As Chimney Sweepers Come to Dust (Flavia de Luce #7)(62)

“Where’s Collingwood?” I demanded. “What have you done with her?”

“Confidentiality between doctor and patient forbids me from answering,” Ryerson Rainsmith said quietly. “Besides, I’m in charge here. This is my infirmary. It is I who should be asking the questions.”

“He’s right, you know,” said another voice behind me, and I spun round.

Dorsey Rainsmith had come up silently behind me.

I might have known.

Her dress was a sand-colored tent, its billows held in by a broad belt. Who knew what weapons were concealed beneath? There seemed room enough in it for racks of axes.

“You have no business being here,” she said. “Why aren’t you in church with the others?”

“Where’s Collingwood?” I asked again. “What have you done with her?”

“She’s had a very bad shock,” Rainsmith said. “She requires peace and quiet if she’s to make a full recovery.”

I was not going to be shaken off so easily. “Where is she? What have you done with her?”

“Dorsey—” he said, giving his wife a brisk nod.

I did not wait to be seized and clapped into a straitjacket. I did what any intelligent girl would do in the circumstances: I took to my heels.

I clattered out of the room and down the stairs with the sound of falling tiles.

“Stop her, Ryerson!” Dorsey shouted, but it was no use. I was younger, faster, and had a head start.

At the bottom, I looked up and caught a glimpse of their white faces, like twin moons, staring down at me from above.

I shot them an insolent grin like the runaway pancake in the fairy tale, swiveled on my heel, and ran straight into the chest of Inspector Gravenhurst.

I nearly knocked him over.

The inspector looked even more surprised to see me than I was to see him.

How long had he been standing there? How much had he seen and heard?

It seemed obvious—at least to me—that he had come to Miss Bodycote’s for a quiet Sunday morning snoop. After all, the doors were always left unlocked from dawn to dusk, and besides, who in their right mind would want to enter such a forbidding-looking fortress?

The question was this: Which of us was more embarrassed?

I was faced with a sudden choice and left with only an instant to make up my mind: Should I blow the whistle on the Rainsmiths for what they had done to Collingwood, or should I keep my trap shut and take my chances on gaining the upper hand?

Well, if you know Flavia de Luce as well as I do, you’ll know that it’s a mug’s question.

“Oh, Inspector,” I said, and I’m ashamed to admit that I allowed my eyelids and eyelashes to flutter almost imperceptibly. “I was hoping to see you again. Have you had any luck identifying the body in the chimney?”

Oh, Flavia! You puncturer of other people’s importance! What a saucy thing to say to the poor man. “Luck?” As if the Toronto Police were only capable of solving crimes by a toss of the dice—or by pulling lots from some plump constable’s hat.

“As a matter of fact we have, Miss de Luce,” he said. “It was front-page news in all the papers. But I don’t suppose you see them at Miss Bodycote’s, do you?”

So. Wallace Scroop must have got his story after all.

Not knowing what to say, I glanced up at the two faces that were still staring blankly down from the landing like a masked chorus waiting to make their entrance.

The inspector, following my gaze, spotted the Rainsmiths.

“Ah, Dr. Rainsmith,” he said. “Good morning. Perhaps, as the pathologist of record, you’re in a much better position than I am to answer this young lady’s question?”

Pathologist? Ryerson Rainsmith the pathologist? Besides being the academy’s appointed medical doctor and chairman of the board of guardians?

How improbably bizarre. How downright dangerous!

But it was not Ryerson Rainsmith who responded to the inspector’s words. In fact, quite the contrary: It was Dorsey Rainsmith, his wife, who began her slow descent of the stairs toward me.

“I shall be happy to, Inspector,” she said. “You may leave it to me.”





? TWENTY-ONE ?

I SUPPOSE I SHOULD have screamed, but I didn’t. Instead, as if in a trance, I watched as the inspector, with no more than a quick nod, vanished out the door.

Caught red-handed in an unauthorized Sunday invasion of the empty premises, he couldn’t get away quickly enough.

Which left me alone with the Rainsmiths.

I didn’t have many options. Since recent circumstances had resulted in my becoming a backslider in the fingernail-biting department, I had nothing to count upon for self-defense but my fists and my feet.

How I wished I had taken the time to pump Dogger for more details about the Kano system of jujitsu, which he once admitted he had studied for a time. One or two of the Deadly Blows would have come in handy just about now: a quick chop here and a clever thrust there, and it would be “nighty-night” to the abominable Rainsmiths.

But the sad truth is that I was so poleaxed at the thought of Dorsey Rainsmith—Dorsey Rainsmith!—being not only a doctor, but also the pathologist who had examined the body in the chimney, that my brain went into the kind of deep freeze that must have been experienced at the end by Captain Scott of the Antarctic.