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up the east staircase to my laboratory.
    Whenever I was upset, I made for my sanctum sanctorum. Here, among the bottles and beakers, I would allow myself to be enveloped by what I thought of as the Spirit of Chemistry. Here, sometimes, I would reenact, step by step, the discoveries of the great chemists. Or I would lift down lovingly from the bookcase a volume from Tar de Luce’s treasured library, such as the English translation of Antoine Lavoisier’s Elements of Chemistry , printed in 1790 but whose leaves, even after a hundred and sixty years, were still as crisp as butcher’s paper. How I gloried in the antiquated names just waiting to be plucked from its pages: Butter of Antimony … Flowers of Arsenic.
    “Rank poisons,” Lavoisier called them, but I reveled in the recitation of their names like a hog at a spa.
    “King’s yellow!” I said aloud, rolling the words round in my mouth—savoring them in spite of their poisonous nature.
    “Crystals of Venus! Fuming Liquor of Boyle! Oil of Ants!”
    But it wasn’t working this time; my mind kept flying back to Father, thinking over and over about what I had seen and heard. Who was this Twining—“Old Cuppa”—the man Father claimed they had killed? And why had Father not appeared at breakfast? That had me truly worried. Father always insisted that breakfast was “the body’s banquet,” and to the best of my knowledge, there was nothing on earth that would compel him to miss it.
    Then, too, I thought of the passage from Dickens that Daphne had read to us: the bruises blue and green. Had Father fought with the stranger and suffered wounds that could not be hidden at the table? Or had he suffered those injuries to the insides described by Fanny Squeers: injuries that left no external marks of violence. Perhaps that was what had happened to the man with the red hair. Which should explain why I had seen no blood. Could Father be a murderer? Again?
    My head was spinning. I could think of nothing better to calm it down than the Oxford English Dictionary. I fetched down the volume with the V s. What was that word the stranger had breathed in my face? “ Vale ”! That was it.
    I flipped the pages: vagabondical … vagrant … vain … here it was: vale : Farewell; good-bye; adieu. It was pronounced val-eh , and was the second person singular imperative of the Latin verb valere , to be well.
    What a peculiar thing for a dying man to say to someone he didn’t know.
    A sudden racket from the hall interrupted my thoughts. Someone was giving the dinner gong a great old bonging. This huge disk, which looked like a leftover from the opening of a film by J. Arthur Rank, had not been sounded for ages, which could explain why I was so startled by its shattering noise.
    I ran out of the laboratory and down the stairs to find an oversized man standing at the gong with the striker still in his hand.
    “Coroner,” he said, and I took it he was referring to himself. Although he did not trouble to give his name, I recognized him at once as Dr. Darby, one of the two partners in Bishop’s Lacey’s only medical practice.
    Dr. Darby was the spitting image of John Bull: red face, multiple chins, and a stomach that bellied out like a sail full of wind. He was wearing a brown suit with a checked yellow waistcoat, and he carried the traditional doctor’s black bag. If he remembered me as the girl whose hand he had stitched up the year before after the incident with a wayward bit of laboratory glassware, he gave no outward sign but stood there expectantly, like a hound on the scent.
    Father was still nowhere in sight, nor was Dogger. I knew that Feely and Daffy would never condescend to respond to a bell (“So utterly Pavlovian,” Feely said), and Mrs. Mullet always kept to her kitchen.
    “The police are in the garden,” I told him. “I’ll show you the way.”
    As we stepped out into the sunshine, Inspector Hewitt looked up from examining the laces of a black shoe that protruded