Alan Bradley - The Weed That Strings the Hangmans Bag

It was Cynthia Richardson who had taken the bicycle clip — Meg's "bracelet" — away from her, and shooed her out of the vicarage.

From the vicarage, it was only a hop, step, and jump to the parish hall, where the thing turned up backstage, as the murder weapon, in Rupert's puppet theater.

That's the way it must have happened. I was sure of it: as sure as my name is Flavia de Luce. And I could hardly wait to tell Inspector Hewitt!

Below me, in the distance, on the far shore of a sea of blue flax, a gray Ferguson tractor was creeping slowly alongside a stone wall, towing a flatbed trailer in its wake. A flash of blond hair in the sunlight told me that the man on foot, unloading stones for wall-mending, must be Dieter, and there was no doubt that the person in overalls at the tractor's wheel was Sally. Even if they had been paying attention — which they weren't — they were too far away to spot me slinking down towards the farmhouse.

As I moved cautiously across the courtyard, the place seemed sunken in shadow: old stone piled upon old stone, with dead-eyed windows (as Sally had said) staring out blindly upon nothing. Which of the blank panes, I wondered, had been Robin's bedroom? Which of the empty windows had framed his lonely little face before that unthinkable Monday in September of 1945, when his short life had ended so abruptly at the end of a rope?

I gave a token knock at the door, and waited a respectful thirty seconds. At the end of that time I turned the knob and stepped inside.

"Mrs. Ingleby?" I called. "Mr. Ingleby? It's me, Flavia. I've come to see if you have any extra-large eggs."

I didn't think there would be a reply, and I was right. Gordon Ingleby was far too hardworking to be mooning about his house while there was still a trace of daylight outside, and Grace — well, Grace was either in her dovecote tower or wandering the hills. The inquisitive Mrs. Mullet had once asked me if I ever came upon her in my rambles about the shire.

"She's a queer one, that Grace Ingleby," she'd said. "My friend Edith — that's Edith Crowly, dear — her as was Edith Fisher before she married Jack — was walkin' over to her choir-practor's appointment in Nether Stowell — she'd missed the bus, you see — and she spotted Grace Ingleby comin' out of a copse at the bottom of Biddy's Lane which goes over the hill to nowhere.

"'Grace!' she called out to her. 'Yoo-hoo, Grace Ingleby!' but Grace slithered through a stile — those are her very words: 'slithered through a stile,' if you can picture it, and by the time she got there herself, Grace was gone. 'Gone like a dog's breath in December.' That's what she said."

When it came to village gossip, Mrs. M was infallible, like Pope Pius IX.

I moved slowly along the corridor, fairly confident that I was alone in the house. At the end of the hall, beside a round window, a grandfather clock was "tocking" away to itself, the only sound in the otherwise silent farmhouse.

I looked quickly into each room: parlor, cloakroom, kitchen, pantry ...

Beside the clock, two steps led up to a small square landing, and by peering round the corner, I could see that a narrow stairway continued upwards to the first floor.

Tucked in beneath the stairs was a cupboard, its oddly angled door of dovetailed boards fitted out with a splendid doorknob of green and white china that could only have been Wedgwood. I would have a jolly good dig through it later.

Each step gave out its own distinctive wooden groan as I ascended: like a series of old coffin lids being pried open, I thought with a pleasant shudder.

Steady on, Flave, old girl. No sense getting the wind up.

At the top of the stairs was a second small landing, from which, at right angles, another three steps led to the upstairs corridor.

It seemed obvious that all the rooms up here were bedrooms, and I was right: A glance into each of the first two revealed cold, spartan chambers, each with a single bed, a washstand, a wardrobe, and nothing more.

The large bedroom at the front of the house was Gordon and Grace's — no doubt about it. Aside from a double dresser and a double bed with a shabby quilt, this room was as cold and sterile as the others.

I had a quick snoop in the dresser drawers: on his side socks, underwear, a wristwatch with no strap, and a greasy, much-thumbed deck of playing cards bearing the crest of the Scots Greys; on hers, slips, knickers, a bottle of prescription sleeping ampules (my old friend chloral hydrate, I noted: C2H3Cl3O2 — a powerful hypnotic that when slipped in alcohol to American thugs was called a "Mickey Finn." In England, it was slipped to high-strung housewives by country doctors and called "something to help you sleep.").

I couldn't keep back a quick smile as I thought of the time that, using no more than alcohol, lavatory cleaner, and a bottle of chlorine bleach, I had synthesized a batch of the stuff and given it, inside a doctored apple, to Phoebe Snow, a prize pig belonging to our neighbor Max Wight. Phoebe had taken five days and seventeen hours to sleep it off and, for a while, "The Remarkable Sleeping Pig" had been the eighth wonder of the British agricultural world. Max had graciously lent her for the fete at St. Tancred's, where Phoebe could be viewed, for sixpence a time, snoring in the back of a lorry marked "Sleeping Beauty." In the end, she had raised nearly five pounds for the choir's surplice fund.

With a sigh I returned to my work.

At the back of Grace's drawer, tucked beneath a soiled linen handkerchief, was a well-thumbed Bible. I flipped open the cover and read the words on its flyleaf: Please return to the parish church of St. Tancred's, Bishop's Lacey.

As I was putting it back into the drawer, a slip of paper fell out and fluttered to the floor. I picked it up with my fingernails, taking great care not to leave my dabs on the thing.

The words were written in purple ink: Grace — Please call if I may provide any further solace. And it was signed Denwyn.

Denwyn Richardson — the vicar. Whom Mad Meg had seen dancing naked in nearby Gibbet Wood.

I pocketed the evidence.

All that was left now was the small bedroom at the back of the house. Robin's bedroom. It had to be. I made my way across the silent landing and stopped in front of the closed door. It was only then that I began to feel a little apprehension. What if Gordon or Grace suddenly stormed into the house and up the stairs? How could I possibly explain my invasion of their bedrooms?

I put an ear to the door's dark paneling and listened. Not a sound.

I turned the knob and stepped inside.

As I had suspected, the room was Robin's, but it was the room of a little boy who had been dead five years: a pathetically small bed, folded blankets, an empty wardrobe, and linoleum on the floor. No shrine, no candles, no framed pictures of the deceased astride a rocking horse or hanging from his knees in an apple tree. What a bitter disappointment!

It was as bare and simple as van Gogh's Bedroom in Arles, but without the warmth; the room was as cold and impersonal as the winter moon.

After a quick look round, there was no more to see, and I stepped outside, closing the door respectfully — almost tenderly — behind me.

And then I heard a footstep downstairs.

What was I to do? The possibilities flashed across my brain. I could gallop down the stairs in tears, pretending I had become lost and disorientated while sleepwalking. I could claim I was suffering a nervous breakdown and didn't know where I was; that I had seen, from the farmyard, a face at an upstairs window, beckoning me with a long finger: that I had thought it was Grace Ingleby in distress.

Interesting though they were, these actions would all come with consequences, and if there was one thing I did not need, it was to introduce complications to my life. No, I thought, I would sneak down the stairs and hope like mad that I would not be caught.

But the idea died almost before it was born. The instant I put my foot on it, the top step gave out a ghastly groan.

There was a flapping near the bottom of the stairs, as if a large bird were trapped in the house. I went slowly, but steadily, down the rest of the staircase. At the bottom, I stuck my head round the corner and my blood ran cold.

A beam of bright sunlight illuminated the end of the hallway. In it, a little boy in rubber boots and a sailor suit was vanishing through the open door.

* TWENTY-SEVEN *

I WAS SURE OF IT.

He had been in the cupboard beneath the stairs all along. I stood there, stock-still at the open door, faced with a dilemma. What should I do? I knew for certain that once I stepped outside this farmhouse, I would not be likely to enter it ever again. Best to have a quick look behind the angled door now, before setting off in pursuit of the sailor-suited apparition.

Inside the dim cupboard, a length of string dangled from a naked bulb. I gave it a tug and the space sprang to feeble light. It was empty.

Empty, that is, except for a pair of child's rubber boots, very much like the ones I had just seen on the feet of the figure in the doorway.

The chief difference was that this pair of Dunlops was clodded with clay, still wet from the morning's rain.

Or the grave.

As I dashed through the open front door, I caught a glimpse of the navy blue sailor suit, just disappearing behind the machine shed. Beyond those rusty galvanized walls, I knew, was a bewildering warren of outbuildings: a maze of sagging sheds, any one of which could easily provide a dozen hiding places.

Off I loped in pursuit, like a hound on the scent. It never occurred to me to be afraid.

But then I slid to a sudden stop. Behind the machine shed, a narrow alley led off to the right. Had the fugitive darted down it to throw me off the track? I edged along the narrow passage, taking great care not to touch the neglected walls on either side. A single scratch from any one of the razor-sharp flaps of ripped tin would almost certainly end in tetanus, and I would end up hog-tied in a hospital ward, foaming at the mouth and wracked by bone-breaking spasms.

How happy Daffy and Feely would be!

"I told you she would come to no good end," Daffy would tell Father. "She should never have been allowed to run loose."

Accordingly, I inched slowly, crab-wise, along the narrow passage. When I finally reached the end, I found my way blocked on the left by a stack of battered petrol drums; on my right by a nettle-ridden pigpen.

As I edged back along the Passage of Death, which seemed, if anything, even more narrow on the return journey, I stopped to listen, but other than the distant sound of clucking hens, I could hear nothing but my own breathing.

I tiptoed softly along between the tumbledown sheds, paying close attention to my peripheral vision, aware that, at any moment, something could pounce upon me from a darkened doorway.

It wasn't until then that I noticed the tracks on the ground: tiny footprints that could only have been made by the waffle-patterned soles of a child's Dunlop rubber boot.

With all of my senses on high alert, I followed their trail.

On past the machine shed they led me; past the rusting hulk of an ancient tractor that leaned crazily to one side, missing a back wheel, looking for all the world like something half sunk in the sands, some ancient engine cast up by the sea.

Another jog to the left and I found myself at the foot of the dovecote, which towered above me like a fairy-tale castle, its piebald bricks stained almost golden by the late light of day.

Although I had been here before, it had been by a different route, and I slowly crept round it to the decrepit wooden door, the sharp pong of pigeon droppings already beginning to fill my nostrils.

Perhaps I had been wrong, I thought for a moment: Perhaps the boy in the sailor suit had run straight on past the tower, and was, by now, well away across the fields. But the footprints in the soil proved otherwise: They led straight to the dovecote door.

Something brushed against my leg and my heart nearly stopped.

"Yow!" said a voice.

It was Tock, the more vocal of the Inglebys' cats.

I put a finger to my lips to shush her, before I remembered that cats don't read sign language. But perhaps they do, for without another sound, she crouched low to the ground and slunk off into the shadows of the dovecote's interior.

Hesitantly, I followed her.

Inside, the place was as I remembered it: the myriad lights beaming in through chinks in the ancient brickwork; the claustrophobic, dust-choked air. This time, though, there was no banshee keening spilling out from the room above. The place was as silent as the crypt that lies beneath Death's own castle.

I put one foot onto the scaffolding and peered up to where it disappeared into the gloom above my head. The old wood let out a baleful croak, and I paused. Whoever — or whatever — was above me in the near-darkness, knew now that I had them cornered.

"Hallo!" I called out, as much to cheer myself as anything. "Hallo! It's me — Flavia! Anyone up there?"

The only sound from above was the buzzing of bees round the upper windows of the dovecote, grotesquely amplified by the tower's hollow structure.

"Don't be frightened," I called. "I'm coming up."

Little by little, one small step at a time, I began my precarious ascent. Again, I felt like Jack, this time climbing the beanstalk; dragging myself up, inch by inch, to face some unknown horror. The old wood creaked horribly, and I knew that it could crumble at any moment, dashing me down to certain death on the flagstones below, in much the same way that the giant — and Rupert — had come crashing down upon the puppet stage.

The climb seemed to go on forever. I stopped to listen: There was still no sound but that of the bees.

Up and up I went again, shifting my feet carefully from one wooden rung to the next, clutching at the crosspieces with fingers that were already beginning to grow numb.

As my eyes at last came level with the arched opening, the interior of the upper chamber came into view. A figure was hunched over the shrine to Robin Ingleby: the same figure that had fled the farmhouse.

On its knees, its back turned to me, the small apparition was dressed in a white and navy sailor suit with a middy collar and short trousers; the waffle soles of its Dunlop rubber boots were almost in my face. I could have reached out and touched them.

My knees began to tremble violently — threatening to buckle and send me plummeting down into the stony abyss.

"Help me," I said, the words brought up suddenly, inexplicably, and surprisingly, from some ancient and reptilian part of my brain.

A hand reached out, white fingers seized mine, and with surprising strength, hauled me up to safety. A moment later I found myself crouched, safe but trembling, face-to-face with the specter.

While the white sailor suit, with its crown-and-anchored jacket, and the Dunlop boots undoubtedly belonged to the dead Robin Ingleby, the strained and haggard face that stared back at me from beneath the beribboned HMS Hood hat was that of his tiny mother, Grace.