Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 104, No. 4 & 5. Whole No. 633 & 634, October 1994
The Passing of Mr. Toad
by Jeffry Scott
© 1994 by Jeffry Scott
For many years pseudonymous author Jeffry Scott was a reporter for the London Daily Mail. These days, he’s a Daily Mail editor, and a very prolific short story writer as well. Mr. Scott has an eye to all that goes on in the mystery field, and in the book business generally, since one of his editorial responsibilities is to scout for books to be serialized in his newspaper...
The day was idyllic, almost uncannily perfect. That made what followed seem so much worse.
I remember standing with one foot up on the log, morning woodland scents blending with the aroma from a mug of coffee in my hand, and feeling a rare sense of awe and gratitude, my nearest approach to a religious response. Appropriate, since it was Sunday.
If you have no patience for ain’t-nature-grand and This-sceptred-isle stuff, skip the next bit. But be assured that it’s relevant...
My cottage being set among trees, a formal garden (any garden apart from spring bulbs in concrete tubs, replaced by bedding plants come summer) is a waste of time. There’s a patio, a ledge I hacked out of the hillside, with a tree trunk set at the edge to stop me strolling over the brink after the second or third sundowner. The ground falls away so steeply that standing out there is like riding in the basket of a hot-air balloon.
St. Mary’s is a ten-minute walk away but the little church’s steeple is only yards off in a straight line, and almost directly below my place; one looks down on the gilded weathercock instead of up at it. As for the surroundings... What do they boast about in Ireland, a hundred shades of green, a thousand? We have a mere fifty along the Drawbel Valley, but that’s enough. Trees and bushes, mainly rhododendrons run wild since the heyday of a landscaped and manicured Victorian estate. Some laurels, many pines, and at a widened turn of the zigzag track, a veteran cedar to shade the horses when carriages brought ladies to the house to execute anaemic watercolours on clement days, last century.
Admiring all that, I was half asleep, caused by being very late to bed, and up early. To, as the old joke goes, get home again. An ignoble part of my mind — men really are the limit, some of us, that is — was gloating. Nothing adds spice to an affair like conducting it in secrecy. My partner was unmarried, but she had an image to protect. As a bachelor with no image to speak of, I cared less about keeping village gossips in the dark. But she was the boss.
Out there on the patio, another side of me was enquiring what had happened to my scorn for no-future flings, and warned that any amount of issue-confronting and assessment of emotions lay ahead. Conscience nagged that I wasn’t a teenager. Nor, for that matter, was the lady.
But all that faded as I took another look across the valley. My end of the Drawbel is deep and narrow, the wound left by a titanic axe — how that simile made me wince in hindsight! As mist burned off, the landscape emerged like a photograph defining in developer fluid. Trees, the steeple, houses amid greenery on the far slopes were all fresh-minted, in that overture to a glorious summer day. Intellect insisted that Bristol, no small city, was only ten miles away, but it might as well have been a million.
“Dear God, it’s pretty,” I mumbled inadequately, and smacked my lips over the coffee, which had no chance of keeping me sleepless. Aching to get to bed yet too idle to move, I compromised by sitting on the fallen tree.
Right after the event I kept telling myself, “Nobody ought to die on a day like this.” It showed how shaken I was. Not the hardened man of semi-action (witnessed a lot, partaken of little) that vanity had suggested. Before lucking out with the novels, I was a trained observer — sounds better than reporter, don’t you think? — and had seen a fair amount of violence and carnage. Was shot at, arrested by the breed of police imposing force rather than upholding laws, survived an air raid: standard been-there-done-that experiences of most foreign correspondents.
None of that prepared me for what befell poor Ben Basgate...
Living on the edge of Petticoat Wood ought to have accustomed me to lethal violence. Stoats and weasels kill rabbits, foxes kill hens (and rabbits), magpies kill songbirds even before they hatch. The rabbits don’t get much of a look-in, but are known to kill their own young, not to mention endless vegetation, and so it goes, day and night on my doorstep. However, human beings count more in the scheme of things. Or so they believe.
But given the context of that cathedral hush and almost daunting beauty, death was unthinkable. When it struck, the impact was all the greater.
I must have dozed, surfacing with a stiff neck and clutching a mug of cold coffee, some of its spilt contents soaking my jeans. It was about nine o’clock, birds sang and there was the faintest whisper of traffic on distant, invisible roads, sounds giving the amphitheater added texture, somehow.
And gradually I became aware of another instrument in the orchestra, suggesting the rattle of a busy woodpecker, but slowed down and oddly close, though it could not be. Tock... tock... tock. Certain noises do float across the valley in still weather, possibly echoing off the slate tiles of St. Mary’s steeple to reach me so clearly.
The measured knocking aroused my curiosity. I knuckled my eyes and gazed around for the source.
A flash of pillar-box red drew my attention. Monks Farm was better than a quarter-mile away on the opposite side of the valley, its chimneys puncturing the froth of trees like masts poking from green clouds. The red fleck was a lot lower down, about the level of the farmhouse’s front lawn. My vision is less than hawklike, but I gathered that Ben Basgate was up and about.
The majority of local folk had no time for Ben, regarding him as a traitor of sorts. Village small-mindedness and envy shaped that opinion. It’s the classic can’t-win syndrome of country communities anywhere in the world — I have recognised the phenomenon from Australia to America, Vietnam to, well, England. Anyone leaving a village to better himself is scorned as a loser if he fails, a show-off if he comes back...
Ben Basgate was no loser. He quit school at fifteen, ran away to London, made money in advertising, and amassed more by selling out and going into the restaurant business. After his widowed father died, Ben came home to the valley to take over the farm.
His idea of agriculture disgusted Drawbel’s opinion makers. In their eyes he let the holding go to rack and ruin, compounding the sin by getting paid for it because Common Market regulations encourage farmers to leave their fields fallow. Set-aside subsidies was the name of the game, and didn’t it put local noses out of joint when Ben Basgate cashed in.
He ran a pop festival on his derelict acres — the village loved that three-day ordeal and the mess left in its wake — to turn a supposedly tax-free profit. Ben opened a “farm shop” stocked with stuff bought at city cash-and-carry outlets, passing it off as organically raised on the premises... until county council snoops closed it down.
There was no harm in him, but then I didn’t live near Monks Farm, except as the crow flies. Half his larks were dreamed up to annoy the natives, simple as that. We got on fine; my secret nickname for Ben Basgate was Mr. Toad, he had that Wind in the Willows air of self-importance and innocent glee at being himself. A hairless head, bulging eyes, and wide mouth endorsed my label.