Complete Works of Rudyard Kipling (Illustrated) (761 page)

So far we could see nothing. Keede made it plainer.

‘Nicol said he went up the bank first Jimmy behind him — and after a few steps he found his helmet knocked off. If he’d been a foot higher up the bank his head ‘ud have gone. The lorry had skidded on the tar of the London Road, as it turned into it left-handed — her tail swung to the right, and the girders swung with it, just missing braining Nicol up on the bank. The lorry was well in the left-hand gutter when he got his breath again. He went for the driver at once. The man said all the lorries always skidded under Channet’s Ash, when it was wet, because of the camber of the road, and they allowed for it as a regular stunt. And he damned the road authorities, and Nicol for being in the light. Then Jimmy Tigner, Nicol told us, caught on to what it meant, and he climbed into the lorry shouting: “You killed Ellen!” It was all Nicol could do to prevent him choking the fellow there and then; but Nicol didn’t pull him off till Jimmy got it out of the driver that he had been delivering girders the night Ellen was killed. Of course, he hadn’t noticed anything.

‘Then Nicol came over to Lemming and me to talk it over. I gave Jimmy a bromide and sent him off to his mother. He wasn’t any particular use, except as a witness — and no good after. Then Nicol went over the whole thing again several times, to fix it in our minds. Next morning he and I and Will called on old Higbee before he could get to church. We made him take out the particular lorry implicated, with the same driver, and a duplicate load packed the same way, and demonstrate for us. We kept her stunting half Sunday morning in the rain, and the skid delivered her into the left-hand gutter of the London Road every time she took that corner; and every time her tail with the girders swiped along the bank of that lane like a man topping a golf-ball. And when she did that, there were half-a-dozen paces — not more — along that schoolchildren’s path, that meant sure death to anyone on it at the time. Nicol was just climbing into the danger-zone when he stepped up, but he was a foot too low. The girders only brushed through his hair. We got some laths and stuck ‘em in along the path (Jimmy Tigner told us Ellen was five foot three) to test our theory. The last lath was as near as could be to where the pig-man had found the body; and that happened to be the extreme end of the lorry’s skid. ‘See what happened? We did. At the end of her skid the lorry’s rear wheels ‘ud fetch up every time with a bit of a jar against the bank, and the girders ‘ud quiver and lash out a few inches — like a golf-club wigglin’. Ellen must have caught just enough of that little sideway flick, at the base of her skull, to drop her like a pithed ox. We worked it all out on the last lath. The rope wrappings on the end of the damned things saved the skin being broken. Hellish, isn’t it? And then Jimmy Tigner realised that if she had only gone two paces further she’d have been round the corner of the bank and safe. Then it came back to him that she’d stopped talkin’ “in dungeon” rather suddenly, and he hadn’t gone back to see! I spent most of the afternoon sitting with him. He’d been tried too high — too high. I had to sign his certificate a few weeks later. No! He won’t get better.’

We commented according to our natures, and then McKnight said: — ’But — if so — why did Wollin disappear?’

‘That comes next on the agenda, Worshipful Sir. Brother Lemming has not the instincts of the real man-hunter. He felt shy. I had to remind him of the prints before he’d call on Wollin again. We’d allowed our prey ten days to get the news, while the papers were busy explainin’ Ellen’s death, and people were writin’ to ‘em and saying they’d nearly been killed by lorries in the same way in other places. Then old Higbee gave Ellen’s people a couple of hundred without prejudice (he wanted to get a higher seat in the Synagogue — the Squire’s pew, I think), and everyone felt that her character had been cleared.’

‘But Wollin?’ McKnight insisted.

‘When Will and I went to call on him he’d come home again. I hadn’t seen him for — let’s see, it must have been going on for a month — but I hardly recognised him. He was burned out — all his wrinkles gashes, and his eyes readjustin’ ‘emselves after looking into Hell. One gets to know that kind of glare nowadays. But he was immensely relieved to see us. So was the old lady. If he’d been a dog, he’d have been wagging his tall from the nose down. That was rather embarrassing too, because it wasn’t our fault we hadn’t had him tried for his life. And while we were talking over the prints, he said, quite suddenly: “I don’t blame you! I’d have believed it against myself on the evidence!” That broke the ice with a brick. He told us he’d almost stepped on Ellen’s body that night — dead and stiffening. Then I’d come round the corner and hailed him, and that panicked him. He jumped on his bike and fled, forgetting the trowel. So he’d bought another with some crazy notion of putting the Law off the track. That’s what hangs murderers.

‘When Will and I first called on him, with our fairy-tales about West Wickham, he had fancied he might be under observation, and Will’s mixing up the cards clinched it...So he disappeared. He went down into his own cellar, he said, and waited there, with his revolver, ready to blow his brains out when the warrant came. What a month! Think of it! A cellar and a candle, a file of gardening papers, and a loaded revolver for company! Then I asked why. He said no jury on earth would have believed his explanation of his movements. “Look at it from the prosecution’s point of view,” he said. “Here’s a middle- aged man with a medical record that ‘ud account for any loss of controls — and that would mean Broadmoor — fifty or sixty miles from his home in a rainstorm, on the top of a fifteen foot cutting, at night. He leaves behind him, with the girl’s body, the very sort of weapon that might have caused her death. I read about the trowel in the papers. Can’t you see how the thing ‘ud be handled?” he said.

‘I asked him then what in the world he really was doing that had to be covered up by suicide. He said he was planting things. I asked if he meant stolen goods. After the trouble we’d given him, Will and I wouldn’t have peached on him for that, would we, Will?’

‘No,’ said Lemming. ‘His face was enough. It was like — ’ and he named a picture by an artist called Goya.

‘“Stolen goods be damned,” Wollin said to me. “If you must have it, I was planting out plants from my garden.” What did you say to him then, Will?’

‘I asked him what the plants were, of course,’ said Lemming, and turned to McKnight. ‘They were daffodils, and a sort of red honeysuckle, and a special loosestrife — a hybrid.’ McKnight nodded judicially while Lemming talked incomprehensible horticulture for a minute or two.

‘Gardening isn’t my line,’ Keede broke in, ‘but Will’s questions acted on Master Wollin like a charm. He dropped his suicide talk, and began on gardening. After that it was Will’s operation. I hadn’t a look-in for ten minutes. Then I said: “What’s there to make a fuss about in all this?” Then he turned away from Will and spoke to me, carneying again — like patients do. He began with his medical record — one shrapnel peppering, and one gassing, with gangrene. He had put in about fourteen months in various hospitals, and he was full of medical talkee-talkee. Just like you, Sandy, when you’ve been seeing your damned specialists. And he’d been doped for pain and pinched nerves, till the wonder was he’d ever pulled straight again. He told us that the only thing that had helped him through the War was his love of gardening. He’d been mad keen on it all his life — and even in the worst of the Somme he used to get comfort out of plants and bot’ny, and that sort of stuff. I never did. Well, I saw he was speaking the truth; but next minute he began to hedge. I noticed it, and said something, and then he sweated in rivers. He hadn’t turned a hair over his proposed suicide, but now he sweated till he had to wipe it off his forehead.

‘Then I told him I was something else besides a G.P., and Will was too, if that ‘ud make things easier for him. And it did. From then on he told the tale on the Square, in grave distress, you know. At his last hospital he’d been particularly doped, and he fancied that that was where his mind had gone. He told me that he was insane, and had been for more than a year. I asked him not to start on his theories till he’d finished with his symptoms. (You patients are all the same.) He said there were Gotha raids round his hospital, which used to upset the wards. And there was a V.A.D. — she must have been something of a woman, too — who used to read to him and tell him stories to keep him quiet. He liked ‘em because, as far as he remembered, they were all about gardening. But, when he grew better, he began to hear Voices — little whispers at first, growing louder and ending in regular uproars — ordering him to do certain things. He used to lie there shaking with horror, because he funked going mad. He wanted to live and be happy again, in his garden — like the rest of us.

‘When he was discharged, he said, he left hospital with a whole Army Corps shouting into his ears. The sum and substance of their orders was that he must go out and plant roots and things at large up and down the country-side. Naturally, he suffered a bit, but, after a while, he went back to his house at Mitcham and obeyed orders, because, he said, as long as he was carrying ‘em out the Voices stopped. If he knocked off even for a week, he said, they helled him on again. Being a methodical bird, he’d bought a motor-bike and a basket lined with oil-cloth, and he used to skirmish out planting his silly stuff by the wayside, and in coppices and on commons. He’d spy out likely spots by day and attend to ‘em after dark. He was working round Channet’s Ash that night, and he’d come out of the meadow, and down the school-children’s path, right on to Ellen’s body. That upset him. I wasn’t worryin’ about Ellen for the moment. I headed him back to his own symptoms. The devil of it was that, left to himself, there was nothing he’d have liked better than this planting job; but the Voices ordering him to do it, scared the soul out of him. Then I asked him if the Voices had worried him much when he was in the cellar with his revolver. He said, comin’ to think of it, that they had not; and I reminded him that there was very little seasickness in the boats when submarines were around.’

‘You’ve forgotten,’ said Lemming, ‘that he stopped fawning as soon as he found out we were on the Square.’

‘He did so,’ Keede assented. ‘And he insisted on our staying to supper, so’s he could tell his symptoms properly. (‘Might have been you again, Sandy.) The old lady backed him up. She was clinging to us too, as though we’d done her a favour. And Wollin told us that if he’d been in the dock, he knew he’d have come out with his tale of his Voices and night-plantings, just like the Ancient Mariner; and that would have sent him to Broadmoor. It was Broadmoor, not hanging, that he funked. And so he went on and on about his Voices, and I cross- examined. He said they used to begin with noises in his head like rotten walnuts being smashed; but he fancied that must have been due to the bombs in the raid. I reminded him again that I didn’t want his theories. The Voices were sometimes like his V.A.D.’s, but louder, and they were all mixed up with horrible dope-dreams. For instance, he said, there was a smiling dog that ran after him and licked his face, and the dog had something to do with being able to read gardening books, and that gave him the notion, as he lay abed in hospital, that he had water on the brain, and that that ‘ud prevent him from root- gatherin’ an’ obeying his orders.’

‘He used the words “root-gathering.” It’s an unusual combination nowadays,’ said Lemming suddenly. ‘That made me take notice, Sandy.’

Keede held up his hand. ‘No, you don’t, Will! I tell this tale much better than you. Well, then Will cut in, and asked Wollin if he could remember exactly what sort of stuff his V.A.D. had read to him during the raids. He couldn’t; except that it was all about gardening, and it made him feel as if he were in Paradise. Yes, Sandy, he used the word “Paradise.” Then Will asked him if he could give us the precise wording of his orders to plant things. He couldn’t do that either. Then Will said, like a barrister: “I put it to you, that the Voices ordered you to plant things by the wayside for such as have no gardens.” And Will went over it slowly twice. “My God!” said Wollin. “That’s the ipsissima verba.” “Good,” said Will. “Now for your dog. I put it to you that the smiling dog was really a secret friend of yours. What was his colour?” “Dunno,” said Wollin. “It was yellow,” says Will. “A big yellow bullterrier.” Wollin thought a bit and agreed. “When he ran after you,” says Will, “did you ever hear anyone trying to call him off, in a very loud voice?” “Sometimes,” said Wollin. “Better still,” says Will. “Now, I put it to you that that yellow bull-terrier came into a library with a Scotch gardener who said it was a great privilege to be able to consult botanical books.” Wollin thought a bit, and said that those were some of the exact words that were mixed up with his Voices, and his trouble about not being able to read. I shan’t forget his face when he said it, either. My word, he sweated.’

Here Sandy McKnight smiled and nodded across to Lemming, who nodded back as mysteriously as a Freemason or a gardener.

‘All this time,’ Keede continued, ‘Will looked more important than ever I’ve seen him outside of his shop; and he said to Wollin: “Now I’ll tell you the story, Mr. Wollin, that your V.A.D. read or told you. Check me where your memory fails, and I’ll refresh it.” That’s what you said, wasn’t it, Will? And Will began to spin him a long nursery-yarn about some children who planted flowers out in a meadow that wasn’t theirs, so that such as had no gardens might enjoy them; and one of the children called himself an Honest Rootgatherer, and one of ‘em had something like water on the brain; and there was an old Squire who owned a smiling yellow bull-terrier that was fond of the children, and he kept his walnuts till they were rotten, and then he smashed ‘em all. You ought to have heard Will! He can talk — even when there isn’t money in it.’