I made a couple of notes but my heart just wasn't in it. I threw down my pencil.

Although I loathed the very idea, it was likely time to begin dressing for the day. Mrs. Mullet had fetched out and cleaned one of the mothballed school uniforms that Harriet, when she was my age, had been made to wear at Miss Bodycote's Female Academy in Toronto, Canada: a black-belted horror worn with long black stockings and a white blouse that made me look like one of those grotesque but amusing creatures from Ronald Searle's St Trinian's cartoons. Like Father and Dogger, Mr. Searle had been a prisoner of the Japanese in Singapore, and his work was much admired by some of us at Buckshaw.

I scrubbed my face and teeth, cleaned the remnants of my nails, sighed deeply, and turned to the task I most truly despised: the braiding of my hair into pigtails.

I had tried everything I could think of to make it an adventure. I had pretended that I was a pirate, lashed to the mainmast in a howling hurricane, splicing the only rope that could secure the last remaining sail.

Right over left ... and up ... and under. Left over right ...

"Ha, ha, me hearties. Simple as sin. Break out the grog!"

But it was no use. Transforming a haystack of mousy brown hair into a length of romantic rigging was too much to hope for.

The worst thing about dressing one's own hair was the fact that it needed to be done backwards. It was like playing a game of "In a Glass Darkly" in Girl Guides, in which one must try to write one's full name with pencil on a scrap of paper while looking in a mirror: -a game during which I always wished I had been born plain old AVA OXO, or at least someone with a more symmetrical name.

The losers and the clumsy players were always hooted heartily, and it was at those times I most often found my thoughts turning to the subject of poisons.

I secured the ends of the pigtails with a couple of blue ribbons tied into neat bows. Yellow was too cheerful for the occasion, red too gaudy, and orange out of the question.

I stared at myself in the looking glass. Who was this girl with her mother's face? It was as if I were wearing a Harriet mask for Carnival and had not noticed it until now.

And, to tell the truth, it frightened me.

Breakfast at Buckshaw was always a glum affair, and this morning was no exception. Tristram and Adam were seated at the foot of the table, as if to keep a respectful distance from the grieving family.

Father, all in black, sat at the head, his palms flat on the table. He had touched not a crumb of his breakfast and it seemed unlikely that he would do so.

Beside him, Feely was a pale ghost, nibbling absently at a piece of dry toast. She needed to keep her strength up if she was to be at the organ for Harriet's funeral.

Everyone from family to the vicar and his wife had tried to dissuade her, but all in vain. Feely was as steely cold in her stubborn resolve as only a wispy-looking musician can be.

Daffy, cocooned in some kind of comic, musty Victorian mourning outfit, was helping herself to another kipper. Her acid glance defied me to say anything.

When she was like this, even Father knew better than to risk a single word.

Aunt Felicity sat at the middle of the table, well apart from both groups, humming mindlessly to herself like a hive of distant bees.

Adam gave me the tiniest of nods before resuming his quiet conversation with Tristram, who did not give me so much as a glance. It was as if our early morning flight had been merely a dream-and perhaps it had. Perhaps it had never happened.

A time traveler, materializing at our breakfast table from some far future, would have supposed that Mrs. Mullet was the only one of us who was flesh and blood with the deceased.

Mrs. M, to be perfectly honest, looked a wreck. Her face was flushed, her eyes brimming with unshed tears, and her hair sticking out like jackstraws.

She fished a kipper and a couple of bangers from their serving dishes and placed them on my plate. Her lips were even more tightly pressed together than they had been before-as if they were now additionally secured by C-clamps.

She said not a word, and I realized in that instant how deep was her despair.

I reached out to touch her hand but she was already gone.

Breakfast broke up with no more than a few hushed words exchanged between the two guests at the foot of the table.

I excused myself and left the room. I would go to my laboratory and try to set down in my notes the confusion that was in my mind.

I was no more than halfway across the foyer when the doorbell rang. Dogger appeared from nowhere, as he often does so uncannily, and swung the heavy door back on its hinges.

Two delivery men in overalls, their arms filled with flowers, stood waiting. Behind them, on the gravel sweep, their van, open at the back, overflowed with bouquets, wreaths, and carpeted arrangements of carnations, cornflowers, arum lilies, and forget-me-nots all nestled in beds of Queen Anne's lace. There were gladioli, peonies, and roses; marigolds, chrysanthemums, and irises.

It was as if the gardens of Heaven had been raided and the plunder delivered to our door with more than enough flowers to overflow the foyer.

In spite of the early hour, a fresh queue of mourners had already formed, snaking round the van and making a straggling half circle in the forecourt.

As the men spat on their hands and began the long job of moving the flowers into the house, Dogger produced a small notebook from his vest pocket and began carefully cataloging the names of the senders, which he read from the pasteboard cards attached to each arrangement.

It was as if all the world had known Harriet, and all the world in mourning had sent their floral tributes.

"Sorry about your mother," a voice said at my ear. "Rotten bad luck. I should have hoped it would turn out better than this."

I spun round, knowing already that it was Adam Sowerby, or, to give him the whole McGillicuddy-as it was so prominently printed on his card, which I still had tucked away in the pages of a recent notebook: Adam Tradescant Sowerby, MA., FRHortS, etc.

Flora-archaeologist

Seeds of Antiquity-Cuttings-Inquiries

Tower Bridge, London E.1 TN Royal 1066

He was, of course, something of a fraud. While working in the guise of an archaeological botanist, retrieving and coaxing back into germination the seeds of plants and flowers thought to be long extinct, the man was actually an inquiry agent, or-to put it more plainly-a private detective.

When he learned of my recent successes, he had tried to recruit me as his partner in criminal investigation, but I had quickly discovered that the man took more than he gave. Worse than that, he had point-blank refused to tell me whom he was working for.

Since Adam was an old friend of Father's, there wasn't much that I could do to keep him off my pitch, but there was no law that said I had to cooperate.

"It must have been a very great shock," he said, still talking, even though I hadn't been listening.

I nodded and headed for the staircase.

"As must have been that poor bloke at the station."

I stopped in my tracks. How did Adam know about that? Had he been there?

I thought he had only arrived last night. Had he already been in consultation with the police?

I could hardly believe that Inspector Hewitt would confide in a private inquiry agent-and a private inquiry agent from London, at that!

Of course, by now, the circumstances of the stranger's death must be the talk of the village. Perhaps that was why some of the mourners had looked at me so oddly. Adam might well have stopped and been given the goods at Bert Archer's petrol station or at the Thirteen Drakes. Or might he have heard the grisly details from someone here at Buckshaw?

If that was the case, the burning question was-from whom?

Who else in the house had seen what happened on the railway platform? If Inspector Hewitt, out of sympathy for the family, had delayed his questioning of the household's inhabitants, who else had witnessed the murder?

Who else was keeping silent?

"All right," I said, turning round reluctantly. "Tell me what you know."

There are people who are able to deflect direct questions as easily as a duck sheds water, and Adam, I knew, was one of them.

"Terence Alfriston Tardiman, bachelor, of 3A Campden Gardens, Notting Hill Gate, London, W8, aged thirty-seven."

Adam's frankness surprised me.

"How do you know that?"

"No magic involved," he said. "I'd been following him for five days. This time."

"What do you mean 'this time'? Have you followed him before?"

Adam nodded. "Off again, on again, gone again, Finnegan. It's been going on for years."

I hadn't the faintest idea what he was referring to, but I pretended I did.

"Who was he?" I asked. "Other than his name."

"That's what I've been trying to discover," Adam said. "As Mr. Churchill once so aptly put it, Tardiman was a riddle inside a mystery wrapped in an enigma. And now that he's dead, more so than ever."

"Mr. Churchill was at the station," I found myself saying. "He spoke to me."

Oh, fluff! I had blurted it out without thinking.

"Winnie quite often likes to insert himself at the heart of the action," Adam told me. "Rather like Alfred Hitchcock's cameo appearances in his own films, but somewhat more risky.

"What did he have to say?" he added casually.

"Just that he was sorry," I said.

I was certainly not going to tell him that Mr. Churchill had asked: "And have you, also, acquired a taste for pheasant sandwiches, young lady?"

With Inspector Hewitt and his men of the Hinley Constabulary and Adam Tradescant Sowerby (Inquiries) on the case, I knew instinctively to keep certain information to myself.

That I had let slip the fact that Mr. Churchill had spoken to me was troubling. I would need to be far more discreet in future.

I was trying to think of a way to remove myself from this dangerous conversation when someone laid a large hand on my shoulder.

It was the vicar, Denwyn Richardson, and behind him stood his wife, Cynthia.

"Dearest Flavia," he said. "We've been looking for you everywhere. I've spoken to your father, of course, but-I told him we were sorry not to have traveled with you to Buckshaw from the station yesterday, but what with poor Mrs. Dainty being taken so suddenly, and everything being consequently at sixes and sevens, to say nothing of the fact that our telephone at the rectory chose that moment to-well, how very, very sorry we are that things have come to such a-"

Cynthia brushed past him and wrapped me in such a tight and quaking hug that I thought my bones would surely shatter.

We had had our battles, Cynthia and I, and it was only recently that I had learned of the tragic death, seven years ago Christmas, of their daughter, Hannah.

Hannah had been four years old, my exact age at the time, when she fell beneath the wheels of a train at Doddingsley station. She had been laid to rest in a so-far unmarked grave in the churchyard of St. Tancred's, and the villagers had begun a conspiracy of silence to shield the Richardsons from grief and guilt. The little girl had darted away from her father on that tragic long-ago Christmas, and he had blamed himself.

The trembling of Cynthia's embrace became a chill as I realized what a harsh reminder the death of Terence Tardiman must be to them: that whole ghastly nightmare on the railway platform brought back to life and shoved in their faces, as it were.

I felt my tears coming, and before I could stop them, they were dribbling down Cynthia's neck. Rather than pulling away, though, she was now hugging me all the harder.

How sorry I suddenly felt for this poor little woman: this poor unfortunate little creature upon whom I had wasted so much hatred over the years. What kind of life did she have, when you stop to think about it? All of her days and nights were given over to visiting the sick, arranging flowers for the church, chairing meetings of this committee and that, booking the parish hall, cooking three meals a day for her husband, typing up and printing handbills and posters on a hectograph or churning out church bulletins on a Banda machine, to say nothing of managing her husband's timetable, mending his clothes, starching his surplices, running the church library, and listening to the troubles of everyone in Bishop's Lacey.

Being married to a man who dressed himself in vestments was no holiday camp.

She didn't seem to want to let me go. The hug went on until I thought to say, "Oh! I'm sorry, I must be hurting you."

At that point we both gave a little laugh and released our life-and-death grip on each other.

Adam, meanwhile, had wandered away and was critically inspecting the funeral flowers. I was dying to ask him what he thought, but I didn't dare.

Dogger had now admitted those from the head of the queue, and the long trudge up the stairs to Harriet's boudoir had resumed. It would go on until just after noon, when preparations for departure would begin.

I could only hope and pray that those officious creatures from the Home Office had thought to stop the dripping.

I took my leave of the Richardsons and climbed the stairs to the east wing. In the top corridor, I knew instantly that I was not alone.

There is a vibration in the air that is not a sound and not a smell but more a feeling in the atmosphere that signals without fail the presence of another.

I flung open the door of my bedroom and marched inside, but no one was there. Then the laboratory. Except for Esmeralda, it, too, was empty.

Down the hall I crept on tiptoe, taking great care to avoid the squeaky floorboard in front of the nook. I put my hand on the knob of Angels-and threw open the door.

Undine was standing on the laboratory stool, the oilcloth wallet in her hand. She had fished it out of its hiding place behind the baggy wallpaper.

"You lied to me," she said, wide-eyed with indignation. "You told me you were watering plants."

I have to give the girl credit. Not only had she found the hidden wallet, but she had manufactured a remarkably good response when I caught her red-handed. It was exactly the kind of thing I might have thought of myself. Someday I might even tell her that-but not now.