The Burry Man's Day (23 page)

‘Very admirable,’ I replied, although thinking that there comes a point where noble idealism becomes ruthless zeal and, once beyond that point, there is no knowing what people will do in the name of a cause, ‘but if you are trying to change minds, all I’m saying is that you might want to lower your sights a little. I don’t see that there’s any point in calling whisky “poison” in a town where so many drink the stuff every day and are manifestly alive and well. Unpoisoned, in fact,’ I explained.

‘But they’re very far from well,’ said Mr Turnbull. ‘They are killing themselves, slowly and insidiously, but killing themselves nonetheless. I speak now as a student of the natural sciences, Mrs Gilver. I have studied the topic in some depth and built up quite a substantial little library on it.’ He took a huge breath and I sensed the beginning of another sermon. I had to keep him out of the pulpit and try to get him to stick to particulars if I was ever to hear anything useful.

‘There are many peoples of the world who lack the European’s capacity to train himself to ingest this poison, Mrs Gilver. Were you aware of that?’

‘I believe I’ve heard as much,’ I said. ‘Red Indians . . .?’

‘And there are places in the world where the fashion is to ingest arsenic. They build up a tolerance to it, little by little.’

‘Really?’ I said. ‘How odd.’

‘And both arsenic and alcohol would kill a child. Or kill its greatest devotee by overdose. Where is the difference between the two? And yet think of the outcry there would be if there were an arsenic factory in the middle of our little burgh. What would you say to that?’

‘Um,’ I said, feeling as though I were back at school being given an oral test without warning. I considered saying that the difference lay in the capacity to make a delicious punch for a party, but I refrained. ‘I do see that you have a point, Mr Turnbull. I certainly do see that. Only, as I say, I wonder if the “poison” angle is your strongest lever in Queensferry of all places. People have to make a living. And I suppose one could say that if they are filching the stuff from the distillery, at least it’s real whisky. I’d have thought it was a good thing in a way to have such a ready supply keeping down the urge towards “moonshine”. I have a sister who married an Anglo-Irishman and the tales she has to tell . . .’

Mr and Mrs Turnbull rolled their eyes at each other, although whether to indicate that I was naive to think there were no illicit stills in the neighbourhood or simply to express horror at my readiness to find a silver lining in their personal black cloud, I could not say. One thing was now clear beyond a shadow of a doubt, however. They could not possibly have had anything to do with the death. No one in his right mind would bang on like this about the dangers of whisky-drinking if he were in the fortunate position of having his own crime tidied away on account of an excess of whisky-drinking by the corpse-to-be. So their creeping around in the woods must indeed have been a nature-walk, and the uncomfortable feeling they gave me, which I had mistaken for my detective hackles rising, must simply be the feeling one sometimes got from an innocent, everyday, monomaniacal, crashing bore.

‘And another thing,’ I said, free to offend them as I chose now, ‘if you spout a lot of talk about poison that they don’t believe and can’t believe, because their livelihoods depend on it and their own eyes refute it, then they won’t believe anything you
do
say. They’ll simply put every word down to “teetotallers’ fairy tales” and the baby will go out with the bathwater.’

‘Hmph,’ said Mrs Turnbull. ‘There is no problem with the locals believing fairy tales, Mrs Gilver. As you yourself have found.’

‘Well, they certainly enjoy them,’ I answered, ‘but as to believing them, who knows?’ I was thinking of the artless way the little Dudgeons had insisted on their current demon being ‘a real one’ as they tried to orchestrate a lift in my motor car. They as good as admitted that most of their monsters were fancy.

‘The children believe them and the parents give way to their silliness,’ pronounced Mr Turnbull. ‘So I am led to conclude that the parents themselves are taken in. No spiritual guidance whatsoever.’

‘That’s just what I was telling Mrs Gilver, my dear,’ said Mrs Turnbull. ‘About the Burry Man. The very next day! Sitting with their picnics at the Fair. And what dreadful unwholesome rubbish was in those picnic-bags. Trudie and Nellie Marshall were telling the little Quigley girl that Robert Dudgeon died because all the little spikes were poisoned and they stuck in him like a thousand darts.’

I sat up at this, trying not to look too unnaturally interested.

‘And the Christie boy told me in all seriousness that his granny had told
him
that the curse of the Burry Man fell after twenty-five years and everyone knew Robert Dudgeon shouldn’t never have dared to do it this last time. I ask you!’

‘Well, at least that shows that they know the Burry Man is just one of their neighbours dressed up for the day,’ I said. ‘Some of the other legends would have it that he’s a real bogeyman who lives in a swamp.’

‘Oh, there were plenty of those too,’ said Mrs Turnbull. ‘Netta Stoddart swears blind that she saw the Burry Man going home on his cart along the Back Braes on Friday night and that when the cart turned round the Burry Man fell off and rolled down the bank on to the railway line and was squashed by a train.’

I could not quite suppress a giggle at this. One had to admire the confidence of little Miss Stoddart to insist on her story when quite a hundred witnesses saw the Burry Man die in an entirely different way. It did occur to me, however, that although the falling, rolling and squashing were nonsense, perhaps Netta Stoddart might have seen the cart turn around.

‘Was there even a train?’ I said.

‘None at all,’ said Mr Turnbull, unsmiling.

‘And was she even in a position to be a witness to this adventure?’ I asked.

‘Oh yes,’ said Mrs Turnbull, with a disapproving note that I could not easily account for at first. ‘The Back Braes run along behind Station Road down there and she was sitting at the back of the bowling green clubhouse with a bottle of ginger ale and a biscuit waiting for her father.’ This sounded fairly innocent so far and so my expression did not deliver the required outrage. Mrs Turnbull went on. ‘Mr Stoddart himself, of course, was in the clubhouse where they keep a jug of beer topped up on high days and holidays and let their members have glassfuls at very preferential rates. How I hate to see children sitting waiting outside for their fathers to finish drinking. And it’s even worse at the bowling green. No children are allowed, which is why poor Netta was hidden around the back, sitting there among the crates of empties, telling herself stories to while away the time.’

This was admittedly rather sordid, and if Mr Stoddart had volunteered to take his daughter to the Fair then it was a bit much for him to stop off on the way and fill up with cheap beer leaving her to kick her heels, but if she had indeed seen the cart turn round and used this as the foundation for her little tale then I was rather glad that Mr Stoddart was not the upstanding father Mrs Turnbull would have him be.

‘Well,’ I said, rising and pulling on my gloves. ‘Thank you for the delicious coffee’ – it had been filthy, of course – ‘and a most interesting chat. I hope the funeral goes off as one would have it do,’ I said to Mr Turnbull. ‘Do give my regards to Mrs Dudgeon, if you are going along afterwards.’ Mr Turnbull’s face puckered as though he had felt a sudden twinge of toothache. Of course he would not be going along afterwards! Watching a crowd of villagers get drunk in honour of the dead would be torture to him, and for once even he might feel that he could not hold forth on his views.

Leaving the schoolhouse by the garden gate, I turned back down the Loan and tried not to get too excited about Netta Stoddart’s tuppenceworth. I told myself that although there is often a case for listening to what falls from the lips of babes and children, there was also Master Christie’s ‘Silver Anniversary Curse’ to remind me that, just as often, what falls is gibberish.

Now, to find the ‘Back Braes’. There was indeed a little lane opening off the Loan and running along the back of the Station Road villas – I could see that some of them had garden gates giving on to it – but it was terribly narrow and I could not imagine why someone would choose to drive a cart along there, with Station Road itself, broad and smooth, only a moment further up the hill. It would be impossible for any ordinary cart and a pretty tight fit even for a cart as dainty as the Dudgeons’ ‘shell hutch’. Still, it was worth investigating.

I started along the lane at what I was beginning to think of as my detecting pace, slow enough to take in anything there was to see but fast enough so that someone happening to look at me would believe I was strolling and not loitering. I kept my head still, as though gazing mindlessly into the middle distance, while all the time my eyes were sweeping back and forth looking at the garden gates and the walls in which they were set, the ground under my feet, the fence to my left separating the lane from the steep wooded bank which fell to the railway line below. Almost immediately, I spotted something which made my heart bump in my ribcage. The lane was tramped hard along the middle where many pairs of feet every day must flatten it and there was no chance of a pony’s hoof prints showing up there, but here and there in the soft dirt towards the edges, I could see quite clearly the wheel tracks of a small cart, two sets, sometimes running along deeply on top of the other and sometimes diverging, making lozenge shapes until they fell together again. It beggared belief, I thought, that two miniature carts had recently made a one-way journey each along this tiny lane, with the brick walls looming on one side and the hawthorn and bramble grabbing at them from the other. The most obvious explanation was that one cart, for some reason – and a reason that had to be significant, I was sure – had come along and then turned back. It was almost as inconceivable that it was any cart except the Dudgeons’ miniature one. I blessed Mr Stoddart’s neglected daughter and hurried on.

Sure enough, beyond the end of the villas, beyond the little footbridge which crossed the railway and connected to another of these ‘back braes’, just where the lane turned the corner at the bowling green, the tracks became confused, crossing each other and making loops. Here too, a few hoof prints showed where the pony had stepped towards the edge of the path trying to turn around in the cramped space. Most compelling of all, there were broken branches on the bushes bordering the steep siding here and some fresh-looking scrapes on the bowling club wall too.

I stood in the middle of the lane, hands on hips, and wondered. Why on earth would someone turn a cart around here? Mr and Mrs Dudgeon must have had to unhitch the pony and manoeuvre the cart around themselves; there certainly was no room to manage the thing otherwise. If they had been strangers to the town, one could understand why they might set off along the lane judging it just wide enough and then have to abandon the plan when this unexpected sharp corner was thrown upon them, but as inhabitants of long standing, it made no sense. And even if one gave little Netta Stoddart her due – she had been right about seeing the cart turning after all – and went along with the next element in her tale, it was hard to see why Robert Dudgeon falling off the cart at this corner would make him decide to go back to the Fair, when he had already made up his mind to go straight home and when Mrs Dudgeon apparently had his dinner waiting for him. Much more likely that, if he had been considering going back to the Fair, falling on to the hard ground at the end of a gruelling day would make him abandon the plan for good and go home to his hot dinner and a mustard bath. It was equally hard to see why, moreover, even if he had decided to turn back to the Fair, he would literally
turn
back, at this awkward corner, and not simply carry on to where the brae must surely rejoin Station Road and make a loop back to the top of the Loan.

So, unsure whether I had in fact discovered anything here on the Back Braes or had only added more questions to my ever-growing list, I myself turned and began to walk back the way I had come. When I got to the little bridge across the railway line, however, I decided to make a detour. There was nothing to be seen over the high garden walls the way I had come and instead I crossed the little footbridge down towards the town. From the other side there was a choice of route. I could turn right and descend on the pleasant little lane known as McIver’s Brae which would give me a pleasant view of the river and the bridge, but would finally deposit me on the Edinburgh Road far beyond the end of the High Street, halfway to the Hawes almost, with a fair walk back to the Bellstane; or I could turn left and be sure somehow or other to emerge from the mouth of a close or lane or vennel somewhere on one of the terraces eventually. There were several dead ends this way, however, and at least one public house, the back yard of which one easily could end up in, and I did not want to make myself any more conspicuous than was absolutely necessary, certainly not as conspicuous as I should be lost amongst the washing lines and beer barrels. I turned for McIver’s Brae. I was shortly very glad indeed that I had done so.

Chapter Eleven

The High Street, when I turned back on myself at the bottom of the brae and looked along it, was deserted. Of course, Mr Dudgeon’s funeral must be due to start any minute and the shops were closed out of respect, with their shutters down. The men would all be at the Kirk by now and I could only assume that those women not closely enough connected to the Dudgeons to be already at the cottage preparing for the feast, were respectfully inside their houses, curtains drawn, and keeping the children in too. So I was glad of my mourning clothes and I hoped that if I walked sedately enough, with my head bowed, then anyone happening to glance from a window and see me would not think me too callous for being out in the sunshine strolling around.

Almost immediately upon setting off, however, negotiating the corner at the Sealscraig, I saw that not quite everyone was closed up for the funeral after all. I caught a flash of light from the corner of my eye and, turning, I saw that there was a solitary drinker in Brown’s Bar and that Mr Shinie Brown was standing at the counter facing him. The light I had seen was the flare of a match as the customer lit a cigarette and when he turned to the side to blow the first smoke politely over his shoulder, I recognized him as one of the two Burry Man’s boys.