As Chimney Sweepers Come to Dust (Flavia de Luce #7)(71)

“No names, no pack drill,” I told him. It was a phrase I had heard Mrs. Mullet’s husband, Alf, use on more than one occasion.

There was a dry chuckle at the other end of the phone, followed by a rustling, a scratching, and a wheeze. I knew he had just lit a cigarette, and I could almost see him, perched on the corner of a desk, cigarette in mouth and pencil in nicotine-stained fingers, ready to take down my every word.

“Shoot,” he said, and I shot.

“Three girls have gone missing from Miss Bodycote’s in the past two years. Their names are Le Marchand, Wentworth, and Brazenose.”

“Brazenose with a Z or an S?”

“A zed,” I told him. This man was wizard sharp.

“Is that it?” he asked.

“No,” I said. It was, in fact, only the bit of bait I was using to get him on the hook.

“I’ll trade you,” I told him. “Fact for fact. You give me one, I’ll give you one.”

“Tit for tat,” he said.

“Exactly,” I said. “Your turn.”

“What do you want to know?”

“The body in the chimney. Identity … cause of death.”

“Hard to say. Badly smoke-damaged. They’re working on it.”

“And the skull?”

“Like I said in the article, ancient, possibly Egyptian.”

“Is there an Egyptian skull missing from the Royal Ontario Museum?” I asked.

“Shrewd kid. They’re looking into that, too.”

There was a bit of a lull in our conversation, during which I could hear him scribbling notes.

“My turn,” he said. “What’s the scuttlebutt at the school? What are the kids saying?”

“Ghosts,” I said, and he laughed, and then I laughed.

“And the teachers?”

“Nothing.”

He paused to let my answer sink in. “Bit odd, isn’t it?”

And it was.

When you stopped and thought about it, it was odd indeed that there had been no official mention of a death at Miss Bodycote’s. There had been no assembling of the girls to reassure, or explain, or even deny. The police had come and gone in near silence.

Which could mean only one thing: that they already had their answers; that they were only waiting to pounce.

It was a chilling thought.

“Still there?” Scroop’s voice emerged tinnily from the receiver, and I realized that I had let it slip away from my ear, listening to the sound of approaching footsteps in the hall.

“Yes,” I whispered. “I have to go”—at the same time closing the telephone directory and shoving the newspaper back into the desk drawer.

“No! Wait!” he shouted, putting me even more on edge. “Give me something … anything. I need more to go on.”

“The first Mrs. Rainsmith,” I whispered, my lips tight against the holes of the telephone’s mouthpiece.

And then the door opened and I was caught.

Miss Fawlthorne and I stood there staring at each other for half an eternity.

“Hello? Hello?” Wallace Scroop’s voice was saying, as if from the depths of a well.

“Oh, yes,” I said into the receiver. “Here she is now. She’s just come back. I’ll put her on.”

At the same time, I slowly pressed down on the cradle with my left forefinger, disconnecting poor Scroop in the middle of a “Hello?”

“Someone for you, Miss Fawlthorne,” I said, handing her the now-dead receiver. “I’m sorry, I told them you had stepped out.”

She took the instrument from me and held it to her ear.

“Yes?” she said. She had fallen for it hook, line, and sinker. “Hello? Hello?”

But of course there was no answer.

“Did they leave a name?” she asked, hanging up.

“No,” I said. “It was a man’s voice.”

I added this in case she had heard any of Wallace Scroop’s words leaking from the receiver.

“Possibly the police,” I couldn’t resist adding, watching her reaction. “It sounded official.”

She stared at me as if I had slapped her face, and in a way, perhaps I had.

“Sit down, Flavia,” she said. “It’s time we had a little talk.”





? TWENTY-THREE ?

WHENEVER SOMEONE TELLS YOU they want to have a little talk, you can be sure they mean a big one.

There’s something in human nature, I’m beginning to learn, that makes an adult, when speaking to a younger person, magnify the little things and shrink the big ones. It’s like looking—or talking—through a kind of word-telescope that, no matter which end they choose, distorts the truth. Your mistakes are always magnified and your victories shrunken.

Has no one ever noticed this but me? If not, then I’m happy to take the credit for being the first to point it out.

Perhaps only J. M. Barrie, the author of Peter Pan, saw through dimly to the truth: that by the time we are old enough to protest such rotten injustice, we have already forgotten it.

I sat, reluctantly, watching Miss Fawlthorne with wary eyes.

“It isn’t easy, is it? Being so aware, I mean.”

God help me! Here it came again, that whole “Poor, dear, lonely, unhappy Flavia de Luce” business. She had pulled this sudden switch the night I arrived at Miss Bodycote’s and now here she was trying it on again.