The Burry Man’s Day

Chapter Nine

‘So,’ I said to Alec back down in the library, ‘what do you think?’ Cadwallader was off on some errand but Buttercup was there, on the edge of her seat with interest, her buttery curls bouncing as she chewed her cake.

‘Can they possibly be as they seem?’ said Alec, meaning the Turnbulls.

‘Are they for real?’ said Buttercup in gurgling American. ‘That’s how you’d say it in New York, darling,’ she said as we turned to stare. ‘You’d say “Are they for real?” In the Outer Burghs anyway.’

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘One does meet some strange people who turn out to be exactly what they portray themselves to be. Look at Hugh. He’s “for real”.’

‘Poor old Hugh,’ said Alec. ‘You are mean about him, Dan. And I’m beginning to see the other side of it, now. Gilverton is in better heart and better repair than many a grander -’

‘Spare me, Alec, please,’ I begged him. ‘It’s not the doing. It’s the reporting afterwards. I spend a great deal of my time at dress-fittings. Or I used to anyway, and Hugh is often pleased with the results, but I don’t bring home the paper patterns and spread them on the tea-table to explain how it’s done. And to return to the subject, if they are to be relied upon, then what that means is that we need to explain why those burdock seeds ended up on the Dudgeons’ midden.’

‘It’s not half as glamorous as I thought, being a detective,’ grumbled Buttercup.

‘It depends on the case,’ I said. ‘If I murder you now, for interrupting, there won’t be any middens involved.’

Buttercup pursed her lips ostentatiously and I resumed.

‘Now, what I thought was this: perhaps Mrs Dudgeon always brings them home – perhaps it’s part of the mystical magical element. But this year, of course, they would have been the last thing on her mind and so one of the sisters may have dealt with them instead. Some sister who’s not much of a Gertrude Jekyll and who simply thought, “Bits of dead plant: put them with all the other bits of dead plant,” which is exactly what I would have done had it been me. We can easily find out – and by we I mean you, darling – from one of the Burry Man’s two helpers what usually happens to the seeds at the end of the day. And you’ll be killing two birds with one stone if you seek them out, Alec, because they will also be able to tell you whether they saw anyone slip Robert Dudgeon the famous sandwich.’ I saw Buttercup get ready to remind me that he could not eat a thing all day – she was very proud of having spotted this before anyone else – but I quelled her. ‘In a packet, I mean. For later. We certainly need to find that out.’

‘The sandwich?’ said Alec. ‘I don’t quite… I had a dream about a sandwich. Last night, I think.’

‘It wasn’t last night, darling,’ I told him. ‘It was luncheon today. And you weren’t dreaming, you were listening to me talking through the alcoholic haze.’ Alec nodded rather sheepishly.

‘Now, if the Burry Man doesn’t usually take his burrs home for some ritual purpose at the end of the day, then we need to find out at whose instigation they ended up back at the cottage this year. Who gathered them up and put them in the cart. Because – and it gives me great pain to say this – I can’t see any reason for them to be whisked away from the scene except the most sinister reason imaginable.’

‘Oh Dandy, you can’t be serious,’ said Alec. Buttercup looked puzzled.

‘I know, I know,’ I said. ‘But Mr Turnbull – or to be more exact Mrs Turnbull – with her comfortable knowledge of local fungi got me thinking. Isn’t there some kind of mushroom – toadstool, really – that’s completely harmless if ingested in most circumstances, but absolutely deadly if taken along with alcoholic drink?’

‘Is there?’ said Alec.

‘I’m sure there is,’ I said. ‘You never met my parents, darling, but they were most… what’s the word, Buttercup?’

‘Mad?’ said Buttercup. ‘Not to be unkind, but I’d say they were mad.’

‘Well, certainly eccentric,’ I admitted. ‘William Morris wasn’t nearly earthy enough for them. William Cobbett, now! And they thumbed through Culpeper’s Herbal as though it were Whitaker’s Almanack.’

Buttercup snorted. ‘D’you remember, Dan, when I came to stay with you and your mother burnt my bodice in the drawing-room fire and gave me that leaflet about consumption and healthy lungs?’ We both laughed. ‘Although I must say,’ she went on, ‘it was wonderful afterwards. No corsets for three glorious weeks until I got home again and my mother whisked me straight to the Army and Navy. She was shocked to the core.’

‘I must have overheard it from them,’ I said. ‘I’m absolutely sure that there is such a mushroom. And – I can’t believe I’m giving air to this when Cad isn’t here to enjoy it – but on the subject of untraceable poisons, there’s “untraceable” and then there’s “perfectly traceable if one looks for it but so unlikely that one doesn’t”. And I just wonder. If the burrs were poisoned, then the poison wouldn’t be in the stomach at all, but only in the blood. And if the doctor didn’t check the blood for that particular poison – and why would he? – then Bob’s your uncle.’

‘But are you saying that Mrs Dudgeon did this?’ said Alec. ‘Wouldn’t she burn them in that case?’

‘No, I don’t think she did do it,’ I said, ‘if anyone actually did anything. It’s the Turnbulls and Miss Brown who are in my sights at the moment. The Turnbulls because they have the required knowledge and their peculiar ideas almost amount to a motive and Joey Brown because she has acted rather shiftily more than once and she obviously has something on her mind. And actually, of course! That’s what she might have been doing round the back this morning. Putting the burrs on the heap or checking that they had been or something. That would make perfect sense. But… let’s consider Mrs Dudgeon for a moment.’

‘If we find out that it was not her idea to take the burrs home, then she is in the clear,’ said Alec.

‘But if it was her idea,’ I supplied, ‘then perhaps the reason she was so desperate to get rid of all her sisters and have the place to herself was so that she could go out and burn them.’

‘And now she has got the place to herself,’ said Alec, sitting up suddenly.

‘Yes indeed, but only by taking the extreme step of sending her husband’s body to the undertakers for its last night above ground. And that obviously took a lot of resolve to carry through, Alec. She was visibly pained at the thought of doing it. And for that reason I’m willing to bet that if there was a murder it wasn’t anything to do with Mrs Dudgeon. I bet if you track down someone who was there you’ll find that it wasn’t her who put the burrs in the cart.’

‘Well, who then?’ said Buttercup.

‘Who indeed,’ said Alec. ‘If we knew that we’d know everything.’

‘We’re getting a long way ahead of ourselves here,’ I said, trying to remain the voice of reason, despite my excitement. ‘We don’t know yet that it wasn’t par for the course. We don’t know if this mushroom works through the bloodstream as well as the digestive system. We don’t even know if it grows here or if it’s in season. And we don’t know if it’s something that would stick out during the post-mortem like a sore thumb. So let’s stay calm.’

‘But the burrs on the midden heap?’ said Alec.

‘Oh yes, certainly,’ I said. ‘They need to be got away before Mrs Dudgeon or anyone else has a chance to start a bonfire and destroy them. But how we are to get them without being seen…’

‘Ooh!’ exclaimed Buttercup.

Alec and I waited for more, but she shook her head.

‘I half remembered something,’ she said. ‘But I’ve forgotten what it was.’

‘Well, do your best, Dandy,’ said Alec. I was about to protest when I realized he was right. As odd as it would be for me to be spotted skulking around in the cottage garden, it would be ten times odder for Alec. Why had I put the horse droppings on top, I lamented. It would have been bad enough without them; it would be ghastly now, and Grant was going to be livid.

I was just on my way out of the door with two sacks and a pair of borrowed gardening gloves when Buttercup hallooed from above me and knelt down to talk to me through the grille of the murder hole.

‘I’ve remembered,’ she sang out. ‘Don’t worry about being caught, Dandy. I was supposed to tell you from Cad, that he’s loaned out the Austin and a boy to take Mrs Dudgeon and “Donald’s” wife whoever “Donald” is to the Co-operative draper to be fitted up with their mourning. Sorry.’

‘Anything else?’ I said, resisting the urge to rush upstairs and box her ears.

‘Um? Yes! The children are at “their Auntie’s Betty’s” so you have a free run for poking about at the cottage.’

‘I see,’ I said. ‘So there was no need to borrow the dog, which rolled in the dung, which went on the heap, which I’m about to toss like a salad with my bare hands. Well, gardening gloves. You are impossible, Buttercup.’ I thought for a moment. ‘This Donald has been doing all the least enticing jobs thus far and if his wife merits shop-bought mourning, then I must be right in thinking that he’s Mr Dudgeon’s brother. And if this wife being at the draper’s gives me a clear run then they must live next door. Ah yes, that makes sense. His wife is “Izzy who has her hands full with eight”. At last they all begin to fall into place. I’ll bet this trip to the draper’s is the most fun poor Izzy has had all year.’

If I had expected either familiarity or the scent of the chase to drive away other more fanciful notions on this third trip through the woods, then I soon found out I was mistaken: I still had the unnerving sensation of being watched as I strode along, and now when I told myself that there were no such things as ghosts I could answer myself that it need not be a ghost but might be a murderer, wondering what I was up to and just about to work it out and come up behind me to put his hands around my throat. It was Mr Turnbull’s hands I imagined in this little scene and Mr Turnbull’s scrubbed cheeks and shining eyes I imagined being the last thing my eyes ever saw in this life; his wife’s voice murmuring ‘That’s right, my dear’ being the last sound my ears ever heard. Despite working myself up into a muck sweat with these fantasies, however, I reached the back garden of Mrs Dudgeon’s cottage unmolested, drew on my gardening gloves and set to work.

The horse dung rolled away more easily than I expected and I did not have to pick too many little seeds out of it with my gloved fingers. I deliberated fairly long, in fact, whether I had to pick any at all. Would every burr be poisoned if this was indeed what had happened? Or would only a few? If only a few, though, how ironic if it happened to be those few I left behind. At last, the spirit of Nanny Palmer came to rest on my right shoulder and I heard her voice telling me that this job was like all others in the matter of being worth doing and therefore worth doing well.

So the light was beginning to fade by the time I was finished. Actual sunset was not until eightish but the clearing was very small and the spruce trees around the back of it quite well grown, so even as early as this the gardens had seen the last of the afternoon’s sunshine. Mrs Donald Dudgeon’s washing would get damp again, I thought, if she was not home soon to take it in.

As I glanced at it upon this thought, my heart leapt up into my throat and I gave a cry. There was a figure standing in the Dudgeons’ back doorway, standing quite still and looking towards me, and without being aware of having decided to do so I found myself running into the trees, the sacks forgotten. This was not prudence in the face of the unknown, nor even self-preservation on the off-chance that this figure might mean me harm; it was blind, whickering terror, for the figure in the doorway was Robert Dudgeon.

‘A ghost, a ghost, a ghost,’ I snivelled under my breath, and: ‘Don’t look back, Dandy! Don’t look back!’, and I kept running until the clearing was out of sight and the trees had closed silently around me. Then I began simultaneously to tire, to slow and to gather my wits about me. When I finally stopped, panting and shaking, to lean against a trunk and catch my breath I almost – alone as I was – blushed for shame. There were two possibilities: either I had seen nothing at all, only shadows; or I had seen someone of the same build and colouring as Robert Dudgeon who just happened to be standing in his doorway. I could not, however, even be sure of that much, because when I thought hard I realized that it might just as easily have been the other doorway – I had only glanced. And if it was the other doorway, then it was pretty clear who the ghost was. I straightened my clothes, ruffled and untucked by my sudden sprinting, patted my beaming cheeks with my fingers in an attempt to cool them down, and set off back the way I had come.

When I reached the clearing once more, the ghost had – quite understandably – come down the garden to the midden heap where he stood, hands on hips, wondering. Of course, it was not Robert Dudgeon, although he did look rather like him. I arranged a smile on my face and prepared to meet Donald.

‘Please forgive me,’ I said as I neared him. He looked up at me, rather dazed. ‘You must wonder what on earth… And please accept my sincere condolences.’ Donald Dudgeon certainly looked grief-stricken enough to make this trite little phrase a necessity rather than a mere politeness. He was obviously quite a bit younger than his brother but he was drawn and tired, pinched with grief.

‘You must wonder what on earth I’m up to,’ I said again. ‘Let me explain. One of your sisters-in-law. Or would they…? One of Mrs Dudgeon’s sisters, that is, Mrs Robert Dudgeon. Oh well, anyway, one of the ladies seems to have put the burrs from Friday here on the midden instead of on the fire. And they won’t rot down, you know. Well, you must know,’ I gestured around the neatly bulging vegetable patch in his own garden, ‘and I happened to notice and I thought how sad for your – for the widow when she sees them. How awful, in fact, next spring, just when she might perhaps be beginning to get on top of things and she comes out to start her garden full of hope and… and there they are. Do you see? None of my business, obviously, but do you see?’

He looked at me very closely, appraising me as though I were a specimen of some exotic genus and he a collector trying to decide if I was a new discovery or if he had one of this type already. It was a most unnerving examination to find oneself subjected to, and I was slightly mesmerized as I looked back innocently (I hoped), returning his stare. It is foolish, of course, to imagine that the lower orders are simple to a man (especially when one considers that some of one’s own set are so very simple that to call them ‘simple’ at all and not something much plainer is more courtesy than accurate description). Still, it comes as a surprise sometimes, and certainly it came as a surprise to me then, to look into the face of a working man such as this and see there such a calculating intelligence, such knowing and complicated sadness, as though the world were laid bare before him and the understanding of it wearied him half to death.

The only way to interpret the next look that flitted over his face was as one of decision and dismissal. He seemed to conclude that I was of no interest to him and without actually saying anything he suggested that I was free to go on my way. And to be sure, it would not have taken too much wisdom and intelligence to categorize me as a harmless lunatic given the drivel I had just been spouting.

‘So,’ I said, gathering up my two sacks by the necks and taking a deep breath. ‘I shall take these away and burn them and Mrs Dudgeon need never think about them again.’

‘That is most helpful of you,’ he said. ‘Thank you.’ His voice as much as his face was weary-sounding, but he spoke well for one of his class, the local accent still there in the clipped vowels and hissed consonants but the words articulated with care. With such care, I suddenly realized, that the most obvious explanation for all of his oddness was that he was, this very minute, profoundly drunk. I remembered the bottles on his rubbish heap and how he had fallen asleep beside the corpse the night before and had not woken when Mrs Dudgeon left the cottage to wander in the woods.

‘I hope it all goes well for you tomorrow,’ I said, still disposed to be sympathetic, remembering that his brother had just died, but instead of accepting my kindness in good spirit, he reared backward and stared at me. ‘Sorry,’ I blurted. ‘I didn’t mean to suggest that it could be a happy day. I mean, I know it’s a funeral, but I hope it all goes smoothly and isn’t too much of a strain.’ This seemed to mollify him; he relaxed again and nodded and I, not wanting to try another remark after that last one had gone down so very badly, simply nodded back, turned to the woods and strode away.

This time, tramping through the trees like a fairy-tale woodcutter with my hessian sacks, I felt none of the jitters from all my earlier trips even though the sun was low enough to flash in and out between the tree trunks in a way that could easily have suggested countless figures flitting between the trees all around me, and perhaps it was because I was not peering around for spooks that I spotted something of great actual, concrete interest that I might otherwise have missed.

I was walking with my head down, beginning to feel the weight of the sacks in my shoulders, even though dried burdock seeds are not particularly solid little objects, musing on how implausible it was that a woodcutter, even a very burly one, could carry his slumbering children in sacks over his shoulder deep into the woods to leave them there, and trying to remember which fairy tale it was where a burly woodcutter did so, and thus entranced by my floating thoughts and the steady crimp, crimp of my feet on the needles beneath me – dreaming and dawdling, Nanny Palmer used to call it – I saw something flash. A step further on, the low shaft of sunlight had shifted and the object had disappeared, but I stopped, returned to what I thought must be the same spot and then rocked backwards and forwards, moving my head, until it caught the light again. I trained my eye on it and moved closer.

‘Good God above,’ I whispered under my breath as I crouched down beside it and poked it clear of the forest litter which was just beginning to cover it up for good. I had no idea what it meant or how it changed things, but I was very pleased to have found it, for it seemed to add a little measure of sense to Mrs Dudgeon’s midnight wandering. It was, of course, the pen. I picked it up by putting a gloved finger against each end, thinking of fingerprints, and dropped it into my dress pocket. Alec was going to love this.

Almost home, a few minutes later, nearing the edge of the woods at last, I did indeed catch a glimpse between the tree trunks of countless figures bearing down on me, but once again my heart and other innards took the sight in their stride because there was no mistaking these: the sun was burnishing their flaming tresses as the little Dudgeons from next door made their way home.

‘Hello there,’ I called to them, and was surprised to see some of the smaller ones clutch at each other and a couple of the medium-sized brothers falter in their steps. ‘It’s only me,’ I said. ‘You remember me.’ I thought, too late, that perhaps I should have stashed the sacks behind a tree before they saw them, but with the typical lack of interest all children show in the doings of adults they barely gave these a glance. Anyway, I reasoned to myself, the way they swarmed around the woods like so many termites, the sacks of burrs were probably safer in my hands than behind any tree within swarming distance. The children were not however, I could not help but notice as I drew near them, in a swarming mood, but stood in a clump in the middle of the path and waited for me to reach them. There were six of them today, only the oldest sister ‘wee Izzy’ and the tiny baby missing. The littlest but one tot was being borne along in a well-worn pushchair by the biggest brother.

‘On your way home from Auntie Betty’s?’ I asked them. A few of them nodded and little Lila’s lip began to tremble. I began to tell myself that it was only to be expected that they were subdued, since their uncle had died and tomorrow was his funeral, but then I remembered that the first time I had met any of the happy band had been the day of the death itself and that they had been absolutely irrepressible then.

‘What’s the matter?’ I asked them. ‘You seem a bit glum.’

‘We dinnae want to go through they woods wurselves,’ said one of the middle-sized brothers.

‘Why ever not?’ I asked, amazed.

‘Cos of the demon,’ said Lila. Her big brothers hung their heads and one of them nudged her to shut her up.

‘But you’re a match for any demon,’ I assured them. ‘Weren’t you going to catch him a few days ago?’

‘We thocht he was a pretendy one,’ said Lila. ‘But now we ken he’s a real one.’

‘I dinnae want to get put doon a hole,’ whimpered one of her small brothers.

‘Now look here, Miss Lila,’ I said, bending down to talk to the child face to face, ‘and you too, boys. You must stop telling each other these horror stories. You must, really. You big boys tell the little ones there’s nothing to be afraid of. And you little ones don’t believe a word they say.’ I stopped, realizing that my advice was becoming confused.

‘We didnae tell naeb’dy nothin’, missus,’ said the oldest boy. ‘We seen ’um. In the woods, right by oor hoose. A real demon comin’ to get us. Comin’ to put us doon the holes with the ghosties.’

‘And what made you think he was real, and coming to get you?’ I said. ‘Why would you think that?’

‘Oor daddy told us,’ said another. ‘Oor daddy told us to watch out for demons and no’ to let one catch us, ever.’

‘And now we’ve tae go hame all by wurselves and it’s gettin’ dark and the hoose is empty til Mammy gets back with Auntie Chrissie.’ They looked up at me beseechingly out of six pairs of blue eyes, and I relented. I was not, however, about to traipse back to the cottage on foot for a fourth time in one day – I was beginning to wear out a trench – but I could not withstand the trembling lips and brimming eyes a moment longer.

‘Very well, then,’ I said. ‘Come and wait on the wall by the castle rise and I’ll fetch my motor car and run you all home. And your daddy’s there, by the way, so you won’t be alone once you get there.’ The second half of this was lost in a chorus of cheers and whoops and they turned on their heels and raced back the way they had come towards the park. By the time I caught up and passed them, dragging my sacks, they were sitting on top of a wall in a jostling row, threatening to tip each other off and arguing about who was going to sit in the front seat.

‘You gullible fool, Dandy,’ I muttered to myself. ‘They saw you coming.’