Alan Bradley - The Weed That Strings the Hangmans Bag

"You," I said, unable to restrain myself. "It was you."

Her face was sad, and suddenly very, very old. It was hard to believe that there remained in this woman a single atom of Grace Tennyson, that happy, outgoing girl who had once so cheerfully conquered the wired innards of Peter the Great, the silver samovar at the St. Nicholas Tea Room.

"Robin's gone," she said with a cough. "The Devil took him."

The Devil took him! Almost the same words Mad Meg had used in Gibbet Wood.

"And who was the Devil, Mrs. Ingleby? I thought for a while it was Rupert, but it wasn't. It was you, wasn't it?"

"Rupert's dead now," she said, touching her fingers to her temples as if she were dazed.

"Yes," I said. "Rupert's dead. He was the Punch and Judy man at the seaside, wasn't he? You had arranged to meet him there, and Robin saw you together. You were afraid he would tell Gordon."

She gave me a half-canny smile.

"At the seaside?" she said with a chuckling cough. "No, no — not at the seaside. Here ... in the dovecote."

I had suspected for some time that the single set of footprints — the ones that had been found five years ago, leading up Jubilee Field to Gibbet Wood — had been those of Grace Ingleby, carrying the dead Robin in her arms. In order to leave only his footprints, she had put on her child's rubber boots. They were, after all, the same size as her own. As if to prove it, she was wearing them now.

Five years after his death, she was still dressing up in Robin's clothing, trying desperately to conjure her son back from the dead. Or to atone for what she had done.

"You carried him to the wood and hung him from a tree. But Robin died here, didn't he? That's why you've made this his shrine, and not his bedroom."

How matter-of-fact it sounded, this nightmare conversation with a madwoman! I knew that if ever I made it safely home to Buckshaw, I was going to be in need of a long, hot, steaming bath.

"I told him to stay down," she said rather petulantly. "'Go back to the house, Robin,' I called out. 'You mustn't come up here.' But he wouldn't listen. Little boys are like that sometimes. Disobedient."

She coughed again, and shook her head ruefully. "'I can do a trick with the rope!' he shouted back. He'd been playing cowboy all day with a rope he'd found in a shed."

Just as Sally had said. Grace must be telling me the truth.

"He climbed up here before we could stop him. Rupert was furious. He grabbed at Robin to give him a shake, but his iron brace slipped on the bricks. Robin — "

Now, silent tears were coursing down her face.

"Fell," I said. There was no need to elaborate.

"Fell," she repeated, and the way she dragged out the word made it echo from the bricks, hovering grotesquely in the round chamber: a sound I would never forget.

With it came an idea.

"Was it Rupert who thought of the Punch and Judy story? That Robin had been playing out the scene with Punch and the hangman?"

"Where did you hear that?" she demanded, suddenly lucid, canny. I thought of Mad Meg's smile in Gibbet Wood; these two women had so much in common.

"Your evidence to the jury at the inquest," I answered. "It's public knowledge."

I did not think it necessary to add that I had heard it from Sally.

"He made me do it," she said, wiping her eyes on the sleeve of the sailor suit, and I realized for the first time how much she looked like Robin. Once noticed, the resemblance was eerie.

"Rupert told me no one would ever know. Robin's neck was broken in the fall, and if we ... if I ..."

A shudder ran through her entire body.

"If I wouldn't do as he ordered, he'd tell Gordon what had been going on between us. I'd be the one to be punished. Gordon's quick with his fists, you know."

As was Rupert. I'd seen the bruises he left on Nialla's arm. Two quick-tempered men. And rather than fighting it out between them, they both had made punching bags of their women.

"Was there no one you could talk to? The vicar, for instance?"

This seemed to set her off, and she was racked by a siege of coughing. I waited until she had finished.

"The vicar," she said, gasping for breath, "is the only one who has made these past five years bearable."

"He knew about Robin?" I could hardly believe it!

"A clergyman's lips are sealed," she said. "He's never breathed a word. He tried to come to Culverhouse Farm once a week, just to let me talk. The man's a saint. His wife thought he was — "

"In love with you."

She nodded, squeezing her eyes tight shut, as if she were in excruciating pain.

"Are you all right?" I asked.

"Wait a few minutes," she said, "and I shall be fine."

Her body was crumbling before my eyes, tipping towards the opening into the shaft.

I grabbed at her arm, and as I did so, a glass bottle that she had been clutching in her fist fell to the brick floor and bounced away, clinking, into the corner, sending a pigeon clattering up towards the opening. I dragged Grace into the center of the chamber and sprang after the bottle, which had come to rest in a mound of ancient guano.

The label told me all I needed to know: Calcium Cyanide, it said. Poison.

Rat poison! The stuff was in common farm use, particularly on those farms whose henhouses attracted vermin. There was still one of the white tablets in the bottom. I removed the stopper and smelled it. Nothing.

Grace was now flat on the floor, twitching, her limbs flailing.

I dropped to my knees and sniffed her lips. The scent of bitter almonds.

The tablets of calcium cyanide, I knew, as soon as they met the moisture of her mouth, throat, and stomach, would produce hydrogen cyanide, a toxic gas that could kill in five minutes.

There was no time to waste. Her life was in my hands. I almost panicked at the thought — but I didn't.

I took a careful look round, registering every detail. Aside from the candle, the shrine, the photograph of Robin, and his toy sailboat, there was nothing in the chamber but rubble.

Well, not quite nothing. On one wall was an ancient watering device for the birds: an inverted glass bulb and tube whose gravity feed kept a dish full for the pigeons to dip their beaks into. From the clarity of the water, it seemed as if Grace had recently filled it.

A glass cock allowed the gravity feed to be turned off. I gave it a twist and pulled the full dish carefully out of its spring clips.

Grace moaned horribly on the floor, apparently no longer aware of my presence.

Treading carefully, I moved to the spot from which the pigeon had flown. Feeling gingerly in the straw with my fingertips, I was quickly rewarded. An egg. No, two little eggs!

Putting them down gently beside the dish, I picked up the sailboat. At the bottom of its tin keel was a lead weight. Damn!

I wedged the thing into the crack between two bricks in the windowsill and pulled for all I was worth — then pulled again. The third time, the weight snapped off.

Using the sharp bottom edge of the keel as a makeshift putty knife, I leaned out the opening to the wide shelf that had served for centuries as a perch.

Below me, the farmyard was empty. No sense wasting time by yelling for help.

I ground the thin keel along the ledge until I had gathered what I needed, then scraped it off, with a reluctant finger, into the water dish.

One step left.

Although their small size made it a tricky bit of work, I cracked the eggs, one at a time, the way Mrs. Mullet had taught me: a sharp rap in the middle, then using the two halves of the shell like twin egg cups, tipping the yolk back and forth from one to the other until the last of the whites had oozed away into the waiting water dish.

Taking up the glass pill bottle, I used it as a pestle: twisting, grinding, and stirring until I had perhaps half a teacup of grayish curded mud, with the slightest tinge of yellow.

So that neither of us would knock it over — Grace was now kicking feebly and pink in the face from lack of oxygen — I sat down beside her, cross-legged on the floor, and pulled her head into my lap, face upwards. She was too weak to resist.

Then seizing her nose between my thumb and forefinger, I pulled open her mouth, hoping that, in her spasms, she wouldn't bite me.

She snapped it shut at once. This was not going to be as easy as I had thought.

I pinched her nose a little tighter. Now, if she wanted to breathe at all, it was going to have to be through her mouth. I hated myself for what I was doing to her.

She struggled, her eyes bulging — and then her mouth flew open and she sucked in a breath of air — then snapped it shut again.

As slowly and as gently as I could, I leaned over and picked up the brimming dish, awaiting the proper moment.

It came sooner than I expected. With a gasp, Grace's mouth flew open, and as she sucked in air again, I dumped the contents of the dish into her mouth and slammed it shut with the heel of my hand under her chin. The empty dish fell to the floor with a crash.

But Grace was fighting me; I could see that. Some part of her was so dead set on dying that she was keeping the stuff in her mouth, refusing to swallow.

With the little finger of my right hand, I began prodding at her gullet, like a seabird digging in the sand.

We must have looked like Greek wrestlers: she with her head locked tightly in the crook of my arm, me bending over her, trembling with the sheer physical effort of trying to keep her from spitting out the nauseating mixture.

And then, just before she went limp, I heard her swallow. She was no longer resisting. I carefully pried open her mouth. Aside from a faint and distasteful glistening of foreign matter, it was empty.

I raced to the window, leaning out as far as I could into the sunshine.

My heart sank. The farmyard was still empty.

Then suddenly there was a noise of machinery in the lane, and a moment later, the gray Fergie came clattering into view, Sally bouncing at the wheel and Dieter dangling his long legs over the gate of the trailer.

"Sally! Dieter!" I shouted.

At first they didn't know where my voice was coming from. They were looking everywhere round the yard, perplexed.

"Up here — in the dovecote!"

I dug in my pocket, fished out Alf's willow whistle, and blew into it like a demented bobby.

At last they spotted me. Sally gave a wave.

"It's Grace!" I hollered. "She's taken poison! Telephone Dr. Darby and tell him to come at once."

Dieter was already dashing for the farmhouse, running full tilt, the way he must once have done when scrambling for his Messerschmitt.

"And tell him to make sure he's got amyl nitrite and sodium thiosulfate in his bag!" I shouted, in spite of a couple of wayward tears. "He's going to need them!"

* TWENTY-EIGHT *

"PIGEON DROPPINGS?" INSPECTOR HEWITT said, for perhaps the third time. "You're telling me that you concocted an antidote from pigeon droppings?"

We were sitting in the vicar's study, sizing one another up.

"Yes," I said. "I had no other choice. Pigeon guano, when it's left outdoors in the sunlight, is remarkably high in NaNO3 — sodium nitrate — which is why I had to scrape it from the outside perch, rather than using the older stuff that was in the chamber. Sodium nitrate is an antidote to cyanide poisoning. I used the whites of pigeons' eggs to produce the suspension. I hope she's all right."

"She's fine," the Inspector said, "although we're seeking an opinion about whether to charge you with practicing medicine without a license."

I studied his face to see if he was teasing, but he didn't seem to be.

"But," I protested, "Dr. Darby said he couldn't have done better himself."

"Which isn't saying much," the Inspector said, looking away from me and out the window.

I saw that I had him beaten.

Inspector Hewitt had flagged me down on my way back to Buckshaw, and asked me to account for my presence at Culverhouse Farm.

A hastily fabricated story about fetching eggs for Mrs. Mullet, who wanted to make an angel food cake, seemed to have got me off the hook. At least for now.

The Inspector had assured me that Grace Ingleby was still alive; that she had been taken to the hospital at Hinley.

He did not say that my antidote had saved her life. I supposed only time would tell.

The vicar, having given up his desk and chair to Inspector Hewitt, stood like a black stork in the corner, rubbing at his eyeglasses with a linen handkerchief.

As Detective Sergeant Woolmer stood at one of the windows, pretending to polish an anastigmat lens from his precious camera, Detective Sergeant Graves glanced up from his notes just long enough to give me a beaming smile. I'd like to think that the almost imperceptible shake of his head that came with it was a sign of admiration.

And even though they're not yet aware of one another, I also like to think that Sergeant Graves will one day marry my rotten sister Ophelia and carry her off to a vine-covered cottage just far enough from Buckshaw that I can drop in whenever I feel like it for a good old gab about murder.

But now there was Dieter to take into account. Life was becoming so complicated.

"Just begin at the beginning," Inspector Hewitt said, suddenly back from his reverie. "I want to make sure we haven't missed anything."

Was I detecting a note of sarcasm? I hoped not, since I really liked the man, although he could be somewhat slow.

"Mrs. Ingleby — Grace — was having an affair with Rupert Porson. Rupert had been coming to Culverhouse Farm for years because ... Gordon supplied him with marijuana. It eased the pain of his polio, you see."

He must have sensed my hesitation.

"No need to worry about betraying him," he said, "Mr. Ingleby has been most frank with us. It's your version I want to hear."

"Rupert and Grace arranged to meet at the seaside, years ago," I said. "Robin saw them there together. He stumbled upon them again, later, in the dovecote. Rupert made a grab for him, or something like that, and Robin tumbled down the central shaft and broke his neck. It was an accident, but still, Robin was dead. Rupert cooked up the idea of having Grace take his body, after dark, to Gibbet Wood, and hang it from a tree. Robin had been seen by several people playing with a rope.

"It was Rupert, too, who invented the story that Robin had been playing out the scene between Punch and Jack Ketch — that he had seen it at the seaside puppet show. Punch and the hangman's tale is one that's known to every child in England. No one would question the story that Robin had accidentally hanged himself. It was just bizarre enough to be true. As a well-known puppeteer, Rupert couldn't afford to have his name linked in any way with the death of a child. He needed to erase himself from the scene of Robin's death. No one but Grace knew he had been at the farm that day.

"That's why he threatened her. He told her that if she didn't do as he wanted, he would spill the beans to Gordon — sorry, I mean that he would inform Gordon that he'd been carrying on an affair with his wife. Grace would lose both her son and her husband. She was already half mad with grief and fear, so it was probably quite easy to manipulate her.