The Weed That Strings the Hangman's Bag

'Take my bags to my room, Dogger,' Aunt Felicity said, returning her gaze to earth, 'and mind the alligator.'

'Yes, Miss Felicity,' Dogger said, a wicker hamper already under each arm and a suitcase in each hand. 'Harrods, I believe.'

'Aunt Felicity's arrived,' I said, slouching into the kitchen. 'I'm suddenly not very hungry. I think I'll just have a lettuce sandwich and eat it in my room.'

'You'll do no such thing,' Mrs. Mullet said. 'I've gone and made a nice aspic salad, with beets and that.'

I pulled a horrid face, but when she glanced at me unexpectedly, I remembered Nialla's dodge and cleverly transformed my grimace into a yawn, covering my mouth with my hand.

'Sorry. I was up early this morning,' I said.

'So was I. More's the pity.'

'I was at Ingleby's farm,' I volunteered.

'So I heard,' she said.

Petrify the woman! Was there nothing that escaped her ears?

'Mrs. Richardson told me you was helpin' them puppet people, her with her Judas hair, like, and him with his gampy leg.'

Cynthia Richardson. I should have guessed. Obviously, the presence of the puppeteers had loosened the purse-string mouth.

'Her name's Nialla,' I said, 'and his is Rupert. She's quite a nice person, actually. She makes scrapbooks--or she used to, at least.'

'That's all very well, I'm sure, dear, but you'll have to--'

'I met Mrs. Ingleby, too,' I persisted. 'In fact, we had quite an interesting chat.'

Mrs. Mullet's polishing of the salad plates slowed--and stopped. She had taken the bait.

'A chat? Her? Ha! That'll be the thirsty Friday!

'Poor soul,' she added, as a quick afterthought.

'She talked about Robin, her son,' I said, with a crumb of truth.

'Get away with you!'

'She said that Robin's gone.'

This was too much even for Mrs. Mullet.

'Gone? I should say he is. He's deader than a doorknob these five years or more. Dead and buried. I mind the day they found him, hangin' by 'is neck in Gibbet Wood. It was a washday Monday, and I'd just hung a load on the line when Tom Batts the postman come to the gate. 'Mrs. M,' he says to me, he says, 'you'd best get ready to hear some bad news.' 'It's my Alf!' I says, and he says, 'No, it's young Robin, Gordon Ingleby's boy,' and phoosh! The wind went out of me just like that. I thought I was going to--'

'Who found him?' I interrupted. 'Young Robin, I mean.'

'Why, Mad Meg it was. Her as lives up there in Gibbet Wood. She spotted a bit of bright under a tree--that's what she calls any old bit of 'mongery she comes across: 'a bit of bright'--and when she goes to pick it up, she sees it's one of them toy shovels, them as you'd take to the beach, like, and the tin sand pail, too, lyin' right there in the woods.'

'Robin's mother took him to the seaside,' I was about to say, but I stopped myself just in time. I remembered that gossip withheld draws more gossip: 'like flies to a magnet,' as Mrs. Mullet herself had once remarked about another matter entirely.

'And then she saw 'im, swingin' by the neck from that there old scaffold,' she went on. ''Is face was awful, she said--like a blackened melon.'

I was beginning to regret that I hadn't brought my notebook.

'Who killed him?' I asked bluntly.

'Ah,' she said, 'that's the thing. Nobody knows.'

'Was he murdered?'

'Might have been, for all that. But like I said, nobody knows for sure. They had what they call an ink-quest at the library--it's the same thing as a poet's mortem, Alf says. Dr. Darby got up and told them the little lad was hanged, and that's all he could rightly say. Mad Meg claimed the Devil took 'im, but you know what she's like. They called up the Inglebys, and that German what drives their tractor--Dieter, 'is name is--as well as Sally Straw. Dumb as Dorothy's donkey, the lot of 'em. Including the police.'

The police? Of course!

The police would certainly have investigated Robin Ingleby's death, and if my guess was right, my old friend Inspector Hewitt would have had a hand in it.

Well, the Inspector wasn't exactly an old friend, but I had recently assisted him with an investigation in which he and his colleagues were completely baffled.

Rather than rely on Mrs. Mullet's village hearsay, I'd get the facts straight from the horse's mouth, so to speak. All I needed was an opportunity to bicycle over to the police station in Hinley. I would drop in casually, just in time for tea.

As I cycled past St. Tancred's, I couldn't help wondering how Rupert and Nialla were getting on. Well, I thought, as I braked and circled back, it wouldn't take long to find out.

But the door to the parish hall was locked. I gave it a good old shaking and more than a few hard knocks, but