As Chimney Sweepers Come to Dust (Flavia de Luce #7)(53)

Fabian: Nordic. Remote. Mysterious. Sells cigarettes.

Gremly: Jumbo’s handmaiden. Tells me to trust no one. Goes to great lengths to appear cretinous but has, perhaps, the highest IQ in the entire school. (Present company excepted, of course: Mine is somewhere north of 137, so I ought to know)

Druce: School bully. Reads lips.

Pinkham: Ratted on Collingwood to Miss Fawlthorne for keeping a notebook on the missing girls. She believes Miss F. to be responsible. Must question her.

Scarlett, Amelia: Claims she saw Brazenose major coming out of the laundry LAST NIGHT (!) And yet Brazenose maj. has been dead or missing since the night of the Beaux Arts Ball of two years ago June (see above).

Trout: Druce’s toady. Small, blond, and nervous. Spilled the Ouija board. Reason? Must question her.





FACULTY AND STAFF


Fawlthorne, Miss: Headmistress. Mentor and tormentor. I hardly know what to make of her.

Bannerman, Mildred: Chemistry mistress. Acquitted murderess. Wizard chemist and excellent teacher. Assists police from time to time.

Dupont, Miss: French mistress. La-di-da.

Fitzgibbon: Matron. Former school nurse. Has access to drugs.

“K”: the missing key holder. Still need to find out who he—or she—is.

Marge & Sal: Laundresses.

Moate, Miss: Science mistress. Medusa in a wheelchair, and like that Gorgon, all head and no body.

Puddicombe, Miss: Games mistress.

Rainsmith, Ryerson: Chairman of the board of guardians and despicable milquetoast, at least when it comes to:

Rainsmith, Dorsey: His wife. Enough said. Reads lurid detective stories, though.

So there it was: my cast of characters—my dramatis personae—like the heroes, the villains, and the bit players with their exits and their entrances, all listed neatly on the first page of a play by Shakespeare.

Was there a killer among them?

Of course my list did not include Inspector Gravenhurst or his assistant, Sergeant LaBelle. It was probably safe enough to discount these two as suspects, but I added them for the sake of completeness. As Uncle Tarquin de Luce once wrote in the margin of one of his many notebooks of chemical experiments: Consider also the container.

Wise words indeed, and ones I intended never to lose sight of.

Something was nagging at me as I read and reread the list: something just below the surface; something that remained maddeningly invisible, like the crystal ball I had once found hidden in plain sight in a running stream.

It was time to make use of a technique I had invented, which I called “word fishing.” I would focus on one key word at a time, letting my mind fly wherever it might in search of associations. Occult … chimney … Ouija board … cigarettes …

The bell did not clang, the whistle did not blow, the penny did not drop until I got to Scarlett, Amelia … laundry. Scarlett claimed to have seen Clarissa Brazenose—or her ghost—coming out of the laundry just last night.

Although my mental fingers were tickling the belly of the thought in the same way that the late Brookie Harewood had once tickled the trout he poached on our estate, I could not quite grasp it.

Scarlett, Amelia … laundry.

Part of the technique of word fishing was to shift the attention somewhere else when the quarry was elusive: to think of something entirely different and then, when the unsuspecting thought nibbled again, to seize it by the throat.

And so I forced myself to think of Johann Schobert, the German composer who, with his wife, child, maidservant, and four casual acquaintances, died in agony after eating certain mushrooms which he had insisted were perfectly edible. Schobert had written the failed comic opera Le Garde-Chasse et le Braconnier (The Gamekeeper and the Poacher), from which Aunt Felicity had insisted Feely play selections on the night of my departure.

Perhaps only Aunt Felicity and I, in all the wide, wide world, knew the reason why.

And it worked!

Laundry.

The word poked its head out of its lair and I seized it. Laundry.

“Yaroo!” I wanted to shout.

Laundry. It wasn’t that Scarlett had seen Brazenose major coming out of the laundry. No, that wasn’t it at all. It was that Scarlett had been awarded a prize for washing and ironing: a little silver-plated mangle.

Had Clarissa Brazenose also been presented with a silver award: a small, tarnished little creature with wings that was, at this very moment, burning a hole in my pocket?

I reached in and fished it out, shivering a little at the very thought of where it had been and what it had been through.

I examined it again through my magnifying glass, this time more carefully.

As I had noticed the first time, it seemed to have wings and a face, but the thing was so tarnished that it was difficult to make out the details. Gruesomely suggestive, though, of a fallen angel that had struck the earth at the blazing speed of an aviator whose parachute had failed to open.

At the top of the head was a tiny perforation, as if for a string or a ring to pass through.

It had been worn round the neck! A medallion. A religious charm. An angel. No, an archangel! Saint Michael the Archangel.

The chain of deductions came as quickly as that.

Why hadn’t I noticed it sooner? The folded apex of the wings extended well above the top of the head. Only an archangel had wings of such dimensions. I had seen them often enough in the moldering volumes of art with which Buckshaw was littered—a momentary pang here—and in the great stained-glass window at St. Tancred’s given in the Middle Ages by the de Lacey family.