Free The Flavia De Luce Series 1-4 by Alan Bradley Page B

you and keep you and make his face to shine upon you, always! Good old faithful Dogger. I knew I could count on you.
    “Yes,” I said. “That’s correct.”
    “What happened then?”
    “We went downstairs and out the kitchen door into the garden. I showed him the body. He knelt down beside it and felt for a pulse.”
    “And how did he do that?”
    “He put his hand on the neck—under the ear.”
    “Hmm,” the Inspector said. “And was there? Any pulse, I mean?”
    “No.”
    “How did you know that? Did he tell you?”
    “No,” I said.
    “Hmm,” he said again. “Did you kneel down beside it too?”
    “I suppose I could have. I don’t think so … I don’t remember.”
    The Inspector made a note. Even without seeing it, I knew what it said: Query: Did D. (1) tell F. no pulse? (2) See F. kneel BB (Beside Body)?
    “That’s quite understandable,” he said. “It must have been rather a shock.”
    I brought to mind the image of the stranger lying there in the first light of dawn: the slight growth of whiskers on his chin, strands of his red hair shifting gently on the faint stirrings of the morning breeze, the pallor, the extended leg, the quivering fingers, that last, sucking breath. And that word, blown into my face … “ Vale .”
    The thrill of it all!
    “Yes,” I said, “it was devastating.”
    I had evidently passed the test. Inspector Hewitt had gone into the kitchen where Sergeants Woolmer and Graves were busily setting up operations under a barrage of gossip and lettuce sandwiches from Mrs. Mullet.
    As Ophelia and Daphne came down to lunch, I noticed with disappointment Ophelia’s unusual clarity of complexion. Had my concoction backfired? Had I, through some freak accident of chemistry, produced a miracle facial cream?
    Mrs. Mullet bustled in, grumbling as she set our soup and sandwiches on the table.
    “It’s not right,” she said. “Me already behind my time, what with all this pother, and Alf expectin’ me home, and all. The nerve of them, axin’ me to dig that dead snipe out of the refuse bin,” she said with a shudder, “… so’s they could prop it up and take its likeness. It’s not right. I showed them the bin and told them if they wanted the carcass so bad they could jolly well dig it out themselves; I had lunch to make. Eat your sandwiches, dear. There’s nothing like cold meats in June—they’re as good as a picnic.”
    “Dead snipe?” Daphne asked, curling her lip.
    “The one as Miss Flavia and the Colonel found on my yesterday’s back doorstep. It still gives me the goose-pimples, the way that thing was layin’ there with its eye all frosted and its bill stickin’ straight up in the air with a bit of paper stuck on it.”
    “Ned!” Ophelia said, slapping the table. “You were right, Daffy. It’s a love token!”
    Daphne had been reading The Golden Bough at Easter, and told Ophelia that primitive courting customs from the South Seas sometimes survived in our own enlightened times. It was simply a matter of being patient, she said.
    I looked from one to the other, blankly. There were whole aeons when I didn’t understand my sisters at all.
    “A dead bird, stiff as a board, with its bill sticking straight up in the air? What kind of token is that?” I asked.
    Daphne hid behind her book and Ophelia flushed a little. I slipped away from the table and left them tittering into their soup.
    “Mrs. Mullet,” I said, “didn’t you tell Inspector Hewitt we never see jack snipe in England until September?”
    “Snipes, snipes, snipes! That’s all I hear about nowadays is snipes. Step to one side, if you please—you’re standin’ where it wants scrubbin’.”
    “Why is that? Why do we never see snipe before September?”
    Mrs. Mullet straightened up, dropped her brush in the bucket, and dried her soapy hands on her apron.
    “Because they’re somewhere else,” she said triumphantly.
    “Where?”
    “Oh, you know … they’re like all them birds what