2 The Weed That Strings the Hangman’s Bag: A Flavia De Luce Mystery by Alan Bradley Page A
Authors: Alan Bradley
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Hill.
Nialla and Rupert were perched on a couple of rotted pilings, letting the flowing water cool their bare feet. Dieter was nowhere in sight.
“Oh, there you are!” I said brightly. “I was looking for you everywhere.”
I undid my shoes, peeled off my socks, and joined them. The sun was well down in the afternoon sky. It was probably now too late to bicycle to Hinley. By the time I got there, it would be past five o’clock, and Inspector Hewitt would be gone for the day.
My curiosity would have to wait.
For a man who had recently been threatened with the blade of a sharp hoe, Rupert was in remarkably good spirits. I could see his shriveled foot, swimming round like a pale little fish, just below the water’s surface.
He reached down, dipped two fingers in the river, and flicked a couple of drops of water playfully in my direction.
“You’d better beetle off home for a decent meal and a good night’s sleep. Tomorrow’s the big day.”
“Righty-ho,” I said, scrambling to my feet. “I wouldn’t miss it for the world. I’m frightfully keen on puppet shows.”
• NINE •
SUPPER HAD SOMEHOW BEEN survived, and the table cleared. We were sitting round it just waiting for someone to think of an excuse for us to go our separate ways: Father to his stamps, Daffy to the library, Feely to her mirror, Aunt Felicity to one of the far-flung guest bedrooms, and I to my laboratory.
“And how’s London these days, Lissy?” Father asked.
Since there was hardly a fortnight that passed without his traveling up there for one stamp show or another, he knew perfectly well how London was. These journeys, though, he always treated as top secret military operations. Father would rather be roasted than let Aunt Felicity know he was in the City.
“She still has all her own teeth,” he used to tell us, “—and she knows how to use ’em.”
Which meant, Feely said, that she wanted things her own way. Daffy said it meant she was a blood-soaked tyrant.
“London?” Aunt Felicity said. “London is always the same: all soot and pigeons and Clement Attlee. Just one damnable deprivation after another. They ought to have men with nets to capture those children one sees in Kensington and train them to run the power plants at Battersea and Bankside. With a better class of people at the switches, the current mightn’t go off so frequently.”
Daffy, who because of company was not allowed to read at supper, was sitting directly across the table from me, letting her eyeballs slowly and agonizingly drift towards one another, as if her brain had just died and the optic nerves and muscles were in their last throes. I would not allow her the satisfaction of a smile.
“I don’t know what the world is coming to,” Aunt Felicity went on. “I shudder to think of the people one meets nowadays—that man on the train, for instance. Did you see him on the platform, Flavia?”
I shook my head.
“Neither did I,” she went on, “but I believe he kept back because he thought I’d whistle for the guard. Kept sticking his head into the compartment all the way down from London—asking if we were at Doddingsley yet. A rum-looking individual he was, too. Leather patches on his elbows and a bandanna round his neck like some brute of an apache dancer from Paris. It oughtn’t to be allowed. I had, at last, to put him in his place.
“‘When the train comes to a full stop and the signboard outside the window says “Doddingsley,”’ I told him, ‘we shall be at Doddingsley—and not a moment sooner.’”
Now it seemed that Daffy’s brain had not only died, but that it had begun to curdle. Her right eye rolled off into one corner, while the other looked as if it were about to explode clean out of her head.
This was an effect she had been working on for years: the ability to bulge her eyes out in two different directions at the same time.
“A touch of the old exophthalmia,” she had called it once, and I had begged her to
Nialla and Rupert were perched on a couple of rotted pilings, letting the flowing water cool their bare feet. Dieter was nowhere in sight.
“Oh, there you are!” I said brightly. “I was looking for you everywhere.”
I undid my shoes, peeled off my socks, and joined them. The sun was well down in the afternoon sky. It was probably now too late to bicycle to Hinley. By the time I got there, it would be past five o’clock, and Inspector Hewitt would be gone for the day.
My curiosity would have to wait.
For a man who had recently been threatened with the blade of a sharp hoe, Rupert was in remarkably good spirits. I could see his shriveled foot, swimming round like a pale little fish, just below the water’s surface.
He reached down, dipped two fingers in the river, and flicked a couple of drops of water playfully in my direction.
“You’d better beetle off home for a decent meal and a good night’s sleep. Tomorrow’s the big day.”
“Righty-ho,” I said, scrambling to my feet. “I wouldn’t miss it for the world. I’m frightfully keen on puppet shows.”
• NINE •
SUPPER HAD SOMEHOW BEEN survived, and the table cleared. We were sitting round it just waiting for someone to think of an excuse for us to go our separate ways: Father to his stamps, Daffy to the library, Feely to her mirror, Aunt Felicity to one of the far-flung guest bedrooms, and I to my laboratory.
“And how’s London these days, Lissy?” Father asked.
Since there was hardly a fortnight that passed without his traveling up there for one stamp show or another, he knew perfectly well how London was. These journeys, though, he always treated as top secret military operations. Father would rather be roasted than let Aunt Felicity know he was in the City.
“She still has all her own teeth,” he used to tell us, “—and she knows how to use ’em.”
Which meant, Feely said, that she wanted things her own way. Daffy said it meant she was a blood-soaked tyrant.
“London?” Aunt Felicity said. “London is always the same: all soot and pigeons and Clement Attlee. Just one damnable deprivation after another. They ought to have men with nets to capture those children one sees in Kensington and train them to run the power plants at Battersea and Bankside. With a better class of people at the switches, the current mightn’t go off so frequently.”
Daffy, who because of company was not allowed to read at supper, was sitting directly across the table from me, letting her eyeballs slowly and agonizingly drift towards one another, as if her brain had just died and the optic nerves and muscles were in their last throes. I would not allow her the satisfaction of a smile.
“I don’t know what the world is coming to,” Aunt Felicity went on. “I shudder to think of the people one meets nowadays—that man on the train, for instance. Did you see him on the platform, Flavia?”
I shook my head.
“Neither did I,” she went on, “but I believe he kept back because he thought I’d whistle for the guard. Kept sticking his head into the compartment all the way down from London—asking if we were at Doddingsley yet. A rum-looking individual he was, too. Leather patches on his elbows and a bandanna round his neck like some brute of an apache dancer from Paris. It oughtn’t to be allowed. I had, at last, to put him in his place.
“‘When the train comes to a full stop and the signboard outside the window says “Doddingsley,”’ I told him, ‘we shall be at Doddingsley—and not a moment sooner.’”
Now it seemed that Daffy’s brain had not only died, but that it had begun to curdle. Her right eye rolled off into one corner, while the other looked as if it were about to explode clean out of her head.
This was an effect she had been working on for years: the ability to bulge her eyes out in two different directions at the same time.
“A touch of the old exophthalmia,” she had called it once, and I had begged her to
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