The Burry Man's Day (26 page)

‘Yet the same point in respect of luncheon tables continues to elude you,’ said Buttercup.

‘And did you get a chance to ask any more after that gaffe or did he draw his skirts aside?’ I said.

Alec waited while the butler scooped a piece of fish on to his plate and a maid following after poured some sauce over it then he resumed.

‘Pray, don’t spare my feelings, Dandy,’ he said. ‘I can take it on the chin if you care to tell me exactly what you think. Yes, I did rather lose his confidence after that, but I fell into step with . . . wait for it . . . the famous Donald.’

‘Ah, Donald!’ I said. ‘Lay preacher, chief recruiter for the Band of Hope and all-round hero.’

‘You’re kidding!’ said Alec. ‘Donald is a Temperance Tenter?’

‘I didn’t think he looked the part either,’ I said, ‘but Mrs Turnbull assured me only this morning that he is their star turn.’

‘Well, well, well,’ said Alec. ‘That must have made things rather awkward at times in the family circle. Anyway, Donald and I got to talking, trailing along there behind the coffin, which was quite a surprise to me at first. Since he was the chief mourner in absence of anyone closer to fill the role, I’d have thought he’d be ringed around with pals. But it seems that a funeral is like a wedding in that respect. No one ever speaks to the groom at a wedding because they always assume he should be talking to someone else.’

‘I noticed that,’ said Cad. ‘It was one of the loneliest days of my life.’

‘Ooh, I loved my wedding day,’ said Buttercup. ‘Both of them. I wish I could have lots more.’

‘Ever the diplomat, darling,’ I said, as she clapped her hand belatedly over her mouth. ‘Are you going to send Cad to Brighton with a floozy or shove him off the ramparts?’

‘As I was saying,’ Alec resumed, sounding severe, ‘Donald and I started to chat about this and that and inevitably the talk turned to Robert Dudgeon and his last day and Donald latched on to that odd little moment, when the Burry Man was almost home and dry and he slipped his leash and headed for the hills. Well, the stairs. Donald told me that Dudgeon was found inside by the dignitaries, tearing off his burry suit, only
he
didn’t – Donald didn’t, I mean – take this to be an indication of poison. Instead he pointed out that people who are suffering a heart attack often talk about a constricted feeling in the chest. A “tight band” or a “band of steel” are the phrases and Donald’s theory is that Dudgeon felt this, took it to be sudden claustrophobia caused by being trussed up like a parcel all day and simply had to get out of the damn things with not a moment to lose.’

‘Interesting,’ I said. ‘It certainly fits the facts. Now Alec, since you’re on the subject of burrs, please tell me you remembered to –’

‘I remembered,’ said Alec with a great show of weary patience in his voice. ‘Have some faith in me, Dandy, please.’

‘Remembered what?’ said Buttercup.

‘Good,’ I said. ‘Because the other Burry Boy was out cold on the bar counter before I had a chance to ask him.’

‘What?’ said Cad, Alec and Buttercup together, staring at me.

‘Oh yes, I’ve a tale of my own to tell about this morning,’ I said. ‘But first things first. Alec?’

‘I’m rather proud of this,’ said Alec. ‘I asked just how bad a thing it was for Dudgeon to do that rushing and ripping off stunt. Asked – you know, very wide-eyed and eager to understand the folklore – if it was bad luck or sacrilege or anything to treat the burrs in that way.’

‘Oh, good thinking,’ I said. ‘Excellent!’

‘And Donald told me that no, not especially, although he did mention that in days gone by people used to pluck burrs from the suit as the Burry Man came around and replace them with flowers. It’s died out for some reason, but Donald supposed that
that’s
the origin of the few flowers still sticking out of the costume here and there.’

‘What a shame it stopped,’ said Buttercup. ‘That must have been lovely. Cad, I think if you and I are in on this next year we should try to reinstate the flower thingummy. We can donate the blooms if our gardens are up and running in time.’

‘Anyway,’ said Alec, ‘it was the easiest step in the world from there to asking what does happen to the things afterwards, and hearing that it’s usually nothing in particular, they just go out for the dustmen once they’ve been picked off the inner suit. And then I asked him if he knew how they ended up back at Dudgeon’s house this year, and he said he didn’t know.’

‘That was skating pretty close to the edge,’ I said. ‘Did it raise his suspicions to have you asking about them? After him finding me guddling with them yesterday, I mean?’

‘It didn’t seem to,’ said Alec. ‘He didn’t mention you.’

‘Hmm,’ I said, stirring my spoon round and round in my syllabub. It started to collapse and then I remembered how delicious Mrs Murdoch’s fruit fool had been the day before and decided just in time that this syllabub probably deserved better treatment. I licked my spoon clean and laid it down again. ‘It would have been good to hear from one of the horses’ mouths, just exactly what happened about those burrs,’ I said. ‘I can’t think of any innocent reason for them to have been saved. And I can’t really see how anyone except Dudgeon or Mrs Dudgeon could have organized getting them into a sack and into the cart. But then I’m absolutely convinced that Mrs Dudgeon did not kill her husband, so I can’t see why she should be concerned to take the things home. And if she was then why did she let them lie for days on the midden heap for anyone to find?’

‘We’ve already said that she was desperate to get rid of everyone from the house,’ said Alec. ‘To give her the chance to get the things on the fire.’

‘In which case she would have been discovered wandering around in the night with a box of matches and some kindling,’ I pointed out. ‘Not with a bottle of ink and a pen.’

‘It’s terribly niggly-piggly sort of work, detecting, isn’t it?’ said Buttercup. ‘You sound so cross with each other, bickering away like that.’ She stood up and dropped her napkin on to her seat. ‘I think I’ll go for a nap,’ she announced. ‘Cad? Come and tuck me in?’

‘Absolutely, my love, I’ll be right there,’ said Cadwallader. ‘But Dandy,’ he went on, ‘are you really saying that the poisoned burrs theory is still on the table?’ Buttercup left the room unnoticed, her shoulders in a sorrowful little slump of self-pity. Cadwallader would have to do some extra billing and cooing this afternoon to make up for the slight.

‘Darling,’ I told him, happy to be in the position to spread such cheer, ‘I am. For one thing there is a rumour to that effect doing the rounds of the local tots and I’ve had independent corroboration this very morning that these little ones are to be ignored at our peril.’ Cad looked at me, open-mouthed, eager for more, but I was tired of having an audience. I wanted to get Alec to myself and really thrash the thing out.

‘Buttercup awaits,’ I reminded him.

‘Is that a secret code?’ he breathed in response. Alec gave a shout of laughter, and Cad joined in with a good-natured grin.

‘I think I’ll leave you to it,’ he said. ‘It’s all way, way over my head. And Freddy’s expecting me.’

Chapter Twelve

An hour in the drawing room with cigarettes, pipe and sheets of paper would be enough for Alec and me to feel that we were both of one mind again, shoulder to shoulder viewing the path ahead.

‘Right, then,’ I said. ‘These burrs, poisoned or otherwise.’ For we had decided to take seriously – at least until we were proved wrong – the fantastical-seeming theory about the burrs. Alec’s brainwave during our session had been to scrutinize them and, if any of them looked poisoned’, to parcel them up and send them to a specialist for analysis.

‘What specialist, though?’ I said. In story books, detectives always just happen to have a very useful selection of acquaintances, chemists and locksmiths and the like, but Alec and I had no such connections to draw on and we were stumped.

‘Well, no one who’s anything to do with the police or the police surgeon,’ said Alec. ‘We must use a little discretion, at least for now.’

‘And we can’t just troop into Edinburgh and hawk them around the hospital corridors searching for a kind man in a white coat,’ I said. ‘They’ve been in a feed sack in a stable, for one thing. And before that, in a midden heap with horse drop–’ I stopped.

‘What?’ said Alec.

‘What about the Dick Vet?’ I said. ‘The Veterinary College at the university. They’re bound to have chemists and poison people there, aren’t they? And one would think they’d be less sniffy about grubby samples of this and that. If we were to telephone and say . . . I don’t know . . . say that a horse had come out in dreadful suppurating sores where he had been brushing against a burdock bush –’

‘Plant,’ said Alec. ‘It’s not a bush. It’s a rosette with a fleshy tap root and a spike of thistle-like flowers sometimes reaching a height of up to . . .’ He laughed at my expression and cut the lecture short. ‘I looked it up,’ he explained. ‘In a horribly musty natural history of the British Isles.’

‘Where?’ I said. ‘When? Why?’

‘Here,’ said Alec. ‘In Cad’s library, waiting for you to come home.’ I always forget about the books in libraries, for some reason. Most of the books in Hugh’s library at home were centuries old, pungent beyond belief and hardly ever written in English. ‘As to why,’ Alec went on, ‘I was really looking for something else.’ He waited, apparently expecting me to comprehend something.

‘Coprinus atramentarius,’
he went on when he had given up. ‘The common ink cap. Your mushroom, darling.’

‘Oh!’ I exclaimed. ‘Excellent. Well done. And?’

‘In season from the early spring until November,’ he said. ‘Very common in any type of woodland.’

‘Gosh,’ I said. ‘Our theory lives on.’

‘For the meantime, anyway,’ said Alec. ‘So go on. You were saying? A horse, suppurating sores . . .’

‘Yes, we could say that we suspected sabotage by an eccentric neighbour, and ask the chemist if such a thing was possible.’

‘Wouldn’t he ask us to bring in some of the burrs so he could check?’ said Alec. ‘Or even the horse.’

‘At which point we could hastily backtrack,’ I replied. ‘Or we could say it had died. Unless that would make him even keener to see it. They have odd tastes, these vets, you know.’

‘Well, it’s worth a try,’ Alec said. ‘Where are the things, Dandy? And do you have a very stout pair of gloves? If there’s the smallest chance that they killed Robert Dudgeon we can hardly go juggling them with our bare hands.’

As I had done every other time this thought had been aired, I suddenly felt rather sheepish, or at least glad that no one else was listening, and I screwed up my nose at him.

‘They can’t possibly be, can they?’ I said. ‘Not really? Not really really?’ I remembered this feeling well from our first case: the feeling that one’s own boring everyday life could not really be traversing these paths of murder and evil; that one must be play-acting, only doing it so well that one was more than half convinced it was true.

Alec shrugged but made no answer.

‘To the stables then,’ I said. (I had stuffed the bags into the empty tack room in the stable yard on my return from the woods.) ‘After all,’ I pointed out, ‘since they had spent an hour or two cosied up with some horse droppings and they were on a bed of cabbage leaves and peapods, I could hardly lug them up to the castle and dump them in my bath.’

We made our way down the castle mound and across the park to where a stand of trees hid the stable block from view.

‘I say, Dandy,’ said Alec as we tramped along. ‘Are you beginning to worry that they won’t be there?’

The thought had not occurred to me, but as soon as Alec voiced it I was convinced. There was the fact of my dreadful feeling that someone (or something) had been watching me in the woods the previous day and, added to that, I had been caught red-handed by Donald Dudgeon while blatantly stealing the burrs. It seemed clear to me now, all of a sudden, that the most discreet way for him to foil my plans would have been simply to watch where I took the burrs and then to wait until it was quiet and steal them back. Alec and I began to walk faster and faster towards the trees.

‘Although,’ I said, ‘there was nothing to suggest that I wasn’t going to do whatever I was going to do with them right that minute. How could he – either Donald or whoever it was that was watching me if anyone
was
watching me – have known that I’d simply leave them sitting there? How on earth
could
I have simply left them sitting there if it comes to that!’ We were trotting along now as we wheeled into the stable yard and we bustled straight for the unused tack room in the far corner, only slowing enough for me to sing out over one shoulder to the stable lad: ‘How’s Nipper?’ And to hear the response: ‘He’s grand, madam. Nivver you fear.’ ‘Now, Dan,’ said Alec, barring my way with an arm flung out across the door, ‘try to remember exactly where you put the sacks and how they looked when you left them. It would be good to know if anyone’s been in here snooping in the meantime.’ I closed my eyes and tried to bring to mind a picture of how the tack room had looked the night before, but to be honest I had been so tired with tramping to and fro through the woods all day and, what with the nervous strain of my peculiar encounters with Donald Dudgeon and the ghastly Turnbulls, not to mention the upset of poor Nipper’s paw, I feared I had simply abandoned them without a glance.

‘I’m sure that’s roughly where I put them,’ I told Alec, on entering. ‘And’ – I picked up one in each hand – ‘that’s exactly the weight of them so far as I can remember, so I should say fairly certainly they’ve been left alone.’

There was no electric light in the room, but Alec lit one of the oil lamps which sat on the windowsill and hooked it over a beam above our heads. I brushed a little straw and dust from the tack table with my gloved hands, then Alec hoisted a sack, turned it upside down, and tipped out its contents. I emptied out the other and we spread the burrs out over the table top. Then we both stood looking, carefully breathing through our mouths (and so eating it).