Serpents in Paradise

by Martin Edwards

  He stopped and looked down at a set of tracks in the soft, earth road—apparently those of the van which we had seen cross the line. I followed the direction of his glance and saw the clear impression of a Blakey’s protector, preceded by that of a gash in the tyre and followed by that of a projecting lump.

  “But this is astounding!” I exclaimed. “It is almost certainly the same track that we saw in Ponder’s Road.”

  “Yes,” he agreed. “I noticed it as we came along.” He brought out his spring-tape and notebook, and handing the latter to me, stooped and measured the distances between the three impressions. I wrote them down as he called them out, and then we compared them with the note made in Ponder’s Road. The measurements were identical, as were the relative positions of the impressions.

  “This is an important piece of evidence,” said he. “I wish we were able to take casts, but the notes will be pretty conclusive. And now,” he continued as we resumed our progress towards the station, “to return to your question. Parton’s evidence at the inquest proved that Cyrus Pedley was drowned in water which contained duck-weed. He produced a specimen and we both saw it. We saw the duck-weed in it and also two Planorbis shells. The presence of those two shells proved that the water in which he was drowned must have swarmed with them. We saw the body, and observed that one hand grasped a wisp of horn-weed. Then we went to view the ditch and we examined it. That was when I got, not a mere hint, but a crucial and conclusive fact. The ditch was covered with duck-weed, as we expected. But it was the wrong duck-weed.”

  “The wrong duck-weed!” I exclaimed. “Why, how many kinds of duck-weed are there?”

  “There are four British species,” he replied. “The Greater Duck-weed, the Lesser Duck-weed, the Thick Duck-weed, and the Ivy-leaved Duck-weed. Now the specimens in Parton’s jar I noticed were the Greater Duck-weed, which is easily distinguished by its roots, which are multiple and form a sort of tassel. But the duck-weed on the Bantree ditch was the Lesser Duck-weed, which is smaller than the other, but is especially distinguished by having only a single root. It is impossible to mistake one for the other.

  “Here, then, was practically conclusive evidence of murder. Cyrus Pedley had been drowned in a pond or ditch. But not in the ditch in which his body was found. Therefore his dead body had been conveyed from some other place and put into this ditch. Such a proceeding furnishes prima facie evidence of murder. But as soon as the question was raised, there was an abundance of confirmatory evidence. There was no horn-weed or Planorbis shells in the ditch, but there were swarms of succineae, some of which would inevitably have been swallowed with the water. There was an obscure linear pressure mark on the arm of the dead man, just above the elbow: such a mark as might be made by a cord if a man were pinioned to render him helpless. Then the body would have had to be conveyed to this place in some kind of vehicle; and we found the traces of what appeared to be a motor-van, which had approached the cart-track on the wrong side of the road, as if to pull up there. It was a very conclusive mass of evidence; but it would have been useless but for the extraordinarily lucky chance that poor Pedley had lost his railway ticket and preserved the receipt; by which we were able to ascertain where he was on the day of his death and in what locality the murder was probably committed. But that is not the only way in which Fortune has favoured us. The station-master’s information was, and will be, invaluable. Then it was most fortunate for us that there was only one ditch on the factory land; and that that ditch was accessible at only one point, which must have been the place where Pedley was drowned.”

  “The duck-weed in this ditch is, of course, the Greater Duck-weed?”

  “Yes. I have taken some specimens as well as the horn-weed and shells.”

  He opened the vasculum and picked out one of the tiny plants, exhibiting the characteristic tassel of roots.

  “I shall write to Parton and tell him to preserve the jar and the horn-weed if it has not been thrown away. But the duck-weed alone, produced in evidence, would be proof enough that Pedley was not drowned in the Bantree ditch; and the dental plate will show where he was drowned.”

  “Are you going to pursue the case any farther?” I asked.

  “No,” he replied. “I shall call at Scotland Yard on my way home and report what I have learned and what I can prove in court. Then I shall have finished with the case. The rest is for the police, and I imagine they won’t have much difficulty. The circumstances seem to tell their own story. Pedley was employed by the Foreign Office, probably on some kind of secret service. I imagine that he discovered the existence of a gang of evil-doers—probably foreign revolutionaries, of whom we may assume that our friend the manager of the factory is one; that he contrived to associate himself with them and to visit the factory occasionally to ascertain what was made there besides Golomite—if Golomite is not itself an illicit product. Then I assume that he was discovered to be a spy, that he was lured down here; that he was pinioned and drowned some time on Tuesday night and his body put into the van and conveyed to a place miles away from the scene of his death, where it was deposited in a ditch apparently identical in character with that in which he was drowned. It was an extremely ingenious and well-thought-out plan. It seemed to have provided for every kind of inquiry, and it very narrowly missed being successful.”

  “Yes,” I agreed. “But it didn’t provide for Dr. John Thorn-

  dyke.”

  “It didn’t provide for a searching examination of all the details,” he replied; “and no criminal plan that I have ever met has done so. The completeness of the scheme is limited by the knowledge of the schemers, and, in practice, there is always something overlooked. In this case, the criminals were unlearned in the natural history of ditches.”

  ***

  Thorndyke’s theory of the crime turned out to be substantially correct. The Golomite Works proved to be a factory where high explosives were made by a gang of cosmopolitan revolutionaries who were all known to the police. But the work of the latter was simplified by a detailed report which the dead man had deposited at his bank and which was discovered in time to enable the police to raid the factory and secure the whole gang. When once they were under lock and key, further information was forthcoming; for a charge of murder against them jointly soon produced King’s Evidence sufficient to procure a conviction of the three actual perpetrators of the murder.

  A Proper Mystery

  Margery Allingham

  Margery Allingham (1904–1966) was the daughter of two writers. Her mother wrote short fiction for women’s magazines, while her father edited the Christian Globe, and also ran the London Journal, before abandoning journalism to become a freelance writer of magazine fiction. Allingham’s first novel, Blackerchief Dick, was written and published while she was still in her teens. In her mid-twenties, she created her most famous character, Albert Campion, who made his first appearance in The Crime at Black Dudley (1929).

  Allingham’s most famous novel, The Tiger in the Smoke (1952), makes excellent use of its setting in London, but she lived in and loved the Essex countryside, and was equally adept when it came to writing rural mysteries. Her non-fiction book The Oaken Heart (1941) is a notable account of life in the countryside during war-time. “A Proper Mystery” was first published just a year later.

  ***

  (This uncollected story appeared in The Lights of Essex magazine in May 1942 where it was illustrated by Bernard Venables. It was republished in the Essex Countryside magazine, October 1986.)

  ***

  ‘Har, that’s a highly remarkable thing, no mistake about it, yes, yes’, said Lefty, quacking away in his high flat voice like a whole pond full of ducks. (Lefty Bowers that was, not Lefty Sheldrake, who married Mrs Wild’s daughter. He was mouthy, but no harm in him.)

  ‘Highly remarkable’, agreed old Harry, putting his whole face in his mug again. No one really heard him, and anyway the observation was just
an affirmative noise. He was a kind of an echo. Sitting there at the corner of the table under the picture of the trotting horse, his blue serge cap with the button on the point where all the seams fell flat on his bald head, he looked so familiar he might have been part of the Dog’s tap furniture.

  ‘A mystery’, bellowed Lefty meaningly, and looking at Mr Light who had long been in there and was standing wonderfully quiet as well he might.

  ‘I don’t think much to ‘ut, I don’t’, said old Bill Fish from his corner, and everybody looked at him sharply. As every Essex man knows, the phrase is a very strong one. People ‘don’t think much to a thing’ when their feelings are pretty near to explosion point, and no one wanted anything seriously unpleasant to happen now that the damage had been done. After all, there was no point in anyone getting wholly riled when the Flower Show was over a fortnight ago, and the judging of the plots in the Garden Field a thing of the past. No peccatory on earth would bring back those succulent lettuces, no hollering in creation restore those trodden onions, no back talk in a year return the ruined splendour of those feathery carrots and sizable marrows.

  The disaster itself was not complicated. Rather, it was one of those occurrences which possess all the simple awfulness of Greek Tragedy.

  Briefly, Mr Light, acting against all advice, as was his nature (but also his undeniable right in a free England), had put his young beasts into the Narrow Meadow on Midsummer Eve. It was his own meadow, and he had satisfied himself that the hedge which divided it from the Garden Field was sound. However, just as everybody had predicted, when the moon was full and the air was fresh off the sea, the animals had got out, and by morning all the little plots which had been awaiting the Show judges were despoiled, wasted, as though a cloud of heavy-footed locusts had passed that way. The destruction on this occasion was ruthless and final, and fourteen out of the twenty keen competitors in the most important contest of the year had been eliminated in one gigantic bovine holiday. It was a catastrophe. That was about the size of it.

  All the prime favourites were down at one stroke, and Bill Fish, the best gardener and carrot king not only of the village but of the county (and, in that case, who knew, but possibly of the world?), had fallen with the rest.

  After a blow like that the whole Flower Show had lost interest; the fire had gone out of it. The Major had taken the Herbaceous, as usual. Miss McTavish had swept off the Table Decorations, Buttonhole and Posy in her normal form, and what excitement there was lay in the Bottled Fruit exhibits and the scandal of the same old jar of cherries getting the first prize yet again. The all-important Cottage Plot entry was scarcely worth discussing. There was nothing of any real standard left to go in. Pitcher Cater, of all people, got the first, and they had to give Willie Brooke the second for his little mound behind his hen’us, while the third prize was just not given at all. It was a disgrace, that was all, just an ordinary disgrace.

  Not only that either, but the destruction of the garden plots was so complete that the Basket of Mixed Vegetables class was a mockery too. Old Harry got away with the first prize there, simply because of his two great cucumbers. They were the only things he could get to grow really well, for he had a single great frame covering pretty well the same area as the shack in which he lived. For the rest, he had but a spadeful of garden, although what there was of it was good enough soil, it being on the verge which bordered the precious field itself. No one begrudged the poor old chap his little triumph. In a way it was almost a fair thing, because in the ordinary way he could only be certain of winning the cucumber prize, which was a mere one and six, whereas the mixed vegetables brought in ten bob, if one pulled it off. Still, taken by and large, and allowing for small mercies, it was a regular maddening thing to have happened, and Mr Light was unpopular, and aware of it.

  In the pause which followed Bill Fish’s strong words, Grecian, the shoemaker came in, and smelling the subject under discussion (which was not difficult, since none other had come up in the ‘Dog and Duck’ for the past three weeks), he went off like a little old alarm clock, as one would expect of him.

  ‘I said it, I said it, I said it! I always hev said it. It were always so. Always. Always. In my father’s time, in my eldest brother’s time, when I were a little old boy. Whenever beasts were put in the Narrow Meadow on Midsummer’s Eve they got out into the Garden Field. I told you. I give you the warning’. Nothing on earth would keep him quiet. He was fairly dancing, glistening with excitement and ancient. ‘Always!, always!’ he repeated with apparent delight. ‘Never was a time when that didn’t happen. Beasts get out of the Narrow Meadow on Midsummer’s Eve. I told you. I told you in time. You can’t say I didn’t’.

  Mr Light is a quick-tempered man. Not bad tempered, you understand, but hot and quick to fly: so there was a quiet time while everybody stood awaiting. Mr Light grew wonderfully rosy. Presently he opened his mouth, and several words which no one expected to hear under a roof came out of his mouth.

  ‘Now, now. Har, Mr Light, I’m took aback!’ said Miss Evelina, the hostess, in her closing-time voice, and there was silence until she’d retired to the passage where she was technically out of ear-shot. Grecian (who got his name from a mule he’d had a lot to do with in the Army, and who, in turn, had got its name from a race horse called Grecian Hero, which it did not resemble) took the temporary quiet for a victory, which was rather the sort of mistake he did make at times. Deathly, as you might say.

  ‘Always hes!’ he repeated. ‘Always hes. I said so, and no one but an ignorant person would have gone against it’.

  Mr Light never spoke much, but he did now.

  ‘I see you’, he said, breathing very hard and saying each word as if he was seeking after it and finding it only just in time to save his meaning from bursting from his head in gas. ‘I see you, Grecian, in a kind of haze!’

  Well, it was a terrible thing to see two men getting on in life a-rolling on the floor hammering at one another as if they were little old boys. Miss Evelina shrieked like a train. Bill Fish was wiped clean off his chair, which made him more spiteful than ever, and lay leaning against the walls, laughing as if they were gates creaking in the wind. Pitchy was doubled up with the stitch and looked as if he were to come in half. Old Harry was protected by the angle of the table in the corner, poor old chap. He stayed where he was, looking right terrified. The policeman was in the big clubroom across the passage, and when he heard Miss Evelina shrieking he came in at once and pulled the two apart.

  He was a wonderfully sensible kind of man for a policeman, but he was born in the county and had been in the village nearly three years. His uniform produced silence, as the Law does. All the same the whole thing was remarkably funny, and some of the young ones guggled in their throats. Old Grecian was sitting on the floor looking completely staggered, regular astounded, same as if one of those bombs had hit him, while Mr Light, properly ashamed of himself, but not going to admit it, not if he died, began to say things he had not ought before anybody, let alone the policeman. Everyone took it very nicely of the policeman. He didn’t get flustered or take out his book or do anything awkward. He just waited until Mr Light gave up, exhausted, and then he said very quietly and with dignity:

  ‘You’re not quite the thing are you, Mr Light?’

  That did it, you know. People were crying with laughter already. Pitchy just shook till the tears ran down his face and then began to heave with his weak stomach and had to be hurried outside. After that, which was the final straw, the only sound in the taproom was a sort of sobbing. Everyone writhed in ecstasy, except old Harry, who looked really terrified, poor old chap, and, of course, the three in the centre.

  ‘That’ll do’, said the policeman, when he reckoned they’d had their laugh. ‘What about is all this here exactly?’ Of course, he knew as well as any body, having had a plot in the Garden Field trodden down himself. So the question was largely rhetorical, but it gave him a chance to say
something he’d evidently been thinking about for a long time.

  ‘There’s a bit of a mystery here’, he said. ‘Some people might say a considerable mystery. I’ve been a-looking at that hedge of yours, Mr Light, and in my opinion as a gardener and not as a policeman, for I can’t commit myself in my official capacity understand, I have an idea that one of they little old quick bushes in it has been took up and put back at some time not so long ago. Very likely at night’.

  This was a pretty staggering statement even for a policeman in the capacity of a gardener, and it electrified the whole room. As you might say if you were Essex born: ‘That lit it up’. Men looked at each another and understood. The mystery was not a magical one any more.

  Immediately there was a tremendous quacking. You could hear it as far as the school. Bill Fish just got up and rushed away on his bicycle without a word. He was going to look and see. It was so simple when you had it given out to you. It doesn’t take long to drive a few head of cattle through a gap, does it?

  Grecian forgot his injuries in his excitement.

  ‘At’s it!’ he said, scrambling to his feet. ‘At’s it! At’s it! Now you’ve hit it. There’s someone done ‘at deliberate. At’s it! And I’ll tell you something else. It’s not the first time. Little old bushes always were a-dying along that hedge. If you take ‘em up they do die after. Seen it scores of times. In my father’s time, in my brother’s time. Always hev seen it’. He shut off then, because Mr Light and the policeman (as well as most other people in the room) were looking at him sort of earnest and peculiar, and it was as though they had become kind of allies, if you follow me.

  ‘Highly remarkable!’ said Lefty again, but he said it soft this time, and wonderingly.

  ‘Now’, said the policeman, putting in a warning, ‘we don’t none of us want to run away with any silly ideas, because there’s no proof of nothing. If there hadda been I should have found it in these last few weeks while I’ve been investigating, but sometimes a man will do a wonderfully silly thing to make hisself look right, even when it’s a blessed silly tale of Midsummer’s Eve being special or magical or something that he’s been letting off his mouth about. This ain’t no official opinion—consider I’m astanding here without my uniform—but I do say, as a gardener, that it would be a very sensible thing if some people didn’t say so much and talk so loud that they hev to spite all their neighbour’s hard work for a twelve month to get theirselves believed. Nobody’, he added with sudden heat, ‘nobody but a particular old fule would do it either. It’s rep-rehensible, there’s no other word for it—and I don’t mind using it in uniform or out—it’s rep-rehensible’.