The Weed That Strings the Hangman's Bag

* NINETEEN *

"RUPERT WAS — A LADIES' man," Sally said slowly, as if reluctant to put her thoughts into words, "but then, you've probably found that out by now."

I nodded, careful not to interrupt. I had learned by observing Inspector Hewitt that silence is the best primer for a conversational pump.

"He's been coming to Culverhouse Farm off and on, for years — since well before the war. And Rupert's not the only one, you know. Gordon has a regular little army of others just like him. He supplies them with something to help manage the pain."

"Bhang," I said. I couldn't help myself. "Gunjah ... Indian hemp, cannabis."

She looked at me with narrowed eyes, and then went on. "Some, like Rupert, come because they once had infantile paralysis — polio, they call it now — others, well, God only knows.

"You see, Gordon considers himself a kind of herbalist: someone who helps to blot out the sufferings that the doctors can't, or won't. He's very discreet about it, but then he has to be, doesn't he? Other than you, I really don't think anyone in Bishop's Lacey has ever guessed that the occasional travelers who stop by Culverhouse Farm are anything other than lost — or perhaps selling agricultural supplies.

"I've been here for eight years," Sally went on. "And don't even bother asking me: The answer is no — I'm not one of Gordon's smokers."

"I didn't expect you were," I said, fawning a little. It worked.

"I grew up in a good home," she went on, a little more eagerly. "My parents were what they used to call, in the old double-decker novels, 'poor but honest.' My mam was sick all the time, but she never would tell us what was wrong with her. Even my father didn't know. Meanwhile, I plodded on at school, got myself a bit of an education, and then the war came.

"Of course, I wanted to help out a bit with the medical bills, so I joined the WLA. Sounds simple, doesn't it? And so it was — there was no more to it than that. I was just a girl from Kent who wanted to fight Adolf Hitler, and see her mother well again.

"I was billeted, along with about forty other girls, at a Land Army hostel between here and Hinley, and that was where I first laid eyes on Rupert. Like a bee to honey that man was, make no mistake about it. He was rambling hither and yon about the countryside every summer with his little puppet show — getting back to his roots, he called it — and whenever I saw him, he seemed to have a new assistant. And she was always a bit of a knockout, if you get my meaning."

"Not long after I came to work at Culverhouse Farm, Rupert showed up for a fresh supply of smoking material. I recognized him at once as the little lame chap who was always chatting us up at the hostel, or the pub, of a weekend.

"I swore from the outset that I wouldn't get involved with him myself; I'd leave it to the other girls to take him down a notch or two. But then — "

Her gaze drifted off into another time.

So Nialla had been right! Rupert had gone off in search of Sally on the day they arrived. The pieces were beginning to fall into place.

Although the fog had now thinned a little, it was still quite dense, wrapping Sally and me in a misty cocoon of oddly reassuring silence. Unless they had come across us by accident, no one would know we were up here at the top of Jubilee Field. No one could have overheard us unless they had come up the length of the field from the bottom, or crept stealthily down from the wood above.

"Oh, Rupert was a charmer, make no mistake about that," Sally went on. "He could charm the — no, I mustn't say that in polite company, must I? He could charm the chickens out of the trees — and especially the hens.

"He'd start with Shakespeare, and then move on to things he'd heard in music halls. If Romeo and Juliet didn't do the job, he'd try his naughty recitations.

"And he got away with it, too — at least, mostly he did. Until he tried it on with Gordon's wife."

Grace Ingleby? I let out an involuntary whistle.

"That must have been quite a long time ago," I said. I knew that it sounded callous, although I didn't mean it that way.

"Years ago," Sally said. "Before Robin died. Before she went all strange. Although you wouldn't think it to look at her now, she used to be quite a stunner."

"She seems very sad," I said.

"Sad? Sad's not the word for it, Flavia. Broken is more like it. That little boy was her whole world, and the day he died, the sun went out."

"You were here then?" I asked gently. "It must have been very difficult for you."

She went on as if she hadn't heard me. "Gordon and Grace had told Robin more than once about their idyllic honeymoon by the sea, and it was something he'd always wanted to do: the sand, the seashells, the pail, the shovel, the sandcastles, the ices, the bathing machines.

"He used to dream about it. 'I dreamed the tide was coming in, Sally!' he told me once, 'and I was bobbing on the sea like a pink balloon!' Poor little tyke."

She wiped away a tear with the rough sleeve of her overall. "God! Why am I telling you all this? I must be daft."

"It's all right," I said. "I promise I won't breathe a word. I'm very good at keeping things to myself."

As a token of goodwill, I went through the motions of cross-my-heart-and-hope-to-die, but without actually saying the words.

After a quick and oddly shy glance at me, Sally went on with her story:

"Somehow they'd managed to put a bit aside for Robin's birthday. Because the harvest was so near, Gordon couldn't get away, but they agreed that Grace would take Robin to the seaside for a few days. It was the first time the two of them, mother and son, had ever been anywhere together without Gordon, and the first time Grace had taken a holiday since she was a girl.

"The weather was hot, even for late August. Grace hired a beach chair and bought a magazine. She watched Robin with his little pail, mudlarking along the water's edge. He was quite safe, she knew. She had warned him about the danger of the tides, and Robin was a most obedient little boy.

"She drifted off to sleep and slept for ages. She hadn't realized how utterly exhausted she was until she awoke and saw how far the sun had moved. The tide had gone out, and Robin was nowhere in sight. Had he disobeyed her warnings and been swept out to sea? Surely someone would have seen him. Surely someone would have wakened her."

"Did Grace tell you this?" I asked.

"Good God, no! It all came out at the inquest. They had to pry it out of her in tiny, broken pieces. Her nerves were something shocking.

"She'd wasted too much time, she said, running up and down the beach, calling out Robin's name. She ran along the edge of the water, hoping for a glimpse of his little red bathing suit; hoping to see his face among the children who were dabbling near the shore.

"Then up and down the beach again, begging the bathers to tell her if they'd seen a little boy with blond hair. It was hopeless, of course. There might have been dozens of children on the beach who answered to that description.

"And then, through sun-dazzled eyes, she saw it: a crowd gathered in the shade beneath the promenade. She burst into tears and began walking towards them, knowing what she would find: Robin had drowned, and the knot of people had gathered round to gawk. She had already begun to hate them.

"But as she drew closer, a wave of laughter went up, and she shoved her way through to the center of the crowd, not caring what they thought.

"It was a Punch and Judy show. And there, seated on the sand, tears of laughter running down his face, was her Robin. She grabbed him up and hugged him, not trusting herself to say a word. After all, it had been her fault: She had fallen asleep, and Robin had been attracted to the Punch and Judy pitch as any child would be.

"She carried him along the beach and bought him an ice, and another. Then she ran back with him to the little booth, to watch the next performance, and she joined in when he roared with laughter, and she shouted out with him 'No! No!' when Punch grabbed the policeman's stick to beat Judy on the head.

"They laughed with the rest of the crowd when Punch tricked Jack Ketch, the hangman, into sticking his own head into the noose, and — "

I had seen the traditional Punch and Judy shows nearly every year at the church fete, and I was all too familiar with the plot.

"' I don't know how to be hanged,'" I said, quoting Punch's famous words. "'You'll have to show me, then I shall do it directly.'"

"'I don't know how to be hanged,'" Sally echoed, "'You'll have to show me.' That's what Grace told the jury later, when an inquest was called into Robin's death, and those were likely her last sane words.

"Worse than that was the fact that, at the inquest, she spoke those words in that awful, strangled, quacking voice that the puppet show men use for Punch: 'I don't know how to be hanged. You'll have to show me.'

"It was ghastly. The coroner called for a glass of water, and someone on the jury lost their nerve and laughed. Grace broke down completely. The doctor insisted that she be excused from further questioning.

"The rest of what happened that awful day at the beach, and later at the farm, had to be pieced together; each of us knew a little. I had seen Robin dragging about a length of rope he'd found in the machine shed. Later, Gordon had seen him playing cowboy at the edge of Jubilee Field. It was Dieter who found him hanging in Gibbet Wood."

"Dieter? I thought it was Mad Meg." It slipped out before I could stop myself.

Sally looked instantly away, and I realized that it was one of those times when I needed to keep my mouth shut and wait things out.

Suddenly she seemed to come to a decision. "You must remember," she said, "that we were only just out of the war. If it was known in Bishop's Lacey that Robin's body had been found hanging in the wood by a German prisoner of war, well ... just think."

"It might have been like that scene from Frankenstein: furious villagers with torches, and so forth."

"Exactly," she said. "Besides, the police believed that Meg actually had been there before Dieter, but that she hadn't told anyone."

"How do you know that?" I asked. "What the police believed, I mean?"

Without realizing what she was doing, Sally was suddenly fluffing up her hair.

"There was a certain young police constable," she said, "whose name I am not at liberty to mention, who used to take me, of an evening, to watch the moon rise over Goodger Hill."

"I see," I said, and I did. "They didn't want Meg to be called up at the inquest."

"Funny, isn't it," she said, "how the law can have a soft spot like that? No, someone had seen her in the village at the time Robin went missing, so she wasn't really a suspect. It was decided that because of her ... because she was ... well, not to put too fine a point on it, that Meg was best left out of things entirely, and that's how it was done."

"So it was Dieter who found the body then."

"Yes. He told me about it that same evening. He was still in shock — hardly making sense: all about how he had come racing down from Gibbet Wood, yelling himself hoarse ... leaping fences, sliding in the mud ... running into the yard, looking up at the empty windows. Like dead eyes, they were, he kept saying, like the windows of the Brontes' parsonage. But as I said, poor Dieter was in shock. He didn't know what he was saying."

I felt a vague stirring in my stomach, but I put it down to Mrs. Mullet's Jenny Lind cake. "And where was Rupert all this time?"

"Strange you should ask. Nobody seems to remember. Rupert came and went, often at night. As time passed, he seemed to become more and more addicted to the stuff Gordon was providing him, and his visits became more frequent. If he wasn't here when Robin died, he wasn't far away."

"I'll bet the police were all over the place."

"Of course they were! At the outset, they didn't know if it was an accident, or if Robin had been murdered."

"Murdered?" The thought had never crossed my mind. "Who on earth would murder a little boy?"

"It's been done before," Sally answered sadly. "Children have always been murdered for no good reason."

"And Robin?"

"In the end, they decided there was no evidence to support that idea. Aside from Gordon and Dieter and me — and Mad Meg, of course — no one else had been in Gibbet Wood. Robin's footprints leading up Jubilee Field and round the old scaffold made it quite clear that he had gone there alone."

"And acted out the scaffold scene from Punch and Judy," I said. "Pretending he was first Punch — and then the hangman."

"Yes. That's what they thought."

"Still," I said, "the police must have had a jolly good look round the wood."

"Almost uprooted it," she said. "Measuring tapes, plaster casts, photographs, little bags of this and that."

"Isn't it odd," I said, "that they didn't spot the patch of cannabis? It's hard to believe Inspector Hewitt would have missed it."

"This must have been before his time," Sally said. "If my memory serves me rightly, it was an Inspector Gully who was in charge of the investigation."

Aha! So that was who decided to keep mum about Meg. In spite of his lack of vigilance, the man must have had at least a rudimentary heart.

"And what was the outcome?" I asked. "Of the inquest, I mean."

I knew that I could look it up later, in the newspaper archive at the library, but for now I wanted to hear it in Sally's own words. She had, after all, been on the spot.

"The coroner told the jury it must reach one of three verdicts: death by unlawful killing, death by misadventure, or an open verdict."

"And?"

"They settled on 'death by misadventure,' although they had the very dickens of a time reaching an agreement."

Suddenly, I realized that the fog was lifting, and so did Sally. Although a light mist still capped the trees in the wood above us, the river and the full sloping length of Jubilee Field, looking like a hand-tinted aerial photograph, were now laid out below us in weak sunlight.

We would be clearly visible from the farmhouse.

Without another word, Sally clambered up onto the tractor's seat and engaged the starter. The engine caught at once, roared briefly, then settled into a steady ticking hum.

"I've said too much," she told me. "I don't know what I was thinking. Mind you keep your promise, Flavia. I'm going to hold you to it."

Her eyes met mine, and I saw in them a kind of pleading.

"I could get into a lot of trouble, you know," she said.

I bobbed my head but didn't actually say yes. With any luck, I could wedge in one last question.

"What do you think happened to Robin and to Rupert?"

With a toss of her head, Sally clenched her jaw, let in the clutch, and lurched away across the field, clods of black mud flying up from the tractor's tires before falling back to the ground like shot birds.