she was a stowaway?”

  Dogger’s eyes lit up. “Excellent,” he said. “But what has killing to do with a rat?”

  “If you don’t mind coming along to the lab,” I replied, “I shall be happy to demonstrate.”

  Two minutes later, to avoid interruptions, we had locked ourselves into the laboratory. Undine had left the key in the lock.

  “If you’d be so good,” I said, hauling out and handing to Dogger one of a pair of wartime gas masks which I kept on hand in case of chemical mishaps.

  Dogger nodded approval, even though he hadn’t yet seen the bag’s contents.

  We strapped on the masks, the transparent eyepieces causing our eyes to bug like giant insects, and our voices, when we spoke, came as hollow, mocking echoes from behind the stifling rubber.

  “I presume you know already what’s inside?” Dogger said.

  “Yes,” I admitted. “I took a quick peek. But only with one eye.”

  I placed the bag on a metal dish and, choosing a surgical scalpel from a drawer under the microscope, made a long incision in the paper and peeled back the edges.

  “Hmmm,” Dogger said, unflappable as always, leaning in for a closer look. “Mus rattus rattus, the black rat. Not native to this country. Smaller than its relative, rattus decumanus, the brown or Norway rat, which, by the way, the Jacobites liked to pretend came over with George the First, and called the Hanoverian rat. The Tories called it the Whig rat.

  “These little fellows, the blacks, are thought to have originated somewhere in Asia, and being great globe-trotters, had, by about 1800, hidden themselves aboard ships and sailed as far as Africa and the South Pacific.”

  “I wonder where this one came from?” I said. “Was it hiding in the ladies’ luggage or is it a local rat? It might have been born in a pile of rags at Bert Archer’s garage. Or in the stuffing of the Morgan’s seats.”

  “I should think the former,” Dogger answered. “The black rat is thought to be near extinction in this country, except in the larger seaports. They have been the victims of their larger and more fierce cousins, the browns.

  “I suggest that we put on surgical gloves before we proceed. Now, then, notice the wedge-shaped upper foreteeth, and the three lower grinders on each side of the jaws. A hungry rat will eat anything from furniture to paper, although they prefer seeds, nuts, and grains.”

  I could think of other things that rats ate, but in order to maintain a certain decorum—if not scientific detachment—I decided not to mention them.

  I let my eyes stray from the stained brown teeth to the glassy eyes.

  “Look, Dogger!” I hadn’t noticed it before. “Look how dilated the pupils are!”

  “And the slight emesis,” Dogger said. Emesis, I remembered, meant “throwing up,” and it was true: On what had been the bottom of the bag was a partially dried dark blot of what I took to be rat puke.

  “We must pursue this to the farthest end of the last thread,” Dogger said, and I knew, almost instinctively, what he meant. I handed him the scalpel.

  With one long and decisive incision, Dogger had laid open the rat from snout to scuppers.

  “How do you know what to look for?” I asked.

  “It’s a matter of experience,” he replied, and I knew better than to ask any more questions. Dogger, as I have said before, has been through hell.

  “Those objects that look like what our American friends call cocktail sausages,” he said, pointing, “are the small intestine, and beneath them, the large. This little sac is the caecum, which joins the two. We should expect to find what we’re seeking in the cocktail sausages.”

  Dogger was making light of a grim job, I knew, to protect my sensitivities, but he needn’t have bothered. I don’t know if you’ve ever dissected a rat, but to me, there was only one word for it: exhilarating.

  There, before my very eyes, were all the wonders of the animal kingdom, laid out in a glistening panorama, like some rich and detailed altarpiece from the Middle Ages: the lungs, the liver, and the ileum, whose function, Dogger told me, is to absorb certain nutrients, such as vitamin B, and, of course, the saucy little sausages of the small intestine which, at a sudden stroke, now fell open, revealing a dark, damp mass of barely digested matter.

  In our ghastly masks with their enormous eye sockets and their dangling rubber breathing hoses, we must have looked like a couple of aliens from a flying saucer dissecting a small earth creature in the name of some ghoulish intergalactic expedition.

  “Dragendorff’s solution,” I said, and Dogger nodded agreement.

  Because I had so recently made it before, it was the work of only a few minutes to make ready a fresh supply: the bismuth subnitrate, the glacial acetic acid, the potassium iodide, all prepared to perfection with precisely the proper amounts of water.

  “Will you do the honors?” I asked, handing Dogger the A solution and the B solution.

  Gravely, Dogger took the glass containers, and with deft hands made ready a flame-dried residue of the rat’s last meal.

  We both of us watched, rapt, as the Dragendorff’s solution went pink with the presence of physostigmine.

  “It died in the bag!” I said, excited beyond all reason.

  “So it would seem,” Dogger said, reaching for a pair of tweezers.

  He plucked from a crease in the bottom of the bag a hard, dark kernel. I reached for the magnifier.

  Dogger took the glass and peered through it. “A Calabar bean,” he said. “Beyond question.”

  Our eyes met, staring at each other through the goggled glasses of the gas masks.

  There was so much to say, and yet so little.

  “Shall we incinerate the remains?” I asked, pointing to the small carcass. “We could do it in the garden. Undine will have forgotten about it by morning.”

  “I’m afraid not,” Dogger said. “The remains will be required by the police as evidence. We must hand it over at once.”

  My heart skipped a beat. “Inspector Hewitt will be thrilled with what we’ve found.”

  If the truth be told, I could hardly wait to see Inspector Hewitt again, if for no other reason than to be in touch—however remotely—with his wife, Antigone.

  Dogger shook his head. “On the contrary. The inspector will not be pleased. They will, of course, carry out their own tests, but it may well be argued by some future defense that we have tainted the evidence.”

  “But we didn’t know it was evidence,” I protested. “We were merely conducting an experiment on a dead rat.”

  “I think the inspector knows us better than that.” Dogger smiled grimly. “Much better than that.”

  As Dogger removed the rat’s carcass to a biologically safe container (a salvaged vacuum-sealed preserves jar), I swabbed down the instruments and work surfaces with a powerful disinfectant. One could only hope that Undine had not handled the furry corpse, but then I recalled that her earlier life had given her experience of vermin far greater than my own.

  At the sink, with rolled-up sleeves, as Dogger and I washed our hands and arms with carbolic soap, scrubbing again and again, companionably, like fellow surgeons at St. Bart’s, I realized that this was one of the happiest moments of my life to date.

  God’s in His heaven, I thought, all’s right with the world.

  But for all the tea in China, I could not have told you why.

  My thoughts were interrupted by a thunderous knocking at the door.

  “Flavia! Open up. It’s urgent.”

  “All right,” I called out. “I’m coming. Keep your shirt on.”

  I caught Dogger’s eye and he gave me an affirmative nod. All traces of our recent experiment had been safely cleared away.

  I unlocked and opened the door and Undine came hurtling into the room like a human cannonball. She stopped just short of treading on my toes.

  “What’s on your mind?” I asked, pleasantly.

  “Where’s my rat?” she demanded, head cocked, hands on hips, and one foot placed ahead of her at a menacing angle.

  “It’s gone to heaven,” I said, trying to put a lighthearted face upon what we had done to the creature. “It is, at this very moment, being awarded its little rat wings and its little rat halo.”

  Undine’s eyes widened. “Do poisoned rats go to heaven?” she demanded, and my heart misfired.

  “What do you mean, poisoned?” I asked.

  She drew herself up to her full height—which wasn’t very much—and focused her pale blue eyes upon me. Magnified by the round black frames of her spectacles, it was a most unnerving sight.

  “The rat puked in the bag,” she said. “I saw it with my own eyes. In Singapore”—as always, she pronounced it with the accent on the last syllable—“it is common knowledge that poisoned rats puke before they kick the bucket. Isn’t that right, Dogger?”

  “It is, indeed, Miss Undine,” Dogger said.

  “In Singapore,” Undine went on, “the poisoned rats are buried in deep trenches, so that the dogs and cats and owls won’t eat them, isn’t that so, Dogger?”

  “It is, indeed, Miss Undine,” Dogger said.

  “So, there!” Undine said, stepping back. “Are you going to bury mine in a deep trench?”

  “In due time, Miss Undine,” Dogger told her. “Meanwhile, we shall hand it over to the proper authorities.”

  “Good job,” Undine said. “I was going to do that anyway. Saves me the trouble.”

  “Did you enjoy your outing with Miss Stonebrook and Miss Pursemaker?” I asked, trying to distract her from a topic I didn’t want to discuss.

  “It wasn’t an outing,” Undine scoffed. “I hid myself in the car boot in the coach house. I thought you knew that.”

  “I probably did,” I said, “but I forgot.”

  “They scared me skinny,” Undine said, making her eyes go wide in a goggle-eyed stare. “I thought the bottom was going to fall out of the thing and scatter my parts all over the road. You have no idea!”