The Flavia De Luce Series 1-4 Read Online Free Page B

you, Jacko? You must have come into a fair bit when Harriet died. Why, the insurance alone—”
    “Shut your filthy mouth!” Father shouted. “Get out before I—”
    Suddenly I was seized from behind and a rough hand was clapped across my mouth. My heart almost leaped out of my chest.
    I was being held so tightly I couldn’t manage a struggle.
    “Go back to bed, Miss Flavia,” a voice hissed into my ear.
    It was Dogger.
    “This is none of your business,” he whispered. “Go back to bed.”
    He loosened his grip on me and I struggled free. I shot him a poisonous look.
    In the near-darkness, I saw his eyes soften a little.
    “Buzz off,” he whispered.
    I buzzed off.
    Back in my room I paced up and down for a while, as I often do when I’m thwarted.
    I thought about what I’d overheard. Father a murderer? That was impossible. There was probably some quite simple explanation. If only I’d heard the rest of the conversation between Father and the stranger … if only Dogger hadn’t ambushed me in the dark. Who did he think he was?
    I’ll show him, I thought.
    “With no further ado!” I said aloud.
    I slipped José Iturbi from his green paper sleeve, gave my portable gramophone a good winding-up, and slapped the second side of Chopin’s Polonaise in A flat Major onto the turntable. I threw myself across the bed and sang along:
    “DAH-dah-dah-dah, DAH-dah-dah-dah, DAH-dah-dah-dah, DAH-dah-dah-dah …”
    The music sounded as if it had been composed for a film in which someone was cranking an old Bentley that kept sputtering out: hardly a selection to float you off to dreamland …
    When I opened my eyes, an oyster-colored dawn was peeping in at the windows. The hands of my brass alarm clock stood at 3:44. On Summer Time, daylight came early, and in less than a quarter of an hour, the sun should be up.
    I stretched, yawned, and climbed out of bed. The gramophone had run down, frozen in mid-Polonaise, its needle lying dead in the grooves. For a fleeting moment I thought of winding it up again to give the household a Polish reveille. And then I remembered what had happened just a few hours before.
    I went to the window and looked down into the garden. There was the potting shed, its glass panes clouded with the dew, and over there, an angular darkness that was Dogger’s overturned wheelbarrow, forgotten in the events of yesterday.
    Determined to put it right, to make up to him somehow, for something of which I was not even certain, I dressed and went quietly down the back stairs and into the kitchen.
    As I passed the window, I noticed that a slice had been cut from Mrs. Mullet’s custard pie. How odd, I thought; it was certainly none of the de Luces who had taken it. If there was one thing upon which we all agreed—one thing that united us as a family—it was our collective loathing of Mrs. Mullet’s custard pies. Whenever she strayed from our favorite rhubarb or gooseberry to the dreaded custard, we generally begged off, feigning group illness, and sent her packing off home with the pie, and solicitous instructions to serve it up, with our compliments, to her good husband, Alf.
    As I stepped outside, I saw that the silver light of dawn had transformed the garden into a magic glade, its shadows darkened by the thin band of day beyond the walls. Sparkling dew lay upon everything, and I should not have been at all surprised if a unicorn had stepped from behind a rosebush and tried to put its head in my lap.
    I was walking towards the wheelbarrow when I tripped suddenly and fell forward onto my hands and knees.
    “Bugger!” I said, already looking round to make sure that no one had heard me. I was now plastered with wet black loam.
    “Bugger,” I said again, a little less loudly.
    Twisting round to see what had tripped me up, I spotted it at once: something white protruding from the cucumbers. For a teetering moment there was a part of me that fought desperately to believe it was a little rake, a cunning