A Red Herring Without Mustard

The first thing I saw was his boots: large, dusty, scarred from work.

Then the leg of his coveralls.

I raised my eyes and looked into his face. “Dieter!”

It was Dieter Schrantz, the laborer from Culverhouse Farm—Bishop’s Lacey’s sole remaining prisoner of war, who had elected to stay in England after the end of hostilities.

“Is it really you?”

I began dusting myself off as I scrambled out of the furnace. Even when I had come out of my crouch and stood up straight, Dieter still towered above me, his blue eyes and blond hair making him seem like nothing so much as a vastly overgrown schoolboy.

“What are you doing here?” I asked, breaking out in a silly grin.

“Am I permitted to ask the same?” Dieter said, taking in the whole room with a sweep of his hand. “Unless this place has become part of Buckshaw, I should say you’re a long way from home.”

I smiled politely at his little joke. Dieter had something of a crush on my sister Feely, but aside from that, he was a decent enough chap.

“I was playing Solitaire Hare and Hounds,” I said, making up rules wildly and talking too fast. “East Finching counts double for a compound name, and Sampson’s scores a triple S—Sampson’s, Salvage, and Scrap—see? I’d get an extra point for having someone with a biblical name, but today’s not a Sunday, so it doesn’t count.”

Dieter nodded gravely. “Very complex, the English rules,” he said. “I have never completely grasped them myself.”

He moved towards the door, but turned to see if I was following.

“Come on,” he said, “I’m going your way. I’ll give you a lift.”

I wasn’t particularly ready to leave, but I knew that my nosing around was at an end. Who, after all, can carry out full-scale snoopage with a six-foot-something ex–prisoner of war dogging one’s every footstep?

I blinked a bit as we stepped out into the sun. On the far side of the path, Dieter’s old gray Ferguson tractor stood tut-tutting to itself, like an elephant that has stumbled by accident upon the elephant’s graveyard: a little shocked, perhaps, to find itself suddenly among the bones of its ancestors.

After closing the gate, I climbed onto the hitch between the two rear wheels, and dragged Gladys up behind me. Dieter let in the clutch, and we were off, the Fergie’s tall tires sending up a spray of cinders that fell away behind us like dark fireworks.

We flew like the wind, basking in the September sunlight and drinking in the fresh autumn air, so it was only when we were halfway down the south slope of Denham Rise that the penny dropped.

My posterior was braced firmly against one of the Fergie’s wings and my feet on the clanking hitch. As we sped along, the ground beneath was just a rushing blur of greenish black.

But why, I thought suddenly, would a farmer be so far from home with no trailer rumbling along behind; no plow, no harrow swaying in the rear? It simply made no sense.

I felt my hackles beginning to rise.

“Who sent you?” I shouted above the whistling wind and the roar of the Fergie’s engine.

“What?”

I knew from my own experience that he was stalling for time.

“What?” he said again, as if I hadn’t heard him, which made me suddenly and inexplicably furious.

“It was Father, wasn’t it?”

But even as the words came out of my mouth, I knew that I was wrong. There was no more chance that Father would telephone Dieter than that the Man in the Moon should ring up the rat catcher.

“Inspector Hewitt!”

I was clutching at straws. The Inspector was equipped with his own official transportation, and would never send a civilian on one of his errands.

Dieter shoved up the throttle in its quadrant and the tractor slowed. He pulled off into a small lay-by where a wooden platform was piled with milk containers.

He turned to me, not smiling.

“It was Ophelia,” he said.

“Feely?” I screeched. Had my sister sent Dieter to follow me? All day?

How dare she! How doubly-damned dare she! This was an outrage.

That I should be thwarted—torn away—kidnapped, virtually, from an important investigation—by my own sister made me see red.

Bright red.

Without a word, I jumped down from the tractor’s hitch, lifted Gladys onto the road, and set off walking down the hill, my head held high and my pigtails swaying.

When I got far enough away to remember it, I put one foot onto a pedal and mounted, shoving off shakily, but recovering enough to begin an offended but dignified coasting.

Moments later, I heard the tractor’s engine rev up, but I did not look back.

Dieter pulled alongside, driving precisely to keep pace.

“She was worried about you,” he said. “She wanted me to see that you were all right.”

Feely worried about me? I could hardy believe it. I could count on one finger the times she had treated me decently in the past couple of years.

“To spy on me, you mean,” I shot back.

It was a mean thing to say, but I said it. I quite liked Dieter, but the thought of him being under my sister’s thumb made me livid.