The Weed That Strings the Hangman's Bag

  “She talked about Robin, her son,” I said, with a crumb of truth.

  “Get away with you!”

  “She said that Robin’s gone.”

  This was too much even for Mrs. Mullet.

  “Gone? I should say he is. He’s deader than a doorknob these five years or more. Dead and buried. I mind the day they found him, hangin’ by ’is neck in Gibbet Wood. It was a washday Monday, and I’d just hung a load on the line when Tom Batts the postman come to the gate. ‘Mrs. M,’ he says to me, he says, ‘you’d best get ready to hear some bad news.’ ‘It’s my Alf!’ I says, and he says, ‘No, it’s young Robin, Gordon Ingleby’s boy,’ and phoosh! The wind went out of me just like that. I thought I was going to—”

  “Who found him?” I interrupted. “Young Robin, I mean.”

  “Why, Mad Meg it was. Her as lives up there in Gibbet Wood. She spotted a bit of bright under a tree—that’s what she calls any old bit of ’mongery she comes across: ‘a bit of bright’—and when she goes to pick it up, she sees it’s one of them toy shovels, them as you’d take to the beach, like, and the tin sand pail, too, lyin’ right there in the woods.”

  “Robin’s mother took him to the seaside,” I was about to say, but I stopped myself just in time. I remembered that gossip withheld draws more gossip: “like flies to a magnet,” as Mrs. Mullet herself had once remarked about another matter entirely.

  “And then she saw ’im, swingin’ by the neck from that there old scaffold,” she went on. “’Is face was awful, she said—like a blackened melon.”

  I was beginning to regret that I hadn’t brought my notebook.

  “Who killed him?” I asked bluntly.

  “Ah,” she said, “that’s the thing. Nobody knows.”

  “Was he murdered?”

  “Might have been, for all that. But like I said, nobody knows for sure. They had what they call an ink-quest at the library—it’s the same thing as a poet’s mortem, Alf says. Dr. Darby got up and told them the little lad was hanged, and that’s all he could rightly say. Mad Meg claimed the Devil took ’im, but you know what she’s like. They called up the Inglebys, and that German what drives their tractor—Dieter, ’is name is—as well as Sally Straw. Dumb as Dorothy’s donkey, the lot of ’em. Including the police.”

  The police? Of course!

  The police would certainly have investigated Robin Ingleby’s death, and if my guess was right, my old friend Inspector Hewitt would have had a hand in it.

  Well, the Inspector wasn’t exactly an old friend, but I had recently assisted him with an investigation in which he and his colleagues were completely baffled.

  Rather than rely on Mrs. Mullet’s village hearsay, I’d get the facts straight from the horse’s mouth, so to speak. All I needed was an opportunity to bicycle over to the police station in Hinley. I would drop in casually, just in time for tea.

  As I cycled past St. Tancred’s, I couldn’t help wondering how Rupert and Nialla were getting on. Well, I thought, as I braked and circled back, it wouldn’t take long to find out.

  But the door to the parish hall was locked. I gave it a good old shaking and more than a few hard knocks, but no one came to let me in. Could they still be at Culverhouse Farm?

  I pushed Gladys through the churchyard to the riverbank, and lifted her across the stepping-stones. Although it was overgrown in places with weeds, and deeply rutted, the towpath brought me quickly back to Jubilee Field.

  Nialla was sitting under a tree, smoking, with Dieter at her side. He scrambled to his feet as soon as he saw me.

  “Well, well,” she said. “Look what the cat dragged in.”

  “I thought you’d be at the church.”

  Nialla twisted the butt of her cigarette fiercely against a tree trunk. “I suppose we should be,” she said, “but Rupert hasn’t found his way back yet.”

  This struck me as rather odd, since Rupert presumably didn’t know anyone in the neighborhood of Bishop’s Lacey. What—or who—could have kept him away so long?

  “Perhaps he’s gone off to see about the van,” I said, noticing that the Austin’s hood was now closed and latched.

  “More likely he’s just gone off to have a good sulk,” Nialla said. “He does that, now and again. Sometimes he just wants to be alone for a while. But he’s been gone for hours.

  “Dieter thought he saw him heading off in that direction,” she added, pointing a finger over her shoulder.

  I turned, and found myself staring up with renewed interest at Gibbet Wood.

  “Flavia,” Nialla said, “leave him be.”

  But it wasn’t Rupert I wanted to see.

  By keeping to the grassy headlands at the edge of the field, I was able to stay clear of the growing flax as I trudged steadily on upwards. It wasn’t much of a climb for me, but for Rupert, with his leg in an iron brace, it must have been torture.

  What on earth would possess the man to climb back up to the top of Gibbet Hill? Did he have some notion of flushing Meg from the dense thickets, and demanding that she hand over Nialla’s butterfly compact? Or was he in a sulk, threatened by Dieter’s blond good looks?

  I could think of a dozen more reasons, yet not one of them made perfect sense.

  Above me, Gibbet Wood clung to the top of Gibbet Hill like a green skullcap. As I approached, and then entered beneath the branches of this ancient forest, it was like stepping into a painting by Arthur Rackham. Here, in the dim green gloom, the air was sharp with the smell of decay: of funguses and leaf mold, of black humus, of slithering muck, and of bark gnawed away to dust by beetles. Bright cobwebs hung suspended like little portcullises of light between the rotted tree stumps. Beneath the ancient oaks and lichen-coated hornbeams, bluebells peeped out from the deep shadows among the ferns, and there on the far side of the glade I spotted the serrated leaves of the poisonous dog’s mercury that, when steeped in water, produced a gorgeous indigo poison that I had once transformed into the bright red color of arterial blood simply by adding a two-percent solution of hydrochloric acid.

  I thought with pleasure of how the ammonia and amides given off by the deep compost on the forest floor provided a perfect feast for omnivorous molds that converted it to nitrogen, which they then stored in their protoplasm, where it would be fed upon by bacteria. It seemed to me a perfect world: a world in which cooperation was a fact of life.

  I drew in a deep breath, sucking the sour tang into my lungs and savoring the chemical smell of decay.

  But this was no time for pleasant reflections. The day was hurrying on, and I had still to find my way to the heart of Gibbet Wood.

  The farther I went in among the trees, the more silent it became. Now, even the birds had become eerily still. This wood, Daffy had told me, was once a royal forest in which, many centuries ago, kings of England had hunted the wild boar. Later, the Black Death had taken most of the inhabitants of the little village that had grown up beneath its skirts.

  I shivered a bit as, high in the branches above me, the leaves stirred fitfully, though whether it was from the swift passage of the ghostly royal hunters or the restless spirits of the plague victims—surely they were buried somewhere nearby?—I could not tell.

  I tripped on a hummock and threw out my arms to save myself. A rotted stump of moss-covered wood was all that stood between the muck and me, and I grabbed at it instinctively.

  As I regained my balance, I saw that the wood had once been square, not round. This was no branch or tree trunk, but a cut timber that had weathered and been eaten away to something that looked like gray coral. Or petrified brain matter.

  My mind recognized it before I did: Only slowly did I realize that I was hanging on for dear life to the rotted remains of the old gallows.

  This was the place where Robin Ingleby had died.

  The backs of my upper arms bristled, as if they were being stroked with icicles.

  I released my grip on the thing and took a step backwards.

  Except for its frame and a sha
ttered set of stairs, there was little left of the structure. Time and weather had crumbled all but one or two of its floorboards, reducing the platform to a few skeletal remains that stuck up out of the brambles like the bones of a dead giant’s ribcage.

  It was then that I heard the voices.

  I have, as I have said before, an acute sense of hearing, and as I stood there under the ruined gallows, I became aware that someone was talking, although the sound was coming from some distance away.

  By rotating slowly on the spot and cupping my hands behind my ears as makeshift reflectors, I quickly determined that the voices were coming from somewhere on my left, and with careful steps, I crept towards them, slipping quietly from tree to tree.

  Suddenly the wood began to thin, and I had to take great care to keep out of sight. Peering round the trunk of an ash, I found myself at the edge of a large clearing that lay at the very heart of Gibbet Wood.

  Here, a garden had been cultivated, and a man with a battered hat and working clothes, was hoeing away industriously among the rows of widely spaced plants.

  “Well, they’re all over the bloody place,” he was saying to someone I could not yet see.

  “… Behind every fence post … hiding under every bloody hayrick.”

  As he removed his hat to mop his face and the top of his head with a colored handkerchief, I saw that the speaker was Gordon Ingleby.

  His lips, set in a weathered face, were the startling crimson hue of what Father called “the sanguine temperament,” and as I watched, he wiped away the spittle that had come with his angry words.

  “Ah! ‘The heavens set spies upon us,’” said the other person in a dramatic voice: a voice I recognized at once as Rupert’s.

  He was lounging in the shade beneath a bush, smoking a cigarette.

  My heart nearly stopped in my chest! Had he spotted me?

  Best to keep still, I decided. Don’t move a muscle. If I’m caught, I’ll pretend I came looking for Rupert and became lost in the woods, like Goldilocks. Because there was something in them that had the ring of truth, people always fell for fairy-tale excuses.

  “Squire Morton was round again last week talking a lot of rubbish to Dieter. Prying’s more like it.”

  “You’re smarter than the lot of them, Gordon. They’ve all got bricks for brains.”

  “Maybe so,” Gordon replied, “and maybe not. But like I told you, this is the end of the line. This is where Gordon gets off.”

  “But what about me, Gord? What about the rest of us? Are we just to be left hanging?”

  “You bastard!” Gordon shouted, raising his hoe in the air like a battle-ax, and taking a couple of threatening steps. He was instantly livid.

  Rupert scrambled awkwardly to his feet, holding out one hand defensively in front of him. “I’m sorry, Gord. I didn’t mean it. It’s just an expression. I didn’t think.”

  “No, you didn’t think, did you? You never do. You don’t know what it’s like living in my skin day and night—living with a dead woman, and the ghost of a dangling kid.”

  A dead woman? Could he be talking about Mrs. Ingleby?

  Well, whatever the case, one thing seemed perfectly clear: This was not a conversation between two men who had met for the first time this morning. By the sound of it, Gordon and Rupert had known one another for a very long time indeed.

  They stood there for a few moments, staring at one another, not knowing what to say.

  “Best be getting back,” Rupert said at last. “Nialla frets.” He turned and walked to the far side of the clearing, then vanished into the wood.

  When he had gone, Gordon wiped his face again, and I saw that his hands were shaking as he pulled a sack of tobacco and a packet of cigarette papers from his shirt pocket. He rolled a clumsy cigarette, spilling shreds of tobacco in his haste, then dug into his trouser pocket for a brass lighter, and lit up, inhaling the smoke with a deep sucking and exhaling so slowly I was sure he must be suffocating.

  In a surprisingly short time he had finished. Grinding the butt into the soil with the heel of his boot, he shouldered his hoe and was gone.

  I waited for about ten minutes to be sure that he wasn’t coming back, then went quickly to the spot where he had been standing. From the earth beneath his heel print, I had no difficulty in retrieving the soggy remains of his cigarette. I broke a couple of leaves from one of the plants and, using them as a makeshift pot holder, picked up the butt, double-rolled it in a fresh leaf, and shoved the thing into the bottom of my pocket. Rupert, too, had left several fag ends beneath the bush where he had been sitting. These I retrieved also, and added to the others. Only then did I retrace my steps through the wood and back across the shoulder of Gibbet Hill.

  Nialla and Rupert were perched on a couple of rotted pilings, letting the flowing water cool their bare feet. Dieter was nowhere in sight.

  “Oh, there you are!” I said brightly. “I was looking for you everywhere.”

  I undid my shoes, peeled off my socks, and joined them. The sun was well down in the afternoon sky. It was probably now too late to bicycle to Hinley. By the time I got there, it would be past five o’clock, and Inspector Hewitt would be gone for the day.

  My curiosity would have to wait.

  For a man who had recently been threatened with the blade of a sharp hoe, Rupert was in remarkably good spirits. I could see his shriveled foot, swimming round like a pale little fish, just below the water’s surface.

  He reached down, dipped two fingers in the river, and flicked a couple of drops of water playfully in my direction.

  “You’d better beetle off home for a decent meal and a good night’s sleep. Tomorrow’s the big day.”

  “Righty-ho,” I said, scrambling to my feet. “I wouldn’t miss it for the world. I’m frightfully keen on puppet shows.”

  • NINE •

  SUPPER HAD SOMEHOW BEEN survived, and the table cleared. We were sitting round it just waiting for someone to think of an excuse for us to go our separate ways: Father to his stamps, Daffy to the library, Feely to her mirror, Aunt Felicity to one of the far-flung guest bedrooms, and I to my laboratory.

  “And how’s London these days, Lissy?” Father asked.

  Since there was hardly a fortnight that passed without his traveling up there for one stamp show or another, he knew perfectly well how London was. These journeys, though, he always treated as top secret military operations. Father would rather be roasted than let Aunt Felicity know he was in the City.

  “She still has all her own teeth,” he used to tell us, “—and she knows how to use ’em.”

  Which meant, Feely said, that she wanted things her own way. Daffy said it meant she was a blood-soaked tyrant.

  “London?” Aunt Felicity said. “London is always the same: all soot and pigeons and Clement Attlee. Just one damnable deprivation after another. They ought to have men with nets to capture those children one sees in Kensington and train them to run the power plants at Battersea and Bankside. With a better class of people at the switches, the current mightn’t go off so frequently.”

  Daffy, who because of company was not allowed to read at supper, was sitting directly across the table from me, letting her eyeballs slowly and agonizingly drift towards one another, as if her brain had just died and the optic nerves and muscles were in their last throes. I would not allow her the satisfaction of a smile.

  “I don’t know what the world is coming to,” Aunt Felicity went on. “I shudder to think of the people one meets nowadays—that man on the train, for instance. Did you see him on the platform, Flavia?”

  I shook my head.

  “Neither did I,” she went on, “but I believe he kept back because he thought I’d whistle for the guard. Kept sticking his head into the compartment all the way down from London—asking if we were at Doddingsley yet. A rum-looking individual he was, too. Leather patches on his elbows and a bandanna round his neck like some brute of an apache dancer from Paris. It oughtn’t to be allowed. I ha
d, at last, to put him in his place.

  “‘When the train comes to a full stop and the signboard outside the window says “Doddingsley,”’ I told him, ‘we shall be at Doddingsley—and not a moment sooner.’”

  Now it seemed that Daffy’s brain had not only died, but that it had begun to curdle. Her right eye rolled off into one corner, while the other looked as if it were about to explode clean out of her head.

  This was an effect she had been working on for years: the ability to bulge her eyes out in two different directions at the same time.

  “A touch of the old exophthalmia,” she had called it once, and I had begged her to teach me the trick. I had practiced in front of a looking glass until my head was splitting, but I could never manage more than a slight lateral googly.

  “God moves in mysterious ways, His wonders to perform,” she had said, when I reported my failure.

  He did indeed. The very thought of Daffy’s words had given me an idea.

  “May I be excused?” I asked, already pushing back my chair. “I forgot to say my prayers this morning. I’d better see to them now.”

  Daffy’s eyes uncrossed and her jaw dropped—I should like to think in admiration.

  As I unlocked the door and walked into my laboratory, the Leitz microscope that had once belonged to Great-Uncle Tar shot me a welcoming gleam of brass. Here, close to the window, I would be able to adjust its reflecting mirror to focus a late beam of sunlight up through the specimen stage to the eyepiece.

  I snipped a lozenge-shaped sample from one of the leaves I had brought from what I now thought of as the Secret Garden in Gibbet Wood, and placed it on a glass slide beneath the lens.

  As I twiddled the focus, with the instrument set at one hundred times magnification, I found almost instantly what I was looking for: the barbed cystoliths that projected like thorns from the leaf’s surface. I flipped the leaf over with a pair of tweezers I had pinched from Feely’s mother-of-pearl vanity set. If I was correct, there would be an even greater number of these clawlike hairs on the underside—and there they were!—shifting in and out of focus beneath the snout of the lens. I sat for a few moments, staring at those stony hairs of calcium carbonate which, I remembered, had first been described by Hugh Algernon Weddell, the great botanist and globe-trotter.