‘Tiny, I think, would not have been a party to that, because, had the method been discovered, he, and he alone, would have been the suspected person. Nevertheless, his Indian experiences did come into it. The poison was administered in curry. Now, George, I shall want the car to meet me at the top of the Hangman at half-past ten tonight. I do not propose to walk home.’

CHAPTER 19

Goblin Market

‘O that I could my bed of earth but view

And smile, and look as cheerfully as you!’

Henry King

The air on the upland road was fresh to the point of being chilly. Parted from George, who had vainly pressed the gun on her for her protection, Mrs Bradley stepped out briskly and covered the rising ground at a most surprising pace.

She had made careful study of the map and she made no mistake about the route. The sky was blue and the slight clouds were high; here a stream ran, and there a bird flew suddenly out of a coppice. The woods on the steeps looked like bluish smoke, or climbed like a company of Green Howards.

Here and there in the valleys a chimney smoked or a small train puffed white steam against brown escarpments. Here was a terraced town with steps leading up from street to street, and here was a huddled village, the houses clustering together as though the snow were still falling and they were taking shelter from the drift.

It was grand country, although the going was not at all easy; and it was a grand day, although Mrs Bradley decided that the clearness of the weather promised rain. She rested on an old mounting block at the end of the first five miles, and beneath a long-perished gibbet at the end of the first ten. There was no longer any sign of the hangman’s power, but as she sat there she could fancy a ghostly creaking which took her mind back to her first walk through Groaning Spinney.

The sound, however, was nothing more than the creaking of a nearby gate which was set in a stone wall almost overgrown by bracken the colour of umber. Mrs Bradley sat, in a reserved and lady-like manner, upon a flat stone which lay beside the gate, and walked alongside the wall because the path she was supposed to be following had been overgrown in the previous summer. A pocket compass gave her sufficient direction, and the slope, as the map had shown, was now downhill.

She came up with Ed Brown at the crossroads after five hours’ steady walking and her two ten-minute rests.

‘You must be tired, mam, I reckon,’ said Ed, with his wary woodland smile. Mrs Bradley shook her head.

‘I brought you out as far as this,’ she said, ‘so that you could show me where the white lilies blow on the banks of Arcady.’