The Weed That Strings the Hangmans Bag - Alan Bradley

"Hullo!" I said. "What's this?"

I pulled it out and looked at it. As soon as I saw the thing, I knew what it was and how it had made its way into my pocket. I turned it over and had a jolly good squint at the reverse.

Yes, there could be no doubt about it--no doubt whatsoever.

* TWENTY-FOUR *

AS I LOOKED AT it from across the high street, the St. Nicholas Tea Room was like a picture postcard of Ye Olde England. Its upstairs rooms, with their tiny-paned bow windows, had been the residence of the present Mr. Sowbell's grandparents, in the days when they had lived above their coffin and furniture manufactory.

The Sowbell tables, sideboards, and commodes, once known far and wide for the ferocity of their black shine and the gleam of their ornate silver knobs and drawer pulls, had now fallen out of favor, and were often to be found at estate sales, standing sullen and alone in the driveway until being knocked down at the end of the day for little more than a pound or two.

"By unscrupulous sharpers who use the wood to turn Woolworth's dressers into antiques," Daffy had once told me.

The undertaker's shop, I noticed, now had a cardboard clock stuck in its window, suspended from an inverted V of black cord. The minute hand pointed to twelve, and the hour hand was missing. Mr. Sowbell had obviously gone to the Thirteen Drakes for his afternoon pint.

I crossed the street and, opening the tearoom door, stepped inside. To my right was a steep wooden staircase, with a painted blue hand pointing upwards: Tea Room Upstairs. Beside the stairs, a dim, narrow passageway vanished into the gloom at the rear of the building. On the wall, another helpful painted hand--this one in red, and marked Gentlemen's and Ladies' Water Closets--pointed the way discreetly.

I knew that the tea shop and the undertaker's shared the W.C. Feely had insisted on dragging us here for tea one autumn afternoon, and I had been gobsmacked at the sight of three women in black dresses and black veils, chattering happily away at the door to the toilet like a congress of toothy crows, before resuming their grim demeanors and slipping back into Mr. Sowbell's premises. The door through which they had vanished opened directly into the undertaker's rooms.

I was right! A discreet Sowbell & Sons, lettered in gold upon the dark varnish, must have been meant to remind mourners not to go blundering off into the tea shop's corridor after they had "soaped their 'ands," as Mrs. Mullet put it.

The black paneled door swung open on silent hinges.

I found myself in a dark Victorian parlor, with flocked wallpaper of black and yellow-cream. On three sides of the room were spindly wooden chairs and a small round table with a spray of artificial baby's breath. The place smelled of dust, with an underlying chemical base.

The wall at the far end of the room was bare, save for a dark framed print of Millet's Angelus, in which a man and a woman, obviously Flemish peasants, stand alone in a field at sunset. The woman's huge hands, which are those of a laborer, are clasped at her breast in prayer. The man has removed his hat, which he holds clutched uncomfortably in front of him. He has set aside his fork and stuck it half into the loose earth. As crows congregate above them like vultures, the couple stands with downcast eyes. Between them, half-empty on the ground, lies a wicker basket.

Max Wight had once told me that when the original of Millet's painting was exhibited in America, the sale of prints had been sluggish at best until someone thought of changing the name from Angelus to Burying the Baby.

It was beneath this print, I guessed, that the coffins were customarily parked. Since the spot was empty, it was obvious that Rupert's body, if it were still on the premises, must be in another room.

To my right was an L-shaped partition. There had to be another door behind it.

I peered round behind the half-wall and found myself looking into a room that was nearly the twin of the first. The only difference that I could see was that the flocked wallpaper was black and pink-cream, and the print on the far wall was Holman Hunt's Light of the World, in which Jesus stands at the door like Diogenes seeking an honest man, with a tin lantern in His hand.

Beneath its dark frame, on trestles, was a coffin.

I crept towards it on tiptoe, my ears tuned for the slightest sound.

I ran my fingers along the highly polished woodwork, the way one might caress a piano lid before lifting it to reveal the keys. I put my thumbs under the join and felt it lift slightly.

I was in luck! The lid was not screwed down. I lifted it and looked inside.

There, like a doll in a box, lay Rupert. In life, his personality had made him seem so much larger, I had forgotten how small he really was.

Was I frightened out of my wits? I'm afraid not. Since the day I had found a body in the kitchen garden at Buckshaw, I had developed a fascination with death, with a particular emphasis on the chemistry of putrefaction.

In fact, I had already begun making notes for a definitive work which I would call De Luce on Decomposition, in which I would outline, step by step, the process of human cadaveric decay.

How exciting it was to reflect upon the fact that, within minutes of death, the organs of the body, lacking oxygen, begin to digest themselves! Ammonia levels start to rise and, with the assistance of bacterial action, methane (better known as marsh gas) is produced, along with hydrogen sulfide, carbon dioxide, and mercaptan, a captivating sulfur-alcohol in whose structure sulfur takes the place of oxygen--which accounts for its putrid smell.

How curious it was, I thought, that we humans had taken millions of years to crawl up out of the swamps and yet, within minutes of death, we were already tobogganing back down the slope.

My keen sense of smell told me that Mr. Sowbell had used a formalin-based embalming fluid on Rupert (a two-percent solution of formaldehyde seemed most likely, with a slight bouquet of something else: chloroform, by the smell of it) and by the slight green tint at the end of Rupert's nose, I could tell that the undertaker had skimped on the ingredients. One could only hope that the lying-in-state at the BBC would be a closed-coffin affair.

Better hurry up, though, I thought. Mr. Sowbell might walk in at any moment.

Rupert's pale hands were folded across his abdomen, with the right hand uppermost. I took hold of his fingers (it was like lifting linked sausages from the icebox) and pulled upwards.

To my amazement, his left hand came with it, and I saw at once that they had been cunningly sewn together. By twisting the cold hands and bending down for a better look beneath them, I saw what I was looking for: a blackened channel that ran from the base of his left thumb to the tips of his first and second fingers.

In spite of Mr. Sowbell's embalming efforts, Rupert was still giving off rather a scorched smell. And there could be no doubt about it: The burn on the palm of his left hand was the precise width of the lever that operated Galligantus.

A floorboard creaked.

As I closed the coffin lid, the door opened and Mr. Sowbell walked into the room. I hadn't heard him coming.

Because I was still in a half-crouch from inspecting Rupert's burned fingers, I was able to come slowly to a standing position.

"Amen," I said, crossing myself extravagantly.

"What on earth--?" said Mr. Sowbell.

"Oh, hello, Mr. Sowbell," I said in an appropriately hushed tone. "I just dropped in to pay my respects. There was no one here, but I thought a quiet prayer would be in order.

"Mr. Porson had no friends in Bishop's Lacey, you know," I added, pulling a handkerchief from my pocket and wiping away an imaginary tear. "It seemed such a shame, and I thought it would do no harm if I--I'm sorry if--"

"There, there," he said. "Death comes to us all, you know, old and young alike...."

Was he threatening me, or was my imagination overheated?

"And even though we expect it," he went on, "it always comes as a shock in the end."

It certainly had for Rupert--but was the man being facetious?

Evidently not, for his long face maintained its professional polish.

"And now if you will excuse me," he said. "I must prepare him for his final journey."

Final journey? Where did they get this claptrap? Was there a phrasebook published for the undertaking trade?

I gave him my ten-years-old-going-on-eleven smile, and faked a flustered exit.

The bell above the door of the St. Nicholas Tea Room jangled merrily as I stepped inside. The establishment, a bit of a climb at the top of the stairs, was owned by none other than Miss Lavinia and Miss Aurelia, the Puddock sisters: those same two relics who had provided the musical prelude to Rupert's spectacular demise.

Miss Lavinia, in a nook at the far side of the room, seemed to be locked in mortal combat with a large silver samovar. In spite of the simplicity of its task, which was the boiling of water, this Heath Robinson contraption was a bulbous squid of tubes, valves, and gauges, which spat hot water as it gurgled and hissed away like a cornered dragon.

"No tea, I'm afraid," she said over her shoulder. She could not yet see who had entered the shop.

"Anything I can do to help, Miss Puddock?" I offered cheerily.

She let out a little shriek as her hand strayed accidentally into a jet of hot steam, and the china cup she was holding crashed to the floor, where it flew into a hundred pale pieces.

"Oh, it's the little de Luce girl," she said, spinning round. "My goodness! You gave me quite a fright. I wasn't expecting to hear your voice."

Because I could see that she'd scalded her hand, I fought back my baser urges.

"Anything I can do to help?" I repeated.

"Oh, dear," she said, flustered beyond reason. "Peter always chooses to act up when Aurelia's not here. She's so much better with him than I am."

"Peter?" I asked.

"The samovar," she said, wiping her wet red hands on a tea towel. "Peter the Great."

"Here," I said, "let me--"

Without another word I took up a bowl of lemon wedges from one of the round tables and squeezed each of them into a jug of iced water. Then I grabbed a clean white table napkin, immersed it until it was soaked, wrung it out, and wrapped it around Miss Puddock's hand. She flinched as I touched her, and then relaxed.

"May I?" I asked, removing an opal brooch from her lapel and using it to pin the ends of the makeshift bandage.

"Oh! It feels better already," she said with a pained smile. "Wherever did you learn that trick?"

"Girl Guides," I lied.

Experience has taught me that an expected answer is often better than the truth. I had, in fact, quite painfully looked up the remedy in one of Mrs. Mullet's household reference books after a superheated test tube seared most of the flesh from a couple of my fingers.

"Miss Cool has always spoken so highly of you," she said. "I shall tell her she was 'bang-on,' as those nice bomber boys from the RAF used to say."

I gave her my most modest smile. "It's nothing, Miss Puddock--just jolly good luck I got here when I did. I was next door, at Mr. Sowbell's, you see, saying a prayer or two at Mr. Porson's coffin. You don't suppose it will do any harm, do you?"

I realized that I was gilding the lily with a string mop for a paintbrush, but business was business.

"Why no, dear," she said. "I think Mr. Porson would be touched."

She didn't know the half of it!

"It was so sad." I lowered my voice to a conspiratorial whisper and touched her good arm. "But I must tell you, Miss Puddock, that in spite of the tragedy on Saturday evening, my family and I enjoyed 'Napoleon's Last Charge' and 'Bendemeer's Stream.' Father said that you don't often hear music like that nowadays."

"Why, thank you, dear," she murmured damply. "It's kind of you to say so. Of course, mercifully, we didn't actually see what happened to poor Mr. Porson, being busy in the kitchen, as it were. As proprietresses of Bishop Lacey's sole tearoom, certain expectations attach, I'm afraid. Not that we resent--"

"No, of course not," I said. "But surely you must have tons of people offering to help out."

She gave a little bark. "Help? Most people don't know the meaning of the word. No, Aurelia and I were left alone in the kitchen from start to finish. Two hundred and sixty-three cups of tea we poured, but of course that's counting the ones we served after the police took charge."

"And no one offered to help?" I asked, giving her an incredulous look.

"No one. As I said, Aurelia and I were alone in the kitchen the whole while. And I was left completely on my own when Aurelia took a cup of tea to the puppeteer."

My ears went up like a flag on a pole. "She took Rupert a cup of tea?"

"Well, she tried to, dear, but the door was locked."

"The door to the stage? Across from the kitchen?"

"No, no ... she didn't want to use that one. She'd have had to brush right past that Mother Goose, that woman who was in the spotlight, telling the story. No, Aurelia took the tea all the way round the back of the hall and down to the other door."

"The one in the opposite passage?"

"Well, yes. It's the only other one, isn't it, dear? But as I've already told you, it was locked."

"During the puppet show?"

"Why, yes. Odd, isn't it? Mr. Porson had asked us before he began if we could bring him a nice cup of tea during the show. 'Just leave it on the little table behind the stage,' he said. 'I'll find it. Puppetry's dry work, you know,' and he gave us a little wink. So why on earth would he lock the door?"

As she went on, I could already feel the facts beginning to marshal themselves in my mind.

"Those were Aurelia's exact words when she'd come all the way back with his cup of tea still in her hand. 'Whatever would possess him to lock the door?'"

"Perhaps he didn't," I said, with sudden inspiration. "Perhaps someone else did. Who has the key, do you know?"

"There are two keys to the stage door, dear. They each open the ones on either side of the stage. The vicar keeps one on his keychain, and the duplicate on a nail in his study at the vicarage. It's all because of that time he went off to Brighton for the C and S--that's the Churchwardens' and Sidesmen's--cricket match, and took Tom Stoddart with him. Tom's the locksmith, you know, and with the two of them gone, no one could get on or off the stage without a stepladder. It played havoc with the Little Theater Group's production of King Lear, let me tell you!"

"And there was no one else about?"

"No one, dear. Aurelia and I were in the kitchen the whole time. We had the door half closed so the light from the kitchen wouldn't spoil the darkness in the hall."

"There was no one in the passageway?"

"No, of course not. They should have had to walk through the beam of light from the kitchen door, right under our noses so to speak. Once we had the water on to boil, Aurelia and I stood right there at the crack of the door so that we could at least hear the puppet show. 'Fee! Fi! Fo! Fum.' Oh! It gives me the goose bumps just to think about it now!"