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

"That's all very well, I'm sure, dear, but you'll have to — "

"I met Mrs. Ingleby, too," I persisted. "In fact, we had quite an interesting chat."

Mrs. Mullet's polishing of the salad plates slowed — and stopped. She had taken the bait.

"A chat? Her? Ha! That'll be the thirsty Friday!

"Poor soul," she added, as a quick afterthought.

"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.