The Weed That Strings the Hangman's Bag

I scarcely dared breathe as I looked on over her shoulder. Little by little, the dead boy took shape before my eyes.

He was hanging quite peacefully in midair, his neck canted to one side, a look of slightly surprised contentment on his face, as if he had suddenly and unexpectedly walked into a room full of angels. In spite of the subdued light of the wood, his neatly parted hair gave off a healthy, and therefore rather unnerving, shine. He wore a striped sweater and dark britches, their legs tucked carelessly into a pair of rubber boots. He must have died quickly, I thought.

Only then did she draw the noose that cramped his neck: a dark braided thing that dangled from the gallows into the space beneath. She shaded the rope with angry slashes of the pencil.

I breathed in deeply. Meg looked up at me triumphantly, seeking approval.

'And now the Devil,' I whispered. 'Draw the Devil, Meg.'

She looked me straight in the eye, relishing the attention. A canny smile appeared at the corner of her mouth.

'Please, Meg--draw the Devil.'

Without taking her eyes from mine, she licked a finger and thumb and turned elaborately to a fresh page. She began again, and as she drew, Gibbet Wood appeared once more at her fingertips. This second sketch grew darker than the first as Meg scrubbed at the pencil marks, smearing them to suggest the half-light of the glade. Then came the gallows, viewed this time from a slightly different angle.

How odd, I thought, that she didn't begin with the Devil, as most people would be tempted to do. But only when she had set the stage to her own satisfaction with trees and bushes did she begin to rough in the figure that was to be the focus of her creation.

In an approximate oval that she had left blank upon the page until now, a sketchy figure began to emerge: arms and shoulders first, followed by knees, legs, arms, hands, and feet.

It wore a black jacket, and stood on one leg in the clearing, as if captured in the midst of a frenzied dance.

Its trousers were hung by their suspenders from a low-hanging branch.

Meg shielded the paper with her left hand as she penciled in the features. When she was finished, she thrust it at me roughly, as if the paper were contaminated.

It took me a moment to recognize the face: to recognize that the figure in the glade--the Devil--was the vicar, Denwyn Richardson.

The vicar? It was too ridiculous for words. Or was it?

Just minutes earlier Meg had told me the Devil was dead, and now she was sketching him as the vicar.

What was going on in her poor addled mind?

'Are you quite sure, Meg?' I asked, tapping the notebook. 'Is that the Devil?'

'Hsssst!' she said, cocking her head and putting her fingers to my lips. 'Someone's comin'!'

I looked round the glade, which, even to my heightened sense of hearing, seemed perfectly silent. When I looked back, my notebook and pencil lay at my feet, and Meg had vanished among the trees. I knew there was little point in calling her back.

I stood there motionless for a few moments, listening, waiting for something, although I'm not sure what it was.

The woodland, I remembered, is an ever-changing world. From minute to minute, the shadows shift, and from hour to hour the vegetation moves with the sun. Insects tunnel in the soil, heaving it up, at first in little hummocks, and then in larger ones. From month to month, leaves grow and fall, and from year to year, the trees. Daffy once said that you can't step into the same river twice, and it's the same with forests. Five winters had come and gone since Robin Ingleby died here, and now there was nothing left to see.

I walked slowly back past the crumbling gallows and plunged into the woods. Within minutes, I was out into the open at the top of Jubilee Field.

Not twenty yards away, almost invisible in the fog, a gray Ferguson tractor was stopped in the field, and someone in a green overall and rubber boots was bending over the engine. That must have been what Meg had heard.

'Hullo!' I shouted. It's always best to announce one's self heartily when trespassing. (Even though I had invented it on the spot, this seemed to be a good general rule.)

As the figure straightened up and turned round, I realized that it was Sally Straw, the Land Army girl.

'Hello,' she said, wiping her oily hands on a rag. 'You're Flavia de Luce, aren't you?'

'Yes.' I stuck out my hand. 'And you're Sally. I've seen you at the market. I've always admired your freckles and your ginger hair.'

To be most effective, flattery is always best applied with a trowel.

She gave me a broad, honest grin and a handshake that nearly crushed my fingers.

'It's all right to call me Sal,' she said. 'All my best friends do.'

She reminded me somewhat of Joyce Grenfell, the actress: a bit mannish in the way she moved, but otherwise decidedly female.

'My Fergie's gone bust,' she said, pointing to the tractor. 'Might be the ignition coil. They do that sometimes, you know: get overheated and go open circuit. Then there's nothing for it but to wait for the ruddy thing to cool.'

Since motors were not my forte, I nodded wisely and kept my mouth shut.