As Chimney Sweepers Come to Dust (Flavia de Luce #7)(76)
Laundry! Of course! What a fool I had been! I felt a stupid grin crawling like a fly across my face.
I wiped my eyes with the back of my hand and the wet window with my palm. No point in leaving clues behind, even if they were drawn in dampness.
Who was it—Daffy would know—that wanted “Here Lies One Whose Name Is Writ in Water” carved on his tombstone? Keats? Yeats?
I couldn’t remember—which was precisely what he wanted, wasn’t it?
It was Monday morning: washing day. The laundry would be opening early and I would be there—with bells on!
*
I let myself in and locked the door. In the early morning darkness, the laundry clanked and groaned as if it were a sleeping beast.
Kelly must have turned up late last night, or earlier this morning, to stoke the boilers, which were now hissing like a basket of angry asps. Already, the heat was almost unbearable. By midday, it would be killing.
I took the note I had written and placed it dead center on the table where Marge worked. She could hardly miss it.
It had caused me a considerable amount of thought and a considerable amount of blood. I hoped it was worth it.
Guided by the beacons of glowing pilot lights, I felt my way in the near darkness round the back of the main boiler to the ladder I had spotted on my earlier visits. Putting one hand on each rail and a foot on the bottom rung, I hauled myself up and began to climb.
A false dawn broke as I neared the frosted window at the top of the wall, where the sickly orange glow of a yard light seeped in among the panting pipes. I inhaled the acrid smell of hot steam.
At the top of the ladder I stepped off onto a walkway of perforated metal which spanned the room behind and above the boilers. Great valves—some painted red—sang away to themselves, like colorful barnacles on the hulk of a sunken liner.
An enormous duct, wrapped like King Tut in some kind of insulating material (asbestos, I hoped—otherwise it would be too hot) ran in an “L” shape down and across the laundry. I hauled myself cautiously up onto it, creeping wormlike along its length until I was directly above Marge’s worktable.
From this “coign of vantage” (as Shakespeare would have called it) I could not possibly be seen. I was tucked away, safely out of sight, high above my enemies like one of the swallows in the battlements of Macbeth’s castle.
… no jutty, frieze, buttress,
Nor coign of vantage, but this bird hath made
His pendant bed …
And here I would nest.
Daffy would be proud of me.
I tucked myself in and waited. The warm humidity and the gentle hissing of the steam duct made it seem as if I were a baby animal—a hippopotamus, perhaps, or an elephant, tucked up in contentment against her mother’s leathery skin, listening to her distant heartbeat and her long, slow breathing.
The heat must have caused me to fall asleep. I was jolted awake by a scream which began as a screech, then rose and fell, wailing in the air.
My eyes flew open, my blood already well on the way to curdling.
“What is it, Marge? What’s the matter?”
Sal’s voice.
“You look as if you’ve seen a ghost. Sit down, I’ll get a chair.”
I didn’t risk peering over the edge of the duct upon which I was lying. My uncanny powers of hearing would tell me all I needed to know.
A nauseating scraping of wood on concrete followed by a plump thump told me that Sal had fetched the chair and that Marge had dropped heavily into it.
A rustle of paper confirmed that Marge had handed my note to Sal.
There was a silence in the steam as words ceased, and a low moan began.
I was enjoying this, actually.
I pictured Sal’s eyes tracking hesitantly across the page, her lips moving as she read.
“What does it mean? One of you knows my killer?”
After hours of pondering, I had decided to crib the message of the Ouija board word for word. I could hardly have bettered it.
“Christ! It’s written in blood, Sal.” Marge had regained the power of speech.
“Fresh blood, too,” she added. “Hasn’t gone brown yet.”
I rubbed my thumb against the still-raw end of my forefinger, which I had pierced again and again with one of the despised embroidery needles from the personal kit I had been issued. It’s surprising how much blood it takes to write half-a-dozen words.
I had signed the message Francesca—a long, smudged signature that leaked horribly off the edge of the page.
“Could it be—her—do you think?” Sal again, her voice trembling.
“Has to be. No other dead Francescas around here—not that I know of.”
“Put it down, Marge. It’s haunted. It’s bad luck. Take my word for it.”
“Wasn’t here Friday when we locked up. Place is tighter than a drum. How did it get in here?”
Sal’s voice had begun to develop a quaver. “What’s it mean, ‘One of you knows my killer’? She wasn’t killed, she fell off a boat and drowned—or so they said.”
“Never found her, though, did they? Maybe somebody bumped her off.”
“Bumped her off?” Sal said indignantly. “Who’d do a thing like that?”
“Beats me. She was like a kid, really. Loved dressing up. Can’t imagine anyone wanting to do her any harm. I found one of her famous red socks a couple of months ago behind the sorting table. Made me sad. Remember how she used to sneak us bags of her home laundry? ‘The chairman would like a little more starch in his white collars,’ she used to say, didn’t she? ‘The chairman would like to have his cuffs turned and leather patches on his elbows.’ Remember? Well, the rich must have their little perks, mustn’t they? Lord love her. I wish her well wherever she might be.”