Alan Bradley - The Weed That Strings the Hangmans Bag

A floorboard creaked.

As I closed the coffin lid, the door opened and Mr. Sowbell walked into the room. I hadn't heard him coming.

Because I was still in a half-crouch from inspecting Rupert's burned fingers, I was able to come slowly to a standing position.

"Amen," I said, crossing myself extravagantly.

"What on earth — ?" said Mr. Sowbell.

"Oh, hello, Mr. Sowbell," I said in an appropriately hushed tone. "I just dropped in to pay my respects. There was no one here, but I thought a quiet prayer would be in order.

"Mr. Porson had no friends in Bishop's Lacey, you know," I added, pulling a handkerchief from my pocket and wiping away an imaginary tear. "It seemed such a shame, and I thought it would do no harm if I — I'm sorry if — "

"There, there," he said. "Death comes to us all, you know, old and young alike...."

Was he threatening me, or was my imagination overheated?

"And even though we expect it," he went on, "it always comes as a shock in the end."

It certainly had for Rupert — but was the man being facetious?

Evidently not, for his long face maintained its professional polish.

"And now if you will excuse me," he said. "I must prepare him for his final journey."

Final journey? Where did they get this claptrap? Was there a phrasebook published for the undertaking trade?

I gave him my ten-years-old-going-on-eleven smile, and faked a flustered exit.

The bell above the door of the St. Nicholas Tea Room jangled merrily as I stepped inside. The establishment, a bit of a climb at the top of the stairs, was owned by none other than Miss Lavinia and Miss Aurelia, the Puddock sisters: those same two relics who had provided the musical prelude to Rupert's spectacular demise.

Miss Lavinia, in a nook at the far side of the room, seemed to be locked in mortal combat with a large silver samovar. In spite of the simplicity of its task, which was the boiling of water, this Heath Robinson contraption was a bulbous squid of tubes, valves, and gauges, which spat hot water as it gurgled and hissed away like a cornered dragon.

"No tea, I'm afraid," she said over her shoulder. She could not yet see who had entered the shop.

"Anything I can do to help, Miss Puddock?" I offered cheerily.

She let out a little shriek as her hand strayed accidentally into a jet of hot steam, and the china cup she was holding crashed to the floor, where it flew into a hundred pale pieces.

"Oh, it's the little de Luce girl," she said, spinning round. "My goodness! You gave me quite a fright. I wasn't expecting to hear your voice."

Because I could see that she'd scalded her hand, I fought back my baser urges.

"Anything I can do to help?" I repeated.

"Oh, dear," she said, flustered beyond reason. "Peter always chooses to act up when Aurelia's not here. She's so much better with him than I am."

"Peter?" I asked.

"The samovar," she said, wiping her wet red hands on a tea towel. "Peter the Great."

"Here," I said, "let me — "

Without another word I took up a bowl of lemon wedges from one of the round tables and squeezed each of them into a jug of iced water. Then I grabbed a clean white table napkin, immersed it until it was soaked, wrung it out, and wrapped it around Miss Puddock's hand. She flinched as I touched her, and then relaxed.

"May I?" I asked, removing an opal brooch from her lapel and using it to pin the ends of the makeshift bandage.

"Oh! It feels better already," she said with a pained smile. "Wherever did you learn that trick?"

"Girl Guides," I lied.

Experience has taught me that an expected answer is often better than the truth. I had, in fact, quite painfully looked up the remedy in one of Mrs. Mullet's household reference books after a superheated test tube seared most of the flesh from a couple of my fingers.

"Miss Cool has always spoken so highly of you," she said. "I shall tell her she was 'bang-on,' as those nice bomber boys from the RAF used to say."

I gave her my most modest smile. "It's nothing, Miss Puddock — just jolly good luck I got here when I did. I was next door, at Mr. Sowbell's, you see, saying a prayer or two at Mr. Porson's coffin. You don't suppose it will do any harm, do you?"

I realized that I was gilding the lily with a string mop for a paintbrush, but business was business.

"Why no, dear," she said. "I think Mr. Porson would be touched."

She didn't know the half of it!

"It was so sad." I lowered my voice to a conspiratorial whisper and touched her good arm. "But I must tell you, Miss Puddock, that in spite of the tragedy on Saturday evening, my family and I enjoyed 'Napoleon's Last Charge' and 'Bendemeer's Stream.' Father said that you don't often hear music like that nowadays."

"Why, thank you, dear," she murmured damply. "It's kind of you to say so. Of course, mercifully, we didn't actually see what happened to poor Mr. Porson, being busy in the kitchen, as it were. As proprietresses of Bishop Lacey's sole tearoom, certain expectations attach, I'm afraid. Not that we resent — "

"No, of course not," I said. "But surely you must have tons of people offering to help out."

She gave a little bark. "Help? Most people don't know the meaning of the word. No, Aurelia and I were left alone in the kitchen from start to finish. Two hundred and sixty-three cups of tea we poured, but of course that's counting the ones we served after the police took charge."

"And no one offered to help?" I asked, giving her an incredulous look.

"No one. As I said, Aurelia and I were alone in the kitchen the whole while. And I was left completely on my own when Aurelia took a cup of tea to the puppeteer."

My ears went up like a flag on a pole. "She took Rupert a cup of tea?"

"Well, she tried to, dear, but the door was locked."

"The door to the stage? Across from the kitchen?"

"No, no ... she didn't want to use that one. She'd have had to brush right past that Mother Goose, that woman who was in the spotlight, telling the story. No, Aurelia took the tea all the way round the back of the hall and down to the other door."

"The one in the opposite passage?"

"Well, yes. It's the only other one, isn't it, dear? But as I've already told you, it was locked."

"During the puppet show?"

"Why, yes. Odd, isn't it? Mr. Porson had asked us before he began if we could bring him a nice cup of tea during the show. 'Just leave it on the little table behind the stage,' he said. 'I'll find it. Puppetry's dry work, you know,' and he gave us a little wink. So why on earth would he lock the door?"

As she went on, I could already feel the facts beginning to marshal themselves in my mind.

"Those were Aurelia's exact words when she'd come all the way back with his cup of tea still in her hand. 'Whatever would possess him to lock the door?'"

"Perhaps he didn't," I said, with sudden inspiration. "Perhaps someone else did. Who has the key, do you know?"

"There are two keys to the stage door, dear. They each open the ones on either side of the stage. The vicar keeps one on his keychain, and the duplicate on a nail in his study at the vicarage. It's all because of that time he went off to Brighton for the C and S — that's the Churchwardens' and Sidesmen's — cricket match, and took Tom Stoddart with him. Tom's the locksmith, you know, and with the two of them gone, no one could get on or off the stage without a stepladder. It played havoc with the Little Theater Group's production of King Lear, let me tell you!"

"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."

* TWENTY-FIVE *

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."