As Chimney Sweepers Come to Dust (Flavia de Luce #7)(63)

“Huh?” was all I could manage.

Meanwhile, Dorsey was oozing down the staircase with slow, cautious steps, the way you might approach a rattlesnake that has been run over by a car and is writhing, injured, at the side of the road.

I had the most awful feeling that she was suddenly going to produce a blanket from somewhere about her abominable person and throw it over my head.

Her mouth was moving meaninglessly, but no sound was emerging.

And then I realized that she had been talking to me but I hadn’t been listening.

“… a very bad shock,” she was saying.

Shock? Who was she talking about? Collingwood?… Or me?

Were they planning to bind me in wet bedsheets and pump me full of chloral hydrate? Was there a chimney waiting for Flavia de Luce?

It was only at that moment, I think, that my mind finally grasped how horribly far from home I was, and how off-balance and deprived of sleep. In ordinary circumstances I would have dealt the Rainsmiths their comeuppance and be already dusting off my hands—but I was not. I was fighting for my life and I knew it.

I backed slowly away from the descending Dorsey, matching her step for step in a deadly tango, edging ever closer to the door.

“Wait,” she said. “You don’t understand.”

Oh, yes, I do, Miss Knockout Drops. I understand all too perfectly.

The average person, I suppose, does not often stop to think about what can be done to one’s body by a pair of homicidal medical doctors. The very thought of it is enough to make the blood dry up like the Dead Sea.

They could, for instance, remove my organs, slowly and one at a time, until nothing was left on the dissecting table but my two eyeballs rolling wildly about in search of mercy, and my arms and legs.

Or they could—but enough!

I knew that I would have one chance—and one chance only—to get myself out of this scrape.

Should I run? Attack? Or use my brain.

The decision was an easy one.

“Daddy!” I called out with a glance toward one of the empty hallways. “Look who’s here. It’s Mr. and Mrs. Rainsmith.”

In real life, if I had ever stooped to calling Father “Daddy,” we both of us should have shriveled up and died from mortification. But this was not real life: It was a bit of impromptu theater I was staging to save my bacon.

And with that vile name “Daddy” on my lips, I slowly strolled casually off with open arms toward my invisible parent who was standing, so to speak, in the wings.

“I hope your flight wasn’t too tiresome?” I said loudly, once I was out of their sight.

And it worked!

The Rainsmiths, as far as I knew, had remained frozen on the staircase—hadn’t moved a muscle, in fact, until sometime after I had crept quietly out the back door and made my way round to the laundry.

The key I had pinched made it a matter of less than three seconds—I counted—before I was inside that hellish temple of cleanliness (a phrase I borrowed from Daffy, who always used it to describe Armfields, the only London dry cleaners to whom Father would entrust his threadbare wardrobe—except his linens, of course, which were permitted to be washed, ironed, stiffened with potato starch, and correctly folded by no one but Mrs. Mullet in the kitchen of her cottage in Cobbler’s Lane).

Again, a pang of something struck at my heart. I swallowed and looked round the cavernous laundry.

Lock the door! my brain commanded, and I obeyed instantly.

Because it was Sunday, the place was cold and clammy and—with the machines shut off, the great boilers as quiet as a pair of landlocked submarines—the whole place was as silent as the grave.

I shivered. Never in my life had I felt more of a trespasser—and that was saying a lot.

For a minute or two, I stood motionless on the same spot, listening. But there was not a sound. Surely, even if the Rainsmiths had the nerve to follow me, I would hear their footsteps. The gravel outside the door would guarantee it.

Meanwhile, I might as well make use of the fact that I was now locked into the laundry, and probably would be for some time.

What better excuse for a jolly good snoop?

On my first visit to this hellhole, I had glimpsed briefly, through the steam, a small room in one corner—no more than a cubicle, really—which appeared to be an office.

Might as well start there.

A battered wooden desk with an ancient telephone handset and a mechanical chair with protruding springs took up most of the space. On the back wall were shelves lined with ledgers bound in linen, most of them dated on their spines with a span of years: 1943–46, 1931–35, and so forth.

I pulled open the desk drawers, one by one. Of the six, two were empty and the remaining four contained a remarkably uninteresting lot of litter: rubber stamps, ink in a pad, the moldy remains of a cheese sandwich in waxed paper, a bottle of Jergens Lotion, aspirin, a pair of rubber gloves, a rubber finger protector, pencils (broken) red and black, and two dog-eared paperbacks: How To Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie, and How To Stop Worrying and Start Living, ditto.

Not very encouraging.

But in the bottom right-hand drawer was a fat telephone directory, its curled cover jamming the sliding rail. I could not seem to free it, and could not look behind it without getting down onto my hands and knees on the unsanitary stone floor.

By bending my elbow at a scarecrow angle, I was somehow able to work my hand behind the bowed book. My fingers came in contact with something furry.