Outside, I shot a glance back over my shoulder and saw that the constable was now standing in the open doorway, watching me walk away. And the look on his face was not that of a policeman. It was something else entirely: the look of a rival skunked. Resentment regurgitated.

  Was the constable going to parlay his sniffing us out into a promotion? Was he using Undine and me to satisfy the fondest wish of his agèd and doting mother? Would he regale her, off duty, with the story of the smelly chesterfield? Would she laugh? Would her old heart burst with pride in her clever son?

  But there was no time for that: The inspector was waiting.

  I strolled casually toward the Vauxhall. Inspector Hewitt sat inside, looking straight ahead, unmoving. It was a pose, and I knew it. I opened the door on the driver’s side and got in beside him.

  There was a long silence. One of my specialties.

  “Flavia, Flavia, Flavia,” the inspector said at last.

  I smiled brightly, as if noticing him for the first time.

  There had been a day when Inspector Hewitt and I had been better friends. In fact at one time, his wife, Antigone, whom I adored, had invited me to tea. But when they had a baby, the fires of friendship had turned to ashes, and I didn’t quite know why. Was it the baby—or was it something I had said or done?

  “Yes, Inspector?” I said eagerly, as if panting for a new assignment.

  There! I’d done it. The ball was in his court again.

  “Flavia, Flavia, Flavia,” he said again.

  “Yes, Inspector?”

  I could keep this up as long as he could, and I think he knew it.

  “This interference has to stop,” he said. “I’ve told you before, nicely, to keep your nose out of official business. Now I’m telling you again, and not so nicely.”

  Now the cow was out of the barn, or the horse out of the stable, whatever you want to call it. The gloves were off.

  “Is that a threat, Inspector?”

  “It’s a warning,” Inspector Hewitt said. “A caution. The next step is a steep one. A very steep one.”

  “Thank you for the suggestion, Inspector,” I said. “I shall take it under advisement.”

  I opened the door of the car and stepped out without looking back, closing it behind me with maddening delicacy, slowness, and greatly exaggerated care. And then with all the nonchalance I could muster, I retrieved Gladys from where I had parked her behind a tree, gave her a light dusting-off with my skirt, raised my chin, and pedaled off in a radiant cloud of righteousness.

  I could almost hear the crackling of the flames of frustration behind me.

  “Don’t faff with Flavia!” I should have shouted back.

  But I didn’t need to, did I?

  * * *

  —

  As I pedaled along heading home, I realized how anxious I was to get there. My chemical laboratory was my kingdom, and away from it, I was a mere husk, like something shed by some disgusting insect, or the paper wrapping on a sweet. Although the rationing of sweets had only just ended at the beginning of this coronation year, I found that I had completely lost my taste for them. Daffy said it was true what they said about forbidden fruit, and that I would need to train myself to crave something else. She suggested crooked rum cigars from Cuba, or Gordon’s Gin, but I think she was joking.

  But as I was saying, I had become aware that there was an “inner me” and an “outer me,” and at the moment I didn’t much care for the outer one. I was only truly myself when I was alone among the glass flasks and retorts in that dear chemical lab in the otherwise abandoned east wing of Buckshaw.

  When my great-uncle Tarquin—or “Tar,” as he was called—died, twenty-five years ago, he had left behind a laboratory that caused the chemists of Oxford and Cambridge to weep with envy.

  He had also left behind a treasure trove of his notebooks and journals, which, despite being placed under strict embargo by some obscure and shadowy government department, had remained at Buckshaw, where I had been devouring them for years.

  Uncle Tar had been involved in certain researches that seized the mind, turned it upside down and shook it, then wrung it out and hung it up to dry. I hardly dared even think of some of these for fear of being whisked away by night, tortured in a stone chamber, and hung from some salt-corroded yardarm at dawn.

  My family had almost always, since the dawn of time, been involved in ultrasecret operations. My own mother had been connected with a shadowy governmental coven called the Nide.

  It had been hinted to me on more than one occasion (once by Winston Churchill at my mother’s funeral) that I, too, might be marked for membership—like it or not. Aunt Felicity, my late father’s sister, was also entangled with the Nide, but to what extent, I did not really know. She had contrived to send me, for a time, to a wretched school in Canada, which I had guessed to be a front for some enormous power. When Father had died suddenly after my return home, I thought I had been tested and had failed. But now, as life unrolled, I was beginning to suspect that what I had once taken for failure was, in fact, a most peculiar sort of success.

  It was all so confusing. Which was why I was always on the lookout for signs and portents. I’m not a superstitious girl, but something big was lumbering this way down the road—I was sure of it. I could feel it in my bones.

  This topsy-turvy world, and my place in it, needed to be set straight for once and for all.

  Or maybe I was just becoming a woman.

  That thought had crossed my mind on one or two occasions, and although it chilled me silly, I’d managed to dismiss it.

  On the one hand, it was the most terrifying thing I had ever faced.

  The instant you become a woman, you become a captive. You are sucked up into that mysterious state that, like a person seen across a lawn through drifting smoke, is partly real and partly vapor. I had seen it happening to Feely and her friends, and it scared me almost to witlessness.

  On the other hand, the prospect was deeply and strangely satisfying. It was as if in a way, I had already crossed the finish line and was home at last, and yet in another way as if I were back at the beginning, waiting for the starter’s pistol.

  Becoming a woman was not part of my plan. The thought of becoming a lady was even worse.

  It was like being reincarnated, I suppose. Was there really such a thing as reincarnation? I should no longer be Flavia de Luce. What would I become? Even worse, who would I become? Would I be the wife of a provincial scrap-iron merchant, sitting at a leaded window composing poems of frail sadness, while gazing out upon a field of poppies? Or a slave, perhaps, in ancient Egypt, milling corn on a slab for the flatbread that would feed the slaves who were hauling stones for the pyramids?

  But perhaps not. The world was changing, and I was changing with it. By the time I managed to reincarnate again I might well be a scientist—a chemist, of course—calibrating the controls of some new and yet-undreamed-of device that would allow me to peer personally into the secret heart of the universe. I would be able at last to prove my theory that we all of us are but ancient light.

  But what would I be giving up?

  A girl of my age is utterly invisible. Nobody gives a fig—or anything else—for us. But once a woman, we become targets, unless we buy joke-shop teeth and stick-on warts, and steal our clothing from hedgerows. And even then—it is simply too horrible to contemplate.

  Perhaps that was part of the reason for my love of chemistry: Perhaps one day I would be able to concoct and patent an elixir of perpetual adolescence.

  Gladys’s chain squeaked happily at my ankles, and I knew that she agreed. For her, the promise of perpetual greasings; for me, I began to bellow the words of that old, old hymn: “Just where I am, oh let me be…” And Gladys’s tires hum-hummed happily along, bound for Buckshaw.

  Home at last, and because I didn’t want to be disturbed, I shinnied up the vines, climbed over the sill, and let myself into my laboratory. At the eastern rear of the building, I was unlikely to be spotted.

  First things first is my motto—at least, one of them.

  I locked the door and carefully removed my Peter Pan collar. Setting it on a glass dish, I switched on a strong light and flipped over the lacy stuff with a pair of tweezers. My stomach took a sudden step back as I realized that my sample had taken a turn for the worse.

  Better get to it!

  Mushrooms are not very substantial things at the best of times, and one that had been picked, cooked, eaten, partly digested, then shot like a cannonball through the air, bounced off the floor, stuck to the bottom of a kitchen chair, and scraped onto a lacy collar for transport was not the tastiest thing to gaze upon.

  With a razor blade, I scraped the sticky residue onto a glass slide. The stickiness was a good sign: proof that the liquids in the stuff had not entirely evaporated.

  I had already formed in my mind a plan for the analysis.

  The glint in the darkness under the table had been the clue. I reviewed my line of reasoning: that there had been some crystalline substance in Major Greyleigh’s vomitus was beyond a doubt. If Mrs. Mullet—or anyone else—had poisoned him with such fast-acting precision that he never got away from the breakfast table, it could only have been through administration of the death cap mushroom (Amanita phalloides).

  The catch was this: Amanita phalloides contains no crystalline matter.

  Therefore, the cause of Major Greyleigh’s demise was some other substance, the mushrooms being no more than mere cover.

  Which let Mrs. Mullet, at least partially, off the hook. But until I could provide a complete and unassailable chain of chemical evidence, everything must remain in doubt.

  I knew of only a few such fast-acting poisons. At the top of the list were those blitzkrieg cyanide capsules, such as the one with which Hermann Göring took his own life after the fall of Nazi Germany. They worked within minutes.

  Was there—could there be—any connection between Major Greyleigh and the trials at Nuremberg? Had the major, by any chance, been one of those executioners called in to apply the canvas caps, the cuffs, and the noose to those condemned to dangle to death for crimes against humanity?

  It was possible. I had pored again and again over the grainy photographs in the piles of newspapers and musty magazines stored under the stairs: the Suns…the Stars…the Mirrors…the Expresses.

  All of them stuffed to the gills with what Dogger called “mountains of mayhem.” No unprintable photo had gone unpublished. Vivid pen-and-ink drawings provided close-up views of a bounty of blunt weapons, wickedly sharp razors, and bloodied beds. I shivered a bit with excitement at the thought of going through them all again: all the murders, all the investigations, all the trials and all the hangings. All of them grisly but instructive.

  But I was not looking for brute power.

  There is a poison that makes cyanide look like the tortoise in the fable. It is so powerful that an amount of it equal in size to just one-eighth of a grain of sand can kill in seconds.

  So lethal is this substance that few people, even now, including chemists, know of its existence.

  I had come across the stuff in one of Uncle Tar’s secret notebooks: a small, scuffed pocket diary that looked like something ready for the rubbish bin. At the time, I had wondered why those things with the most power were so often in the most plain packages. The Holy Bible, for instance: traditionally black.

  As it happened, this notebook was bound in black also, and at the top reverse of a middle page was written the word “Saxitoxin.”

  Ha! I had thought. Saxitoxin. The most toxic of the known shellfish poisons.

  Uncle Tar’s notes made it clear that this was a top-secret matter: that the military was investigating this swift and powerful poison as a matter of greatest urgency and under a veil of the greatest secrecy. That had been more than twenty years ago. Could they still be keeping it under their collective hats?

  Even more interesting was the fact that Uncle Tar had devised a test for the presence of saxitoxin, which involved oxidizing a sample at a slightly elevated temperature in the presence of hydrogen peroxide: a substance known to every mother in the British Empire for the cleaning out of her little darlings’ ears.

  This was going to be a piece of cake: a dirty, deadly one to be sure, but a piece of cake nevertheless, or “notwithstanding” as Dickens would have put it.

  I couldn’t help rubbing my hands together in the classic expression of glee—before, of course, I put on my rubber gloves.

  The proof in the pudding, if any were needed, lay in the fact that saxitoxin, unlike the death cap mushroom, did indeed contain its death-dealing payload in crystalline form.

  And I was about to prove it.

  I positioned the prepared slide on a small glass scaffold, which I placed, with tweezers, into the center of a glass beaker, before setting it on a ring tripod, held rigidly in place by a clever rubber clamp and a heavy-duty support stand.

  I was keenly aware that I probably had enough poison at my fingertips to kill in an instant the entire membership of the Bishop’s Lacey Waterloo Memorial Lawn Bowling Club.

  Not that I would want to, of course. But still, I couldn’t be too careful.

  Beside my sample on the little stand, I dripped a few drops of hydrogen peroxide, then capped the beaker with a white ceramic disk.

  And then, ever so gently, I lit and applied a thin and gentle flame from a Bunsen burner to the bottom of the flask. Easy does it, Flavia. We only need a temperature of 100 degrees C.

  Fortunately, saxitoxin, according to Uncle Tar, has a melting point of about 420 degrees F, so I didn’t need to worry much about destroying the evidence.

  It didn’t take long, and while the glass was heating, I took a quick turn around the laboratory, lowering all the blackout blinds.

  With the room now illuminated only by the flame of the burner, I pulled up a stool and peered into the flask.

  “Flavia! Flavia!”

  A series of staccato thuds came from the door.

  “Who is it?” I said in a disinterested voice, although I knew the answer well enough.

  “Skinless Jack! I’ve come for your soul and your liver!”

  Even in the darkness of my locked lab, I found myself shivering to the very core. What was it that shook me so?

  I gripped the edge of the bench.

  “Flavia! It’s me! Let me in!”

  “Go away,” I growled.

  “It’s important! Let me in.”

  The thudding continued.

  There’s only one way to deal with a persistent pest, which is to remain perfectly silent. Silence is more effective than a thousand swear words.

  “Flavia, let me in. I’ve got a present for you.”

  I closed my eyes and banished my brain to Antarctica.

  “I found it in Moonflower Cottage.”

  I opened the door.

  “Give it here,” I said, extending my hand around the door jamb.

  “Only if you let me in,” Undine said. “I have the upper hand and you might as well admit it.”

  “A cauldron of curses,” I said, glaring at her.

  “Kiss my bewtocks,” she replied.

  “Your what?”

  “My bewtocks. The part you sit on.”

  “That’s pronounced BUT-tocks,” I said. I had to give the child credit. If she couldn’t pronounce the word, it meant she had read it somewhere. According to Daffy, there is a grace that can be attained only from reading the printed page. It is a grace that must be acknowledged, no matter what. It was once known as the benefit of clergy, by which the ability to read aloud, in Latin, the third verse of Psalm 51 could save you from the gallows. Even though the practice has been dead for centuries, it’s still alive in secret ways.

  I was glad that I was keen on chemistry, rather than creeds or canon law.

  “Well, kiss them, too, however they’re pronounced,” Undine said, squeezing herself between the door and the frame and oozing into the room.

  I turned away from her and focused on my heated beaker.

  The little stage seemed unchanged, and my heart sank a little.

  But then as I watched with disappointed eyes, the magic began to happen. The crystal matter began to glow a bright, unearthly blue.

  “Fluorescence!” I sang the word aloud. “Fluorescence! Fluorescence!”

  The poison was there! The saxitoxin was there! And I was here!

  I found myself hugging the repellent Undine.

  “That’s more like it,” she said.

  But I had proved my point. Major Greyleigh had died not by the poison of the death cap mushroom, but by saxitoxin: a substance known to only a handful of people—including me!

  Were all the facts known, I myself would be a suspect—or perhaps even the next victim.

  A wet, Draculic kiss was being planted on my cheek. I shook myself loose.

  “Have a gander at this,” Undine said, holding out what appeared to be a plain wooden box and shoving it in my face.

  “More light! she shouted. “More light for the Infidels!”

  I shut off the flame beneath the beaker and swept open the nearest blackout curtains.

  “Give it here,” I told her, setting the box on the windowsill. “Now then, where did you find this?”

  “At that cottage. In the kitchen.”

  “I searched the kitchen. I didn’t see it.”

  “That’s because you’re not the Amazing Me!” she crowed.

  This child was getting on my nerves. She reminded me of someone I had once known.

  “It was under the box of silverware.” She giggled. “Who would think to look under the silverware?

  “No one except me,” she added in a horrid cackle, wringing her hands diabolically.

  It was true. A shallow box of precisely the same dimensions as the treasured utensils above would be the safest place in the house. Who would think to look beneath the silver?