Free 2 The Weed That Strings the Hangman’s Bag: A Flavia De Luce Mystery by Alan Bradley

board, and Nialla threw open the door. A moment later we had collapsed, hugging one another, into the seat as Rupert manipulated the engine controls. Halfway down, as the motor started at last, the van gave off an alarming backfire before settling down to an unhealthy coughing. At the bottom of the hill, Rupert touched the brakes, and we turned neatly into the lane that leads to Culverhouse Farm.
    Overheated from its exertions, the Austin stood sputtering and steaming like a leaky teakettle in the farmyard, which, to all intents and purposes, seemed to be abandoned. In my experience, whenever you arrived at a farm, someone always came out of the barn to greet you, wiping his oily hands on a rag and calling to a woman with a basket of eggs to bake some scones and put the tea on. At the very least, there should have been a barking dog.
    Although there were no pigs in evidence, a weathered sty at the end of a row of tumbledown sheds was full of tall nettles. Beyond that was a turreted dovecote. Assorted milk pails, all of them rusty, lay scattered about the yard, and a lone hen picked halfheartedly among the weeds, watching us with its wary yellow eye.
    Rupert climbed out of the van and slammed the door loudly.
    “Hello?” he called. “Anyone here?”
    There was no reply. He walked past a battered chopping block to the back door of the house and gave it a thunderous knocking with his fist.
    “Hello? Anyone at home?”
    He cupped his hands, peering in through the grimy window of what must once have been the buttery, then motioned us out of the van.
    “Odd,” he whispered. “There’s someone standing in the middle of the room. I can see his outline against the far window.” He gave the door a couple more loud bangs.
    “Mr. Ingleby,” I called out, “Mrs. Ingleby, it’s me, Flavia de Luce. I’ve brought the people from the church.”
    There was a long silence, and then we heard the sound of heavy boots on a wooden floor. The door creaked open upon a dark interior, and a tall blond man in overalls stood blinking in the light.
    I had never seen him before in my life.
    “I’m Flavia de Luce,” I said, “from Buckshaw.” I waved my hand vaguely in its direction to the southeast. “The vicar asked me to show these people the way to Culverhouse Farm.”
    The blond man stepped outside, bending substantially in order to get through the low doorway without banging his head. He was what Feely would have described as “indecently gorgeous”: a towering Nordic god. As this fair-haired Siegfried turned to close the door carefully behind him, I saw that there was a large, faded red circle painted on the back of his boiler suit.
    It meant he was a prisoner of war.
    My mind flew instantly back to the wooden block and the missing axe. Had he chopped up the Inglebys and stacked their limbs like firewood behind the kitchen stove?
    What a preposterous thought. The war had been over for five years, and I had seen the Inglebys—at least Grace—as recently as last week.
    Besides, I already knew that German prisoners of war were not particularly dangerous. The first ones I had seen were on my first-ever visit to a cinema, the Palace, in Hinley. As the blue-jacketed captives were marched by their armed guards into the theater and seated, Daffy had nudged me and pointed.
    “The enemy!” she had whispered.
    As the lights went down and the film began, Feely had leaned over and said, “Just think, you’ll be sitting with them in the dark for two hours. Alone … if Daffy and I go for sweets.”
    The film was In Which We Serve, and I couldn’t help noticing that when HMS Torrin was sunk in the Mediterranean by the Luftwaffe’s dive-bombers, although the prisoners did not applaud the deed openly, there were nevertheless smiles among them.
    “Captured Germans are to not be treated inhumanely,” Father had told us when we got home, quoting something he had heard on the wireless, “but are to be shown very clearly that we regard