The Burry Man's Day (20 page)

‘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.

The only way to interpret the
next
look that flitted over his face was as one of decision and dismissal. He seemed to conclude that I was of no interest to him and without actually saying anything he suggested that I was free to go on my way. And to be sure, it would not have taken too much wisdom and intelligence to categorize me as a harmless lunatic given the drivel I had just been spouting.

‘So,’ I said, gathering up my two sacks by the necks and taking a deep breath. ‘I shall take these away and burn them and Mrs Dudgeon need never think about them again.’

‘That is most helpful of you,’ he said. ‘Thank you.’ His voice as much as his face was weary-sounding, but he spoke well for one of his class, the local accent still there in the clipped vowels and hissed consonants but the words articulated with care. With such care, I suddenly realized, that the most obvious explanation for all of his oddness was that he was, this very minute, profoundly drunk. I remembered the bottles on his rubbish heap and how he had fallen asleep beside the corpse the night before and had not woken when Mrs Dudgeon left the cottage to wander in the woods.

‘I hope it all goes well for you tomorrow,’ I said, still disposed to be sympathetic, remembering that his brother had just died, but instead of accepting my kindness in good spirit, he reared backward and stared at me. ‘Sorry,’ I blurted. ‘I didn’t mean to suggest that it could be a happy day. I mean, I know it’s a funeral, but I hope it all goes smoothly and isn’t too much of a strain.’ This seemed to mollify him; he relaxed again and nodded and I, not wanting to try another remark after that last one had gone down so very badly, simply nodded back, turned to the woods and strode away.

This time, tramping through the trees like a fairy-tale woodcutter with my hessian sacks, I felt none of the jitters from all my earlier trips even though the sun was low enough to flash in and out between the tree trunks in a way that could easily have suggested countless figures flitting between the trees all around me, and perhaps it was because I was
not
peering around for spooks that I spotted something of great actual, concrete interest that I might otherwise have missed.

I was walking with my head down, beginning to feel the weight of the sacks in my shoulders, even though dried burdock seeds are not particularly solid little objects, musing on how implausible it was that a woodcutter, even a very burly one, could carry his slumbering children in sacks over his shoulder deep into the woods to leave them there, and trying to remember which fairy tale it was where a burly woodcutter did so, and thus entranced by my floating thoughts and the steady crimp, crimp of my feet on the needles beneath me – dreaming and dawdling, Nanny Palmer used to call it – I saw something flash. A step further on, the low shaft of sunlight had shifted and the object had disappeared, but I stopped, returned to what I thought must be the same spot and then rocked backwards and forwards, moving my head, until it caught the light again. I trained my eye on it and moved closer.

‘Good God above,’ I whispered under my breath as I crouched down beside it and poked it clear of the forest litter which was just beginning to cover it up for good. I had no idea what it meant or how it changed things, but I was very pleased to have found it, for it seemed to add a little measure of sense to Mrs Dudgeon’s midnight wandering. It was, of course, the pen. I picked it up by putting a gloved finger against each end, thinking of fingerprints, and dropped it into my dress pocket. Alec was going to love this.

Almost home, a few minutes later, nearing the edge of the woods at last, I did indeed catch a glimpse between the tree trunks of countless figures bearing down on me, but once again my heart and other innards took the sight in their stride because there was no mistaking these: the sun was burnishing their flaming tresses as the little Dudgeons from next door made their way home.

‘Hello there,’ I called to them, and was surprised to see some of the smaller ones clutch at each other and a couple of the medium-sized brothers falter in their steps. ‘It’s only me,’ I said. ‘You remember me.’ I thought, too late, that perhaps I should have stashed the sacks behind a tree before they saw them, but with the typical lack of interest all children show in the doings of adults they barely gave these a glance. Anyway, I reasoned to myself, the way they swarmed around the woods like so many termites, the sacks of burrs were probably safer in my hands than behind any tree within swarming distance. The children were not however, I could not help but notice as I drew near them, in a swarming mood, but stood in a clump in the middle of the path and waited for me to reach them. There were six of them today, only the oldest sister ‘wee Izzy’ and the tiny baby missing. The littlest but one tot was being borne along in a well-worn pushchair by the biggest brother.

‘On your way home from Auntie Betty’s?’ I asked them. A few of them nodded and little Lila’s lip began to tremble. I began to tell myself that it was only to be expected that they were subdued, since their uncle had died and tomorrow was his funeral, but then I remembered that the first time I had met any of the happy band had been the day of the death itself and that they had been absolutely irrepressible then.

‘What’s the matter?’ I asked them. ‘You seem a bit glum.’

‘We dinnae want to go through they woods wurselves,’ said one of the middle-sized brothers.

‘Why ever not?’ I asked, amazed.

‘Cos of the demon,’ said Lila. Her big brothers hung their heads and one of them nudged her to shut her up.

‘But you’re a match for any demon,’ I assured them. ‘Weren’t you going to catch him a few days ago?’

‘We thocht he was a pretendy one,’ said Lila. ‘But now we ken he’s a real one.’

‘I dinnae want to get put doon a hole,’ whimpered one of her small brothers.

‘Now look here, Miss Lila,’ I said, bending down to talk to the child face to face, ‘and you too, boys. You
must
stop telling each other these horror stories. You must, really. You big boys tell the little ones there’s nothing to be afraid of. And you little ones don’t believe a word they say.’ I stopped, realizing that my advice was becoming confused.

‘We didnae tell naeb’dy nothin’, missus,’ said the oldest boy. ‘We seen ’um. In the woods, right by oor hoose. A real demon comin’ to get us. Comin’ to put us doon the holes with the ghosties.’

‘And what made you think he was real, and coming to get you?’ I said. ‘Why would you think that?’

‘Oor daddy told us,’ said another. ‘Oor daddy told us to watch out for demons and no’ to let one catch us, ever.’

‘And now we’ve tae go hame all by wurselves and it’s gettin’ dark and the hoose is empty til Mammy gets back with Auntie Chrissie.’ They looked up at me beseechingly out of six pairs of blue eyes, and I relented. I was not, however, about to traipse back to the cottage on foot for a fourth time in one day – I was beginning to wear out a trench – but I could not withstand the trembling lips and brimming eyes a moment longer.

‘Very well, then,’ I said. ‘Come and wait on the wall by the castle rise and I’ll fetch my motor car and run you all home. And your daddy’s there, by the way, so you won’t be alone once you get there.’ The second half of this was lost in a chorus of cheers and whoops and they turned on their heels and raced back the way they had come towards the park. By the time I caught up and passed them, dragging my sacks, they were sitting on top of a wall in a jostling row, threatening to tip each other off and arguing about who was going to sit in the front seat.

‘You gullible fool, Dandy,’ I muttered to myself. ‘They saw you coming.’

Chapter Ten

‘So where does all of that get us?’ said Alec, through toast-crumbs, the next morning. He had his breakfast napkin tucked into his stiff collar to preserve the sparkling shirt-front and the black tie. Cadwallader, surprisingly less pragmatic – perhaps wearing one’s napkin in one’s collar fell foul of one of those unexpected pockets of etiquette in American life, although why they bother with these odd little nods to politeness in the overall scheme of things one can hardly see – Cadwallader for whatever reason, anyway, was simply leaning over from well back with his neck stretched out and scooping egg into the bowl of his fork, rather confirming my point.

Cad and Alec were bound for Robert Dudgeon’s funeral, Buttercup and I, of course, being barred from attendance along with all other females including his own widow. I had always thought this particular stricture of the Presbyterian Scotch one of the most unbending (from a very strong field) but I was glad that Mrs Dudgeon did not have a funeral to contend with; if she was no more restored to herself than she had been at my last sight of her I was sure she could not have stood it.

I had been rather wrung out myself at the end of the day before, when I had finally deposited the six little scallywags plus pushchair at their garden gate and returned home, and I had been almost thankful when Buttercup stuck out her lip and firmly vetoed any talk of the case over dinner or through our card game afterwards. Since she was breakfasting in bed this morning, however – her habitual indolence having overcome any thoughts of her role as hostess at last after five days of manful effort – I was taking the chance to bring the men up to date.

Cad had been torn between triumph and sulks when I revealed that I was coming around to the idea of poisoning after all, and seemed to think I had not been playing fair in not telling him all about my mysterious mushroom on the very first night.

‘We must remain cautious,’ I had told him. ‘It might be something that would show up clearly in the stomach, in which case it can’t have been the sandwich. Or it might be something which doesn’t work through the blood, in which case it couldn’t be the burrs. And we might find a perfectly innocent explanation for either the sandwich or the burrs or both, in which case we are back where we started.’

‘Well?’ prompted Alec. ‘Remaining cautious, of course, what’s next?’

‘What’s next,’ I said, ‘are some jobs suitable for the untrained enthusiast – you and me – and some for which we unfortunately need an expert. We need to find out where the cart turned around and why. I’m going to walk the obvious routes today and see what I can see. You, Cad, are going to latch on to the Burry Man’s boys at the funeral – can you remember what they looked like? Good – and pin this blasted sandwich down once and for all. Then this evening, Alec, you must go to “Broon’s Bar”, with fingers crossed that the fair Joey is on duty, and see if you can get any further with her – I’m sure she knows something and I can’t quite work out what her standing is with the Dudgeon family. She was trusted to sit with Mr Dudgeon’s body – trust which she betrayed, by the way, in leaving him alone – but on the other hand Mrs Dudgeon’s sisters are divided in their opinions of her. One of them sounded very sniffy about the girl yesterday, until another reminded her rather grudgingly that we are all “Jock Tamson’s bairns” when all’s said and done –’