The Weed That Strings the Hangman's Bag

Its trousers were hung by their suspenders from a low-hanging branch.

Meg shielded the paper with her left hand as she penciled in the features. When she was finished, she thrust it at me roughly, as if the paper were contaminated.

It took me a moment to recognize the face: to recognize that the figure in the glade--the Devil--was the vicar, Denwyn Richardson.

The vicar? It was too ridiculous for words. Or was it?

Just minutes earlier Meg had told me the Devil was dead, and now she was sketching him as the vicar.

What was going on in her poor addled mind?

"Are you quite sure, Meg?" I asked, tapping the notebook. "Is that the Devil?"

"Hsssst!" she said, cocking her head and putting her fingers to my lips. "Someone's comin'!"

I looked round the glade, which, even to my heightened sense of hearing, seemed perfectly silent. When I looked back, my notebook and pencil lay at my feet, and Meg had vanished among the trees. I knew there was little point in calling her back.

I stood there motionless for a few moments, listening, waiting for something, although I'm not sure what it was.

The woodland, I remembered, is an ever-changing world. From minute to minute, the shadows shift, and from hour to hour the vegetation moves with the sun. Insects tunnel in the soil, heaving it up, at first in little hummocks, and then in larger ones. From month to month, leaves grow and fall, and from year to year, the trees. Daffy once said that you can't step into the same river twice, and it's the same with forests. Five winters had come and gone since Robin Ingleby died here, and now there was nothing left to see.

I walked slowly back past the crumbling gallows and plunged into the woods. Within minutes, I was out into the open at the top of Jubilee Field.

Not twenty yards away, almost invisible in the fog, a gray Ferguson tractor was stopped in the field, and someone in a green overall and rubber boots was bending over the engine. That must have been what Meg had heard.

"Hullo!" I shouted. It's always best to announce one's self heartily when trespassing. (Even though I had invented it on the spot, this seemed to be a good general rule.)

As the figure straightened up and turned round, I realized that it was Sally Straw, the Land Army girl.

"Hello," she said, wiping her oily hands on a rag. "You're Flavia de Luce, aren't you?"

"Yes." I stuck out my hand. "And you're Sally. I've seen you at the market. I've always admired your freckles and your ginger hair."

To be most effective, flattery is always best applied with a trowel.

She gave me a broad, honest grin and a handshake that nearly crushed my fingers.

"It's all right to call me Sal," she said. "All my best friends do."

She reminded me somewhat of Joyce Grenfell, the actress: a bit mannish in the way she moved, but otherwise decidedly female.

"My Fergie's gone bust," she said, pointing to the tractor. "Might be the ignition coil. They do that sometimes, you know: get overheated and go open circuit. Then there's nothing for it but to wait for the ruddy thing to cool."

Since motors were not my forte, I nodded wisely and kept my mouth shut.

"What are you doing away out here?"

"Just rambling," I said. "I like to get away, sometimes. Go for a walk--that sort of thing."

"Lucky you," she said. "I never get away. Well, hardly ever. Dieter's taken me for a pint of half-and-half at the Thirteen Drakes a couple of times, but then there was a most god-awful flap about it. The POWs are not allowed to do that, you know. At least they weren't during the war."

"Dieter told me your sister Ophelia had him to tea yesterday," she added, somewhat cagily. I realized at once that she was fishing.

"Yes," I said, kicking carelessly at a clod of dirt, gazing off into the distance, and pretending I wasn't remotely interested. Friend or not, if she wanted gossip from me, it would have to be tit for tat.

"I saw you at the puppet show," I said. "At the church, on Saturday night. Wasn't that a corker? About Mr. Porson, I mean?"

"It was horrid," she said.

"Did you know him?"

It probably wasn't a fair question, and I fired it at her without warning: straight out of the blue.

Sally's expression became instantly guarded, and she hesitated a bit too long before answering.

"I--I've seen him around." Her lie was obvious.

"On the telly, perhaps?" I asked, perhaps too innocently. "The Magic Kingdom? Snoddy the Squirrel?"

I knew as soon as I said it that I'd pushed things too far.

"All right," she said, "what are you up to? Come on--out with it."

She planted her hands on her hips and fixed me with an unwavering stare.

"I don't know what you mean," I said.

"Oh, come off it. Don't give me that. Everyone for fifty miles around knows that Flavia de Luce doesn't go walking in the woods just to put roses in her cheeks."

Could that be true? Fifty miles? Her answer rather surprised me: I should have thought a hundred.

"Gordon'd have your hide if he caught you in that wood," she said, pointing to the sign.

I put on my best sheepish look, but kept quiet.