‘Plant,’ said Alec. ‘It’s not a bush. It’s a rosette with a fleshy tap root and a spike of thistle-like flowers sometimes reaching a height of up to…’ He laughed at my expression and cut the lecture short. ‘I looked it up,’ he explained. ‘In a horribly musty natural history of the British Isles.’
‘Where?’ I said. ‘When? Why?’
‘Here,’ said Alec. ‘In Cad’s library, waiting for you to come home.’ I always forget about the books in libraries, for some reason. Most of the books in Hugh’s library at home were centuries old, pungent beyond belief and hardly ever written in English. ‘As to why,’ Alec went on, ‘I was really looking for something else.’ He waited, apparently expecting me to comprehend something.
‘Coprinus atramentarius,’ he went on when he had given up. ‘The common ink cap. Your mushroom, darling.’
‘Oh!’ I exclaimed. ‘Excellent. Well done. And?’
‘In season from the early spring until November,’ he said. ‘Very common in any type of woodland.’
‘Gosh,’ I said. ‘Our theory lives on.’
‘For the meantime, anyway,’ said Alec. ‘So go on. You were saying? A horse, suppurating sores…’
‘Yes, we could say that we suspected sabotage by an eccentric neighbour, and ask the chemist if such a thing was possible.’
‘Wouldn’t he ask us to bring in some of the burrs so he could check?’ said Alec. ‘Or even the horse.’
‘At which point we could hastily backtrack,’ I replied. ‘Or we could say it had died. Unless that would make him even keener to see it. They have odd tastes, these vets, you know.’
‘Well, it’s worth a try,’ Alec said. ‘Where are the things, Dandy? And do you have a very stout pair of gloves? If there’s the smallest chance that they killed Robert Dudgeon we can hardly go juggling them with our bare hands.’
As I had done every other time this thought had been aired, I suddenly felt rather sheepish, or at least glad that no one else was listening, and I screwed up my nose at him.
‘They can’t possibly be, can they?’ I said. ‘Not really? Not really really?’ I remembered this feeling well from our first case: the feeling that one’s own boring everyday life could not really be traversing these paths of murder and evil; that one must be play-acting, only doing it so well that one was more than half convinced it was true.
Alec shrugged but made no answer.
‘To the stables then,’ I said. (I had stuffed the bags into the empty tack room in the stable yard on my return from the woods.) ‘After all,’ I pointed out, ‘since they had spent an hour or two cosied up with some horse droppings and they were on a bed of cabbage leaves and peapods, I could hardly lug them up to the castle and dump them in my bath.’
We made our way down the castle mound and across the park to where a stand of trees hid the stable block from view.
‘I say, Dandy,’ said Alec as we tramped along. ‘Are you beginning to worry that they won’t be there?’
The thought had not occurred to me, but as soon as Alec voiced it I was convinced. There was the fact of my dreadful feeling that someone (or something) had been watching me in the woods the previous day and, added to that, I had been caught red-handed by Donald Dudgeon while blatantly stealing the burrs. It seemed clear to me now, all of a sudden, that the most discreet way for him to foil my plans would have been simply to watch where I took the burrs and then to wait until it was quiet and steal them back. Alec and I began to walk faster and faster towards the trees.
‘Although,’ I said, ‘there was nothing to suggest that I wasn’t going to do whatever I was going to do with them right that minute. How could he – either Donald or whoever it was that was watching me if anyone was watching me – have known that I’d simply leave them sitting there? How on earth could I have simply left them sitting there if it comes to that!’ We were trotting along now as we wheeled into the stable yard and we bustled straight for the unused tack room in the far corner, only slowing enough for me to sing out over one shoulder to the stable lad: ‘How’s Nipper?’ And to hear the response: ‘He’s grand, madam. Nivver you fear.’ ‘Now, Dan,’ said Alec, barring my way with an arm flung out across the door, ‘try to remember exactly where you put the sacks and how they looked when you left them. It would be good to know if anyone’s been in here snooping in the meantime.’ I closed my eyes and tried to bring to mind a picture of how the tack room had looked the night before, but to be honest I had been so tired with tramping to and fro through the woods all day and, what with the nervous strain of my peculiar encounters with Donald Dudgeon and the ghastly Turnbulls, not to mention the upset of poor Nipper’s paw, I feared I had simply abandoned them without a glance.
‘I’m sure that’s roughly where I put them,’ I told Alec, on entering. ‘And’ – I picked up one in each hand – ‘that’s exactly the weight of them so far as I can remember, so I should say fairly certainly they’ve been left alone.’
There was no electric light in the room, but Alec lit one of the oil lamps which sat on the windowsill and hooked it over a beam above our heads. I brushed a little straw and dust from the tack table with my gloved hands, then Alec hoisted a sack, turned it upside down, and tipped out its contents. I emptied out the other and we spread the burrs out over the table top. Then we both stood looking, carefully breathing through our mouths (and so eating it).
‘I feel pretty foolish,’ I announced at length.
‘Hm,’ said Alec. ‘Did you expect some of them to have little skulls and crossbones on them?’ He spoke peremptorily, but he was clearly feeling much the same.
‘Let’s be forensic about it nevertheless,’ I said. ‘We’ve never had to do anything like this before so let’s make sure our inaugural attempt is at least thorough and not a disgrace to Mr Holmes.’ I buttoned the cuffs of my gloves carefully and began to poke about in the mess.
‘Right. What is there to note?’
‘Nothing,’ said Alec. ‘There are thousands of them. All identical.’
‘Not really,’ I said. ‘Not when you look closely. Some of them are fairly fresh-looking while others are dried up and turning yellow. That supports what Cad said about the scarcity this year. The pickers could not afford to be choosy. And look, some of them have been quite carefully harvested, neat little spheres, while others have been ripped off the plant and still have bits of stalk. Lots of them have fluff stuck in the spurs.’
‘Some of them are stuck together in plates,’ said Alec, getting into the spirit of the thing. ‘Look at this.’ He held up a sheet of burrs about three feet long and ten inches wide, holding together quite firmly although ragged at the sides.
‘I didn’t notice that when I was bundling them off the heap,’ I admitted. ‘Here’s a huge one.’ I held up a corner, but it began to rip apart as I did so.
‘Careful, Dandy,’ said Alec. ‘Lay it out flat. That must be the back piece or the breast piece.’
‘Yes, and that long one you found first is a leg surely. Rather grisly somehow, isn’t it?’ But Alec was as happy as a little boy with frog-spawn now, rummaging around on the tack table for more big pieces.
‘Here’s some of the head, surely,’ he cried, lifting a curved cap of burrs carefully over his hands. I shuddered. Alec laid the latest find at the top of the table above the large square patch and stood back.
‘I’m not sure I want to reconstruct the whole thing,’ I said. ‘It’s giving me the willies.’
‘Are you afraid that when we put the last piece in place, he’ll sit up and reach out towards you?’ said Alec, in a whisper.