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

"And there was no one else about?"

"No one, dear. Aurelia and I were in the kitchen the whole time. We had the door half closed so the light from the kitchen wouldn't spoil the darkness in the hall."

"There was no one in the passageway?"

"No, of course not. They should have had to walk through the beam of light from the kitchen door, right under our noses so to speak. Once we had the water on to boil, Aurelia and I stood right there at the crack of the door so that we could at least hear the puppet show. 'Fee! Fi! Fo! Fum.' Oh! It gives me the goose bumps just to think about it now!"

I stood perfectly still and held my breath, not moving a muscle. I kept my mouth shut and let the silence lengthen.

"Except — " she said, her gaze wavering. "I thought — "

"Yes?"

"I thought I heard a footstep in the hall. I'd just glanced over at the wall clock, and my eyes were a little dazzled by the light above the stove. I looked out and saw — "

"Do you remember the time?"

"It was twenty-five past seven. We had the tea laid on for eight o'clock, and it takes those big electric urns a long time to come to the boil. How odd that you should ask. That nice young policeman — what's his name? — the little blond fellow with the dimples and the lovely smile?"

"Detective Sergeant Graves," I said.

"Yes, that's him: Detective Sergeant Graves. Funny, isn't it? He asked me the same question, and I gave him the same answer I am going to give you."

"Which is?"

"It was the vicar's wife — Cynthia Richardson."

CYNTHIA, THE RODENT-FACED avenger! I should have known! Cynthia, who doled out good works in the parish of St. Tancred's with the hand of a Herod. I could easily see her taking it upon herself to punish Rupert, the notorious womanizer. The parish hall was part of her kingdom; the spare key to the stage doors was kept on a nail in her husband's study.

How she might have come into possession of the vicar's missing bicycle clip remained something of a mystery, but mightn't it have been in the vicarage all along?

By his own admission, the vicar's absentmindedness was becoming a problem. Hence the engraved initials. Perhaps he had left home without the clip last Thursday and shredded his trouser cuff because he wasn't wearing it.

The details were unimportant. One thing I was sure of: There was more going on in the vicarage than met the eye, and whatever it was (husband dancing naked in the woods, and so forth), it seemed likely that Cynthia was at the heart of it all.

"What are you thinking, dear?" Miss Puddock's voice interrupted my thoughts. "You've suddenly gone so quiet!"

I needed time to get to the bottom of things, and I needed it now. I was unlikely to have a second chance to plumb the depths of Miss Puddock's village knowledge.

"I — I suddenly don't feel very well," I said, snatching at the edge of a table and lowering myself into one of the wire-backed chairs. "It might have been the sight of your poor scalded hand, Miss Puddock. A delayed reaction, perhaps. A touch of shock."

I suppose there must have been times when I hated myself for practicing such deceits, but I could not think of any at the moment. It was Fate, after all, who thrust me into these things, and Fate would jolly well have to stand the blame.

"Oh, you poor thing!" Miss Puddock said. "You stay right where you are, and I shall fetch you a nice cup of tea and a scone. You do like scones, don't you?"

"I l-love scones," I said, remembering suddenly that shock victims were known to shiver and shake. By the time she came back with the scones, my teeth were chattering like marbles shaken in a jar.

She removed a vase of lily of the valley (Convallaria majalis) , whisked the starched linen cloth from one of the tables, and wrapped it round my shoulders. As the sweet smell of the flowers wafted across my nostrils, I remembered with pleasure that the plant contained a witch's brew of cardioactive glycosides, including convallatoxin and glucoconvalloside, and that even the water in which the flowers had stood was poisonous. Our ancestors had called it Our Lady's tears, or Ladder-to-Heaven, and with good reason!

"You mustn't take a chill." Miss Puddock clucked solicitously as she poured me a cup of tea from the hulking samovar.

"Peter the Great seems to be behaving himself now," I observed with a calculated tremor and a nod towards the gleaming machine.

"He's very naughty sometimes." She smiled. "It comes of his being Russian, I expect."

"Is he really Russian?" I asked, priming the pump.

"From his distinguished heads," she said, pointing to the double-headed black eagle that functioned as a hot water tap, "to his royally rounded bottom. He was manufactured in the shops of the brothers Martiniuk, the celebrated silversmiths of Odessa, and it was said that he was once used to make tea for Tsar Nicholas and his unfortunate daughters. When the city was occupied by the Reds after the Revolution, the youngest of the Martiniuks, Vladimir, who was just sixteen at the time, bundled Peter up in a wolf skin, roped him to a handcart, and fled with him on foot — on foot, fancy! — to the Netherlands, where he set up shop in one of Amsterdam's cobbled alleys, and changed his name to van den Maarten.

"Peter," she said, giving the samovar a light but affectionate pat, "was his sole possession, other than the handcart, of course. He planned to make his fortune by producing endless copies, and selling them to Dutch aristocrats, who were said to be mad about Russian tea."

"And were they?" I asked.

"I don't know," she replied, "and nor did Vladimir. He died of influenza in the great epidemic of 1918, leaving his shop and all that was in it to his landlady, Margriet van Rijn. Margriet married a farm boy from Bishop's Lacey, Arthur Elkins, who had fought in Flanders, and he brought her back with him to England not long after the end of the Great War.

"Arthur was killed when a factory chimney collapsed on him in 1924, and Margriet died of shock when they brought her the news. After her death, my sister and I found that she had willed us Peter the Great — and there was nothing for it but to open the St. Nicholas Tea Room. Twenty-five years ago, that was, and as you can see, we're still here.

"He's a very temperamental old samovar, you know," she went on, moving as if to caress his silver surface, but thinking better of it. "Of course, he's an awful old fraud. Oh, he spits boiling water and blows out fuses on occasion, but underneath it all he has a heart of gold — or at least, of silver."

"He's quite magnificent," I said.

"And doesn't he know it! Well, well, here I am talking about him as if he were a cat. When Grace was with us, she used to call him 'the Tyrant.' Imagine that! 'The Tyrant wants his polishing,' she'd say. 'The Tyrant wants his electrical contacts cleaned.'"

"Grace?" I asked.

"Grace Tennyson. Or Ingleby, as she is now."

"Grace Ingleby used to work here?"

"Oh, yes! Until she left to marry Gordon, she was our star waitress. You wouldn't think it to look at her, but she was as strong as an ox. You don't often see that in such a tiny bit of a thing.

"And she wasn't the slightest bit intimidated by Peter and his moods. Spark and spit as he may, Grace was never afraid to roll up her sleeves and have a good rummage round his innards."

"She sounds very clever," I said.

"She was all of that." Miss Puddock laughed. "All of that and more. And no wonder! One of our customers once told us — an RAF Squadron Leader, I think he was — and in confidence, of course — that Grace had the highest IQ he'd ever seen in 'the fairer sex,' as he put it: that if the people in Special Operations hadn't whisked her off to do top secret work, she might well have spent the rest of the war installing wireless sets in Spitfires."