I hugged myself in anticipation of a tidal wave of gratitude and praise. But none came.
"Thanks," Nialla said, and pocketed the thing.
Thanks? Just thanks? The nerve! I'd show her: I'd pretend she hadn't hurt me; pretend I didn't care.
"I can't help noticing," I remarked casually, "that you're packing the van, which means that Bert Archer's repaired it and you're about to be on your way. Since Inspector Hewitt is nowhere in sight, I expect that means you're free to go."
"Free?" she repeated, and spat in the dirt. "Free? The vicar's given me four pounds, six shillings, and eightpence from the show. Bert Archer's bill comes to seven pounds ten. It's only because the vicar put in a word for me that he's willing to let me drive to Overton to pawn whatever I can. If you call that free, then I'm free. It's all bloody well and good for Little Miss Nabob, who lives in a country house the size of Buckingham Palace, to make her smart-pants deductions. So think what you like, but don't bloody well patronize me!"
"All right," I said. "I didn't mean to. Here, take this, please."
I dug into my pocket again and pulled out the coin, the one Aunt Felicity had foisted upon Dogger, thinking it was a shilling. Dogger, in turn, had planted it in my pocket, believing, perhaps, that it would soon be spent on horehound sticks at Miss Cool's shop.
I handed it to Nialla, who looked at it with disbelief.
"Fourpence!" she said. "Bloody fourpence!"
Her tears were flowing freely as she flung it away among the tombstones.
"Yes, it is only fourpence," I said. "But it's fourpence in Maundy money. The coins are produced by the Royal Mint, to be handed out by the Sovereign — "
"Blow the Sovereign!" she shouted. "And blow the Royal Mint!"
" — on Maundy Thursday. They're quite rare. If I remember correctly, Bert Archer is a coin collector, and I think you'll find the Maundy fourpence will more than pay for the van."
With all the righteous dignity I could muster, I grabbed Gladys by the handlebars and shoved off for home. When I looked back from the corner of the church, Nialla was already on her hands and knees, scrabbling in the churchyard grass, and I couldn't tell whether the tears she was wiping away were tears of anger or of happiness.
* TWENTY-SIX *
"ALL RIGHT, DOGGER," I SAID, "the jig is up."
I had found him in the butler's pantry, polishing Father's shoes.
Dogger's duties at Buckshaw varied in direct proportion to his present capabilities, his participation in our daily life rising and descending, rather like those colored balls in Galileo's thermometer that float at different levels in a glass tube, depending on the temperature. The fact that he was doing shoes was a good sign. It indicated clearly that he had advanced once again from gardener to butler.
He looked up from his work.
"Is it?" he asked.
"Cast your mind, if you please, back to Saturday evening at the parish hall. You're sitting beside me watching Jack and the Beanstalk when suddenly something goes wrong backstage. Rupert comes crashing down dead, and within minutes you are telling me that you fear we have seen murder. How did you know that? How did you know it wasn't an accident?"
This question had been gnawing away at my subconscious like a rat at a rope, but until that very moment, I had not been fully aware of it.
Dogger breathed on the upper of one of Father's regimental half-wellingtons before he answered, giving the glassy black surface a final loving rub with his shirtsleeve.
"The circumstances spoke against it," he said. "Mr. Porson was a perfectionist. He manufactured all his own equipment. A puppeteer works in the dark. There's no room for error. A frayed electrical wire was out of the question."
"It wasn't frayed," I said. "I spotted it when I was backstage with Inspector Hewitt. The insulation was scraped away."
"I should have been surprised if it wasn't," he said.
"Congratulations on a brilliant deduction," I said, "although it's one that didn't occur to me."
And it certainly hadn't, because the female mind doesn't work that way.
Seen from the air, the male mind must look rather like the canals of Europe, with ideas being towed along well-worn towpaths by heavy-footed dray horses. There is never any doubt that they will, despite wind and weather, reach their destinations by following a simple series of connected lines.
But the female mind, even in my limited experience, seems more of a vast and teeming swamp, but a swamp that knows in an instant whenever a stranger — even miles away — has so much as dipped a single toe into her waters. People who talk about this phenomenon, most of whom know nothing whatsoever about it, call it "woman's intuition."
Although I had arrived at much the same conclusion as Dogger, it had been by a very different route.
In the first place, although it was obvious that Rupert had been murdered for what he had done to a woman, I think I had known almost from the moment of his death that Nialla was not his killer.
"The instant he came crashing down onto the stage," I said, "Nialla leaped to her feet and moved towards him. Her first, and automatic, impulse was to go to his aid."
Dogger rubbed his chin and nodded.
"But she forced herself to stop," I went on, "as soon as she saw the smoke and the sparks. She quickly realized that touching any part of his body could mean instant death. For her — and her baby."
"Yes," Dogger said. "I noticed that, too."
"Therefore, Nialla is not the murderer."
"I believe you can safely remove her from your list," said Dogger.
It wasn't until I was halfway along the road to Culverhouse Farm that I realized how tired I was. I'd been up before the sun and had been going flat out ever since. But time was of the essence: If I didn't get there before Inspector Hewitt, I wouldn't know the gruesome details until I read about them in the News of the World.
This time, rather than crossing the river behind the church, I had decided to go round by the Hinley road and approach the farm from the west. By doing so, I would have the advantage of height to survey the terrain, as well as keeping to the cover of Gibbet Wood. Now that the noose was tightening, so to speak, it would never do to be ambushed by a cold-blooded killer.
By the time I was halfway up the chalky road of Gibbet Hill, I felt as if my blood were mud, and my shoes were made of lead. Under any other circumstances, I might have crawled into a quiet thicket for a nap, but it was not to be. Time was running out and, as Father was so fond of saying, "Tired is a mucker's excuse."
As I listened to the wind sighing and whispering in the treetops of Gibbet Wood, I found myself half hoping that Mad Meg would leap out and divert me from my mission. But this, too, was not to be: Aside from a yellowhammer tapping away like a busy shoemaker at the far side of the wood, there were no signs of life.
When I reached the top of the hill, Jubilee Field sloped away from me towards the river, a blanket of electric blue. At the outbreak of war, Gordon had been made to grow flax, or so Mrs. Mullet had told me, by order of HM Government, who required the stuff to manufacture parachutes. But the Battle of Britain had been years ago, and parachutes were no longer required in anywhere near the same quantity.
Still, working under the cloak of wartime necessity, it seemed that Gordon had managed to keep his secret crop of cannabis tucked handily away among the trees of Gibbet Wood, its very existence known to no more than a handful of people.
Which one of them, I wondered — if it was one of them — besides hating him passionately enough to kill, possessed sufficient electrical knowledge to have put the jolt to Rupert Porson?
A flash of light caught my eye: a reflection from the side of the road. I saw at once that it was one of Mad Meg's roadside junk ornaments, dangling by a string from a bramble bush. It was no more than a jagged bit of chrome trim, jarred loose from the radiator of some passing motorcar by the roughness of the road. Hanging beneath it, and twisting idly in the sun (it was this that had caught my eye) was a small ridged circular disk of silver which, judging by its red stains, had once been the lid on a half-pint tin of paint.