Black Widow by S. Fowler Wright

Author:S. Fowler Wright
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: police procedurals, British, mystery, crime, hercule poirot
ISBN: 9781434443755
Publisher: Wildside Press LLC
Published: 2013-07-30T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER XXI.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Bulger, I had to take Tommy away from his work yesterday afternoon.”

For once, the ancient gardener appeared to hear without difficulty. “What you has to do, sir, you has; and I don’t say but that’ll take you through at the last day, if so be you can make it good.

“There’s some maybe as thinks Tommy’s worth harking to when he speaks, and there’s some have known him a bit longer than you who’d give him a clout over the jaw, and tell him to mind his job. Even a fool is accounted wise when he openeth not his mouth.”

This somewhat surprising quotation, which is never likely to be popular at police headquarters, nor enscrolled over the entrances of judicial courts, must be attributed to the fact that Mr. Bulger combined his gardening activities with the position of local preacher for the Primitive Methodist denomination. In this office, his deafness was of no particular disadvantage, his habit of sometimes singing the wrong hymn (the number of which had been announced by an attendant deacon) only producing acute difficulty when he selected one of longer stanzas than that upon which his congregation had previously concentrated.

He was actually a preacher of considerable power, with a vein of humorous shrewdness which his hearers appreciated no less because it was an infrequent ingredient in the discourses on which they relied to save their souls from eternal fire. He was accustomed to mature these addresses during the long mental leisures allowed by the drilling of seeds, and the unhurried guidance of an electric mower. Long years of use had reduced most of his occupations to a mechanical though expert routine, leaving his mind free for the abstract verities, in the expounding of which his duty and pleasure met; and he may have been the only human creature in Beacon’s Cross whose life fulfilled its own capacity and was entirely enviable.

The text of his sermon would be most commonly suggested by some experience or incident of the week, and the one he now quoted had been appropriately selected, even before Tommy’s abduction had enriched the subject under at least four additional headings. There was an amount of inevitable gossip in the village, concerning both Redwin’s departure and Sir Daniel’s death, mostly of a fictitious, and some of a malicious, character, which was naturally resented by those who ate the bread of Bywater Grange, and the purveyors of scandal were to be chastised with vigour from the rostrum of the Primitive Methodist Chapel.

Inspector Pinkey was less able to appreciate the position than the Superintendent would have been, having less knowledge of local politics; but he observed that Mr. Bulger resented the fact that he had lost Tommy’s help for the afternoon, and, more doubtfully, that he might be hinting that any statement the boy might make would be too unreliable to be worth the trouble it took to get. He answered amiably: “Well, we didn’t get overmuch when he opened his.”

Mr. Bulger again permitted

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