“Percival Hanley,” Max said. “Like so many others: a rainy night, a girl, a drink, a cruel laugh, a knife, a slash, a pool of blood. The old, old story.”

  I found myself gaping at the man in the yellowing photo who was so soon to become a corpse. There’s something weirdly magnetic about knowing such a thing. It forms an instant and invisible bond: a secret kind of love—and perhaps even forgiveness.

  I let out my breath slowly, already feeling the noose around my neck.

  “And then,” said Max, “the cuffs, the cell, the stony bread. The dock, the walk, and then the drop.”

  “The treasured drop,” I said. “Stop it, Max. You’re making my elbows cold.”

  And it was true. A creeping gooseflesh was already halfway to my armpits on its way to my neck. Such sudden insight could be handled only in small quantities.

  “And look here,” Max said quietly, turning a page to reveal a pleasant-looking portly gent stepping out of a rain-wet automobile and away from its shining nickel-plated radiator. His face was not smiling nor was it grim. He was just another face in the crowd. Just another pedestrian carrying a black case.

  “The arrival of the hangman,” Max said reverently. “The moment of truth…almost.”

  “Is that him?” I asked. “Major Greyleigh, I mean?”

  “Yes.”

  I hugged myself and rubbed my shoulders.

  “The rest of it carried out behind barred doors, of course,” Max went on, his voice changing almost to a chant.

  “Fortunately for us, there is one final shot. It was obtained by Freddie Leaper, an enterprising photographer from News of the World, by concealing a bulky press camera in an artificial hunchback made of wicker and strapped to his shoulders. He even went so far as to manufacture a built-up boot, which he dragged behind for sympathy in a most pathetic manner—or so it was said. I’m quoting now from his own newspaper. They covered the ensuing trial in astonishing detail and with even greater relish.

  “He pulled the wool over the eyes of the Law! they wrote. No one dared question him! Not even the governor!”

  “The photographer?” I asked. “The photographer was put on trial?”

  “For dusting the dignity of the court,” Max said. “Freddie was sentenced to nine months, I believe.”

  Max turned the page to reveal a large photo of black iron bars and bolts, and behind them a small and forbidding metal door.

  Killer’s last walk, the caption read in bold black letters.

  “The bourne from which no traveler returns,” Max intoned, “but in a wicker basket.”

  “Wicker seems to play an important role in the Dance of Death,” I said, proud of having joined the game.

  “A keen observation!” Max said. He was about to clap me on the back when he stopped.

  “Is that it?” I asked. “The final photo? I don’t see anything much.”

  “That blurry bundle of rags on the left,” he said, “is the elbow of the condemned, Percival Hanley. His final public appearance.”

  “And the hangman?”

  “A quick look at his handiwork for the record, then hustled out a back passageway in a news-seller’s getup. Bundle of newspapers in his arms. Hard to spot. Gone before his subject’s eyelids have stopped flickering. Another fine job. Money in the bank and a nice fishing trip in the offing. British justice.”

  “Wait a minute, Max,” I said. “I’m British to the bone, but this stuff gives me the jimjams.”

  “It’s meant to.” Max grinned. “That’s the way it works.”

  “Is it the same in every prison?”

  “Pretty well,” Max said. “Governments, and especially the judicial system, cling to cut-and-dried. The illusion of strict decency, you know.”

  “And what do you think, Max? Do you think it’s decent?”

  “Dear girl,” he said. “Would I have given up so many hours of my short life”—he laughed extravagantly as he reached out to stroke the spine of a purple scrapbook—“to labor so with scissors and paste pot, if I didn’t?”

  He left a moist silence hanging in the air.

  “Yes, well, then…” he said at last. “Do you want to see more?”

  I gulped and admitted that I did.

  And for the next couple of hours, I sat in silence as Max turned the pages of the scrapbooks, commenting briefly on a few and leaving the others for me to read by myself. Talk was unnecessary. Photos flew by in a numbing procession.

  “That’s Annie Embers,” he said, pointing. “Poisoned her three children and died of heart failure on her way to the chamber. Cheated the law. Law not pleased. Steps taken. Behind closed doors, of course.”

  So, this was the world in which Major Greyleigh carried out his deadly duties. I could imagine him speaking softly to the condemned, gently holding the elbow of Annie Embers to make sure she didn’t trip and injure herself.

  Max turned another page, and here were photos of an actual noose, with printed arrows pointing to the splice and eyelet, and a typed table of the required fatal drop lengths based upon the prisoner’s weight.

  And then there was the trolley, a stout businesslike cart to receive the body of the condemned once it was removed from the grip of the noose. It looked like the carts you see in Covent Garden for apples or potatoes.

  “The Tram to Morgue Street,” Max said in a quiet voice. I noticed that he was watching me closely. He had stopped turning the pages.

  “Yes,” I said. I was not going to play at this private game of his, whatever it was.

  “Look, Max,” I said, “I have to go.”

  He nodded sadly—or did I imagine the sadness?

  He walked me to the front door and held it open for me ceremoniously.

  I stepped outside, then turned back to face him. “I expect you’ll be adding Major Greyleigh to your cuttings,” I said.

  “Yes—I expect I will,” Max said after a long pause. “Listen, Flavia—” he added suddenly.

  I realized I had been standing there nibbling at a hangnail.

  “Yes?”

  “Look after yourself,” he said as he closed the door, as if barricading himself against some evil lurking in the forecourt.

  How ridiculous, I thought as I seized Gladys by the handlebars and pushed off homeward. Who else was there to look after me? I was an orphan with two remote and glacial sisters, and an aunt who seemed to live on another planet. Aunt Felicity was an odd old bird who flew aeroplanes and hinted at a vast correspondence with some obscure and secret masters.

  “For all we know, she might be a theosophist,” Daffy had once said. But whatever she was, Aunt Felicity ruled whatever roost she happened to find herself in.

  I could speak of none of this, of course, even if my tongue were burning. There are secret obligations thrust upon us all, but none more than those we are forced to grow into.

  They are like awakening from a dream in quicksand. Who could possibly throw you a rope?

  The answer came in a flash. Dogger!

  Dogger, of course, my shield and protector.

  “Gladys,” I said, when I got to the gate, “make haste, and don’t spare the old gutta-percha.” Gladys knew what I meant.

  · Six ·

  If there is one place on earth where I am truly at home, besides my laboratory, it is sitting on an upturned bucket in the greenhouse at Buckshaw. It is here that Dogger and I solve the problems of the universe. It is a place of safety where we can speak freely, and with no danger of being overheard.

  Facing each other, we have a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree view of the approaches; no one can catch us unawares. No one can eavesdrop on our deliberations.

  “Did you have a productive outing, Miss Flavia?” he asked.

  “I did,” I said. I needed to warm up to this conversation slowly: to collect my thoughts. “I went to Max’s house. Did you guess where I was?”

  “Guesses are for amateurs, Miss Flavia,” Dogger said with a slight smile.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I take it back.”

  “No need to do that. Friendship, I believe, transcends the odd banana peel.”

  I felt warm all over. “Go ahead, tell me how you knew,” I said, giving him an especially generous smile.

  “You have that slightly electric look about you as if you have been in conversation with Mr. Brock. It’s quite unmistakable.”

  “Really? It’s that obvious?”

  “To me it is,” Dogger said. “Besides, he is the only person I’m aware of with a library on judicial hangings. I should have been disappointed in you if you hadn’t paid him a visit.”

  “You flatter me, Dogger.”

  “No, I don’t, Miss Flavia. I merely state the obvious.”

  “Tea?” I asked. We kept an old enamel teapot on an electric hotplate for those days—especially rainy ones—when we felt like a sip and a chin-wag.

  “The making of a pot of tea is a blessing,” Father once told me in a rare moment of revealing his thoughts. “A blessing upon both the one who prepares it and those who drink it. A small sacrament, to be sure, but it must never be done frivolously or unthinkingly.”

  Father and Dogger had both partaken in solemn tea ceremonies while in captivity during the war, and although they never spoke of it, you could tell by the way they handled their cups and saucers that it was a kind of communion: a matter of life and death combined.

  “It’s like lending a book, isn’t it, Father?” Daffy had asked, breaking the spell.

  “Precisely, Daphne,” Father had told her, and I saw her begin to glow with a new, raw pride.

  Oh, how I missed him. It was a kind of ache that cannot be put into words.

  “I feel as if we’re going round in circles,” I said to Dogger. “We haven’t even seen the victim. We haven’t access to the evidence except a quarter teaspoon of splatter and some dolls. We’re working at a great disadvantage.”

  “Do you think so?” Dogger asked. “The days of village crimes being solved by dotty old ladies on tricycles are almost over, save for the occasional Agatha Christie at Christmas. The man in a white lab coat with a microscope is the new Sir Lancelot. Science has overthrown both native wit and the tingle of spinster intuition, so that you are, Miss de Luce, as the Americans say, ‘sitting in the catbird seat.’ ”

  “Do you really think so, Dogger? If that’s true, drawbacks have become doorways. But perhaps I was reasoning ahead of the facts. Didn’t Sherlock Holmes warn against that?”

  “ ‘It is a capital mistake to theorize in advance of the facts,’ ” Dogger quoted. “ ‘The Adventure of the Second Stain.’ ”

  “Do you read Sherlock Holmes, Dogger?”

  “Of course,” he said. “Doesn’t everyone?”

  The tea had done its work and we were now in that warm, companionable state that others seek at church: bliss and brains—an unbeatable combination.

  In the church, the graveyard provides the background aroma of earth. I have often thought that all great detectives ought to have their office in a churchyard since the smell of the decaying dead is so much more stimulating than that of cigarettes and coffee.

  In the greenhouse, of course, we have the potting tables to provide that stimulus. No wonder God created us in a garden! I’d bet a shilling that it was actually in a greenhouse but was crossed out by our Bible’s early editors as too posh.

  “We’ll not be able to manage a look at the remains of Major Greyleigh,” Dogger said, pursuing his own line of thoughts. “Nor will we have access to the pathologist’s report. The major will be put on ice and parked there until it pleases Her Majesty. I suggest that your best line of pursuit lies much closer to home.”

  “Mrs. Mullet!” I’m afraid I shouted.

  “Just so,” said Dogger.

  * * *

  —

  “Come along, Mrs. M,” I said heartily, rushing into the kitchen at speed to create an impression of determination. “I hereby free you from your bonds. It’s Girls’ Day Out. The monstrous regiment of women is about to march!”

  “I’ve work to do,” she said, pushing a pail of water across the floor with a mop. “Mind your feet.”

  I could see that she was determined, so I did the only thing I could think of: I got down on my knees and began wringing my hands.

  “Oh beautiful maiden,” I said in what I thought was a princely voice, “oh charming girl, oh lovely one, oh marvel of unequaled beauty, come with me to the church, where we shall be wed, and raise a flock of children with green hair and amber eyes.”

  “Get away with you,” she said. “You’re in the way of my mop. Church indeed,” she sniffed.

  “Well, that part’s true,” I said. “The Cluck and Grumble is today. I was hoping to do a spot of the old cloak-and-dagger. You know—pump the ladies of the parish about Major Greyleigh. I could use your skills.”

  I saw her eyes begin to light—and then to fade.

  “You want to pump me, you mean.”

  She said this with a slight smile to show that she wasn’t being impertinent, and that there were no hard feelings.

  The vicar was the only male allowed at the Cluck and Grumble, and then only for ten minutes, during which he sipped his tea from a Spode cup adorned with angels and strawberries, before making his excuses and escaping. Once he was gone, the ladies got down to it with a vengeance, and there were no holds barred. Rich picking grounds for a little pitcher with big ears and acute hearing such as mine.

  “No…no…I promise, Mrs. M, no questions. Cross my heart and hope to die.”

  I faked a few magical gestures and kissed both my thumbs.

  “Well, all right,” she said. “But no monkeyshines, mind.”

  * * *

  —

  The sunshine had returned as we walked toward the village, although to the east, rain still slanted down over the hills in that way once described as “like pencil lead.”

  “I’m worried about our young Undine,” Mrs. Mullet said out of nowhere.

  “In what way, Mrs. M?” I asked.

  “She’s ’angin’ about with a bad lot. She needs to be taken in ’and.”

  Mrs. Mullet was never one to beat about the bush.

  “By whom?” I said, and the moment the words slipped my lips I regretted them.

  “By you, for one,” she said. “She needs more of a big sister, like.”

  “Well, she has Daffy,” I said, not very convincingly.

  “Miss Daphne’s goin’ up to Oxford. She already ’as ’er papers filled out. The vicar’s putting in a word for ’er.”

  “What!”

  “It’s true,” Mrs. Mullet said. “She’s goin’ to read English and teach somewhere swanky, she says.”

  I couldn’t believe my ears. Why hadn’t I been informed? Why couldn’t my own sister have told me first?

  “Well, she might not go, after all,” Mrs. Mullet went on. “ ‘I ’ave three strikes against me,’ she told me. ‘My religion, my wantin’ formal eddication, and bein’ the sister of Flavia de Luce.’ I’m sure she was jokin’, but that’s what she said, dear.”

  Daffy? Joking? When senses of humor were being handed out, my sister had been standing at the tail end of the queue with her snout stuck in a copy of Paradise Lost.

  I was about to spit in the dirt when I realized that the last item—the one about being my sister—was a compliment. The fact that Daffy acknowledged living in my shadow should have given me an inner glow, and it almost did.

  Mrs. Mullet had slowly swiveled her face toward me, not saying anything, like a gigantic toad.

  “Well, you know what I mean,” I conceded. “Daffy and I are both still here. We share the same blood.”

  “Blood don’t count. You ’ave to care.”

  Her words hurt because they were practically true. As I have said, I loved Undine, but not in any useful way. My love was remote and nearly mythical: like the king’s daughter in a fairy tale.

  Mrs. Mullet went on. “She needs someone to teach ’er to clean ’er teeth, to wash ’er ’ands and ’air, like. She needs someone to get ’er into the Girl Guides: somebody who can teach ’er to start a campfire and not to whistle in church.”

  “She seems quite fond of Carl Pendracka,” I said.

  “Pfffssshhh! ’E’s an American,” she scoffed.

  “Nothing wrong with that. The Americans are on our side, especially the ones at Leathcote. They’re more like neighbors.”

  “But he’s also a man,” she said, and there was no arguing with that. “I’ve tried to do my bit, God knows. I’ve took ’er to the cinema in Hinley. Thought she’d enjoy some of them Gene Artery and Roy Rochester pictures. Teach ’er to know good from bad. You can tell ’oo’s good and ’oo’s bad in the pictures by the color of their ’ats and ’orses. The good ’uns get the white and the bad ’uns get the black.”

  “I’ll never forget that, Mrs. M. And she came home whistling ‘My Adobe Hacienda’ through her teeth. It went on for weeks. Everywhere. Day and night. Maddening.”

  “That’s what I was talkin’ about,” she said.

  “I’ll have a chat with Carl,” I promised. “I’ll remind him that Undine’s a very impressionable child. I’ll ask him to take care what he puts into her head.”

  We strolled in silence for a minute. A pair of robins hopped up and down in a hedgerow as if they were playing a rowdy game of Snakes and Ladders. If they could have such courage, why shouldn’t I?

  “Mrs. M,” I said, “why do I have the feeling that you’re keeping something from me?”

  Did I see her blanch?

  She stopped walking; lifted a foot and pretended to examine an imaginary stone stuck in the sole of her shoe.