The Weed That Strings the Hangman's Bag

frantic, waiting for the slightest scrap of news? But Grace Ingleby wasn't keeping watch at the windows. And why not? The reason is a simple one: She already knew that Robin was dead.'

Somewhere behind me, the vicar gasped.

'I see.' Inspector Hewitt nodded. 'An ingenious theory ... most ingenious. But still hardly enough to build a case upon.'

'Granted,' I agreed, 'but there's more.'

I looked from one of them to another: the vicar, Inspector Hewitt, and Sergeant Graves, their eager faces thrust forward, hanging upon my every word. Even the hulking Sergeant Woolmer slowed his polishing of the intricate lens.

'Robin Ingleby's hair was always a haystack,' I told them. ''Tousled' is perhaps the proper word. You can see it in his photos. And yet when he was found hanging from the timbers of the old gallows, his hair was as neatly combed as if he'd just climbed down from the barber's chair. Meg captured it perfectly in her drawing. See?'

There was an intake of breath as everyone huddled over the page from my notebook.

'It was something that only a mother would do,' I said. 'She couldn't resist. Grace Ingleby wanted her son to be presentable when he was found, hanging by the neck, dead in Gibbet Wood.'

'Good Lord!' Inspector Hewitt said.

* TWENTY-NINE *

'GOOD LORD,' FATHER EXCLAIMED. 'There's Broadcasting House. They've set up cameras in Portland Place.'

He got up from his chair for the umpteenth time and hurried across the drawing room to twiddle with the knobs on the television receiving set.

'Please be quiet, Haviland,' Aunt Felicity said. 'If they were interested in your commentary, the BBC would have sent for you.'

Aunt Felicity, who had barely got home to Hampstead, had hurried back again to Buckshaw as soon as the idea came into her head. She had hired the television for the occasion ('at ruinous expense,' she hastened to point out), and because of it, was now enjoying vastly increased dictatorial powers.

Early in the morning of the previous day, the workmen had begun erecting a receiving aerial on the ramparts of Buckshaw.

'It needs to be high enough to pick up the signal from the new transmitting tower at Sutton Coldfield,' Aunt Felicity had said, in a voice that suggested television was her own invention. 'I had wanted all of us to go up to London to attend the Porson obsequies,' she went on, 'but when Lady Burwash let slip that the Sitwells were having in the telly ...

'No, no, don't protest, Haviland. It's educational. I'm only doing it for the good of the girls.'

Several muscular workers, dressed in overalls, had lugged the set from the back of a pantechnicon and into the drawing room. There it now crouched, its single gray eye staring, like a flickering Cyclops, at those of us gathered in its baleful glow.

Daffy and Feely were huddled together on a chesterfield, feigning boredom. Father had invited the vicar and told them to watch their language.

Mrs. Mullet was enthroned in a comfortable wing-backed chair, and Dogger, who preferred not to sit in Father's presence, stood silently behind her.

'I wonder if they have televisions in Portland Place,' Feely said, idly, 'or whether they might, rather, be looking out their windows?'

I recognized this at once as an attempt to twit Father, whose contempt for television was legendary.

'Television is a bauble,' he would reply, whenever we pleaded with him to have a receiver installed. 'If God meant for pictures to be sent through the air, He'd have never given us the cinema.

'Or the National Gallery,' he'd add sourly.

But in this case, he had been overruled.

'But it's History, Haviland,' Aunt Felicity had said in a loud voice. 'Would you have denied your daughters the opportunity to watch Henry the Fifth address his men on Crispin's Day?'

She had taken up a stance in the middle of the drawing room.'This story shall the good man teach his son;

And Crispin Crispian shall ne'er go by,

From this day to the ending of the world,

But we in it shall be remembered;

We few, we happy few, we band of brothers--'

'Nonsense!' Father said, but Aunt Felicity, like Henry the Fifth, pushed on, undaunted:'For he today that sheds his blood with me

Shall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile,

This day shall gentle his condition:

And gentlemen in England now abed

Shall think themselves accursed they were not here,

And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks

That fought with us upon St. Crispin's day.'

'That's all very well and good, but they didn't have television in 1415,' Father had said rather sullenly, missing her point entirely.

But then, yesterday, something remarkable had happened. One of the mechanics, who had been in the drawing room with his eye intently upon the receiver, had begun calling instructions out the window to a companion on the lawn, who relayed them, in a drill-sergeant voice, to the man on the roof.