Precisely seven minutes later, Gladys and I were barreling toward the village as if all the furies of Hell were snapping at our heels—and perhaps they were. The rain had let up and the sky was beginning to brighten.

  · Three ·

  Just past the churchyard, Major Greyleigh’s cottage was the only property on the narrow lane. Moonflower Cottage looked nothing like its name. Rather than romantic, it was a somewhat sad affair, hunched and penitent, in the deep shade of some trees at the end of Brambling Lane: a rutted track that petered out at the northeast corner of St. Tancred’s churchyard. The house itself had seen many rains and had accumulated an indefinable air of sogginess. Perhaps the summer home of King Neptune, I thought.

  There were as yet no police warnings in place, and no signs of anyone alive standing guard. Well, I knew where Inspector Hewitt was, didn’t I? He was at Buckshaw, giving Old Hob to Constable Bunce, and he hadn’t given me explicit instructions not to leave. It was a gift from above, and I offered up to Old Mother Providence a silent prayer of “Cheerio!”

  Since the front door was visible from the road, I strolled casually round the back of the house and tried the windows. But alas, they were all latched, as was the garden door.

  My skills as a cat burglar were considerable, as anyone with an older sister will understand. With two older sisters, I was near legendary.

  I shinnied up a convenient pear tree and let myself in at a surprisingly beautiful Georgian casement window, which stood out, even from the ground, like a Cinderella of windows amid a wall of ugly stepsisters, its panes, tinted green with age, glowing as if with pride in their own beauty.

  For a moment, I paused in my tracks to listen. I could hear nothing but birdsong from outside. Most notable about the place was its smell of sadness: an inextinguishable whiff of distant and not-so-happy times.

  It’s strange, isn’t it, how sadness is first detected by the nose? One would expect the eyes to lead the way, but it’s invariably the nose that triggers the earliest alarm. Sadness is much like smoke, I’ve decided: an odor raised at the very doorstep of the brain.

  I made a mental note to investigate this as soon as I had an opportunity, even to write a trifling monograph on the subject, perhaps. Goodness knows I’d had enough sadness in my life to provide material for a fat volume—or several fat volumes if I really wanted to wallow.

  I wiped my nose on my sleeve and looked around the room.

  How I wished Dogger were here. Our two sets of eyes combined—to say nothing of our noses—

  I had not asked Dogger to come with me to Moonflower Cottage because in housebreaking, two’s a crowd. And besides, I did not want to lead him into iniquity. Not that barging into a stranger’s house was strictly an iniquity, but you know what I mean. And, after all, since he was older, Dogger would be expected to know right from wrong much more than I would ever be.

  Despite the temptation to go rooting about in a dead man’s goods and chattels, I needed to have a good squint at the scene of the crime before it—or I—was disturbed. First things first. Dogger would be proud of me.

  So down to the kitchen I crept, down a dark and narrow staircase that had been designed to keep the household staff out of sight of their betters: a wood-paneled cloak of invisibility right out of The Arabian Nights.

  The kitchen, by contrast, was as surprisingly bright as a painting by Vermeer. Despite the recent rain, tall many-paned windows let tentative shafts of new sunshine fall onto the dark slate of the floor, which was illuminated in a chessboard of light.

  In the very center of the room was a small but sturdy square table with a single chair. This, obviously, was where Major Greyleigh had met his maker.

  Mushroom poisoning is a messy business at best: not something that Elizabeth Barrett Browning, for instance, would ever choose to write a poem about. A mushroom going daintily in on a fork is a very different thing than a load of fungus coming out in a spectacular gush.

  And yet there wasn’t a trace of it.

  You could never have guessed what had happened here. Someone had obviously taken a great deal of trouble to clean up the residue, and I wondered why.

  How had the police allowed this to happen? Or had they mopped it up themselves? Had one of their members bungled? The unfortunate Constable Bunce, perhaps? I hadn’t even met him yet, but my heart had gone out to him on wings of gossamer.

  I dropped to my knees and crawled under the table, craning my neck to inspect the underside of the tabletop. If there is one element of criminal poisoning that is frequently overlooked, it is the examination of backsplash on the underside of furniture. Taylor’s Medical Jurisprudence doesn’t mention it; nor, for that matter, does Agatha Christie.

  It’s always darker under a table than it is topside, and this one was no exception. I hadn’t thought to bring a torch, but that’s not an obstacle. A kitchen, after all, is a toolroom, whose drawers and cupboards are—or ought to be—full of implements.

  I scrambled to my feet. The answer was in the third drawer: a set of electroplated silver spoons. I chose the brightest and polished it on my skirt, then back under the table I went. Aiming the bowl of the spoon at the nearest checkerboard of sunlight on the tile floor, I angled the reflected beam of my improvised spotlight until it produced a bobbling little ray of light on the underside of the tabletop.

  I ran a fingertip along the rough bottom of the boards. They were faintly damp: not the dry-as-dust surface you’d expect to find in an old country kitchen. I held my finger to my nose. The smell of bleach was obvious. Someone had done a job of cleaning. And quite recently, too.

  I wiggled my way out from under the table and overturned the chair.

  Aha!

  I had found the elusive particles: not, like Marley’s ghost, a bit of undigested beef, but instead a fine spatter of undigested mushrooms. I scraped at them with my fingernail.

  There were times when I was grateful that I’d given up biting my nails, and this was a perfect example. The residue was semisolid, and not yet hardened to be beyond analysis. As I picked at it, a tiny flash of light caught my eye: almost microscopic, but certainly not imaginary. It was like the flash of a distant lighthouse, caught by the watch of a ship at sea.

  A quick return to the spoons drawer and back with a mate of the soup spoon already in my hand. This would be tricky: using the first spoon to focus the sunlight on the scrapings. I turned over the second spoon and used its backside as a convex mirror to reflect the image.

  I felt like the Girl with the Ten Thumbs in the fairy tale, but by gosh and garters, it worked!

  As I had suspected, the pinprick of light was a crystal: minute, but unmistakable. I could hardly wait to get it home and under the lens of my powerful Leitz microscope.

  To be a good chemist, you must have keen eyesight and a strong stomach, and I have both. I ought to mention, if I haven’t already, that although I have a pair of black-framed NHS reading glasses, I do not really need them. They were foisted upon Father by an unscrupulous optician in a dark little court just off Covent Garden, and I wore them only when I needed to gain sympathy and time was short.

  I thought just for a moment of stealing one of these silver spoons and having it engraved: Necessity is the mother of invention. It would make a ripping souvenir of this most unusual case.

  But how to get the late contents of the dead man’s stomach back to Buckshaw? A soft carrier was required to prevent damage: something to protect it from the air and avoid further dehydration.

  The inspiration came to me in an instant, as if delivered direct from Heaven by a flock of scientific angels.

  I flipped up the back of the starched white Peter Pan collar that Mrs. Mullet had insisted on my wearing, wiped the remnants of Major Greyleigh’s breakfast on the underside, and neatly folded it back down into position. No one was likely to find the lethal specimen there.

  A sudden shadow blotted the light from the room. Someone had walked past the window! Rather than dropping to the floor or flattening myself against the wall, I froze in position, like a rabbit hunted by a hawk. Any movement—even the slightest—could draw attention to your presence.

  Weren’t the police taught not to walk in front of windows? I’d have thought it would have been drummed into their heads on the first morning of Police College.

  I hardly dared move even my eyes.

  “Caught you, you devil!” rasped a hoarse voice at my ear as my elbow was roughly seized. My spine almost fell out.

  I spun round and found myself nose to nose with Undine.

  “I followed you,” she said cheerily, before I could tear her limb from limb.

  “What are you doing here?” I hissed, afraid to raise my voice.

  “Trespassing,” she said. “Same as you. Let’s get on with it.”

  Several thoughts crossed my mind—none of them nice.

  “You go stand watch at the front door. Find a window. Don’t let anyone see you. Call me if somebody comes.”

  “Yes, O Mighty One! Thank you, O Mighty One!” Undine said, dropping to her knees and clasping her hands.

  I walked out of the room, leaving her to stew in her own stupidity.

  I made my way through a drab passage to the front of the house. Taking my own advice, I peered out through the curtains of what I took to be the drawing room, from which there was a clear view of the gate.

  There was no one in sight.

  I turned slowly, taking in my surroundings.

  Compared with the bright kitchen, this dark little drawing room was a dungeon. A sickly-colored paper covered the walls: the color of the young man’s skin described with such precision by Gilbert and Sullivan:

  A pallid and thin young man,

  A haggard and lank young man,

  A greenery-yallery, Grosvenor Gallery,

  Foot-in-the-grave young man!

  On the walls hung numerous framed paintings of horses and hounds, all of them frozen in a kind of glum and oily twilight. A small, dark, shabby desk lurked in the shadows.

  The room was dominated by an outsized leather chesterfield of a yellowish-gray color, which reminded me of certain species of the more interesting mushrooms. It had come, no doubt, from one of the artistic gentlemen’s clubs in Pall Mall and was meant more for a committee room than for a private home. I wondered how such an enormous piece of furniture had found its way to Bishop’s Lacey. It was much more grand than anything at Buckshaw.

  I reached out and touched the thing. It was softer and more pliable than ever you could have imagined—like the cheek of the teenage Virgin Mary. Leather like this could not be faked. It could only be produced over time through being polished by a billion bums, if you’ll forgive the expression.

  After a quick examination of the red Turkey carpet (you can learn much more about a room’s inhabitants by examining both sides of the carpet and the floor beneath it than you can by examining, say, the ceiling), I turned my attention to the dark desk in the corner. Standard Army & Navy Stores issue: plain, durable, and cheap. No hidden compartments and no secret documents in a cache on the underside. Just a desk.

  I opened the drawers. They were empty.

  How odd, I thought. Drawers were made to hold things. An empty drawer meant either that nothing had yet been put in it, or that things had been taken out of it.

  Perhaps the desk had just recently been acquired. Perhaps the major was tired of dealing with his correspondence at the kitchen table. If so, where did he keep his papers?

  With a daily cook coming in (dear, innocent Mrs. Mullet), he probably kept them in his bedroom. I thought I’d better have a look up there before I did anything else.

  But before I could take a step, there was a “Hssst!” behind me. I spun round.

  Undine again.

  “I searched the loo,” she said. “It seemed too clean. And it reeked of Slippo.”

  Good old Slippo—the bleach found in all the best-regulated bathrooms.

  “Hmmm,” I said, but I could almost have hugged her.

  “Look!” she whispered, pointing over my shoulder.

  Not daring to make any sudden movement, I craned my neck slowly around and saw a car sliding to a silent halt at the gate. I muttered a curse that must have made my ears go slightly red.

  Confound that man! He kept turning up like chewing gum on the sole of a Sunday shoe.

  I remembered something the vicar had once told me: “Coincidence is bosh.”

  My life was becoming a chessboard. Perhaps the squares of sunlight on the kitchen floor had been a sign: Undine had followed me to the churchyard. Inspector Hewitt had made his move at Buckshaw. I retaliated by coming to Moonflower Cottage. Undine had followed me here. And now Inspector Hewitt again. I felt as if I had fallen through Alice’s looking glass, and that it would only be moments before the Red Queen materialized in front of me saying, “Hullo, Flavia. Got any bread and butter on you?”

  But it wasn’t the Red Queen standing almost on my toes: It was Undine.

  “Quick!” she said, tugging at my elbow. “We have to hide!”

  But where? We were just feet from the front door, through which the inspector might come at any instant. Doors and windows were out of the question. There were only two pieces of furniture in the room, the desk and the chesterfield.

  The desk was too small to hide us both.

  “Follow me!” Undine said. She dived for the couch and vanished as effectively as if a conjuror had made a sweep of his cape and waved his wand.

  “Where are you?” I asked, trying not to panic.

  “Inside,” she said, her voice muffled by leather and horsehair. “Climb into the crack at the back of the seat.”

  I stuck my hand into the joint behind the seat cushions. To my amazement, there was a surprising amount of space in the guts of the thing.

  “That’s my ankle.” Undine giggled. “Come on, before we get caught.”

  I lay down and forced a leg into the interior of the couch.

  “They had one of these at the Officers’ Club at Mandalay,” Undine whispered. “I used to hide inside it when I’d pinched their loose change.”

  “Shhh!” I said. “Someone’s coming.”

  I rolled as far back as I could into the hidden space, forcing my way with my elbows and my backside. It was, as Daffy would have said, surprisingly commodious.

  And it was dark.

  As footsteps came closer and closer, I held my breath. I could feel Undine’s foot on my shoulder and her toes seemed to tremble.

  The footsteps came to a halt, by the sound of them, just inches away.

  “Hello?” said a voice. It wasn’t Inspector Hewitt’s. It must have been one of his constables.

  “Hello?” he said again. “Anyone here?”

  Had he sensed our presence? Or had he seen movement through the window?

  Scarcely breathing, we waited

  Ages passed. Eons. Glacial ages glided by in magnificent review.

  I was beginning to see spots in front of my eyes. Oxygen deprivation, I decided. I needed to relax and breathe deeply, like some Tibetan lama or Indian holy man.

  Slowly, silently, and with perfect control, I was drawing in a measured breath when—pfft—close to my head—as if a fairy had dropped a little posey…

  But then the stink struck me like a sudden sledgehammer.

  This was no fairy. This was no delicate daisy.

  It was Undine! That rotten, putrid villain, Undine.

  She had let off a silent broadside: one that was going to kill all the cattle within a radius of a mile and cause the greenwoods beyond first to sicken and then to die.

  I suppressed a shuddering choke, and cursed Carl Pendracka for teaching her his malodorous tricks.

  “Who’s there?” the Unknown Constable demanded.

  “I know you’re here somewhere,” he said.

  Full marks, Constable, I couldn’t help thinking. You’re destined for bigger things.

  And then I got the giggles. They started in my throat, then spread to my chin and my chest, and from there to my stomach. I simply couldn’t suppress them.

  “All right, then. Out you come. Hop it.”

  A hand reached into the space, grazed my nose, and seized Undine’s ankle.

  “Out you come,” the constable said again.

  There was nothing for it but to obey. I fought my way out of the upholstery, still chuckling, but unable to stop.

  “Sorry about that,” Undine said apologetically. “That was the Silent Assassin. It got away on me. It must have been my increased cabbage consumption.”

  Which set me off again. I couldn’t help it.

  What a scene it must have been: two girls convulsed in waves of helpless giggles and a large police constable, whose enormous, pale, looming, and unfamiliar face seemed to provide the only light in the shadows of the room. He was in no mood for levity.

  “Guv’nor wants to have a word,” he said in a flat tone. “In the car. Outside.”

  “I don’t believe we’ve met,” I said, sticking out a firm professional hand. “I’m Flavia de Luce.”

  “I know well enough who you are,” he said, jabbing his thumb toward the window and the Vauxhall. “Guv’nor wants to see you. In the car. Outside.”

  I withdrew my offered hand haughtily and wiped it on my skirt, and without another word, turned and walked out the front door.

  I’d be leaving Undine behind, of course, but since she had already made the acquaintance of one of Inspector Hewitt’s constables at Buckshaw, she might well be able to extract further wagonloads of information. She would be quite safe with a policeman. In fact, if anything, it was he who was in danger.