Alan Bradley - The Weed That Strings the Hangman's Bag

What a preposterous thought. The war had been over for five years, and I had seen the Inglebys — at least Grace — as recently as last week.

Besides, I already knew that German prisoners of war were not particularly dangerous. The first ones I had seen were on my first-ever visit to a cinema, the Palace, in Hinley. As the blue-jacketed captives were marched by their armed guards into the theater and seated, Daffy had nudged me and pointed.

"The enemy!" she had whispered.

As the lights went down and the film began, Feely had leaned over and said, "Just think, you'll be sitting with them in the dark for two hours. Alone ... if Daffy and I go for sweets."

The film was In Which We Serve , and I couldn't help noticing that when HMS Torrin was sunk in the Mediterranean by the Luftwaffe's dive-bombers, although the prisoners did not applaud the deed openly, there were nevertheless smiles among them.

"Captured Germans are to not be treated inhumanely," Father had told us when we got home, quoting something he had heard on the wireless, "but are to be shown very clearly that we regard them, officers and men, as outcasts from the society of decent men."

Although I respected Father's word — at least in principle — it was clear that the man who had greeted us at Culverhouse Farm was no outcast; not by any stretch of the imagination.

Five years after the coming of peace, he could only be wearing his bull's-eyed boiler suit out of pride.

"May I present myself? I am Dieter Schrantz," he said, with a broad smile, shaking hands with each of us in turn, beginning with Nialla. From those four words alone, I could tell that he spoke nearly perfect English. He even pronounced his own name the way any Englishman would have done, with hard r s and a s and no unpleasant snarling of his surname.

"The vicar said that you should come."

"Bloody van broke down," Rupert said, jerking his head towards the Austin with, I thought, a certain measure of aggressiveness. As if he ...

Dieter grinned. "Don't worry, I'll help you run it down the lane to Jubilee Field. That's where you're billeted, you know, old chap."

Old chap? Dieter had obviously been in England for quite some time.

"Is Mrs. Ingleby at home?" I asked. I thought that it was probably best if Nialla was given a tour of the amenities, as it were, before she had to ask.

The shadow of a cloud passed over Dieter's face.

"Gordon's gone off up the wood somewhere," he said, gesturing to Gibbet Hill. "He likes to work alone most of the time. He'll be down presently to help Sally in the meadow. We shall see them when we take your 'bus down to the river."

"Sally" was Sally Straw, a member of the Women's Land Army, or "Land Girl," as they were called, who had been working at Culverhouse Farm since sometime during the war.

"All right," I said. "Hullo! Here's Tick and Tock."

Mrs. Ingleby's two tortoiseshell cats came ambling out of a shed, yawning and stretching in the sun. She often took them with her, for company, to the market, as she did several of her farm creatures, including, now and then, her pet goose, Matilda.

"Tick," she had informed me once, when I inquired about their names, "because she has ticks. And Tock because she chatters like a magpie."

Tock was walking directly towards me, already well launched into a meowling conversation. Tick, meanwhile, ambled off towards the dovecote, which rose up darkly from behind the warren of shabby, overgrown sheds.

"You go on ahead," I said. "I'll come down to the field in a few minutes."

I swept Tock up into my arms. "Who's a pretty pussy, then?" I cooed, watching from the corner of my eye to see if anyone was taken in. I knew that the cat was not: She had begun to squirm immediately.

But Rupert and Nialla were already piling into the van, which still stood shuddering away to itself in the yard. Dieter gave a shove and climbed onto the running board, and a moment later, with a wave, they were bumping out of the yard and into the lane that led down the slope to Jubilee Field and the river. A gentle backfire in the middle distance confirmed their departure.

The moment they were out of sight, I put Tock down in the dusty yard.

"Where's Tick?" I said. "Go find her."

Tock resumed her long feline monologue, and stalked off to the dovecote.

Needless to say, I followed.

THE DOVECOTE WAS A work of art. There's no other way of putting it, and I shouldn't have been in the least surprised to hear that the National Trust had its eye on it.

It was from this remarkable specimen of architecture that Culverhouse Farm had taken its name — "culverhouse" being the old word for a dovecote. This one was a tall round tower of ancient bricks, each one the shade of a faded rose, but no two of them alike. Built in the time of Queen Anne, it had once been used to breed and raise doves for the farm's dinner table. In those days, the legs of the little dovelets were snapped to keep them fattening in the nest (this fact gleaned from the kitchen chatter of Mrs. Mullet). But times had changed. Gordon Ingleby was an avid pigeon fancier, and the birds that had lived in the tower in this century were more likely to be coddled by hand than in boiling water. At the weekends, he had sent them off by rail to some far-flung flyspeck on the map of England, where they would be released to come flapping immediately back to Culverhouse Farm. Here, they would be welcomed by the slapping-off of elaborate mechanical time clocks, much petting and bragging, and a great gorging on grain by the birds.

At least, such had been the case until little Robin Ingleby had been found hanging by the neck from the rotted gallows in Gibbet Wood. Since that day, other than a few wild specimens, there had been no more doves at Culverhouse Farm.

Poor Robin, when he died, had been the same age as I was then, and I found it hard to believe that someone so young could actually be dead. Still, it was a fact.

When one lives in a village, the more things are hushed up, the more one hears, and I remembered the undercurrent of gossip that had swept through Bishop's Lacey at the time, lapping away like the tide at the timbers beneath a pier.

"They say young Robin Ingleby's gone and killed himself." "Robin Ingleby's been done in by his parents." "The little lad's been slaughtered by Satanists. Mark my words — "

Most of these theories had been leaked to me by Mrs. Mullet, and I thought of them now as I approached the tower, gazing up in wonder at its myriad of openings.

As that monk called the lector had done in the monasteries of the Middle Ages, Daffy often read aloud to us as we ate our meals. We had recently been treated to Henry Savage Landor's description, in Across Coveted Lands , of the Towers of Silence, in Persia, on top of which the Parsees placed corpses in a sitting position, with a stick under the chin to keep them upright. When the crows arrived to squabble over the body, it was considered a ticket to Heaven if the right eyeball was the first one consumed. The left was not quite so auspicious.

I could not help thinking of this now, and of the author's account of the curious circular pigeon towers of Persia, each with a deep central pit for the collection of guano, whose production was the sole reason for keeping the birds.

Could there be, I wondered, some strange connection between towers, birds, death, and corruption? As I paused there for a moment, trying to think what it might be, a peculiar sound came drifting from the tower.

At first I thought it might be the muttering and cooing away to themselves of doves, high above my head in the cote. Or was it the wind?

It seemed too sustained to be either of these, rising and falling like the sound of a ghostly air-raid siren, almost at the threshold of hearing.