‘That’s one suspicious circumstance. Then, of course, it was clear right away on Friday night that there was something wrong with Mrs Dudgeon. Something extra wrong, I mean, over and above the grief and shock. Only now does that begin to make sense. She knew, you see, and she dreaded anyone else finding out. Also, there was the blasted ham sandwich which Robert Dudgeon ate sometime before his death. We simply could not track down the origin of that ham sandwich, Inspector. Obviously, he could consume nothing during his round and we knew that Mrs Dudgeon did not intend him to dine off a sandwich because she was all set to take him straight home and she had made a meal for him to eat when he got there. The dishes were still being washed up later that evening when Mrs de Cassilis and I visited her.’
‘Now as to the switch itself,’ said Alec. ‘That was very neatly handled indeed. Tell him, Dan.’
‘This is conjecture, you understand,’ I said to the inspector, ‘but it all fits. Pat Rearden told me that in the morning, for the first time in all his Burry Mann-ing years, Robert Dudgeon asked to be left quite alone. I need to check with Mr Rearden – or I suppose it will be you who checks now, Inspector – but I’ll bet that this moment alone was requested once Dudgeon was completely in costume. He would then withdraw into a cupboard or something and be replaced by the other Burry Man who’d been waiting in the same cupboard to be handed the baton.’ Inspector Cruickshank looked rather sceptical, but said nothing. ‘At the end of the day, as we all know, the Burry Man – not Mr Dudgeon, so let’s call him X for the moment – X dashed off up the stairs away from his guards and when they caught up with him, somewhere in the bowels of the Rosebery Hall, they found Robert Dudgeon ostensibly having ripped off the headpiece and some of the body suit. In fact of course he had shrugged most of it back on, and only just left a bit undone. X, the Burry Man that Rearden and his pal had been steering around all day, was once again tucked away out of view.
‘Now, here is another very significant piece of evidence, Inspector, and one that we are very lucky to have got our hands on. Mrs Dudgeon had her pony and cart parked in Craw’s Close on Friday as she waited for her husband’s return. She refused to move it even though the pony – as ponies will – left droppings all over the Craw’s Close washing green and the women of the Close were not best pleased. You know the layout of the town better than me, of course, but I’m sure we’ll find that the spot where the cart stood is handily situated for a back exit from the Rosebery Hall. There are back doors giving on to that general area, aren’t there?’ The inspector nodded. ‘I thought so. Very well then, the decoy Burry Man scurries into the cart – there’s an opening at the back under the seats, you know – and Mrs Dudgeon, again for the first time in all her years of connection with the event, bundles up the burrs from Robert’s costume and shoves them in there too. Next they set off for home, up the Loan and – most unaccountably, it seemed to me at first – along the Back Braes just below Station Road.’
‘There’s never room for a pony and cart along there,’ said Inspector Cruickshank.
‘Well, the Dudgeons’ little cart really is tiny,’ I said.
‘Of course,’ said the inspector. ‘Robert made himself a wee bogie from one of the hutches when the works here closed, I was forgetting.’
‘So there is room, just,’ I said. ‘But there’s certainly no room to turn it. And yet that is exactly what happened. At the bowling green corner, with much toing and froing and with the pony and cart uncoupled while it was carried out, they turned the cart, went back along the brae and rejoined the Fair in time for the greasy pole.’
‘And how do you know this?’ said the inspector.
‘They were seen,’ Alec told him. ‘What was her name, Dan?’
‘Netta Stoddart,’ I supplied. ‘Sitting at the back of the bowling green clubhouse waiting for her daddy, Netta Stoddart saw them turn the cart. This much I believed right from the start. I now believe the next section of her evidence too. That the Burry Man fell off the cart and rolled down the hill to the railway line. I had that down as a taradiddle. For one thing, why would Dudgeon come back to the Fair if he had just had a tumble? But I now see that little Netta was not talking about “Robert Dudgeon”; she was talking about a “Burry Man”. That is, a man covered in a suit of burrs, and she saw him rolling out of the cart and down the slope to make his getaway. Of course, the next bit – that a train came along and squashed him – is just Netta making life more interesting for herself and can be filed away with the ghost pony and the swamp. Not to mention the holes with the ghostie soldiers down them, the demon in the woods and the dead babies who cry in the night.’
Inspector Cruickshank gave all of this very careful consideration, but when he began to speak, the opening sniff said it all.
‘A very clever tale, madam,’ he said, ‘but a bit too fanciful for my taste, I’m afraid, even if you have managed to convince Mr Osborne here.’
Alec looked rather startled at this take on things, but said nothing.
‘I mean to say,’ the inspector continued, in a patient tone, ‘you say yourself that the Stoddart girl made things up -’
‘Yes but -’ said Alec, but Inspector Cruickshank sailed on.
‘And I still don’t think there’s room for the cart along that lane,’ he said. ‘Never mind space to turn it.’
‘There are clear tracks,’ I said, but then we both looked out of the castle window where the hail storm had given way once more to hammering rain.
‘And why was it that Mrs Dudgeon took the burrs, you’re saying?’ he asked.
‘Ah, this was a nice touch,’ said Alec. ‘What better place to hide a lot of burrs than with another lot of burrs after all.’
‘And if the tragedy of Friday night had not occurred,’ I chipped in, ‘no doubt Dudgeon would soon have burnt the lot.’
‘And why didn’t Mrs Dudgeon do the same?’
‘I’m not sure,’ I said. ‘Perhaps she forgot about them in all the horror of what happened. She was absolutely beside herself, Inspector. Or perhaps – if Mr Dudgeon was the gardener in the family – she did not know that they wouldn’t just dissolve harmlessly there on the heap.’ This was rather feeble and I could see that I was in danger of losing him completely.
‘Meanwhile this other one, this X, went all the way from the bowling green corner along the edge of the railway line up to the Dudgeons’ cottage to put his burrs on the heap there too? Why would he do that now? Whoever he was.’
I looked to Alec, hoping that he had an answer for this, but he was looking back at me, hoping the same.
‘Maybe,’ I said slowly, thinking as I spoke, ‘if we knew who it was, that would become clear.’
‘And what’s more, you’re saying he went there in the burrs. Actually wearing all the burrs? Why would he do that?’ I had no answer this time.
‘So that he wouldn’t be recognized?’ suggested Alec.
‘And why should he care about being recognized?’ the inspector said.
‘Again,’ I insisted, ‘we might be able to answer that if we knew who he was. I can easily believe that he would make his way to his destination still wearing the burrs, though, even if it was torture, because he would have been beautifully camouflaged amongst the trees and anyone who saw him was likely to doubt his own eyes or be doubted if he tried to pass the news on. And actually,’ I said, finding my stride now, ‘he would have been pretty safe. There were no trains just then and there was not likely to be anyone in the woods. No children playing there for once, since everyone was at the Fair. Once he was beyond the footbridge over the line – and he went past that still on the cart – there was a clear run all the way back to Cassilis.’