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.(See 1 above)What if on Friday, the night of the murder, Pemberton, believing that Bonepenny was carrying the Ulster Avengers, had followed him from Bishop's Lacey to Buckshaw and murdered him there?But hold on, Flave, I thought.Hold your horses.Don't go galloping off like that.Why wouldn't Pemberton simply waylay his victim in one of those quiet hedgerows that border nearly every lane in this part of England?The answer had come to me as if it were sculpted in red neon tubing in Piccadilly Circus: because he wanted Father to be blamed for the crime!Bonepenny had to be killed at Buckshaw!Of course! With Father a virtual recluse, it was unlikely to expect that he would ever happen to be away from home.Murders—at least those in which the murderer expected to escape justice—had to be planned in advance, and often in very great detail.It was obvious that a philatelic crime needed to be pinned on a philatelist.If Father was unlikely to come to the scene of the crime, the scene of the crime would have to come to Father.And so it had.Although I had first formulated this chain of events—or, at least, certain of its links—hours ago, it was only now, when I was at last forced to be alone with Flavia de Luce, that I was able to fit together all the pieces.Flavia, I'm proud of you! Marie-Anne Paulze Lavoisier would be proud of you too.Now then: Pemberton, of course, had followed Bonepenny as far as Doddingsley; perhaps even all the way from Stavanger.Father had seen them both at the London exhibition just weeks ago—proof positive that neither one was living abroad permanently.They had probably planned this together, this blackmailing of Father.Just as they had planned the murder of Mr.Twining.But Pemberton had a plan of his own.Once satisfied that Bonepenny was on his way to Bishop's Lacey (where else, indeed, would he be going?), Pemberton had got off the train at Doddingsley and registered himself at the Jolly Coachman.I knew that for a fact.Then, on the night of the murder, all he had to do was walk across the fields to Bishop's Lacey.Here, he had waited until he saw Bonepenny leave the inn and set out on foot for Buckshaw.With Bonepenny out of the way and not suspecting that he was being followed, Pemberton had searched the room at the Thirteen Drakes, and its contents—including Bonepenny's luggage—and had found nothing.He had, of course, never thought, as I had, to slit open the shipping labels.By now, he must have been furious.Slipping away from the inn unseen (most likely by way of that steep back staircase), he had tracked his quarry on foot to Buckshaw, where they must have quarreled in our garden.How was it, I wondered, that I hadn't heard them?Within half an hour, he had left Bonepenny for dead, his pockets and wallet rifled.But the Ulster Avengers had not been there: Bonepenny had not had the stamps upon his person after all.Pemberton had committed his crime and then simply walked off into the night, across the fields to the Jolly Coachman at Doddingsley.The next morning, he had rolled up with much ado in a taxicab at the front door of the Thirteen Drakes, pretending he had just come down by rail from London.He would have to search the room again.Risky, but necessary.Surely the stamps must still be hidden there.Parts of this sequence of events I had suspected for some time, and even though I hadn't yet put together the remaining facts, I had already verified Pemberton's presence in Doddingsley by my telephone call to Mr.Cleaver, the innkeeper of the Jolly Coachman.In retrospect, it all seemed fairly simple.I stopped thinking for a moment to listen to my breathing.It was slow and regular as I sat there with my head resting on my knees, which were still pulled up in an inverted V.At this moment I thought of something Father had once told us: that Napoleon had once called the English “a nation of shopkeepers.” Wrong, Napoleon!Having just come through a war in which tons of trinitrotoluene were dumped on our heads in the dark, we were a nation of survivors, and I, Flavia Sabina de Luce, could see it even in myself.And then I muttered part of the Twenty-third Psalm for insurance purposes.One can never be too sure.Now: the murder.Again the dying face of Horace Bonepenny swam before me in the dark, its mouth opening and closing like a landed fish gasping in the grass.His last word and his dying breath had come as one: “Vale,” he had said, and it had floated from his mouth directly to my nostrils.And it had come to me on a wave of carbon tetrachloride.There was no doubt whatsoever that it was carbon tetrachloride, one of the most fascinating of chemical compounds.To a chemist, its sweet smell, although very transient, is unmistakable.It is not far removed in the scheme of things from the chloroform used by anesthetists in surgery.In carbon tetrachloride (one of its many aliases) four atoms of chlorine play ring-around-a-rosy with a single atom of carbon.It is a powerful insecticide, still used now and then in stubborn cases of hookworm, those tiny, silent parasites that gorge themselves on blood sucked in darkness from the intestines of man and beast alike
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