The Weed That Strings the Hangmans Bag - Alan Bradley

Dieter's face went suddenly grim, and a fire--could it have been anger?--came into his eyes.

"It was I," he said, "who found him."

You who found him? I thought. Impossible! Mrs. Mullet had made it perfectly clear that it was Mad Meg who had discovered Robin's body.

There was a remarkably long silence, and then Feely leapt to her feet to refresh Dieter's teacup.

"You must excuse my little sister," she said with a brittle laugh. "She has rather an unhealthy fascination with death."

Full points, Feely, I thought. But although she had hit the nail on the head, she didn't know the half of it.

The rest of the afternoon was pretty much a thud. Father had made what I admit was a noble attempt to switch the conversation to the weather and the flax crops, while Daffy, sensing that little else was worthy of her attention, had crawled back into her book.

One by one, we made our excuses: Father to tend to his stamps, Aunt Felicity to have a nap before supper, and Daffy to the library. After a while, I grew bored with listening to Feely prattle on to Dieter about various balls and outings in the country, and made my escape to the laboratory.

I chewed on the end of my pencil for a while, and then I wrote:Sunday, 23rd of July, 1950WHERE IS EVERYONE? That is the burning question.WHERE IS NIALLA? After spending the night at Mrs. Mullet's cottage, she simply disappears. (Does Inspector Hewitt know she's gone?)WHERE IS MAD MEG? After erupting at the afternoon performance of Jack and the Beanstalk, she is taken to rest on the vicar's couch. And then she vanishes.WHERE IS MUTT WILMOTT? He seems to have slunk off sometime during the fatal performance.WHAT WAS RUPERT DOING AT CULVERHOUSE FARM 6 YEARS AGO? Why, when he and Dieter met at the farm on Friday, did they not admit that they already knew one another?AND WHY, ABOVE ALL, DOES DIETER CLAIM TO BE THE ONE WHO FOUND ROBIN INGLEBY'S BODY HANGING IN GIBBET WOOD? Mrs. Mullet says it was Mad Meg, and Mrs. M is seldom wrong when it comes to village chin-wagging. YET WHY WOULD DIETER LIE ABOUT A THING LIKE THAT?

Where to begin? If this were a chemical experiment, the procedure would be obvious: I would start with those materials most closely to hand.

Mrs. Mullet! With any luck, she would still be puttering in the kitchen before plundering the pantry and carting off her daily booty to Alf. I ran to the top of the stairs and peered through the balustrades. Nobody in the hall.

I slid down the banister and dashed into the kitchen.

Dogger looked up from the table where, with clinical accuracy, he was excising the skin from a couple of cucumbers.

"She's gone," he said, before I could ask. "A good half hour ago."

He's a devil, that Dogger! I don't know how he does it!

"Did she say anything before she left? Anything interesting, that is?"

With Dogger in the kitchen as an audience, Mrs. M would hardly have been able to resist blathering on about how she took Nialla in (poor waif!), tucked her into a cozy bed with a hot-water bottle and a glass of watered-down sherry, and so forth, with a full account of how she slept, what they had for breakfast, and what she left on her plate.

"No." Dogger picked up a serrated bread knife and applied its edge to a loaf of new bread. "Just that the joint is in the warming oven, apple pie and clotted cream in the pantry."

Bugger!

Well, then, there was nothing for it but to make a fresh start in the morning. I'd set my alarm for sunrise, then strike out for Culverhouse Farm and Gibbet Wood beyond. It was unlikely that there would be any clues left after all these years, but Rupert and Nialla had camped at the bottom of Jubilee Field on Friday night. If my plan were properly executed, I could be there and back before anyone at Buckshaw even knew that I was gone.

Dogger tore off a perfect square of waxed paper, and wrapped the cucumber sandwiches with hospital bed corners.

"I thought I'd make these tonight," he said, handing me the package. "I knew you'd want to get away early in the morning."

Curtains of wet mist hung in the fields. The morning air was damp and chill, and I breathed in deeply, trying to come fully awake, filling my nostrils and then my lungs with the rich aroma of dark soil and sodden grass.

As I bicycled into St. Tancred's churchyard, I saw that the Inspector's Vauxhall was gone, and so, I reasoned, was Rupert's body. Not that they would have left him crumpled on the puppet stage from Saturday evening until Monday morning, but I realized that the corpse would no longer be there inside the parish hall, its eyes bugging, its string of saliva congealed by now into a stalactite of spit....

If I thought it had been, I might have been tempted to barge in for another look.

Behind the church, I removed my shoes and socks and wheeled Gladys through the deeper water beside the submerged stepping-stones. Saturday night's rain had increased the flow of water, which roiled about her spokes and tires, washing clean the accumulated mud and clay from my ride into Bishop's Lacey. By the time I reached the other bank, Gladys's livery was as fresh as a lady's painted carriage.

I gave my feet a final rinse, sat down on a stile, and restored my footwear.

Here, along the river, visibility was even less than it had been on the road. Trees and hedges loomed like pale shadows as I cycled along the grassy verge in a gray, wooly fog that blotted all the sound and color from the world. Except for the muted grumble of the water, all was silence.

At the bottom of Jubilee Field, Rupert's van stood forlorn beneath the willows, its gaily painted sign, "Porson's Puppets," jarringly out of place with both the location and the circumstances. There wasn't a sign of life.

I laid Gladys carefully down in the grass and tiptoed alongside the van. Perhaps Nialla had crept back and was now asleep inside, and I wouldn't want to frighten her. But the lack of condensation on the windscreen told me what I had already begun to feel: that no one was breathing inside the cold Austin.

I peered in at the windows but saw nothing unusual. I went round to the back door and gave the handle a twist. It was locked.

I walked in ever-widening circles through the grass, looking for any trace of a fire, but there was none. The campsite was as I had left it on Saturday.

As I reached the bottom of the farm lane, I was stopped in my tracks by a rope hung across the road, from which a sign was suspended. I ducked underneath to read its message.

Police Investigation----No Admittance by Order----Hinley Constabulary

Inspector Hewitt and his detectives had been here. But in posting their sign, they had obviously not thought of anyone coming across the swollen river. In spite of his promise to the Inspector, Sergeant Graves had still not learned his lesson about people slipping in by way of the back door.

Very well, then. Since there was nothing to see here anyway, I would move on to my next objective. Although I could not see it in the fog, I knew that Gibbet Wood lay not far ahead at the top of Gibbet Hill. It would be wet and soggy in among the trees, but I was willing to bet that the police had not been there before me.

I dragged Gladys under the barricade and pushed her slowly up the lane, which was far too steep to pedal. Halfway to the top, I shoved her behind a hawthorn hedge, and continued my climb, hemmed in on all sides with misty glimpses of blue flax.

Then suddenly the dark trees of the wood loomed out of the mist immediately in front of me. I had come upon it without realizing how close I was.

A weathered wooden sign was nailed to a tree, bearing the red words: KEEP OUT----TRESP----

The rest of it had been shot away by poachers.

As I had known it would be, everything in the wood was wet. I gave a shiver at the clammy coldness, steeled myself, and waded into the vegetation. Before I had gone half a dozen steps into the ferns and bracken, I was thoroughly soaked to the knees.

Something snapped in the underbrush. I froze as a dark form swooped on silent wings across my path: an owl, perhaps, mistaking the heavy morning mist for its twilight hunting time. Although it had startled me, its very presence was comforting: It meant that no one else was with me in the wood.

I pushed on, trying to follow the faint paths, any one of which, I knew, would lead me to the clearing at the very center.

Between two ancient, gnarled trees, the way was barred with what seemed to be a mossy gate, its gray wood twisted with rot. I was halfway over the crumbling barrier before I realized that I was once again at the steps of the old gallows. How many doomed souls had climbed these very stairs before being turned off the platform overhead? With a gulp, I looked up at the remnants of the structure, which now was open to the sky.

A leathery hand seized my wrist like a band of hot iron.

"What you up to, then? What you doin' snoopin' round this place?"

It was Mad Meg.

She shoved her sooty face so close to mine I could see the sandy bristles on the end of her chin. The witch in the wood, I thought, for one panicky moment, before I regained my senses.

"Oh, hullo, Meg," I said, as calmly as I could, trying to tame my pounding heart. "I'm glad I found you. You gave me quite a fright."

My voice was shakier than I had hoped.

"Frights as lives in Gibbet Wood," Meg said darkly. "Frights as lives here an' not elsewhere."

"Exactly," I agreed, not having the faintest idea what she was on about. "I'm glad you're here with me. Now I shan't be afraid."

"No Devil now," Meg said, rubbing her hands together. "Devil's dead and jolly good."

I remembered how frightened she had been at Rupert's performance of Jack and the Beanstalk. To Meg, Rupert was the Devil, who had killed Robin Ingleby, shrunk him to a wooden doll, and put him on the stage. Better to approach this indirectly.

"Did you have a nice rest at the vicarage, Meg?" I asked.

She spat on the trunk of an oak as if she were spitting in a rival witch's eye.

"Her turned me out," she said. "Took old Meg's bracelet and turned her out, so she did. 'Dirty, dirty.'"

"Mrs. Richardson?" I asked. "The vicar's wife? She turned you out?"

Meg grinned a horrid grin and set off through the trees at a near-gallop. I followed at her heels, through underbrush and ferns, deadfall, and the snags of thorns. Five minutes later and breathless, we were back where we had begun, at the foot of the rotted gallows.

"See there," she said, pointing. "That's where 'e took 'im."

"Took who, Meg?"

Robin Ingleby, she meant. I was sure of it.

"The Devil took Robin right here?" I asked.

"Turned 'im into wood, 'e did," she confided, looking over her shoulder. "Wood to wood."

"Did you actually see him? The Devil, I mean."

This was something that hadn't occurred to me before.

Was there a chance that Meg had seen someone in the wood with Robin? She lived, after all, in a shack among the trees, and it seemed unlikely that much happened within the bounds of Gibbet Wood that escaped her scrutiny.

"Meg saw," she said knowingly.

"What did he look like?"

"Meg saw. Old Meg sees plenty."

"Can you draw?" I asked, with sudden inspiration. I pulled my notebook from my pocket and handed her a stubby pencil.

"Here," I said, flipping to a blank page, "draw me the Devil. Draw him in Gibbet Wood. Draw the Devil taking Robin."

Meg gave something that I can describe only as a wet snicker. And then she squatted down, flattened the open notebook against her knee, and began to draw.

I think I was expecting something childish--nothing more than scrawled stick figures--but in Meg's sooty fingers, the pencil sprang to life. On the page, the glade in Gibbet Wood slowly appeared: a tree here, a tree there; now the rotted wood of the gallows, instantly recognizable. She had started at the margins and was working in towards the center of the page.

From time to time she clucked over her work, turning the pencil over and erasing a line. She was quite good, I have to give her that. Her sketch was probably better than I might have done myself.

And then she drew Robin.

I scarcely dared breathe as I looked on over her shoulder. Little by little, the dead boy took shape before my eyes.

He was hanging quite peacefully in midair, his neck canted to one side, a look of slightly surprised contentment on his face, as if he had suddenly and unexpectedly walked into a room full of angels. In spite of the subdued light of the wood, his neatly parted hair gave off a healthy, and therefore rather unnerving, shine. He wore a striped sweater and dark britches, their legs tucked carelessly into a pair of rubber boots. He must have died quickly, I thought.

Only then did she draw the noose that cramped his neck: a dark braided thing that dangled from the gallows into the space beneath. She shaded the rope with angry slashes of the pencil.

I breathed in deeply. Meg looked up at me triumphantly, seeking approval.

"And now the Devil," I whispered. "Draw the Devil, Meg."

She looked me straight in the eye, relishing the attention. A canny smile appeared at the corner of her mouth.

"Please, Meg--draw the Devil."

Without taking her eyes from mine, she licked a finger and thumb and turned elaborately to a fresh page. She began again, and as she drew, Gibbet Wood appeared once more at her fingertips. This second sketch grew darker than the first as Meg scrubbed at the pencil marks, smearing them to suggest the half-light of the glade. Then came the gallows, viewed this time from a slightly different angle.

How odd, I thought, that she didn't begin with the Devil, as most people would be tempted to do. But only when she had set the stage to her own satisfaction with trees and bushes did she begin to rough in the figure that was to be the focus of her creation.

In an approximate oval that she had left blank upon the page until now, a sketchy figure began to emerge: arms and shoulders first, followed by knees, legs, arms, hands, and feet.

It wore a black jacket, and stood on one leg in the clearing, as if captured in the midst of a frenzied dance.

Its trousers were hung by their suspenders from a low-hanging branch.

Meg shielded the paper with her left hand as she penciled in the features. When she was finished, she thrust it at me roughly, as if the paper were contaminated.

It took me a moment to recognize the face: to recognize that the figure in the glade--the Devil--was the vicar, Denwyn Richardson.

The vicar? It was too ridiculous for words. Or was it?

Just minutes earlier Meg had told me the Devil was dead, and now she was sketching him as the vicar.

What was going on in her poor addled mind?

"Are you quite sure, Meg?" I asked, tapping the notebook. "Is that the Devil?"

"Hsssst!" she said, cocking her head and putting her fingers to my lips. "Someone's comin'!"

I looked round the glade, which, even to my heightened sense of hearing, seemed perfectly silent. When I looked back, my notebook and pencil lay at my feet, and Meg had vanished among the trees. I knew there was little point in calling her back.