Free Flavia de Luce 3 - A Red Herring Without Mustard by Alan Bradley Page A

parapet and arranged myself as carefully as if I were sitting for a statue of Wendy, from Peter Pan: seated primly, leaning slightly forward in eager relief, palms pressed flat to the stone for support, brow neatly furrowed with concern. I hoped I wouldn’t look too smarmy.
    Not a minute too soon. The car’s headlamps were already flashing between the trees to my left, and seconds later, a blue Vauxhall was chuddering to a stop at the bridge.
    Fixed in the spotlight of the powerful beams, I turned my head slowly to face them, at the same time lifting my hand ever so languidly, as if to shield my eyes from their harsh and unrelenting glare.
    I couldn’t help wondering how it looked to the Inspector.
    There was an unnerving pause, rather like the one that occurs between the time the houselights go down, but before the orchestra strikes up the first notes of the overture.
    A car door slammed heavily, and Inspector Hewitt came walking slowly into the converging beams of light.
    “Flavia de Luce,” he said in a flat, matter-of-fact voice: too flat to be able to tell if he was thrilled or disgusted to find me waiting for him at the scene of the crime.
    “Good morning, Inspector,” I said. “I’m very happy to see you.”
    I was half hoping that he would return the compliment but he did not. In the recent past I had assisted him with several baffling investigations. By rights he should be bubbling over with gratitude—but was he?
    The Inspector walked slowly to the highest point in the middle of the humpbacked bridge and stared off towards the glade where the caravan was parked.
    “You’ve left your footprints in the dew,” he said.
    I followed his gaze, and sure enough: Lit by the low angle of the Vauxhall’s headlamps, and although Dr. Darby’s footprints and the tire tracks left by his car had already lightened somewhat, the impressions of my every step lay black and fresh in the wet, silvery grass of the glade, leading straight back to the caravan’s door.
    “I had to make water,” I said. It was the classic female excuse, and no male in recorded history had ever questioned it.
    “I see,” the Inspector said, and left it at that.
    Later, I would have a quick piddle behind the caravan for insurance purposes. No one would be any the wiser.
    A silence had fallen, each of us waiting, I think, to see what the other would say. It was like a game: First one to speak is the Booby.
    It was Inspector Hewitt.
    “You’ve got goose-bumps,” he said, looking at me attentively. “Best go sit in the car.”
    He had already reached the far side of the bridge before he turned back. “There’s a blanket in the boot,” he said, and then vanished in the shadows.
    I felt my temper rising. Here was this man—a man in an ordinary business suit, without so much as a badge on his shoulder—dismissing me from the scene of a crime that I had come to think of as my very own. After all, hadn’t I been the first to discover it?
    Had Marie Curie been dismissed after discovering polonium? Or radium? Had someone told her to run along?
    It simply wasn’t fair.
    A crime scene, of course, wasn’t exactly an atom-shattering discovery, but the Inspector might at least have said “Thank you.” After all, hadn’t the attack upon the Gypsy taken place within the grounds of Buckshaw, my ancestral home? Hadn’t her life likely been saved by my horseback expedition into the night to summon help?
    Surely I was entitled to at least a nod. But no—
    “Go and sit in the car,” Inspector Hewitt had said, and now—as I realized with a sinking feeling that the law doesn’t know the meaning of the word “gratitude”—I felt my fingers curling slowly into involuntary fists.
    Even though he had been on the scene for no more than a few moments, I knew that a wall had already gone up between the Inspector and myself. If the man was expecting cooperation from Flavia de Luce, he would bloody well have to work for it.

SIX
    THE NERVE OF THE