The Burry Man’s Day

Chapter Twelve

An hour in the drawing room with cigarettes, pipe and sheets of paper would be enough for Alec and me to feel that we were both of one mind again, shoulder to shoulder viewing the path ahead.

‘Right, then,’ I said. ‘These burrs, poisoned or otherwise.’ For we had decided to take seriously – at least until we were proved wrong – the fantastical-seeming theory about the burrs. Alec’s brainwave during our session had been to scrutinize them and, if any of them looked poisoned’, to parcel them up and send them to a specialist for analysis.

‘What specialist, though?’ I said. In story books, detectives always just happen to have a very useful selection of acquaintances, chemists and locksmiths and the like, but Alec and I had no such connections to draw on and we were stumped.

‘Well, no one who’s anything to do with the police or the police surgeon,’ said Alec. ‘We must use a little discretion, at least for now.’

‘And we can’t just troop into Edinburgh and hawk them around the hospital corridors searching for a kind man in a white coat,’ I said. ‘They’ve been in a feed sack in a stable, for one thing. And before that, in a midden heap with horse drop-’ I stopped.

‘What?’ said Alec.

‘What about the Dick Vet?’ I said. ‘The Veterinary College at the university. They’re bound to have chemists and poison people there, aren’t they? And one would think they’d be less sniffy about grubby samples of this and that. If we were to telephone and say… I don’t know… say that a horse had come out in dreadful suppurating sores where he had been brushing against a burdock bush -’

‘Plant,’ said Alec. ‘It’s not a bush. It’s a rosette with a fleshy tap root and a spike of thistle-like flowers sometimes reaching a height of up to…’ He laughed at my expression and cut the lecture short. ‘I looked it up,’ he explained. ‘In a horribly musty natural history of the British Isles.’

‘Where?’ I said. ‘When? Why?’

‘Here,’ said Alec. ‘In Cad’s library, waiting for you to come home.’ I always forget about the books in libraries, for some reason. Most of the books in Hugh’s library at home were centuries old, pungent beyond belief and hardly ever written in English. ‘As to why,’ Alec went on, ‘I was really looking for something else.’ He waited, apparently expecting me to comprehend something.

‘Coprinus atramentarius,’ he went on when he had given up. ‘The common ink cap. Your mushroom, darling.’

‘Oh!’ I exclaimed. ‘Excellent. Well done. And?’

‘In season from the early spring until November,’ he said. ‘Very common in any type of woodland.’

‘Gosh,’ I said. ‘Our theory lives on.’

‘For the meantime, anyway,’ said Alec. ‘So go on. You were saying? A horse, suppurating sores…’

‘Yes, we could say that we suspected sabotage by an eccentric neighbour, and ask the chemist if such a thing was possible.’

‘Wouldn’t he ask us to bring in some of the burrs so he could check?’ said Alec. ‘Or even the horse.’

‘At which point we could hastily backtrack,’ I replied. ‘Or we could say it had died. Unless that would make him even keener to see it. They have odd tastes, these vets, you know.’

‘Well, it’s worth a try,’ Alec said. ‘Where are the things, Dandy? And do you have a very stout pair of gloves? If there’s the smallest chance that they killed Robert Dudgeon we can hardly go juggling them with our bare hands.’

As I had done every other time this thought had been aired, I suddenly felt rather sheepish, or at least glad that no one else was listening, and I screwed up my nose at him.

‘They can’t possibly be, can they?’ I said. ‘Not really? Not really really?’ I remembered this feeling well from our first case: the feeling that one’s own boring everyday life could not really be traversing these paths of murder and evil; that one must be play-acting, only doing it so well that one was more than half convinced it was true.

Alec shrugged but made no answer.

‘To the stables then,’ I said. (I had stuffed the bags into the empty tack room in the stable yard on my return from the woods.) ‘After all,’ I pointed out, ‘since they had spent an hour or two cosied up with some horse droppings and they were on a bed of cabbage leaves and peapods, I could hardly lug them up to the castle and dump them in my bath.’

We made our way down the castle mound and across the park to where a stand of trees hid the stable block from view.

‘I say, Dandy,’ said Alec as we tramped along. ‘Are you beginning to worry that they won’t be there?’

The thought had not occurred to me, but as soon as Alec voiced it I was convinced. There was the fact of my dreadful feeling that someone (or something) had been watching me in the woods the previous day and, added to that, I had been caught red-handed by Donald Dudgeon while blatantly stealing the burrs. It seemed clear to me now, all of a sudden, that the most discreet way for him to foil my plans would have been simply to watch where I took the burrs and then to wait until it was quiet and steal them back. Alec and I began to walk faster and faster towards the trees.

‘Although,’ I said, ‘there was nothing to suggest that I wasn’t going to do whatever I was going to do with them right that minute. How could he – either Donald or whoever it was that was watching me if anyone was watching me – have known that I’d simply leave them sitting there? How on earth could I have simply left them sitting there if it comes to that!’ We were trotting along now as we wheeled into the stable yard and we bustled straight for the unused tack room in the far corner, only slowing enough for me to sing out over one shoulder to the stable lad: ‘How’s Nipper?’ And to hear the response: ‘He’s grand, madam. Nivver you fear.’ ‘Now, Dan,’ said Alec, barring my way with an arm flung out across the door, ‘try to remember exactly where you put the sacks and how they looked when you left them. It would be good to know if anyone’s been in here snooping in the meantime.’ I closed my eyes and tried to bring to mind a picture of how the tack room had looked the night before, but to be honest I had been so tired with tramping to and fro through the woods all day and, what with the nervous strain of my peculiar encounters with Donald Dudgeon and the ghastly Turnbulls, not to mention the upset of poor Nipper’s paw, I feared I had simply abandoned them without a glance.

‘I’m sure that’s roughly where I put them,’ I told Alec, on entering. ‘And’ – I picked up one in each hand – ‘that’s exactly the weight of them so far as I can remember, so I should say fairly certainly they’ve been left alone.’

There was no electric light in the room, but Alec lit one of the oil lamps which sat on the windowsill and hooked it over a beam above our heads. I brushed a little straw and dust from the tack table with my gloved hands, then Alec hoisted a sack, turned it upside down, and tipped out its contents. I emptied out the other and we spread the burrs out over the table top. Then we both stood looking, carefully breathing through our mouths (and so eating it).

‘I feel pretty foolish,’ I announced at length.

‘Hm,’ said Alec. ‘Did you expect some of them to have little skulls and crossbones on them?’ He spoke peremptorily, but he was clearly feeling much the same.

‘Let’s be forensic about it nevertheless,’ I said. ‘We’ve never had to do anything like this before so let’s make sure our inaugural attempt is at least thorough and not a disgrace to Mr Holmes.’ I buttoned the cuffs of my gloves carefully and began to poke about in the mess.

‘Right. What is there to note?’

‘Nothing,’ said Alec. ‘There are thousands of them. All identical.’

‘Not really,’ I said. ‘Not when you look closely. Some of them are fairly fresh-looking while others are dried up and turning yellow. That supports what Cad said about the scarcity this year. The pickers could not afford to be choosy. And look, some of them have been quite carefully harvested, neat little spheres, while others have been ripped off the plant and still have bits of stalk. Lots of them have fluff stuck in the spurs.’

‘Some of them are stuck together in plates,’ said Alec, getting into the spirit of the thing. ‘Look at this.’ He held up a sheet of burrs about three feet long and ten inches wide, holding together quite firmly although ragged at the sides.

‘I didn’t notice that when I was bundling them off the heap,’ I admitted. ‘Here’s a huge one.’ I held up a corner, but it began to rip apart as I did so.

‘Careful, Dandy,’ said Alec. ‘Lay it out flat. That must be the back piece or the breast piece.’

‘Yes, and that long one you found first is a leg surely. Rather grisly somehow, isn’t it?’ But Alec was as happy as a little boy with frog-spawn now, rummaging around on the tack table for more big pieces.

‘Here’s some of the head, surely,’ he cried, lifting a curved cap of burrs carefully over his hands. I shuddered. Alec laid the latest find at the top of the table above the large square patch and stood back.

‘I’m not sure I want to reconstruct the whole thing,’ I said. ‘It’s giving me the willies.’

‘Are you afraid that when we put the last piece in place, he’ll sit up and reach out towards you?’ said Alec, in a whisper.

‘Stop it!’ I said. ‘You’re worse than those horrid children.’ I was trying to laugh but really the idea was shivery-making. ‘I’m surprised there aren’t such rumours about the Burry Man,’ I went on. ‘Except that his bare hands would scotch it.’

‘Anyway there’s not much chance of our putting the whole thing together,’ Alec said, fitting another short leg piece on the other side. ‘Look at all these odd bits and single burrs from all the nooks and crannies. Heaps of them.’

I nodded. There were indeed undulating piles of burrs left on the table besides the large knitted-together sections. With their wisps of fluff sticking to them and their stalks jutting out they made the table top look like one of those miniature battle scenes my sons are always constructing. A wintry battle scene with patches of thin snow and lots of dead trees.

‘Have you noticed,’ I said, ‘that all the stuck-together ones are quite clean, and all the loose ones have the white wool or whatever it is clinging to them?’

Alec took a moment to check and then nodded.

‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘That’s odd. And the stuck-together ones are the best ones too, the fresh whole ones with no bits of stalk.’

‘I suppose that makes sense,’ I said. ‘Using the cream of the crop for the places the imperfections would show and using up the dregs in the corners.’ Alec was laying some more pieces on top of the body patch, trying them this way and that to make them fit.

‘I wonder if this is the front or the back,’ he said, half to himself.

‘I’d say the back is in one piece and those are the front bits, broken up like a jigsaw,’ I said. ‘Remember – Dudgeon began pulling his suit off himself. He’d hardly reach round and snatch it off his back. Ooh! Here’s an arm.’ I handed it over to Alec who laid it in place sticking out from the shoulder.

‘Can we move all these odds and ends on to the floor?’ he said. ‘There isn’t room to make the suit up properly with all the extras in the way.’

I am not sure whether it occurred first to him or to me, but certainly by the time I had looked up to catch his eye he was already raising his head to stare back.

‘And that shouldn’t be, should it?’ I said, with my heart thumping.

Alec looked at the table again, first at the emerging form of the burry suit and then at the battleground piles all around.

‘Could these possibly be used up in the joins?’ he said, talking slowly, trying to stay calm, apparently fighting excitement of his own.

‘I don’t think so,’ I answered, ‘but I’m afraid there’s only one way to find out. Do you happen to have a pair of thick combinations with you, darling? I suppose not since it’s August. Well, you shall just have to borrow some from Cad.’

‘Steady on,’ said Alec. ‘We can just lay them out on the table here, surely.’

‘I’d feel better if there was a three-dimensional reconstruction,’ I said. ‘To make sure. I know from some very unsuccessful attempts at dressmaking when I was a child that the third dimension makes quite a difference.’

‘And what about the poison?’ said Alec, refusing to give in without a fight.

‘I think we always knew the poison was a stretch,’ I reminded him. ‘We only entertained the poison because we couldn’t see any other reason to hang on to the burrs, but we can now. Come on, let’s go and ask Cad.’

The afternoon was turning to evening by the time we had finished and the sky had blackened and was threatening rain the way it can after a hot afternoon, making the tack room horribly gloomy despite the oil lamp. Alec, out of modesty, had reconstructed his own burry trousers, working up from the ankles with loud gasps and winces, and then I had pressed the back patch to his shoulders and pieced together the other squares and strips over his front. We scrupulously avoided any burrs with white fluffy garnishing, and once I had got my eye in I found it easier and easier to tell which were the prime burrs – the fat, green, carefully picked ones – and used only these to make the joins and to fill, as Alec had put it, the nooks and crannies.

I had filched a flask of brandy from the library while the winter combinations were being hunted out and I lifted it to his lips again now, as he stood there with one hand braced against the tack room wall and the other out to the side holding a broomstick for support.

‘Are you sure?’ I asked, stoppering the flask. Alec nodded. ‘Because I think we’ve fairly well proved our case as it is.’

‘Heads are larger than anyone ever thinks,’ Alec replied. ‘I know that from drawing classes.’

‘I’ll go and get a flour bag from Mrs Murdoch then,’ I said and made for the door. ‘There should just be time before the deluge.’

‘Only – Dandy…?’ said Alec. I turned. It was hard not to smile seeing him standing there, until – that is – I looked into his eyes. ‘Hurry back, won’t you?’ he said. I nodded, sober again, and sped off.

Once the flour bag was thoroughly banged against the wall to dislodge the dust I lowered it over Alec’s head and felt with a piece of coal for his eyes and mouth. Then I took it off and set about the coal marks with my nail scissors. When it went back on again it no doubt felt better to him but it looked even worse to me and I remembered how it was the eyes and dark hole of a mouth that were the worst of it all on the Burry Man’s day; that and the white hands grasping the staves. I shuddered. Alec must have felt it because he said:

‘Try this end of the stick, darling,’ and I apologized.

When the back of his head was covered I began on the face, ringing his eyes and putting a strip down his nose, partly to lighten the mood and partly to give myself a pattern to work to. I was engrossed in the task of getting the things on in some kind of order, and had almost forgotten Alec in spite of the closeness of his steady breathing when suddenly I felt him begin to shake under my fingers.

‘No!’ he shouted. ‘Take it off. Take the bag off. Now!’

I grabbed the top of the flour bag despite the barbs piercing the palms of my hands and tore it off, ignoring the rip as the joining layer of burrs along his shoulders protested.

‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Can’t really account for that, I’m afraid, but I just couldn’t stand it a minute longer.’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ I told him. ‘The bag itself is more than half covered whether you wear it or not. And look.’

He craned round stiffly and looked at the table, where the snowy battleground lay undisturbed, easily as many burrs as Alec was wearing, all lying there, left over.

‘Right,’ he said. ‘I think I can stand this long enough for you to get Inspector Cruickshank, Dandy. So long as he’s available now and willing to come along. But God knows how Robert Dudgeon did it for hours on end.’

‘Well, that’s the point, isn’t it?’ I said. ‘He didn’t. Paddy Rearden told me as much. “He wasn’t himself that day.” He told me over and over again, if I’d only had the wits to hear it. The Burry Man wasn’t himself at all.’

Inspector Cruickshank was at his tea when I banged on the door of his house ten minutes later, but he covered his plate with a pan lid and set it to the side of the stove to keep warm, all without a murmur, even though it was fried fish and potatoes and bound to be soggy when he returned.

‘It may seem terribly theatrical when you see what we’ve done, Inspector,’ I said to him as we drove back up the Dalmeny road for the Cassilis stable yard through the beginning of the rain, ‘but we felt we had to convince you because without the evidence of your own eyes it all sounds so very nebulous and strained. And we have to convince you because although we’ve made an important discovery we have no earthly idea what it means or where to go next.’

‘And this is to do with Robert Dudgeon, is it?’ said Inspector Cruickshank. ‘I thought as much. You weren’t happy that day at the Fair, were you, madam? With the doctor’s report? I’ve not had a look like that since I scuffed my new boots first day on and had to come in and tell my mammy.’ He spoke affably enough, but even so I blushed. I had not realized that my disapproval had been quite so obvious as all that.

‘Well, I think I owe the doctor and you an apology,’ I said. ‘I have no reason to doubt the report. What we’ve found isn’t about how Mr Dudgeon died, but it’s a strange thing that needs some explanation all the same. As you’ll soon see.’

I swung the motor car into the east gate of the park and took the back lane to the stable, going very slowly around the corners since it was just after five and the stable lads were all making their way home, heads bent against the downpour which had begun in earnest now.

‘I found the burrs from Mr Dudgeon’s suit on the midden heap behind the cottages,’ I explained as we drew up and got down. ‘And I – well, I suppose I stole them.’ I could see the oil lamp in the tack room and could just make out the figure of Alec standing at the back of the room like a scarecrow. ‘We’ve been doing a bit of reconstruction,’ I said, beckoning the inspector towards the door, ‘and we’ve made a rather startling discovery.’

Alec’s neck must have been getting terribly stiff and it was no doubt this that caused the slow creaking turn of his head as we came in, but if he had spent the whole of his time alone thinking it out he could not have come up with a more eerie finishing touch to the whole tableau.

‘Bloody hell!’ yelped Inspector Cruickshank, and took a step backwards on to my foot.

‘Alec Osborne, sir,’ Alec said. ‘We haven’t met.’

I began to laugh at that as much as at the inspector’s outburst, hopping about shaking my crushed foot, and Alec grinned too. Even the inspector gave a rueful smile along with his apology to me, then his eye was caught by the contents of the tack table and the smile switched instantly off.

‘There were two quite separate garments underneath,’ I explained a moment later. ‘You can tell from all this white stuff. We think the ones we’ve used here were the real Burry Man’s burrs, the ones gathered officially and put together by people who knew what they were doing. They’re still hanging together in patches, many of them. These ones are terribly second rate.’ I stirred the heaps with my finger. ‘Hastily collected, inexpertly picked, and stuck to ordinary combinations, from which they gathered a great deal of stray fabric. I daresay when we take Alec’s suit off it will be covered in little bits of the same.’

‘Yes indeed,’ said Inspector Cruickshank.

‘Well, if you’re convinced,’ said Alec, ‘might I trouble someone to help me disrobe? I’ve had enough of this.’

‘Certainly, sir,’ said Inspector Cruickshank. ‘Now the easiest thing for you and quite handy for me too for I’d like to keep a hold of this suit all made up like that, the easiest thing would be if I just cut you out of it with my army knife here. Slit the combinations down the back and pull them off your front.’

He turned and looked at me. Alec too was smiling at me, waiting.

‘Oh!’ I said. ‘Yes, of course. I’ll step outside.’ I pondered whether to go and tell Cad the bad news about the fate of his combinations but, inspector or no, the man was standing behind Alec with an army knife at the ready and, since the case was still wide open and we did not know who we suspected and who therefore we did not, I decided to stick very close by. Besides, the rain had turned to hail stones now, one of those astonishing, but short-lived, hail storms which had always seemed so unseasonal to me when I had first come north but which I now knew very well. Across the yard, Nipper’s master was sheltering in a doorway, Nipper himself tucked pitifully at his heels and looking up at the sky with the whites of his eyes showing.

‘This is a surprise, isn’t it?’ I called over.

‘Naw. I kent it would come to hell,’ the lad called back, making me blink.

‘Sorry?’ I said.

‘I could tell fae the sky. I kent it would come tae hell stones afore it was done.’

‘Oh, I see,’ I said. ‘Hail stones. Yes, I see.’ What had I been saying to Alec, about the impossibility of ever really getting a ‘guid Scots tongue’ into an English head?

‘Now then, Mrs Gilver,’ said Inspector Cruickshank, sweeping open the tack room door. Inside, Alec was knotting his tie with arms which still looked rather stiff and fumbling. ‘We can go down to the station or I can come up to the castle, whichever suits you the best. I know you’re a guest there and if you’d rather not -’

‘Oh no, no, no. It will be absolutely fine,’ I assured him, thinking that Cad would hate to miss this. ‘In fact, it was Cad – Mr de Cassilis, you know – who was first convinced that something was up and persuaded me to take the c-… to look into it.’ I felt rather bashful about revealing my status in the matter now that a real professional was about to enter the arena.

‘All well and good,’ said the inspector. ‘To the castle it is.’

‘So then,’ said Inspector Cruickshank, settling into an armchair in the library with a large whisky and soda, the half-eaten plate of fish and chips and the pot of tea apparently put well behind him. Alec and I, the principals, were facing him on two further armchairs while Cad and Buttercup sat perched on a bench under the window, keeping quiet and hoping not to be sent out, like two children past their bedtimes. ‘We had an extra Burry Man running around the place on Friday, did we?’ went on the inspector. ‘And up to no good, I imagine. Tell me what first roused your suspicions, and we’ll take it from there.’

‘I’ll let Dandy tell you, Inspector,’ said Alec, whom Cruickshank seemed to be addressing. ‘She was here first after all.’

‘All right,’ I said, attempting to order my thoughts. ‘The first thing to say is that even though we’re not sure about much, I don’t think it was exactly what you say: a rogue Burry Man duplicating the real one. What would be the point for one thing?’

‘Money?’ said the inspector. ‘In the buckets? Or whisky? I think I’ll put a couple of men on just to check that the Burry Man didn’t come round twice to the same place with different helpers.’

‘Wouldn’t everyone know that it should be Pat Rearden and… the other one?’ I said.

‘Not these days,’ said Mr Cruickshank. ‘The Ferry’s getting bigger every year with incomers. It’s not the place it used to be. And as for the helpers: people would hardly question whether it was genuine as long as the Burry Man was there in the middle of it all. Maybe it was a burglary scheme. Everyone outside cheering the Burry Man and one of the gang in the houses looking for anything worth lifting.’

I was finding this rather flustering, truth be told, unused to someone else confidently barging in with his own theories, and such dull little theories at that. It revealed to me as nothing else would have just how very collaborative Alec was in comparison.

‘You know best, Inspector,’ I said, I hoped placatingly. ‘But we were thinking more along these lines: that the real Burry Man – Robert Dudgeon, that is – was elsewhere on Friday and was using let’s call him the duplicate Burry Man as an… well, as an alibi. If I explain where our suspicions arose, you’ll see why that is.

‘First of all, there was Dudgeon’s sudden and extreme reluctance to do the job. It came over him out of nowhere on Thursday afternoon, making him try with some considerable determination to wriggle out of the commitment. Then just as suddenly he seemed to change his mind back again and think that it could be managed. And now that I come to think of it, I did joke a little about Mr de Cassilis stepping into the breach – it was only a joke, Cad – and I think I did say that even though he was a newcomer and it would not be popular with those in the know, I expected that once he was in costume no one would be any the wiser.

‘That’s one suspicious circumstance. Then, of course, it was clear right away on Friday night that there was something wrong with Mrs Dudgeon. Something extra wrong, I mean, over and above the grief and shock. Only now does that begin to make sense. She knew, you see, and she dreaded anyone else finding out. Also, there was the blasted ham sandwich which Robert Dudgeon ate sometime before his death. We simply could not track down the origin of that ham sandwich, Inspector. Obviously, he could consume nothing during his round and we knew that Mrs Dudgeon did not intend him to dine off a sandwich because she was all set to take him straight home and she had made a meal for him to eat when he got there. The dishes were still being washed up later that evening when Mrs de Cassilis and I visited her.’

‘Now as to the switch itself,’ said Alec. ‘That was very neatly handled indeed. Tell him, Dan.’

‘This is conjecture, you understand,’ I said to the inspector, ‘but it all fits. Pat Rearden told me that in the morning, for the first time in all his Burry Mann-ing years, Robert Dudgeon asked to be left quite alone. I need to check with Mr Rearden – or I suppose it will be you who checks now, Inspector – but I’ll bet that this moment alone was requested once Dudgeon was completely in costume. He would then withdraw into a cupboard or something and be replaced by the other Burry Man who’d been waiting in the same cupboard to be handed the baton.’ Inspector Cruickshank looked rather sceptical, but said nothing. ‘At the end of the day, as we all know, the Burry Man – not Mr Dudgeon, so let’s call him X for the moment – X dashed off up the stairs away from his guards and when they caught up with him, somewhere in the bowels of the Rosebery Hall, they found Robert Dudgeon ostensibly having ripped off the headpiece and some of the body suit. In fact of course he had shrugged most of it back on, and only just left a bit undone. X, the Burry Man that Rearden and his pal had been steering around all day, was once again tucked away out of view.

‘Now, here is another very significant piece of evidence, Inspector, and one that we are very lucky to have got our hands on. Mrs Dudgeon had her pony and cart parked in Craw’s Close on Friday as she waited for her husband’s return. She refused to move it even though the pony – as ponies will – left droppings all over the Craw’s Close washing green and the women of the Close were not best pleased. You know the layout of the town better than me, of course, but I’m sure we’ll find that the spot where the cart stood is handily situated for a back exit from the Rosebery Hall. There are back doors giving on to that general area, aren’t there?’ The inspector nodded. ‘I thought so. Very well then, the decoy Burry Man scurries into the cart – there’s an opening at the back under the seats, you know – and Mrs Dudgeon, again for the first time in all her years of connection with the event, bundles up the burrs from Robert’s costume and shoves them in there too. Next they set off for home, up the Loan and – most unaccountably, it seemed to me at first – along the Back Braes just below Station Road.’

‘There’s never room for a pony and cart along there,’ said Inspector Cruickshank.

‘Well, the Dudgeons’ little cart really is tiny,’ I said.

‘Of course,’ said the inspector. ‘Robert made himself a wee bogie from one of the hutches when the works here closed, I was forgetting.’

‘So there is room, just,’ I said. ‘But there’s certainly no room to turn it. And yet that is exactly what happened. At the bowling green corner, with much toing and froing and with the pony and cart uncoupled while it was carried out, they turned the cart, went back along the brae and rejoined the Fair in time for the greasy pole.’

‘And how do you know this?’ said the inspector.

‘They were seen,’ Alec told him. ‘What was her name, Dan?’

‘Netta Stoddart,’ I supplied. ‘Sitting at the back of the bowling green clubhouse waiting for her daddy, Netta Stoddart saw them turn the cart. This much I believed right from the start. I now believe the next section of her evidence too. That the Burry Man fell off the cart and rolled down the hill to the railway line. I had that down as a taradiddle. For one thing, why would Dudgeon come back to the Fair if he had just had a tumble? But I now see that little Netta was not talking about “Robert Dudgeon”; she was talking about a “Burry Man”. That is, a man covered in a suit of burrs, and she saw him rolling out of the cart and down the slope to make his getaway. Of course, the next bit – that a train came along and squashed him – is just Netta making life more interesting for herself and can be filed away with the ghost pony and the swamp. Not to mention the holes with the ghostie soldiers down them, the demon in the woods and the dead babies who cry in the night.’

Inspector Cruickshank gave all of this very careful consideration, but when he began to speak, the opening sniff said it all.

‘A very clever tale, madam,’ he said, ‘but a bit too fanciful for my taste, I’m afraid, even if you have managed to convince Mr Osborne here.’

Alec looked rather startled at this take on things, but said nothing.

‘I mean to say,’ the inspector continued, in a patient tone, ‘you say yourself that the Stoddart girl made things up -’

‘Yes but -’ said Alec, but Inspector Cruickshank sailed on.

‘And I still don’t think there’s room for the cart along that lane,’ he said. ‘Never mind space to turn it.’

‘There are clear tracks,’ I said, but then we both looked out of the castle window where the hail storm had given way once more to hammering rain.

‘And why was it that Mrs Dudgeon took the burrs, you’re saying?’ he asked.

‘Ah, this was a nice touch,’ said Alec. ‘What better place to hide a lot of burrs than with another lot of burrs after all.’

‘And if the tragedy of Friday night had not occurred,’ I chipped in, ‘no doubt Dudgeon would soon have burnt the lot.’

‘And why didn’t Mrs Dudgeon do the same?’

‘I’m not sure,’ I said. ‘Perhaps she forgot about them in all the horror of what happened. She was absolutely beside herself, Inspector. Or perhaps – if Mr Dudgeon was the gardener in the family – she did not know that they wouldn’t just dissolve harmlessly there on the heap.’ This was rather feeble and I could see that I was in danger of losing him completely.

‘Meanwhile this other one, this X, went all the way from the bowling green corner along the edge of the railway line up to the Dudgeons’ cottage to put his burrs on the heap there too? Why would he do that now? Whoever he was.’

I looked to Alec, hoping that he had an answer for this, but he was looking back at me, hoping the same.

‘Maybe,’ I said slowly, thinking as I spoke, ‘if we knew who it was, that would become clear.’

‘And what’s more, you’re saying he went there in the burrs. Actually wearing all the burrs? Why would he do that?’ I had no answer this time.

‘So that he wouldn’t be recognized?’ suggested Alec.

‘And why should he care about being recognized?’ the inspector said.

‘Again,’ I insisted, ‘we might be able to answer that if we knew who he was. I can easily believe that he would make his way to his destination still wearing the burrs, though, even if it was torture, because he would have been beautifully camouflaged amongst the trees and anyone who saw him was likely to doubt his own eyes or be doubted if he tried to pass the news on. And actually,’ I said, finding my stride now, ‘he would have been pretty safe. There were no trains just then and there was not likely to be anyone in the woods. No children playing there for once, since everyone was at the Fair. Once he was beyond the footbridge over the line – and he went past that still on the cart – there was a clear run all the way back to Cassilis.’

‘But why?’ said the inspector. ‘I’m not saying I agree with anything you’ve said, mind, but just for the sake of argument if any of that did happen, why? Why did Robert and Chrissie Dudgeon not go all the way home with this mystery man hidden under the back of the cart? That would have been much safer than leaving him to flit through the woods on his own no matter how empty they were. It would only take one sober, respectable adult to see him and the game would be up.’

I could see the sense in this.

‘Perhaps,’ I said, making a last attempt, ‘perhaps they were concerned to make everything look as near normal as possible, and normal on that particular evening meant staying at the Fair and climbing the greasy pole.’

The inspector was shaking his head again.

‘You’ve put together a wondrous tale,’ he said, ‘but it’s all smoke and mirrors when you get right down to it. Still, good work with the burrs, Mr Osborne. I’ll certainly have to look into that. It could be that there’s a lot of folk have things missing from the house and they haven’t put two and two together. Or maybe they have and they’re hanging back not wanting to point the finger at Robert Dudgeon when he’s not here any more to defend himself.’ I could not believe that he was brushing off all our lovely evidence and our beautifully knitted-together explanations and sticking to this boring account of petty thievery, but there did not seem to be anything else to say that would convince him he was wrong, so Alec and I simply bade him farewell with as much good grace as we could muster.

‘If I can have the use of your telephone, Mr de Cassilis,’ he said, ‘I’ll ring the sergeant and get him to pick me up and take the evidence away at the same time. No, no, no,’ he brushed off Buttercup’s mutterings of hospitality, ‘I’ll wait in the stable yard, if it’s all the same, Mrs de Cassilis. He’ll only be a minute up from the Ferry to get me.’ He bowed slightly to me and I inclined my head in return but when he turned his back to leave, I stuck my tongue out at him and crossed my eyes.