The Burry Man’s Day, page 18
‘Yes, poor Mr Dudgeon,’ I said again, as we took our first sips.
Mrs Turnbull looked rather drawn both ways at this. She wanted nothing more than to launch into all that she felt about the death, but she did not want to start from a point of sympathizing with the departed. She pursed her mouth and made a tsk-ing sound.
‘The children are terribly unnerved by it all,’ she said.
‘Your children?’ I asked, wondering why that should be so.
‘In a sense,’ she answered. ‘My husband and I have not been blessed with children of our own, and so we think of all his charges as our children. And, as I say, they are beginning to make up silly stories about it already to frighten themselves with.’
‘It was most unfortunate,’ I said. ‘Dozens of them must have been right there on the spot when he fell. One can only hope that it was all over so quickly that they could be led away before they really latched on to what was happening.’
‘If only that were so,’ said Mrs Turnbull. ‘But I’m afraid the parents, nine times out of ten, take no care at all to keep their talk away from little ears. And when they try to be discreet they simply confuse the children even more. By the very next day, there were half a dozen different versions of what had happened, all wildly fanciful, of course. I heard them regaling one another as they sat having their picnics. Quite tiny children some of them and you would not believe what they came out with.’
‘Oh, I think I would,’ I said, laughing. ‘I’ve been exposed to the Dudgeons next door.’
‘The who?’ said Mrs Turnbull.
‘Next door to Robert and Chrissie,’ I said. ‘The little red-headed scamps. They have some simply bloodcurdling tales to tell of what goes on in those woods.’
‘Well,’ said Mrs Turnbull, frowning slightly, ‘there we cannot blame the parents. Donald is one of our stalwarts.’
‘Really?’ I said, wondering to what manner of stalwart she was alluding.
‘Oh yes, a tireless worker for the cause.’
I racked my brain briefly to determine which cause this might be. He did seem to have a green thumb, but could horticulture, even to such as the Turnbulls, really be called ‘a cause’?
‘He is quite the most charismatic speaker on our entire summer circuit,’ said Mrs Turnbull. ‘His success rate astonishes even me sometimes. In fact, I have suggested to him that he would make an excellent lay-preacher, but he’s a religious conservative through and through. He wouldn’t hear of it.’
I was having to work pretty hard by now to stop myself from gaping. Charismatic? A speaker? A lay-preacher, even?
‘You seem surprised, Mrs Gilver,’ said Mrs Turnbull. ‘Have you and Donald met?’
‘I have met him, just briefly,’ I said. ‘And more to the point I’ve seen the whisky bottles on the rubbish heap outside his cottage. I shouldn’t have thought he was lay-preacher material at all.’
Mrs Turnbull threw back her head and let out a peal of laughter. Happy as I always am to provide entertainment for my fellow man, I felt the stirrings of annoyance as wave after wave of chuckles issued from her. I was glad to see that she slopped some coffee on to the lap of her dress, which was rather pale, and I hoped it left a stain.
‘He speaks in our Temperance tent,’ said Mrs Turnbull. ‘And each time he does, men flock to the front to hand over their bottles and watch him pour them out into the ground. It’s a marvellous sight, Mrs Gilver. But I suppose it does mean that he ends up with more than a few empties!’ She was laughing again, and this time I had the grace to smile a little with her.
‘Well, so much for my judgement of character then,’ I said with what I thought was great magnanimity. ‘I thought he looked a born drinker. In fact, I thought he was drunk!’
‘Appearances can be deceptive,’ said Mrs Turnbull. ‘It’s not the first time poor Donald, with his looks what they are, has been taken for one of the lost lambs instead of the shepherd. But he is as fierce a foe of the demon drink as any man born and he is leading his children along the straight path in the most determined way.’
I thought wryly to myself that he might care to widen his scope a little. They were perhaps well drilled in the evils of drink but their minds ran far from the lessons of Sunday school when at play in the woods.
‘Well, I’m glad for the sake of the children and their mother to have the source of all the bottles cleared up,’ I said. I was merely making chit-chat, but to my horror Mrs Turnbull read rather more into it than I had meant.
‘You’re of our mind?’ she said. ‘I had heard that at Mrs de Cassilis’s little party, you had a cocktail in your hand. But I’m delighted to hear it.’
I began to gabble. ‘Well, no, that is, yes. You did. I’m not. I can’t abide whisky but I’m not a teetotaller. Not that I’d say I’m a drinker, you understand. I’m – you know, a glass of sherry before lunch, a cocktail or two, wine with dinner and perhaps a little something afterwards . . .’ I ground to a halt, thinking that this list sounded positively debauched when one said it out loud in one breath like that. ‘Moderation in all things,’ I finished, lamely.
‘The doctrine of moderation in all things,’ said Mrs Turnbull, ‘is as harmful as it is hypocritical.’ I blinked. ‘That may sound radical,’ she went on. I had been thinking it sounded insufferably rude, but she was welcome to call it radical if she chose. ‘But no one actually means moderation in all things. No one really advocates moderation in murder, moderation in slavery.’ This was obviously a pre-prepared speech, one which had been wheeled out many a time before now and would be many more times to come. What a cheek, to make me sit through it here in her parlour where etiquette prevented me from escape!
‘In short, moderation is only to be recommended where the phenomenon in question is essentially harmless.’
‘I don’t agree,’ I said, which was a bald statement to make in any normal social intercourse, but as my sons would say ‘she started it’. ‘I think moderation can be safely advocated if the . . . stuff,’ I had forgotten her wording, ‘is harmless in moderation.’
‘Oh, but my dear Mrs Gilver,’ she said, earnestly coming to sit on the edge of her seat and leaning towards me, ‘it’s not. It’s poison.’
Under the present circumstances, I felt I could say nothing in argument against that. Mr Dudgeon’s intake had been far from moderate, it was true, but he was on his way to be buried that very morning and I was in no heart to champion whisky any further. One point worth noting in passing, I thought, was that this readiness on Mrs Turnbull’s part to talk of whisky as ‘poison’ rather pointed to her innocence in the matter of Robert Dudgeon’s death. She would hardly want to draw a close comparison between the two if she or her husband were the author of the crime.
‘It’s utter, utter poison and quite useless in the bodily economy,’ Mrs Turnbull was saying. ‘If my husband were only here he could tell you.’
‘Your wish has been granted,’ said Mr Turnbull, sweeping in the parlour door in a black tie and rather green-tinged dark suit. ‘What can I tell Mrs Gilver, my dear?’
‘Your wife is attempting to get my signature on the pledge,’ I said, speaking with no more reverence than this silly nonsense deserved; it was long past time I staked a claim in the conversation again.
‘You may scoff,’ said Mr Turnbull. I inclined my head, accepting his permission graciously, then I took a hold of myself again. I must swallow all annoyance and do what was needed for the case.
‘I hold no particular brief one way or the other,’ I said, trying to sound lofty. ‘Only I do wonder if going around saying it’s poison is wise. Around here in particular.’ I was speaking with forked tongue, hoping to jolt them, but if they did know anything about Robert Dudgeon they hid it remarkably well and only frowned at me in puzzlement and waited for more. ‘Around here where so many depend on the stuff for their livelihood, I mean. What would become of Queensferry without the bottling hall?’
‘Queensferry without the bottling hall,’ said Mr Turnbull in a dreamy voice, as though he was speaking of Elysium, ‘would be a better place in every way.’
‘Then you would only have to close all the mines and scuttle all the fishing boats and you’d be happy,’ I said, and I did not trouble with much politeness. All very well for Mr Turnbull to lay waste to any trade that was not ‘healthful exercise’ in another form, but we could not all be schoolmasters. ‘And our young men would be off on a ship to the New World to work down their mines instead.’ I remembered Tommy from the night of the greasy pole, threatening emigration to escape his wife and her nagging tongue, and I thought that I would accept a fairly long boat ride to get away from the Turnbulls right now. Mrs Turnbull, I noticed, was reddening with wifely anger to hear me speak to her husband so, but before she had managed more than a rumble, he stepped in.
‘We keep our eyes raised to the heavens and our hearts follow, Mrs Gilver,’ he said. ‘We are not troubled by those who would pull us down.’
‘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.
