Intrusion

I found a strange thing today, in a place where it shouldn't have been. Laid across a tray of pansies in my greenhouse was a rusty iron spike. How it got there, I have no idea. It's about a foot long, a quarter inch flat, hammered to an ugly point like a dagger and with a curved bracket welded to one end.

It can't have been lost or hidden or dropped - it was placed, carefully enough not to damage the seedlings. Nothing is missing, nothing else is disturbed. So who put it there, and when? How, when at night it's unlit and pitch dark in this village? Is it a tool? A weapon? An omen? A loose piece of a Eurofighter that fly supersonically overhead of us? What? A mystery.

The greenhouse is on land at the side of the house and can't be reached except via the back door or by clambering painfully over a thick hawthorn hedge. Until today, it's been somewhere for nobody but me to be, among the plants and the freshly oxygenated air, able to look as if I'm busy at the first sign of Mme.'s approaching footsteps. Now it holds a secret. Damn.