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

"Then up and down the beach again, begging the bathers to tell her if they'd seen a little boy with blond hair. It was hopeless, of course. There might have been dozens of children on the beach who answered to that description.

"And then, through sun-dazzled eyes, she saw it: a crowd gathered in the shade beneath the promenade. She burst into tears and began walking towards them, knowing what she would find: Robin had drowned, and the knot of people had gathered round to gawk. She had already begun to hate them.

"But as she drew closer, a wave of laughter went up, and she shoved her way through to the center of the crowd, not caring what they thought.

"It was a Punch and Judy show. And there, seated on the sand, tears of laughter running down his face, was her Robin. She grabbed him up and hugged him, not trusting herself to say a word. After all, it had been her fault: She had fallen asleep, and Robin had been attracted to the Punch and Judy pitch as any child would be.

"She carried him along the beach and bought him an ice, and another. Then she ran back with him to the little booth, to watch the next performance, and she joined in when he roared with laughter, and she shouted out with him 'No! No!' when Punch grabbed the policeman's stick to beat Judy on the head.

"They laughed with the rest of the crowd when Punch tricked Jack Ketch, the hangman, into sticking his own head into the noose, and — "

I had seen the traditional Punch and Judy shows nearly every year at the church fete, and I was all too familiar with the plot.

"' I don't know how to be hanged,'" I said, quoting Punch's famous words. "'You'll have to show me, then I shall do it directly.'"

"'I don't know how to be hanged,'" Sally echoed, "'You'll have to show me.' That's what Grace told the jury later, when an inquest was called into Robin's death, and those were likely her last sane words.

"Worse than that was the fact that, at the inquest, she spoke those words in that awful, strangled, quacking voice that the puppet show men use for Punch: 'I don't know how to be hanged. You'll have to show me.'

"It was ghastly. The coroner called for a glass of water, and someone on the jury lost their nerve and laughed. Grace broke down completely. The doctor insisted that she be excused from further questioning.

"The rest of what happened that awful day at the beach, and later at the farm, had to be pieced together; each of us knew a little. I had seen Robin dragging about a length of rope he'd found in the machine shed. Later, Gordon had seen him playing cowboy at the edge of Jubilee Field. It was Dieter who found him hanging in Gibbet Wood."

"Dieter? I thought it was Mad Meg." It slipped out before I could stop myself.

Sally looked instantly away, and I realized that it was one of those times when I needed to keep my mouth shut and wait things out.

Suddenly she seemed to come to a decision. "You must remember," she said, "that we were only just out of the war. If it was known in Bishop's Lacey that Robin's body had been found hanging in the wood by a German prisoner of war, well ... just think."

"It might have been like that scene from Frankenstein: furious villagers with torches, and so forth."

"Exactly," she said. "Besides, the police believed that Meg actually had been there before Dieter, but that she hadn't told anyone."

"How do you know that?" I asked. "What the police believed, I mean?"

Without realizing what she was doing, Sally was suddenly fluffing up her hair.

"There was a certain young police constable," she said, "whose name I am not at liberty to mention, who used to take me, of an evening, to watch the moon rise over Goodger Hill."

"I see," I said, and I did. "They didn't want Meg to be called up at the inquest."

"Funny, isn't it," she said, "how the law can have a soft spot like that? No, someone had seen her in the village at the time Robin went missing, so she wasn't really a suspect. It was decided that because of her ... because she was ... well, not to put too fine a point on it, that Meg was best left out of things entirely, and that's how it was done."

"So it was Dieter who found the body then."

"Yes. He told me about it that same evening. He was still in shock — hardly making sense: all about how he had come racing down from Gibbet Wood, yelling himself hoarse ... leaping fences, sliding in the mud ... running into the yard, looking up at the empty windows. Like dead eyes, they were, he kept saying, like the windows of the Brontes' parsonage. But as I said, poor Dieter was in shock. He didn't know what he was saying."

I felt a vague stirring in my stomach, but I put it down to Mrs. Mullet's Jenny Lind cake. "And where was Rupert all this time?"

"Strange you should ask. Nobody seems to remember. Rupert came and went, often at night. As time passed, he seemed to become more and more addicted to the stuff Gordon was providing him, and his visits became more frequent. If he wasn't here when Robin died, he wasn't far away."

"I'll bet the police were all over the place."

"Of course they were! At the outset, they didn't know if it was an accident, or if Robin had been murdered."

"Murdered?" The thought had never crossed my mind. "Who on earth would murder a little boy?"

"It's been done before," Sally answered sadly. "Children have always been murdered for no good reason."

"And Robin?"

"In the end, they decided there was no evidence to support that idea. Aside from Gordon and Dieter and me — and Mad Meg, of course — no one else had been in Gibbet Wood. Robin's footprints leading up Jubilee Field and round the old scaffold made it quite clear that he had gone there alone."

"And acted out the scaffold scene from Punch and Judy," I said. "Pretending he was first Punch — and then the hangman."

"Yes. That's what they thought."

"Still," I said, "the police must have had a jolly good look round the wood."

"Almost uprooted it," she said. "Measuring tapes, plaster casts, photographs, little bags of this and that."

"Isn't it odd," I said, "that they didn't spot the patch of cannabis? It's hard to believe Inspector Hewitt would have missed it."

"This must have been before his time," Sally said. "If my memory serves me rightly, it was an Inspector Gully who was in charge of the investigation."

Aha! So that was who decided to keep mum about Meg. In spite of his lack of vigilance, the man must have had at least a rudimentary heart.

"And what was the outcome?" I asked. "Of the inquest, I mean."

I knew that I could look it up later, in the newspaper archive at the library, but for now I wanted to hear it in Sally's own words. She had, after all, been on the spot.

"The coroner told the jury it must reach one of three verdicts: death by unlawful killing, death by misadventure, or an open verdict."

"And?"

"They settled on 'death by misadventure,' although they had the very dickens of a time reaching an agreement."

Suddenly, I realized that the fog was lifting, and so did Sally. Although a light mist still capped the trees in the wood above us, the river and the full sloping length of Jubilee Field, looking like a hand-tinted aerial photograph, were now laid out below us in weak sunlight.

We would be clearly visible from the farmhouse.

Without another word, Sally clambered up onto the tractor's seat and engaged the starter. The engine caught at once, roared briefly, then settled into a steady ticking hum.

"I've said too much," she told me. "I don't know what I was thinking. Mind you keep your promise, Flavia. I'm going to hold you to it."

Her eyes met mine, and I saw in them a kind of pleading.

"I could get into a lot of trouble, you know," she said.