2 The Weed That Strings the Hangman’s Bag: A Flavia De Luce Mystery (8 page)

“Don’t let the clutch in now—wait until we get to the top!” Nialla shouted.

“Men!” she muttered to me. “Men and their bleeding exhaust noises.”

Ten minutes later we were at the crest of Gibbet Hill. In the distance, Jubilee Field sloped away towards the river, a gently rolling blanket of flax of such electric-blue intensity that it might have caused van Gogh to weep.

“One more good heave,” Nialla said, “and we’re on our way.”

We groaned and we grunted, pushing and shoving against the hot metal, and then suddenly, as if it had become weightless, the van began moving on its own. We were on the downside of the hill.

“Quick! Jump in!” Nialla said, and we ran alongside as the van picked up speed, bucketing and bumping down the rutted road.

We jumped onto the running board, and Nialla threw open the door. A moment later we had collapsed, hugging one another, into the seat as Rupert manipulated the engine controls. Halfway down, as the motor started at last, the van gave off an alarming backfire before settling down to an unhealthy coughing. At the bottom of the hill, Rupert touched the brakes, and we turned neatly into the lane that leads to Culverhouse Farm.

Overheated from its exertions, the Austin stood sputtering and steaming like a leaky teakettle in the farmyard, which, to all intents and purposes, seemed to be abandoned. In my experience, whenever you arrived at a farm, someone always came out of the barn to greet you, wiping his oily hands on a rag and calling to a woman with a basket of eggs to bake some scones and put the tea on. At the very least, there should have been a barking dog.

Although there were no pigs in evidence, a weathered sty at the end of a row of tumbledown sheds was full of tall nettles. Beyond that was a turreted dovecote. Assorted milk pails, all of them rusty, lay scattered about the yard, and a lone hen picked halfheartedly among the weeds, watching us with its wary yellow eye.

Rupert climbed out of the van and slammed the door loudly.

“Hello?” he called. “Anyone here?”

There was no reply. He walked past a battered chopping block to the back door of the house and gave it a thunderous knocking with his fist.

“Hello? Anyone at home?”

He cupped his hands, peering in through the grimy window of what must once have been the buttery, then motioned us out of the van.

“Odd,” he whispered. “There’s someone standing in the middle of the room. I can see his outline against the far window.” He gave the door a couple more loud bangs.

“Mr. Ingleby,” I called out, “Mrs. Ingleby, it’s me, Flavia de Luce. I’ve brought the people from the church.”

There was a long silence, and then we heard the sound of heavy boots on a wooden floor. The door creaked open upon a dark interior, and a tall blond man in overalls stood blinking in the light.

I had never seen him before in my life.

“I’m Flavia de Luce,” I said, “from Buckshaw.” I waved my hand vaguely in its direction to the southeast. “The vicar asked me to show these people the way to Culverhouse Farm.”

The blond man stepped outside, bending substantially in order to get through the low doorway without banging his head. He was what Feely would have described as “indecently gorgeous”: a towering Nordic god. As this fair-haired Siegfried turned to close the door carefully behind him, I saw that there was a large, faded red circle painted on the back of his boiler suit.

It meant he was a prisoner of war.

My mind flew instantly back to the wooden block and the missing axe. Had he chopped up the Inglebys and stacked their limbs like firewood behind the kitchen stove?

What a preposterous thought. The war had been over for five years, and I had seen the Inglebys—at least Grace—as recently as last week.

Besides, I already knew that German prisoners of war were not particularly dangerous. The first ones I had seen were on my first-ever visit to a cinema, the Palace, in Hinley. As the blue-jacketed captives were marched by their armed guards into the theater and seated, Daffy had nudged me and pointed.

“The enemy!” she had whispered.

As the lights went down and the film began, Feely had leaned over and said, “Just think, you’ll be sitting with them in the dark for two hours. Alone … if Daffy and I go for sweets.”

The film was In Which We Serve, and I couldn’t help noticing that when HMS Torrin was sunk in the Mediterranean by the Luftwaffe’s dive-bombers, although the prisoners did not applaud the deed openly, there were nevertheless smiles among them.

“Captured Germans are to not be treated inhumanely,” Father had told us when we got home, quoting something he had heard on the wireless, “but are to be shown very clearly that we regard them, officers and men, as outcasts from the society of decent men.”

Although I respected Father’s word—at least in principle—it was clear that the man who had greeted us at Culverhouse Farm was no outcast; not by any stretch of the imagination.

Five years after the coming of peace, he could only be wearing his bull’s-eyed boiler suit out of pride.

“May I present myself? I am Dieter Schrantz,” he said, with a broad smile, shaking hands with each of us in turn, beginning with Nialla. From those four words alone, I could tell that he spoke nearly perfect English. He even pronounced his own name the way any Englishman would have done, with hard rs and as and no unpleasant snarling of his surname.

“The vicar said that you should come.”

“Bloody van broke down,” Rupert said, jerking his head towards the Austin with, I thought, a certain measure of aggressiveness. As if he …

Dieter grinned. “Don’t worry, I’ll help you run it down the lane to Jubilee Field. That’s where you’re billeted, you know, old chap.”

Old chap? Dieter had obviously been in England for quite some time.

“Is Mrs. Ingleby at home?” I asked. I thought that it was probably best if Nialla was given a tour of the amenities, as it were, before she had to ask.

The shadow of a cloud passed over Dieter’s face.

“Gordon’s gone off up the wood somewhere,” he said, gesturing to Gibbet Hill. “He likes to work alone most of the time. He’ll be down presently to help Sally in the meadow. We shall see them when we take your ’bus down to the river.”

“Sally” was Sally Straw, a member of the Women’s Land Army, or “Land Girl,” as they were called, who had been working at Culverhouse Farm since sometime during the war.

“All right,” I said. “Hullo! Here’s Tick and Tock.”

Mrs. Ingleby’s two tortoiseshell cats came ambling out of a shed, yawning and stretching in the sun. She often took them with her, for company, to the market, as she did several of her farm creatures, including, now and then, her pet goose, Matilda.

“Tick,” she had informed me once, when I inquired about their names, “because she has ticks. And Tock because she chatters like a magpie.”

Tock was walking directly towards me, already well launched into a meowling conversation. Tick, meanwhile, ambled off towards the dovecote, which rose up darkly from behind the warren of shabby, overgrown sheds.

“You go on ahead,” I said. “I’ll come down to the field in a few minutes.”

I swept Tock up into my arms. “Who’s a pretty pussy, then?” I cooed, watching from the corner of my eye to see if anyone was taken in. I knew that the cat was not: She had begun to squirm immediately.

But Rupert and Nialla were already piling into the van, which still stood shuddering away to itself in the yard. Dieter gave a shove and climbed onto the running board, and a moment later, with a wave, they were bumping out of the yard and into the lane that led down the slope to Jubilee Field and the river. A gentle backfire in the middle distance confirmed their departure.

The moment they were out of sight, I put Tock down in the dusty yard.

“Where’s Tick?” I said. “Go find her.”

Tock resumed her long feline monologue, and stalked off to the dovecote.

Needless to say, I followed.

• SEVEN •

THE DOVECOTE WAS A work of art. There’s no other way of putting it, and I shouldn’t have been in the least surprised to hear that the National Trust had its eye on it.

It was from this remarkable specimen of architecture that Culverhouse Farm had taken its name—“culverhouse” being the old word for a dovecote. This one was a tall round tower of ancient bricks, each one the shade of a faded rose, but no two of them alike. Built in the time of Queen Anne, it had once been used to breed and raise doves for the farm’s dinner table. In those days, the legs of the little dovelets were snapped to keep them fattening in the nest (this fact gleaned from the kitchen chatter of Mrs. Mullet). But times had changed. Gordon Ingleby was an avid pigeon fancier, and the birds that had lived in the tower in this century were more likely to be coddled by hand than in boiling water. At the weekends, he had sent them off by rail to some far-flung flyspeck on the map of England, where they would be released to come flapping immediately back to Culverhouse Farm. Here, they would be welcomed by the slapping-off of elaborate mechanical time clocks, much petting and bragging, and a great gorging on grain by the birds.

At least, such had been the case until little Robin Ingleby had been found hanging by the neck from the rotted gallows in Gibbet Wood. Since that day, other than a few wild specimens, there had been no more doves at Culverhouse Farm.

Poor Robin, when he died, had been the same age as I was then, and I found it hard to believe that someone so young could actually be dead. Still, it was a fact.

When one lives in a village, the more things are hushed up, the more one hears, and I remembered the undercurrent of gossip that had swept through Bishop’s Lacey at the time, lapping away like the tide at the timbers beneath a pier.

“They say young Robin Ingleby’s gone and killed himself.” “Robin Ingleby’s been done in by his parents.” “The little lad’s been slaughtered by Satanists. Mark my words—”

Most of these theories had been leaked to me by Mrs. Mullet, and I thought of them now as I approached the tower, gazing up in wonder at its myriad of openings.

As that monk called the lector had done in the monasteries of the Middle Ages, Daffy often read aloud to us as we ate our meals. We had recently been treated to Henry Savage Landor’s description, in Across Coveted Lands, of the Towers of Silence, in Persia, on top of which the Parsees placed corpses in a sitting position, with a stick under the chin to keep them upright. When the crows arrived to squabble over the body, it was considered a ticket to Heaven if the right eyeball was the first one consumed. The left was not quite so auspicious.

I could not help thinking of this now, and of the author’s account of the curious circular pigeon towers of Persia, each with a deep central pit for the collection of guano, whose production was the sole reason for keeping the birds.

Could there be, I wondered, some strange connection between towers, birds, death, and corruption? As I paused there for a moment, trying to think what it might be, a peculiar sound came drifting from the tower.

At first I thought it might be the muttering and cooing away to themselves of doves, high above my head in the cote. Or was it the wind?

It seemed too sustained to be either of these, rising and falling like the sound of a ghostly air-raid siren, almost at the threshold of hearing.

The sagging wooden door stood ajar, and I found that I could slip through easily into the hollow center of the tower. Tock brushed past my ankles, then vanished into the shadows in search of mice.

The sharp reek of the place slapped me in the face: the unmistakable chemical smell of dove’s guano, which the great Humphry Davy had found to yield, by distillation, carbonate of ammonia, with a residuum of carbonate of lime and common salt, a finding I had once verified by experiment in my chemical laboratory at Buckshaw.

Far above my head, countless beams of sunshine slanting in through the open ports dappled the curving walls with dots of yellow light. It was as if I had stepped into the colander in which some giant strained his soup bones.

Here, inside, the wailing sound was even louder, a whirlpool of noise amplified by the circular walls, of which I was the very center. I couldn’t have called out—even if I’d dared.

At the center of the room, pivoting on an ancient wooden post, was a moveable scaffold, somewhat like a library ladder, which must at one time have been used by their keepers to gain access to the doomed little birds.

The thing groaned fearsomely as I stepped onto it.

Up I went, inch by inch, hanging on for dear life, stretching my arms and legs to make impossible giant steps from one creaking crosspiece to the next. I looked down only once, and it made my head swim.

The higher I climbed, the louder the keening sound became, its echoes now coming together in a chorus of voices that seemed to congregate in some wild, high lament.

Above me, and to my left, was a vaulted opening that gave onto a niche larger than the others. By standing on tiptoe and seizing the brick ledge with my fingertips, I was able to pull myself up until my eyes were level with the floor of this grotto.

Inside, a woman knelt, her back towards me. She was singing. Her thin voice echoed from the bricks and swirled round my head:

“The robin’s gone afloat
The wind that rocks him to and fro
With a soft cradle-song and slow
Pleases him in the ebb and flow,
Rocking him in a boat.”

It was Mrs. Ingleby!

In front of her, on an overturned box, a candle burned, adding its smoky odor to the stifling heat of the little brick cave. To her right was propped up a black-and-white photograph of a child: her dead son, Robin, who grinned happily at the camera, his shock of blond hair bleached nearly white by the sun of long-gone summer days. To her left, lying on its side, as if it were hauled up on the beach to be cleaned of barnacles, was a toy sailboat.

I held my breath. She mustn’t know I was here. I would climb down slowly, and—

My legs began to shake. I hadn’t much of a grip, and my leather soles were already slipping on the weathered wooden frame. As I started to slide back, Mrs. Ingleby began her wail again, this time another song and, oddly, in another voice: a harsh, swashbuckling, piratical gargle: