‘Well, who then?’ said Buttercup.
‘Who indeed,’ said Alec. ‘If we knew that we’d know everything.’
‘We’re getting a long way ahead of ourselves here,’ I said, trying to remain the voice of reason, despite my excitement. ‘We don’t know yet that it wasn’t par for the course. We don’t know if this mushroom works through the bloodstream as well as the digestive system. We don’t even know if it grows here or if it’s in season. And we don’t know if it’s something that would stick out during the post-mortem like a sore thumb. So let’s stay calm.’
‘But the burrs on the midden heap?’ said Alec.
‘Oh yes, certainly,’ I said. ‘They need to be got away before Mrs Dudgeon or anyone else has a chance to start a bonfire and destroy them. But how we are to get them without being seen…’
‘Ooh!’ exclaimed Buttercup.
Alec and I waited for more, but she shook her head.
‘I half remembered something,’ she said. ‘But I’ve forgotten what it was.’
‘Well, do your best, Dandy,’ said Alec. I was about to protest when I realized he was right. As odd as it would be for me to be spotted skulking around in the cottage garden, it would be ten times odder for Alec. Why had I put the horse droppings on top, I lamented. It would have been bad enough without them; it would be ghastly now, and Grant was going to be livid.
I was just on my way out of the door with two sacks and a pair of borrowed gardening gloves when Buttercup hallooed from above me and knelt down to talk to me through the grille of the murder hole.
‘I’ve remembered,’ she sang out. ‘Don’t worry about being caught, Dandy. I was supposed to tell you from Cad, that he’s loaned out the Austin and a boy to take Mrs Dudgeon and “Donald’s” wife whoever “Donald” is to the Co-operative draper to be fitted up with their mourning. Sorry.’
‘Anything else?’ I said, resisting the urge to rush upstairs and box her ears.
‘Um? Yes! The children are at “their Auntie’s Betty’s” so you have a free run for poking about at the cottage.’
‘I see,’ I said. ‘So there was no need to borrow the dog, which rolled in the dung, which went on the heap, which I’m about to toss like a salad with my bare hands. Well, gardening gloves. You are impossible, Buttercup.’ I thought for a moment. ‘This Donald has been doing all the least enticing jobs thus far and if his wife merits shop-bought mourning, then I must be right in thinking that he’s Mr Dudgeon’s brother. And if this wife being at the draper’s gives me a clear run then they must live next door. Ah yes, that makes sense. His wife is “Izzy who has her hands full with eight”. At last they all begin to fall into place. I’ll bet this trip to the draper’s is the most fun poor Izzy has had all year.’
If I had expected either familiarity or the scent of the chase to drive away other more fanciful notions on this third trip through the woods, then I soon found out I was mistaken: I still had the unnerving sensation of being watched as I strode along, and now when I told myself that there were no such things as ghosts I could answer myself that it need not be a ghost but might be a murderer, wondering what I was up to and just about to work it out and come up behind me to put his hands around my throat. It was Mr Turnbull’s hands I imagined in this little scene and Mr Turnbull’s scrubbed cheeks and shining eyes I imagined being the last thing my eyes ever saw in this life; his wife’s voice murmuring ‘That’s right, my dear’ being the last sound my ears ever heard. Despite working myself up into a muck sweat with these fantasies, however, I reached the back garden of Mrs Dudgeon’s cottage unmolested, drew on my gardening gloves and set to work.
The horse dung rolled away more easily than I expected and I did not have to pick too many little seeds out of it with my gloved fingers. I deliberated fairly long, in fact, whether I had to pick any at all. Would every burr be poisoned if this was indeed what had happened? Or would only a few? If only a few, though, how ironic if it happened to be those few I left behind. At last, the spirit of Nanny Palmer came to rest on my right shoulder and I heard her voice telling me that this job was like all others in the matter of being worth doing and therefore worth doing well.
So the light was beginning to fade by the time I was finished. Actual sunset was not until eightish but the clearing was very small and the spruce trees around the back of it quite well grown, so even as early as this the gardens had seen the last of the afternoon’s sunshine. Mrs Donald Dudgeon’s washing would get damp again, I thought, if she was not home soon to take it in.
As I glanced at it upon this thought, my heart leapt up into my throat and I gave a cry. There was a figure standing in the Dudgeons’ back doorway, standing quite still and looking towards me, and without being aware of having decided to do so I found myself running into the trees, the sacks forgotten. This was not prudence in the face of the unknown, nor even self-preservation on the off-chance that this figure might mean me harm; it was blind, whickering terror, for the figure in the doorway was Robert Dudgeon.
‘A ghost, a ghost, a ghost,’ I snivelled under my breath, and: ‘Don’t look back, Dandy! Don’t look back!’, and I kept running until the clearing was out of sight and the trees had closed silently around me. Then I began simultaneously to tire, to slow and to gather my wits about me. When I finally stopped, panting and shaking, to lean against a trunk and catch my breath I almost – alone as I was – blushed for shame. There were two possibilities: either I had seen nothing at all, only shadows; or I had seen someone of the same build and colouring as Robert Dudgeon who just happened to be standing in his doorway. I could not, however, even be sure of that much, because when I thought hard I realized that it might just as easily have been the other doorway – I had only glanced. And if it was the other doorway, then it was pretty clear who the ghost was. I straightened my clothes, ruffled and untucked by my sudden sprinting, patted my beaming cheeks with my fingers in an attempt to cool them down, and set off back the way I had come.
When I reached the clearing once more, the ghost had – quite understandably – come down the garden to the midden heap where he stood, hands on hips, wondering. Of course, it was not Robert Dudgeon, although he did look rather like him. I arranged a smile on my face and prepared to meet Donald.
‘Please forgive me,’ I said as I neared him. He looked up at me, rather dazed. ‘You must wonder what on earth… And please accept my sincere condolences.’ Donald Dudgeon certainly looked grief-stricken enough to make this trite little phrase a necessity rather than a mere politeness. He was obviously quite a bit younger than his brother but he was drawn and tired, pinched with grief.
‘You must wonder what on earth I’m up to,’ I said again. ‘Let me explain. One of your sisters-in-law. Or would they…? One of Mrs Dudgeon’s sisters, that is, Mrs Robert Dudgeon. Oh well, anyway, one of the ladies seems to have put the burrs from Friday here on the midden instead of on the fire. And they won’t rot down, you know. Well, you must know,’ I gestured around the neatly bulging vegetable patch in his own garden, ‘and I happened to notice and I thought how sad for your – for the widow when she sees them. How awful, in fact, next spring, just when she might perhaps be beginning to get on top of things and she comes out to start her garden full of hope and… and there they are. Do you see? None of my business, obviously, but do you see?’
He looked at me very closely, appraising me as though I were a specimen of some exotic genus and he a collector trying to decide if I was a new discovery or if he had one of this type already. It was a most unnerving examination to find oneself subjected to, and I was slightly mesmerized as I looked back innocently (I hoped), returning his stare. It is foolish, of course, to imagine that the lower orders are simple to a man (especially when one considers that some of one’s own set are so very simple that to call them ‘simple’ at all and not something much plainer is more courtesy than accurate description). Still, it comes as a surprise sometimes, and certainly it came as a surprise to me then, to look into the face of a working man such as this and see there such a calculating intelligence, such knowing and complicated sadness, as though the world were laid bare before him and the understanding of it wearied him half to death.