A Red Herring Without Mustard

He had positioned her so that her feet were closest to the empty door frame, and now I watched as he eased past her and leapt to the ground outside.

I heard the Morris’s starter grind—and then engage. The motor roared and moments later I saw him backing his machine towards the caravan.

Now he was clambering back aboard.

“Take this end,” he said, pointing to the Gypsy’s feet. “It’s lighter.”

He scrambled past me, seized the end of the door that lay beneath her head, and began sliding it towards the doorway.

“Into the offside seat,” he said. “That’s it … easy now.”

I had suddenly seen what he was trying to do, and as Dr. Darby lifted the head of the door, I guided its foot down into the space between the passenger’s seat and the instrument panel.

With surprisingly little struggle, our task was finished. With the Gypsy jutting up at a rigid angle, the little Morris looked like an oversized woodworking plane; the Gypsy herself like a mummy lashed to a board.

It isn’t the neatest of arrangements, I remember thinking, but it will do.

“You’ll have to stay here,” Dr. Darby said, wedging himself in behind the steering wheel. “There’s not room for the three of us in the old bus. Just stay put and don’t touch anything. I’ll send the police as soon as I’m able.”

What he meant, of course, was that I was in far less physical danger if I remained in one spot, rather than risking the possibility of flushing out the Gypsy’s attacker by walking home alone to Buckshaw.

I gave the doctor a halfhearted thumbs-up. More than that would have been out of place.

He let in the clutch and the car, with its weird cargo, began teetering slowly across the grove. As it crept over the humpbacked bridge, I had my last glimpse of the Gypsy, her face dead white in the light of a sudden moon.

FIVE

NOW I WAS TRULY alone.

Or was I?

Not a leaf stirred. Something went plop in the water nearby, and I held my breath. An otter, perhaps? Or something worse?

Could the Gypsy’s attacker still be here in the Palings? Still hiding … still watching … from somewhere in the trees?

It was a stupid thought, and I realized it instantly. I’d learned quite early in life that the mind loves nothing better than to spook itself with outlandish stories, as if the various coils of the brain were no more than a troop of roly-poly Girl Guides huddled over a campfire in the darkness of the skull.

Still, I gave a little shiver as the moon slipped behind a cloud. It had been cool enough when I’d first come here with the Gypsy, chilly when I’d ridden Gry into the village for Dr. Darby, and now, I realized, I was beastly cold.

The lights of the caravan glowed invitingly, warm patches of orange in the blue darkness. If a wisp of smoke had been floating up from the tin chimney, the scene might have been one of those frameable tear-away prints in the weekly magazines: A Gypsy Moon, for instance.

It was Dr. Darby who had left the lamp burning. Should I scramble aboard and turn it out?

Vague thoughts of saving paraffin crossed my mind, and even vaguer thoughts of being a good citizen.

Saints on skates! I was looking for an excuse to get inside the caravan and have a jolly good gander at the scene of the crime. Why not admit it?

“Don’t touch anything,” Dr. Darby had said. Well, I wouldn’t. I’d keep my hands in my pockets.

Besides, my footprints were already everywhere on the floor. What harm would a few more do? Could the police distinguish between two sets of bloody footprints made less than an hour apart? We shall see, I thought.

Even as I clambered up onto the footboard I realized that I should have to work quickly. Having arrived at the hospital in Hinley, Dr. Darby would soon be calling the police—or instructing someone else to call them.

There wasn’t a second to waste.

A quick look round showed that the Gypsy lived a frugal life indeed. As far as I could discover, there were no personal papers or documents, no letters, and no books—not even a Bible. I had seen the woman make the sign of the cross and it struck me as odd that a copy of the scriptures should not have its place in her traveling home.

In a bin beside the stove, a supply of vegetables looked rather the worse for wear, as if they had been snatched hastily from a farmer’s field rather than purchased clean from a village market: potatoes, beets, turnips, onions, all jumbled together.

I shoved my hand into the bin and rummaged around at the bottom. Nothing but clay-covered vegetables.

I don’t know what I was looking for, but I would if I found it. If I were a Gypsy, I thought, the bottom of the veggie bin would have been high on my list of hiding places.