The Weed That Strings the Hangman's Bag

lengthen.

'Except--' she said, her gaze wavering. 'I thought--'

'Yes?'

'I thought I heard a footstep in the hall. I'd just glanced over at the wall clock, and my eyes were a little dazzled by the light above the stove. I looked out and saw--'

'Do you remember the time?'

'It was twenty-five past seven. We had the tea laid on for eight o'clock, and it takes those big electric urns a long time to come to the boil. How odd that you should ask. That nice young policeman--what's his name?--the little blond fellow with the dimples and the lovely smile?'

'Detective Sergeant Graves,' I said.

'Yes, that's him: Detective Sergeant Graves. Funny, isn't it? He asked me the same question, and I gave him the same answer I am going to give you.'

'Which is?'

'It was the vicar's wife--Cynthia Richardson.'

* TWENTY-FIVE *

CYNTHIA, THE RODENT-FACED avenger! I should have known! Cynthia, who doled out good works in the parish of St. Tancred's with the hand of a Herod. I could easily see her taking it upon herself to punish Rupert, the notorious womanizer. The parish hall was part of her kingdom; the spare key to the stage doors was kept on a nail in her husband's study.

How she might have come into possession of the vicar's missing bicycle clip remained something of a mystery, but mightn't it have been in the vicarage all along?

By his own admission, the vicar's absentmindedness was becoming a problem. Hence the engraved initials. Perhaps he had left home without the clip last Thursday and shredded his trouser cuff because he wasn't wearing it.

The details were unimportant. One thing I was sure of: There was more going on in the vicarage than met the eye, and whatever it was (husband dancing naked in the woods, and so forth), it seemed likely that Cynthia was at the heart of it all.

'What are you thinking, dear?' Miss Puddock's voice interrupted my thoughts. 'You've suddenly gone so quiet!'

I needed time to get to the bottom of things, and I needed it now. I was unlikely to have a second chance to plumb the depths of Miss Puddock's village knowledge.

'I--I suddenly don't feel very well,' I said, snatching at the edge of a table and lowering myself into one of the wire-backed chairs. 'It might have been the sight of your poor scalded hand, Miss Puddock. A delayed reaction, perhaps. A touch of shock.'

I suppose there must have been times when I hated myself for practicing such deceits, but I could not think of any at the moment. It was Fate, after all, who thrust me into these things, and Fate would jolly well have to stand the blame.

'Oh, you poor thing!' Miss Puddock said. 'You stay right where you are, and I shall fetch you a nice cup of tea and a scone. You do like scones, don't you?'

'I l-love scones,' I said, remembering suddenly that shock victims were known to shiver and shake. By the time she came back with the scones, my teeth were chattering like marbles shaken in a jar.

She removed a vase of lily of the valley (Convallaria majalis), whisked the starched linen cloth from one of the tables, and wrapped it round my shoulders. As the sweet smell of the flowers wafted across my nostrils, I remembered with pleasure that the plant contained a witch's brew of cardioactive glycosides, including convallatoxin and glucoconvalloside, and that even the water in which the flowers had stood was poisonous. Our ancestors had called it Our Lady's tears, or Ladder-to-Heaven, and with good reason!

'You mustn't take a chill.' Miss Puddock clucked solicitously as she poured me a cup of tea from the hulking samovar.

'Peter the Great seems to be behaving himself now,' I observed with a calculated tremor and a nod towards the gleaming machine.

'He's very naughty sometimes.' She smiled. 'It comes of his being Russian, I expect.'

'Is he really Russian?' I asked, priming the pump.

'From his distinguished heads,' she said, pointing to the double-headed black eagle that functioned as a hot water tap, 'to his royally rounded bottom. He was manufactured in the shops of the brothers Martiniuk, the celebrated silversmiths of Odessa, and it was said that he was once used to make tea for Tsar Nicholas and his unfortunate daughters. When the city was occupied by the Reds after the Revolution, the youngest of the Martiniuks, Vladimir, who was just sixteen at the time, bundled Peter up in a wolf skin, roped him to a handcart, and fled with him on foot--on foot, fancy!--to the Netherlands, where he set up shop in one of Amsterdam's cobbled alleys, and changed his name to van den Maarten.

'Peter,' she said, giving the samovar a light but affectionate pat, 'was his sole possession, other than the handcart, of course. He planned to make his fortune by producing endless copies, and selling them to Dutch aristocrats, who were said to be mad about Russian tea.'

'And were they?' I asked.

'I don't know,' she replied, 'and nor did Vladimir. He died of influenza in the great epidemic of 1918, leaving his shop and all that was in it to his landlady, Margriet van Rijn. Margriet married a farm boy from Bishop's Lacey, Arthur Elkins, who had fought in Flanders, and he brought her back with him to England not long after the end of the Great War.