They were unmistakable.

People looked at one another as they recognized the tune, first in astonishment and disbelief, but then with growing smiles at the sheer audacity of it.

Daffy began to sing in her fine, loud voice: "Ta-ra-ra BOOM-de-ay, ta-ra-ra BOOM-de-ay ..."

And then someone else-I think it was, incredibly, Cynthia, the vicar's wife-took up the words. Others joined in, somewhat uncertainly at first but growing in confidence with every beat: "Ta-ra-ra BOOM-de-ay, ta-ra-ra BOOM-de-ay ..."

And now even more, until practically everyone in the church was singing: "Ta-ra-ra BOOM-de-ay, ta-ra-ra BOOM-de-ay ..."

The booming bass of Mr. Haskins, the verger, came echoing from somewhere back behind the font.

The vicar was singing, Inspector Hewitt and Antigone were singing, Dame Agatha Dundurn was singing-even I was singing: "Ta-ra-ra BOOM-de-ay, ta-ra-ra BOOM-de-ay!"

Feely finished off with a flourish of trumpet stops, and then the organ fell silent, as if suddenly embarrassed at what it had done.

As the music faded and died up among the beams and king posts of the ancient roof, Daffy folded her papers and walked placidly back to her seat beside Father in the transept.

Father's eyes were closed. Tears were trickling down his face. I placed my hand on top of his on the rail but he seemed not to notice.

People were still smiling at their neighbors, shaking their heads, whispering to one another, and everywhere except in the de Luce pew, a lingering glow hung in the air.

I turned round and looked at Dogger, but his face was, as they say in the thrillers on the wireless, inscrutable.

Daffy and Feely cooked this up together, I thought. Behind closed doors they had plotted it note by note. I wished they'd let me in on their plan. I might have advised against it.

But now the vicar was coming forward.

"Now is Christ risen from the dead," he said, without batting an eye, "and become the first-fruits of them that slept."

As if butter wouldn't melt in his mouth; as if something wonderful hadn't just happened in his church-a miracle, perhaps; as if "Ta-ra-ra BOOM-de-ay" hadn't been the last words upon his lips, and upon everyone else's to boot.

"For since by man came death," he was now telling us, "by man came also the resurrection of the dead. For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive," and on and on from there, wading through all those lovely words about the glories of the sun and the moon and the stars, until at last, as I knew he must, he came to that inevitable passage: "O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?"

Just like that. We had been torn from a jolly good singsong and plunged back into grief. I was struggling with my feelings, staring at the stained glass as if help could possibly come from there, as if hope could possibly spring from the colorful chemicals of the glass.

The yellow scrolls had most likely been achieved with sulfur and calcium, the black letters enameled with a paint compounded in the Middle Ages from a closely guarded formula containing precisely measured amounts of powdered iron or copper oxide, adhesive, and the glassmaker's own urine.

I read the words again.

At first glance, it seemed as if the artist had made a stained-glass misprint. Sawson Defifak, the letters appeared to spell out. The M looked like a W, the H like a K. It was only when your eye and brain locked in to the intricate curlicues of the Gothic lettering that you saw that "Sawson Defifak" was actually "Samson Delilah."

It was easy once you got the hang of it.

Like so many other things.

It was in that fraction of an instant-in that finest sliver of time-that the penny dropped.

In my mind, the words "Lens Palace" took form: those urgent words that Harriet had scribbled in her own urine.

Of course! How clear it all was, once you saw!

The S was an A. The P was a D, and by all that was holy, the As were Es.

Except for the second one, of course, which couldn't possibly be anything but a U!

When I had begun to thaw Harriet's oilcloth wallet, the letters of her message had immediately begun to diffuse into the old fabric, becoming more spidery and fantastic with every passing moment.

Her message had not been "Lens Palace." It had, rather, spelled out the name of the woman who was now sitting next to me buffing her fingernails on the hem of her skirt.

Lena de Luce.

It was Lena who had followed Harriet from Singapore to India, and from India to that final confrontation in Tibet. Who else could it have been? For what other reason would Harriet have scribbled Lena's name in invisible fluid on the outside of the packet containing her last will and testament?

My blood ran cold-then hot.

I was sitting next to a killer!

This creature beside me, preening herself like the cat that ate the canary, had murdered my mother. Her own flesh and blood!

Get a grip on yourself, Flavia. You mustn't let her know.

At this particular moment, I thought, on the face of this vast globe which is spinning in its gravitationally appointed place among all the other planets, you are the only one of its two and a half billion inhabitants-other than Lena, of course-who knows the truth.

What was it Aunt Felicity had shouted through the rubber tube during our flight in Blithe Spirit?

"We de Luces have been entrusted ... for more than three hundred years ... with some of the greatest secrets of the realm. Some of us have been on the side of good ... while others have not."

It was as plain as the nose on your face: Lena was one of those who had not.

Why hadn't I listened to my instincts the first time I laid eyes on the woman? How could I have allowed her to sleep-she and her abominable daughter-under the roofs of Buckshaw? Even now, the very thought of it made my marrow itch.

The question was this: Why had Lena come to Bishop's Lacey?

The full horror came crashing down upon me like the stones of the house that Samson wrecked.

The man at the station-the man beneath the wheels of the train, the man in the long coat: "The one who was talking to Ibu," Undine had told me.

He had being trying to warn me-or at least to warn Father.

"The Gamekeeper is in jeopardy. The Nide is under-"

"Attack" was the word he was almost certainly going to say.

But Lena had been there on the station platform!

The man in the long coat had been talking to her. Undine had blurted that out during our playing of Kim's Game.

I had, in fact, confronted Lena with this fact in my laboratory, but we had been interrupted by the sudden arrival, outside the window, of Tristram Tallis in Blithe Spirit.

And then, as if that weren't enough, there had been that word: "pushed."

"Someone pushed him," a woman's voice had said on the platform.

"Push over," Lena had ordered, less than an hour ago as she wedged her way into the pew beside me. There had been something familiar about the voice, but I hadn't had time to think about it.

At the station she had cried out those words herself in order to distract attention.

Of course! How fiendishly clever of her-and how cold-blooded.

In the same calculating way, she had arranged to lure me to the Jack O'Lantern.

"After the funeral," she had said.

Within the hour!

But now, I realized, this much was certain: If Lena found out I was on to her, I was no better than a dead duck.

The next funeral at St. Tancred's would be mine.

TWENTY-EIGHT.

WHAT HAPPENED NEXT IS no more than a blur-as if the world had become a mixture of paints, or of fluids, in a spinning centrifuge.

I realized that whatever the outcome, I could not confide in Inspector Hewitt. If the truth be told, I had been looking forward to patiently unknitting the knot of evidence for him and laying it out at his grateful feet.

And Antigone's, of course. I was beginning to suspect that Antigone Hewitt was pregnant. She had that same mysterious radiance about her which I had observed last autumn in Nialla Gilfoyle, the traveling puppeteer: a kind of warm luminescence that was so much more than just a healthy glow. I knew that the Hewitts had lost more than one baby in the making, and I could only pray that the next one would be a howling success.

Saint Tancred, please watch over her, I begged.

No, I could not possibly tell Inspector Hewitt. Aunt Felicity had made it quite clear that I was to discuss the Nide and its activities with no one but her. They were beyond Top Secret. The Gamekeeper had spoken.

Nor, then, could I tell the Inspector anything about the stranger at the station: Terence Alfriston Tardiman, bachelor, of 3A Campden Gardens, Notting Hill Gate, London, W8, aged thirty-seven, Adam had said.

I would have to remain no more than a witness-an important one, to be sure-but a witness nonetheless.

I don't mind admitting it was a bit of a bitter pill. I would have to fade into the wallpaper, so to speak, and let the Inspector take all the credit.

I could only hope that he and his henchmen had done their homework and were close to discovering on their own who had shoved Terence Tardiman under the train. Surely by now they must have discovered who at Buckshaw Halt had called out "Someone pushed him."

If they were still baffled, I would perhaps have to send them an anonymous letter, made up of cutout letters from various newspaper headlines, pasted up on a sheet of waxed butcher's paper, and posted from a pillar box in Fleet Street to avoid suspicion.

I should have to break my braces again to contrive a trip up to London, but it would be worth it. Perhaps Inspector Hewitt would suspect anyway, in his heart of hearts, the identity of the sender. He would recognize the fingerprints of my intelligence. Even so, he would never be able to prove it, or to admit openly that it was Flavia de Luce who had cracked the case.

We would smile at each other pleasantly over crumpets, the Inspector and I, and ask each other if we took cream or sugar with our tea, both of us knowing, but not speaking, the delicious truth.

I was dragged back into the present by the vicar's voice saying: "Man that is born of a woman hath but a short time to live, and is full of misery. He cometh up, and is cut down, like a flower; he fleeth as it were a shadow, and never continueth in one stay. In the midst of life we are in death-"

Due to the circumstances, it had been agreed-although it was unusual-to have the committal to the grave inside the church as part of the funeral service.

Harriet was to be laid to rest in the family vault in the crypt below. Her coffin would be moved there later, at such time as, the vicar told us, "the mourners have dispersed."

We were now nearing the end.

"Thou knowest, Lord," the vicar said, "the secrets of our hearts."

I glanced over at Lena. I couldn't help myself.

She turned her head suddenly and met my gaze and held it, and I found that, try as I might, I could not look away.

It is said that certain poisonous snakes are able to petrify small animals with their gaze: a fact which I had doubted until now, even though Mrs. Mullet had warned me against Gertie Mumfield who had the evil eye and whose ignorant stare was not to be returned at any cost.

Whatever the case, I was simply unable to break the gaze in which Lena had locked me. Something unknown was passing back-and surprisingly forth-from her eye to mine: a silent telegraphic conversation which I was too inexperienced to decode.

She knew that I knew. There could be no doubt about it. She was sucking the truth from my eyes and there was nothing I could do to stop it.

Only with the greatest effort was I able to lower my lids, although it was like trying to force down a paint-encrusted window sash.

I turned my head away and rolled my eyes down towards the floor before I dared open them again.

To my horror, the vicar had already arrived at that part of the service where we would be asked to step forward, each in turn-Father, Feely, Daffy, me-to sprinkle a small handful of dirt from the graveyard onto Harriet's coffin.

"-thou most worthy Judge eternal," he was now saying, "suffer us not, at our last hour, for any pains of death, to fall from thee."

He nodded at Father, who rose up and tottered forward like an automaton which had not been actuated for a century.

Daffy and I followed.

"Ashes to ashes, dust to dust; in sure and certain hope of the Resurrection to eternal life-"

How cruel those words were! I didn't want to hear them.

I clapped my hands to my ears and took a backwards step. In doing so, I must have caught my foot on the lower of the chancel steps. I reached out to steady myself from falling by grabbing the corner of Harriet's coffin.

As I regained my balance, I saw Inspector Hewitt coming quickly up the center aisle.

Could he be that worried about me?

Probably not, because Detective Sergeant Woolmer, moving like a heavy lorry, was already halfway up one of the side aisles-and Detective Sergeant Graves was blocking the other.

What was going on here? Had they been asked to participate in the committal?