"You've got goose bumps," he said, looking at me attentively. "Best go sit in the car."

He had already reached the far side of the bridge before he turned back. "There's a blanket in the boot," he said, and then vanished in the shadows.

I felt my temper rising. Here was this man -- a man in an ordinary business suit, without so much as a badge on his shoulder -- dismissing me from the scene of a crime that I had come to think of as my own. After all, hadn't I been the first to discover it?

Had Marie Curie been dismissed after discovering polonium? Or radium? Had someone told her to run along?

It simply wasn't fair.

A crime scene, of course, wasn't exactly an atom-shattering discovery, but the Inspector might at least have said "Thank you." After all, hadn't the attack upon the Gypsy taken place within the grounds of Buckshaw, my ancestral home? Hadn't her life likely been saved by my horseback expedition into the night to summon help?

Surely I was entitled to at least a nod. But no --

"Go and sit in the car," Inspector Hewitt had said, and now -- as I realized with a sinking feeling that the law doesn't know the meaning of the word "gratitude" -- I felt my fingers curling slowly into involuntary fists.

Even though he had been on the scene for no more than a few moments, I knew that a wall had already gone up between the Inspector and myself. If the man was expecting cooperation from Flavia de Luce, he would bloody well have to work for it.