Alan Bradley - The Weed That Strings the Hangmans Bag

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 shattered 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 had, 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.

More for my own amusement than anything, I placed the leaf in a test tube, into which I decanted a few ounces of dilute hydrochloric acid, then corked it and gave it a vigorous shaking. Holding it up to the light, I could see the tiny bubbles of carbon dioxide form and rise to the surface as the acid reacted with the calcium carbonate of the tiny spurs.

This test was not conclusive, though, since cystoliths were sometimes present in certain nettles, for instance. In order to confirm my findings, I would need to go a little further.

I was eternally grateful to Uncle Tar who, before his death in 1928, had bought a lifetime subscription to Chemical Abstracts & Transactions, which, perhaps because the editors had never been informed of his death, still arrived faithfully each month on the hall table at Buckshaw.

Piles of these enticing journals, each issue with a cover the exact blue of a mid-March sky, were now stacked in every corner of my laboratory, and it was among these — in one of the issues from 1941, in fact — that I had found a description of the then newly discovered Duquenois-Levine test. It was my own variation of this procedure that I was about to perform.

First I would need a small quantity of chloroform. Since I had used the last available bottle for a failed fireworks display on Buckshaw's south lawn to celebrate Joseph Priestley's birthday in March, I would first have to manufacture a fresh supply.

A quick raid below-stairs produced (from Mrs. Mullet's cleaning cupboard) a tin of chlorine bleaching powder, and from her pantry, a bottle of pure vanilla extract.

Safely back upstairs in the laboratory, I locked the door and rolled up my sleeves.

The tin of Bleachitol was, in reality, no more than calcium hypochlorite. Would calcium hypochlorite, I wondered, by any other name smell as sweet? Heated with acetone to a temperature of somewhere between 400 and 500 degrees Fahrenheit — or until the haloform reaction occurs — a quite decent chloroform may afterwards be extracted from the resulting acetate salts by simple distillation. This part of it was, as they say, a piece of cake.

"Yarooh!" I shouted, as I poured the results into a brown bottle and shoved home the cork.

Next, I stirred a half teaspoon of vanilla extract into a few drops of acetaldehyde (which, because the stuff is volatile and boils at room temperature, Uncle Tar had thoughtfully stored beneath a layer of argon in a sealed bottle), then tipped the mixture into a clean beaker into which I had already measured six and a half tablespoons of ethanol — plain old C2H5OH. This I had pinched from Father's sideboard, where it had lain unopened for ages after being brought him as a gift from a fellow philatelist who had been posted to Russia by the Foreign Office.

And now the stage was set.

Placing a fresh sample of one of the leaves into a clean test tube, I added a few drops of my alcoholic vanillin preparation (which I thought of calling the Duquenois-Levine-de-Luce reagent), and after waiting for a minute, just a nibbins of concentrated hydrochloric acid.

Again, as in my previous test, small bubbles arose in the tube as the carbon dioxide was formed, but this time, the liquid in the test tube turned quickly to a shade of blueish purple.

Excitedly, I added to the mixture a couple of drops of my homemade chloroform, which, since chloroform is not miscible in water, sank promptly to the bottom.

When the stuff had stratified into two distinct layers (the clear chloroform on the bottom and the blueish purple of the Duquenois reagent floating on top of it), I gave it a jolly good mixing up with a glass stirring rod and, holding my breath, waited for it to settle one last time.

It didn't take long: Now the chloroform layer had taken on the color of its upper blanket, the mauve of a hidden bruise.

Because I had already suspected the outcome, I didn't bother to cry "Eureka."

It wasn't parsnips Gordon Ingleby was growing in his secret glade: It was Indian hemp!

I had read about the stuff in an offprint of O'Shaughnessy's On the Preparations of the Indian Hemp, or Gunjah; Their Effects on the Animal System in Health, and Their Utility in the Treatment of Tetanus and Other Convulsive Diseases, a copy of which I had found tucked away in one of Uncle Tar's desk drawers.

Had Uncle Tar been using Indian hemp? Would that further explain his sudden and spectacular departure from Oxford as a young man?

Gunjah, or bhang, had long been known as an opium substitute, and Dr. O'Shaughnessy himself had reported great success in using it to treat a case of infantile convulsions.