IN the corridor Appleby bumped into Sebastian Dromio, and at the same time became aware of uproar somewhere outside: shouts, pounding feet and a succession of blood-curdling yells.

'Whash that?' Sebastian was grasping a tumbler and it was evident that he had been far from taking Appleby’s advice on keeping a clear head. 'Whash shishit?' Sebastian’s hand trembled and he stared at Appleby with a wild and wavering surmise.

'I have no idea---but I’m going to find out.'

'Shtop. It’s those damned villagers. Shoshialists, colonel. Think we’re dagoes. Always have, confound them. Heard about this beashtly affair and come to burn down the house. Polish no good; call out the military at once.'

'I hardly think it’s as bad as that, Mr. Dromio. In fact there’s no reason why you shouldn’t go to bed.'

Sebastian shook his head. Finding that it continued to shake after the negative nature of his gesture was clear, he looked first puzzled and then alarmed; presently however he succeeded in putting up a hand and stopping it. 'Die with my bootsh on. All Dromios prepared to die with their bootsh on ever shinch they had any. Defend our women to the lasht. Shoot at shight.' And Sebastian clutched Appleby by the lapel of his coat.

The shouting renewed itself. Appleby shook himself free. 'All right,' he said, 'shoot away. But I’m going out.'

'Shoot?' Sebastian looked immensely surprised. 'Damn good notion, colonel. Teach them who we are.' And with surprising dexterity Sebastian Dromio whipped out a revolver and fired it through the nearest window, shattering a large sheet of glass.

'You can’t do that!' Appleby grabbed at the revolver; Sebastian dodged, turned and ran. Appleby pursued him, swearing. Sebastian blundered down the corridor, whipped into a vestibule, threw open a door and disappeared into darkness. Appleby followed him with misgiving, but at his utmost speed, and found himself on a terrace bathed in moonlight. Twenty yards away stood Hyland, all gleaming buttons and peaked and braided cap. Appleby gave him a shout---and as he did so saw the cap rise some inches in air and go spinning to the ground; there followed a second shattering report close by his ear. Sebastian gave a yell, vaulted a balustrade, and was lost in impenetrable shadow.

Hyland came forward, dusting his cap. 'Appleby, is that you? And what the devil was that?'

'Almost another sudden death. Your Sebastian Dromio’s tight, and he’s got a gun.'

'Don’t call him my Sebastian Dromio.' Hyland was aggrieved. 'Have you got a gun?'

'Have I got a tank or a jeep? Don’t be an ass.'

'No more have I---or any of us. But the fellow must be stopped. What does he think he’s doing, anyway?'

'Defending his women to the last. Thinks he’s in the thick of a peasant revolt. My God---there he goes again.'

A third revolver shot had rung out in the gardens below. And, farther away, men were still shouting. Appleby got on the balustrade. 'Are these your men making that fool noise? That’s what upset Dromio---and I’m afraid it’s going to keep on doing it. Couldn’t you call them off?'

'Call them off? Dash it, man, they’ve got the murderer cornered.'

'I don’t believe it for a moment. And, even so, need they behave like a pack of dogs after a fox?'

'Hounds, Appleby---for heaven’s sake.' Hyland was outraged.

'It will be Dromio who has got them cornered, if you ask me. Even if there’s been no damage so far, your local constabulary may still show a death roll of three. Pretty stiff---even if they are clearing up a grim crime of retribution. Come on.' Appleby dropped into darkness.

'What are you going to do?'

'Jump on Dromio’s back and rub his nose in the mud. Come on, I tell you.'

Hyland came on, landing heavily in a freshly manured flower-bed. He got to his feet, breathing heavily, and both men ran. As they did so a fourth shot rang out and there was a brief startled silence. A fifth shot followed---and from somewhere a man’s voice rose in a sharp cry of pain. Hyland stopped. 'He’s got one.'

'But listen.'

The cry of pain was repeated, and then turned into a stream of lurid curses. 'All’s well,' said Appleby. 'Only an arm or a leg. You can’t think all that up if you’ve got it in the tummy.'

'But he’s got a sixth shot in the locker.' Hyland was running again. 'There they are. Hi, you men, there---lie down, scatter!'

A voice came back out of the darkness. 'He’s here, sir---somewhere among those hedges. But he seems to be armed.’

'Nothing of the sort. It’s another fellow altogether who has the gun. Lie down, the whole lot of you. He has one more shot to go. Then you can rush him as soon as he shows himself.'

Appleby, crouched in the shadow of a patch of shrubbery, peered ahead. Two tall hedges came together at a right-angle straight in front of him, and disposed round these, like men besieging a house, there could just be discerned a number of helmeted forms, now sheltering behind what cover they could find. Appleby moved cautiously up to the nearest of these. 'Just what is this, anyway?'

'I don’t know that I can say, sir. One of our men came upon the fellow wandering in the park. He was the man we were told to get all right, for he was waving a decanter the same as if he intended to brain somebody. Dead drunk, he looked. But when we closed on him he put on a fair turn of speed and got the shelter of these hedges. And somehow we can’t get at him. And now some fool’s turned up with a gun . . . There he goes!'

Just so, Appleby thought, might a whaler cry 'There she blows!' And following the constable’s finger where it pointed above the dark line of the hedge he saw, momentarily glinting in the moonlight, that crystal decanter which ought to be lying shivered like its companions in Sir Oliver Dromio’s study. Three times it waved in air and then vanished; its disappearance was followed by a wild yell of derision and defiance. 'Come on,' yelled a raucous voice; 'come on, you barstards and let me bash the whole bloody lot of you! Call yourselves coppers? Yah!'

Appleby sighed. His expectations of enlightenment from this grotesque episode were meagre. He listened carefully. 'Hyland,' he called, 'do you know, I think I hear that fellow Dromio going right down the drive?'

It was true. As the taunting presence beyond the hedge fell silent it was possible to hear Sebastian’s voice receding into distance. He was calling upon an imaginary corps of Dromio cadets to drive the threatening Jacquerie off the estate. His sixth shot, however, he appeared to be saving up still.

'All right, men---forward you go.' And Hyland advanced upon the system of hedges before him, waving his cane. The effect, Appleby thought, was rather like a travesty of some battle-piece by Lady Butler.

'Yah, muckers!' The jeering voice rose again. 'Come on, the whole blurry gang. I’ll make bleeding ’ermits of the lot of yer.'

Undeterred by this mysterious threat, the local constabulary advanced. With cat-like tread, Appleby murmured to himself---and indeed it was a Gilbertian moment. There were angry exclamations, mutters of bafflement. 'Can’t make it out, sir,’ somebody called. 'Seems like a little garden with this hedge all round.'

'Come into the garden, you bleeding Mauds!' The decanter was erected again and circled---rather like Excalibur waving---above the surface of the lake. It disappeared and the voice broke into uproarious song. 'For I’m the king of the carsle,' it sang, 'And you’re----' The traditional words appeared altogether inadequate to the feelings of the singer; he extemporized after a fashion that made Hyland breathe hard as he listened.

There was a sudden shout of triumph. 'Here you are, sir, I’ve found a gap.'

The constabulary converged upon this rally-cry and were presently piling through a narrow opening in the hedge. Appleby followed. He was in time to hear shouts of bewilderment and alarm. 'Can’t make it out, sir.' 'Seems to be hedge whereever you turn, like.' 'No sight of him, sir.' 'Them little paths all over the place.'

'Hyland,' called Appleby, 'do you know where we are?'

'Yes, I do. We’re in a damned maze.'

'Yah---muts! Will yer walk into my parlour, you blurry blue-bottles? I’ll fix yer! I’m a-coming at yer!' With very considerable dramatic effect, the voice sank to a gloating stage-whisper. 'I’m a-coming at you bleeders with a blurry rusty knife. Where will it get yer, mate? Arsk Haristotle. That’s what I advise you. Arsk Haristotle and the ’ermits.'

Appleby lit a cigarette. All around him constables blundered and swore. It seemed that only two or three of them had torches, and into the narrow canyons of the maze the moonlight cast no gleam. 'Hyland,' Appleby called again, 'you know how these places are commonly made? As soon as you get to the centre there’s a direct path straight out. Why doesn’t the fellow simply make off?'

But the fellow showed no intention of that; he was plainly enjoying himself enormously. 'Nah then,' he cried, 'I’m a-coming arfter the first of you. Let’s ’ope it’s your boss, mates. No more wife and kids for ’im. Listen, will yer?'

Everybody listened. The sound with which they were regaled was definitely displeasing, being nothing less than the whetting of some iron implement upon stone. From somewhere outside the maze the constable who had been winged by Sebastian Dromio swore softly as a comrade administered first-aid. Then there was absolute silence---a silence through which there could presently be heard a soft rustling as of somebody creeping on his belly over fallen leaves. Appleby could hear a young constable near him breathing with unnatural haste. Here and there torches flickered. But the forces of the law had precipitated themselves so gallantly into the intricacies of the maze that all were now isolated and no one man able to help another.

For seconds the silence was absolute. Then there was a spine-chilling scream, a dull thud, an ebbing succession of dull, deep sobs. Appleby could hear men gasp around him; Hyland, the commander who had led his forces into a fatal trap, was grinding his teeth beyond a barrier of hedge. The sobs grew fainter. Then imperceptibly they grew again in volume and altered in tone, presently they made a distinguishable laughter which welled to a mild mocking delight. 'That tickled yer, called the voice. 'That sent yer running home to yer mothers.'

Appleby chuckled. 'Him all the time---and just treating us to a little play. Hyland, do you think it any good trying to track this rustic Minotaur through this labyrinth?'

'I can’t say that I do.'

'Quite so---and moreover we are wasting our time. The fellow can be no more than a grotesque flourish somewhere on the outer margin of the case.'

' ’Ere---’oo are you calling names?' The gloating voice was abruptly injured.

'Come along men.' Appleby’s words carried clearly across the maze. 'Find your way out and make your way back to the house. There’s nothing of any interest to us here.'

'That’s right, sir.' From somewhere in the darkness a constable of nimbler wit than his fellows took up Appleby’s words. 'Nothing here, I reckon, but a kid from the village having a game with us.'

'I tell yer I’ve got an ’orrible knife! I tell yer I’m going to spoil all yer ’igh ’opes of romance! D’yer ’ear, you blurry blue-bottles?' Anxiety to reinstate himself dominated the unseen lurker’s tones.

'Been to too many picture shows, I reckon,' said another constable. 'Here’s the exit, boys. Make for my voice.'

' ’Ere, wait a bit---you can’t do this to me!' From the recesses of the maze there came a sound of hurrying feet and laboured breathing. 'Yer can’t leave me all alone ’ere in the dark, lads; not arfter wot I seen tonight. 'Taint Christian---you arsk parson. Nor tain’t the law neither. Ain’t yer policemen?'

The body of men thus invoked had by this time extricated itself from the maze. 'That’s right,' called Hyland briskly. _ 'Straight up to the terrace.'

'Don’t I ’elp pay yer bleeding wages? I demands protection---that’s wot I do.' The voice modulated from indignation to pathos. 'Don’t even a mucking gardener ’ave ’is rights? 'Ere I am.'

Appleby turned round in time to see a lurching figure break from the cover of the maze and advance unsteadily but rapidly towards the retreating constabulary. In one hand he swung a crystal decanter, quite empty. Here was undoubtedly the fellow whom he had encountered earlier that night, a queer terror in his eyes. Appleby halted. 'Are you Grubb the gardener?' he asked.

'That’s me, sir.' Grubb raised his free hand and gave a deferential tug at a forelock.

'I thought so. Well, good night to you.'

'Good night to me? Mewot’s seen such ’orrors as you wouldn’t believe?' Grubb was very drunk; he had just passed from extreme belligerence to some ecstasy of fraternal feeling; it was plain that this cavalier treatment hurt him very much. 'Don’t be ‘ard of ’eart, sir. Take me along of you, and ear what I ’as to say.'

'If you want to tell us something you may come up to the house. But hurry along. We have very little time to waste.'

At this Grubb took a constable’s arm and moved amiably forward. The hunt had come to the tamest of ends. Up a long flagged path between beech-hedges the forces of Hyland advanced, majestic and measured, conscious of duty laudibly discharged. The moon, as if to dignify the scene yet further, emerged from its clouds; the lawn was silvered; the bold arabesques of the hippogriffs cast their shadows across it like a gaping and carious mouth. And into this the party marched.

'Halt!'

The word rang out so commandingly that, as if on a parade- ground, everybody stood stock still. Some peered into the shadows. Others, with a nicer ear, apprehensively eyed the moon. Appleby, sceptical of any supernatural intervention on the captured Grubb’s behalf, scanned the hippogriffs. And, sure enough, on one of them the diminished figure of a man perilously swayed. In one hand he held a revolver. For a badly intoxicated man Sebastian Dromio had achieved a remarkable climb.

'Back to your hovels!' Sebastian’s weapon circled in air. 'Not to be intimidated by a mob of beashtly peasants, believe me.'

'Whose yer calling a pheasant?' Grubb was again abruptly truculent. Swaying slightly on his feet, and slowly swinging the decanter---of which nobody had thought to relieve him---he stared vacantly upwards. 'Who are yer, anyway?' he called.

'I am Shir Shebastian Dromio.' The answer came slurred but promptly from the hippogriff. 'I am defending my property---deuced great property just come to me from my desheasted nephew. Not going to stand for any nonsense from peasants. Got a gun. Shoot at shight. Shoot one of you now. Picking my man.' And Sebastian poised his weapon with an unsteady but dangerous hand.

'Property!' Grubb raised his voice scornfully. 'A bleeding Jack on the Bean-stalk---that’s what yer are.'

'I tell you I am Shir----'

'You're nothing but a blurry nigger up a gum-tree.' Grubb brandished his decanter and favoured the heavens with an unfocused stare. 'Send the police arfter yer, that’s what I’ll do. Friends of mine, they are. And what yer doing to that mucking 'orse anyway?' And Grubb pointed a wavering finger at the hippogriff. Suddenly his body stiffened and his voice changed; his eye had at last fixed itself on the relevant object overhead. 'Gawd---if it ain’t Mr. Dromio! I knows yer'---the voice was shrill---'I knows yer ’orrible family crime! I seen----'

Sebastian Dromio’s arm stiffened and his weapon spurted fire; a moment later his figure had swayed, spun, toppled from its crazy perch. What followed was a loud splash. The curve of Sebastian’s fall had taken him into the lilypond.

'Well, I’m blessed.' Hyland found his voice. 'A couple of you men haul Mr. Dromio out. As likely as not he’s very little the worse.'

And so it proved. They hauled him from the pond, green with duckweed and shivering. Hyland looked at him distastefully. 'It might be worse,' he said. 'He might have done something pretty nasty with that gun.'

'He has, sir.' It was a constable who spoke soberly from a little distance away. 'Grubb is quite dead. That bullet got him through the heart.'

HAD Appleby wanted Inspector Hyland out of the way (and it is not inconceivable that he did) he could not have done it better than retail at this point his encounter with the slumbering man with the glittering object at his feet. Instantly Hyland’s picture of a dark domestic tragedy went by the board and he addressed himself with all his energies to organizing a hunt for this prowler in the environs of Sherris. Whereupon Appleby decided that, unearthly as was the hour, he would endeavour to introduce himself to the family. And Swindle, approached on this, thought it possible that Mr. Sebastian Dromio might be still available.

And presently Appleby was shown into the library, a gloomy room full of ancient books arrayed behind latticed doors, and suggesting that some eccentric Dromio had been fond of reading perhaps a couple of hundred years ago. At the moment it contained a Dromio who seemed fond of drinking, for Sebastian sat before the cheerless fireplace plying himself from a syphon and a half-empty bottle of whisky. He received Appleby matter-of-factly and without inquiry as to his status. 'Nasty thing,' he said. 'Hard on the women. But then young Oliver never was the thoughtful sort. Have a spot.'

Because he was no longer a policeman Appleby had a spot. 'Who’s the heir?' he enquired.

'To the title, you mean? Dashed if I know much about that sort of thing. If it dodges backwards I suppose it comes to me. But probably it just fades out. I must ask some fellow at the club.' Sebastian looked sharply at Appleby and appeared to see that he found this ignorance surprising. 'Never inquired,' he said, 'because I was just not interested. No money nowadays in a handle to your name. And it’s money I’d like to see---particularly after this mess, which is likely to give the last blow to the family business. Young Oliver couldn’t have got himself killed at a more awkward moment. Forgive my talking like this. No use, you know, putting too fine a point upon matters in an affair of this sort.'

'None at all,' agreed Appleby. 'So you don’t stand to gain by what has happened, Mr. Dromio?'

Upon this, at least, Sebastian did for a moment seem to feel that a finer point might have been put. But he shook his head confidently. 'Quite the other way. I’ve been holding things together for years and filling my own modest nose-bag on the strength of it. But I’m dashed if I see myself doing it any longer. Have to retire to lodgings in Cheltenham---that sort of thing.' Sebastian picked up the bottle. 'And the simplest comforts are so deuced expensive these days. Take whisky.' And Sebastian took whisky. 'Or take----'

'I think it would be better to take care.' And Appleby pointed frankly to the bottle. 'The police, you know. I was one of them myself----'

'A policeman!' Sebastian Dromio was startled. 'I thought you might be the under---the doctor, that is to say.'

Appleby shook his head, not at all offended at having been taken for some one sent to measure the body. 'I know their ways, and presently they'll be back badgering you again. So it would be just as well to keep a clear head.'

A fleeting gleam as of sharp calculation passed over Sebastian Dromio’s face. Then he looked impressed. 'Well,' he said, 'thanks for the tip. And I won’t take more than two fingers.' He tilted the bottle. 'Not that they have anything on me.'

'Of course not. But they'll ask some nasty questions. By the way, what were you doing when this thing happened?'

'Doing? Mucking about the Sounds with a cigar, I'd say. Warm night. A deuced disagreeable old woman came to dinner. Name of Gollifer. But I looked in on the drawing-room in a civil way round about half past eleven and found her gone. We took a stroll in the garden and got the news as we came back. Nasty thing. Hard on the women.'

Appleby nodded. 'But then,' he asked, 'young Oliver never was the thoughtful sort, was he?'

Sebastian Dromio frowned, as if finding this observation dimly familiar. 'Thoughtful?' he said. 'Selfish, trivial chap. Vain as an eighteen-year-old lad buying his first ties in the Burlington Arcade. Not that I don’t go there myself. Little shop half-way up.'

'What was Sir Oliver doing in America?'

'Trying to marry money, as far as I could find out. Project had my blessing, I must admit. Girl with pots of it and lost her head to him entirely. Family was the difficulty. Merchants in Amsterdam long before the Dromios came to England. And a bit particular, as Americans of that sort are apt to be. Made enquiries, no doubt, and found that Oliver was a bit of a blackguard, poor chap. You know, he treated Lucy---Sebastian, who had suddenly fiushed darkly, checked himself. 'Mustn’t speak ill of the dead. Have a spot, doctor?'

'Thank you, no. Inspector Hyland tells me that when you rang him up you said something about a fire---some fire that---occurred here long ago.'

'Did I do that?' Sebastian was startled and crafty. 'Well, there was a fire, and a mystery of sorts, when Oliver was a baby. But I must have been a bit upset to talk rot like that. More the sort of thing the women would say.'

'No doubt. And of course this crime is likely to be the consequence of troubles much more recent than that.' Appleby paused. 'Money, I should say.'

'Money?' Sebastian’s voice was sharp. 'What d’you mean by that? Only effect of Oliver’s death, I tell you, will be to see what money there is fly out at the window.'

'He was the head of the firm, I suppose?'

'Of course he was.'

'But you had more or less to manage it for him?'

'I’ve done it for years. Deuced intricate, I can tell you.'

'The money is intricate? You mean you are about the only person who has been seeing his way through it?'

'Well, yes, I suppose that’s so.' Sebastian smiled uneasily. 'I say, colonel, what about a spot?'

'No, thank you.' Appleby was unimpressed by this sudden dignity conferred upon him. 'Had Sir Oliver been showing any curiosity to see his way through it as well? If he was thinking of getting married, and the lady’s family was of consequence, they might want to know----'

'Dash it all!' Sebastian Dromio lurched to his feet, and Appleby saw that he was older than he had supposed. 'Do you know, I don’t believe Kate and young Lucy have gone to bed? Ought to go in, I think, and do what I can.' And Sebastian moved towards the door.

Appleby picked up the whisky bottle. 'I think,' he said gravely, 'you’d better have another spot first. And, if you like, I'll go in instead.'

Sebastian sat down again. 'Deuced kind of you. No, I can pour it out for myself, my dear chap. Straight along the corridor and the drawing-room’s on the right.' And as Appleby reached the door he raised his glass and stared at him with a glassy eye. 'Chin-chin!' he called.

+++

Two ladies sat in the drawing-room. They appeared to be listening to the tick of the clock, which stood at twenty minutes to two. And when Appleby entered they looked at him in some surprise.

This was natural enough. The intrusion, he thought, was not decent, and would scarcely have been so in a fully accredited officer. He had better tell the simple truth.

'My name is Appleby and I have been brought here by Inspector Hyland because I used to be at Scotland Yard and responsible for such inquiries as must unfortunately be made here. May I come in?'

The elder lady bowed and with a hand which trembled slightly pointed to a chair. The younger lady looked at him fixedly and suddenly her eyes widened. 'Did you marry Judith Raven?' she asked.

'Yes---nearly twelve months ago.'

'Mama'---and the younger lady turned to the elder---'this is very odd. Here, for the first time, is somebody who may well discover the truth. And you have asked him to sit down.'

'Lucy, dear, I don’t know what you mean.' Lady Dromio’s voice was plaintive, vague---but her eye upon Appleby was appraizing nevertheless. 'Would you prefer me to stand up?'

'The gentleman has a great reputation. He is clever at finding out about all sorts of abominable things. Do you really want him around the place?'

Lady Dromio flushed. 'You are unkind,' she said.

'We go in for ‘foul secrets.’ Lucy Dromio turned an expressionless face to Appleby, and he suddenly saw that quite recently this young woman’s whole being had been overthrown. 'I was speaking of it only this afternoon, when I went for a walk with a clergyman.'

There was a silence, Lucy Dromio apparently judging this an effective speech by itself. And she looked at Appleby out of a sort of mocking misery which he found himself disliking very much. 'Would that be Mr. Greengrave?' he asked gently.

'Yes, it was he. Mama, I told him that we camped outside the cupboard with the family skeleton, and that you took your pleasure in leaning forward and making the door creak. But how was I to know that it would fly open tonight?'

The young lady, Appleby thought, should write mediocre novels. She would then probably not be a nuisance again. As it was, she had to give this sort of little quirk to grave matters. 'You had no idea,' he asked her, 'that Sir Oliver Dromio might be killed?'

'I threatened to kill him.'

'When in conversation with a clergyman?'

'No. Later this evening. Not long before it really did happen.'

'I see. Would that, Miss Dromio, have been as the result of the painful emotional scene that took place after dinner in this room?'

Lucy Dromio caught her breath sharply. Lady Dromio reached out for a crumpled object which might have been a fragment of embroidery. The clock ticked. Then the elder lady spoke. 'Was some calamity expected?' she asked. 'Was there a spy?'

'I cannot say. But certainly there was no police spy. The police knew nothing until Mr. Dromio telephoned.'

Lucy Dromio had gone very pale and she was looking at Appleby as if he must indeed have prescience in abominable things. 'Then how do you know that in this room----'

'Because of that rose.' And Appleby pointed to a little heap of twisted and shredded petals on a table. 'It is what a woman does when her unhappiness---her despair---is very great. And, had it been done before dinner, the debris would probably have been cleared away when servants went through the room.'

Rather unsteadily, Lucy Dromio laughed. 'Mama,' she said, 'did I not tell you? Everything is crumbling about us. Oliver is dead. And the secret of Sherris is on its last legs---or perhaps I should say bones.'

Lady Dromio drew herself up and turned to Appleby. 'Our misfortune has been heavy, sir, and my daughter is overwrought. Perhaps see----'

And Appleby stood up. Suddenly Lucy Dromio sprang across the room, picked up the torn petals in her cupped hand and sent them over him in a little shower. 'Rose leaves, when the rose is dead,' she cried, 'are heaped for the beloved’s bed.' She ran to the door and paused by it for a moment. 'A rose is a rose,' she called. 'A rose is a rose is a rose.' She was gone.

+++

Appleby brushed rose-leaves from his hair, 'You say, Lady Dromio, that your daughter is overwrought. She appears to seize upon the remark as a cue, and goes off like mad Ophelia with snatches of song. Casually, one would say she is acting a part. And yet she is, obviously, greatly upset. Can you tell me if there is anything that she is trying to conceal?'

'I don’t think I can.'

'But this evening, and in this room, there was some distressing scene? And Miss Dromio’s talk of a family skeleton in the cupboard and of the door creaking as it stirred, has some meaning?'

'There are things that I must tell you.' Lady Dromio took up her fragment of embroidery and turned to a basket beside her. For a moment her hand hovered irresolutely between two contrasting shades of silk, and she was silent. 'What I must tell you is this.' And Lady Dromio’s hand went decisively down on one skein. 'Three sons were born to me when Oliver came. Now Oliver is dead, and it will be thought that I am childless---that I have only Lucy. It will be thought that the property should go to Sebastian. But now I must tell you something---which I have told nobody. There is no reason to suppose that my other sons are not alive.'

'The children who were thought to have perished in a fire?'

'Yes, Mr. Appleby.' And Lady Dromio inclined her head. 'My own boys. And they are still alive and may come back to me.'

'And it is your knowledge of this that Miss Lucy has---referred to as a skeleton in the cupboard?'

'Lucy knows nothing of it. Nobody does. But she feels that I have always been . . . waiting.'

'I see.' But Appleby looked at Lady Dromio doubtfully, not at all sure of what light had in fact come to him. So far, extreme reticence had marked the Dromios. And now this story---which nobody knew---was pitched at him. Was there something odd in that? The story itself was certainly odd. Its simplest explanation was merely that this old lady was mad. The world is full of crazy old souls who believe that dead sons are alive and coming back to them. And yet, if Hyland was to be believed, there really had been some mystery attaching to that fatal fire forty years ago. Was it possible that Lady Dromio’s persuasion had at least some basis in fact?

'My eldest boy may come back.'

'I beg your pardon?' Appleby was startled out of his speculations.

'My husband was mad, Mr. Appleby. Until just before he---died it was a thing not commonly known. But he was mad and violent. When the three boys were born he was like a man demented. It is said that he tossed them about the room until it was not known which was which. And hard upon that there was the fire. We cannot tell that it was really Oliver who was---rescued. My husband was indifferent to the matter. He was only concerned that he should have one son and not three.'

'Lady Dromio, do I understand you to mean that under cover of this fire he had two of the infants smuggled away?' 

'Yes---just that. It was very rash and unkind. But then, as I have said, he was mad.'

'I do not at all see how he could have contrived such a thing.' Appleby hesitated. 'Are you quite, quite sure that the shock of losing the two children did not----'

'Send me mad myself?' Lady Dromio was now working composedly at her embroidery. 'That, of course, is the natural thing to think. I might have comforted myself with the---the fantasy that my children were really alive, after all. Is that not it?'

'Some such possibility does occur to me. You see, I find it hard to understand how, even under cover of a big fire, two infants could be spirited away. There would have to be remains---what were definitely the remains of two human children---before the coroner who must have investigated the accident would be satisfied.'

'But there were. That was what puzzled me.'

'Puzzled you?'

'Yes. You see, I knew that none of my babies had died: I knew it because I knew that my husband had caused the fire.'

'Did that follow?'

'Somehow it did---quite certainly. He was mad, and he had done something very wicked. But he had not killed his own children.'

'Or any children?'

Lady Dromio was silent. 'It was my great fear. For years there was this fear as well as my uncertainty and sorrow. And then at last my mind was relieved---thanks to Grubb.' Lady Dromio paused. 'Grubb was the garden boy and they had arrested him for starting the fire. Since I knew that my husband had done it I had of course to insist that they let Grubb go. When my husband died I reinstated him, although by now he hated the family. It seemed the honest thing to do. Honesty is sometimes the best policy---just as it says in the book.'

'No doubt. But you haven’t yet told me how you knew it was your husband who started the fire.'

'I just knew.' Appleby, who had felt his interest in Lady Dromio’s statement growing, was suddenly exasperated.

'But you must see---' he began.

'Yes, I do see. And what you want comes later. But I only came by it through just knowing; otherwise I shouldn’t have been looking for it, and I shouldn’t have noticed Grubb. There was a cottage where my husband used to lodge a gamekeeper; it is on the edge of the park. And I came to notice that young Grubb kept wandering that way and staring at it. He still does. He is head gardener now, you know---and, I fear, a very lazy and dishonest man; I have had to dissuade Oliver more than once from dismissing him. Well, it was like this. Grubb would stand in front of this cottage and behave in a very odd way. It was a sort of play-acting. And one day I understood it---quite in a flash. He was imitating my dead husband. He was imitating his manner of acting when a sudden idea would come to him. I couldn’t think why. But now I believe I know. He was trying to puzzle out something that had come to my husband, once, standing just there. So I began to inquire.'

Lady Dromio, prompted perhaps by some instinct for drama, paused to match her silks. Appleby waited silently. He had no doubt now that from this straggling narrative something of substance was going to emerge.

'I remembered that the cottage had been empty from just about the time of the fire; when I was up and about again the gamekeeper and his family were gone. And what I eventually found out was this. The man’s wife had given birth to twins a few days before my own children came. The doctor who had delivered them was certain that they would not live. And then the whole family disappeared. My husband told the doctor a little later that he had sent them all off to the woman’s mother, where they would be better cared for. And nobody, of course, was the least curious when they never came back. Don’t you think, Mr. Appleby, that what really happened is clear? My husband had this sudden wicked inspiration. He simply waited until these infants were dead and substituted their bodies for two of his own children whom he persuaded the gamekeeper and his wife to take away. I had no difficulty in understanding that this was what had happened. But I found it very difficult to decide what to do. My husband had been mad and that frightened me. I was afraid that it might all be supposed as---as you think, and that I might be taken for mad too. I couldn’t bring myself to have the horrible thing opened up and a search made. I put it off from day to day and week to week, hoping that I might find real evidence, something that I could take with confidence to lawyers and people like that. But I didn’t find any real evidence.'

'Never?'

'Not for a very long time. And as the months went by it seemed more and more hopeless to bring such a strange story forward. For it is strange, is it not?'

Appleby nodded. 'Yes,' he said soberly. 'As strange as anything I have ever heard.'

'Only something did turn up at last. But by that time I had adopted Lucy---I thought somehow it would help me along---and Oliver had begun going to school. I was very ignorant of the world and of affairs. I did not know what trouble I might start if somewhere I found two boys with an obscure claim to be Oliver’s brothers. And yet I wanted my children very much.'

'That was natural.' Lady Dromio, Appleby could see, had hardened with the years, and now her character had a strength which had been lacking in her in the period she described. Yet there was something affecting in the rather helpless simplicity with which she told her story. 'But will you tell me now just what was the evidence you finally found?'

'I read a novel about detectives and that gave me an idea. It seemed that there really were rather low but clever people whom one could employ to find things out without any necessity of really explaining oneself. I bought some nasty newspaper and found one of these people advertising. I went to see him, which was very horrid. I think he mostly lurked about hotels peering through keyholes because of divorces and things like that.' Lady Dromio paused and looked at Appleby vaguely, as if wondering who or what he might be. 'Not,' she added hurriedly, 'at all the sort of person one would associate with the police. But quite able all the same. He found out two things. The first was this: that someone with our gamekeeper’s name had taken his wife and two infant children to America about a fortnight after the fire. And the second thing----'

'One moment, Lady Dromio. Had you asked this fellow to discover whether something of that sort had, or had not, happened?'

'No---I had said nothing about children. I simply gave the gamekeeper’s name and said I thought he might have emigrated. But the second thing this man discovered was even more important. I had to pay a great deal for it---no doubt because there were solicitors’ clerks and rather superior people like that to bribe. In the few months before his death my husband had sent very considerable sums of money to somebody whom I recognized as an old university acquaintance of his, a rather eccentric doctor in New York. So, you see, at last I had something on which I could definitely act.'

'And you acted?'

Lady Dromio laid down her embroidery, crossed the room, and wrapped a fine shawl around herself; it had the effect of making her look very much older. 'I found I couldn’t. It was something too unknown and big. It could mean nothing to those distant children, and something had grown up obscurely within me to make me fear them. I had a foreboding of disaster should they---my own children---return to Sherris.'

There was silence. On the mantelpiece the little silver clock ticked its way doggedly through the small hours; on the floor the shredded rose petals lay. Appleby looked searchingly at Lady Dromio. 'And that is all?'

'No---no, it is not. I have always known that one day I would do something. And I did---forty years after all the unhappiness began. Oliver was in America. On a sudden impulse I wrote to him, telling him everything and giving him that New York doctor’s name. After that I heard nothing from him---although he usually wrote regular letters when away---except he once rather urgently sent for money. I was much worried, thinking the shock might have been very great. Only sometimes I wonder whether that particular letter reached him, for he was moving about a good deal and was sometimes careless about his mail.'

'You would have been glad to know that the letter had, in fact, missed him?'

'Yes, Mr. Appleby. The letter was a mistake. If he was to hear the story he should have heard it face to face.'

'I rather agree with you. And you have heard nothing to suggest that he had contacted those unknown brothers?'

'Nothing whatever. And I have now told you everything.' Lady Dromio once more applied herself to her embroidery.

Appleby looked at her seriously. 'Everything? What of your son’s plan to marry? Had he advanced far with that?'

'I suppose Sebastian has told you of his pursuing an heiress? But I cannot say how far it had gone. At the time of his ceasing writing he was still very reticent.'

'His plan must have upset your adopted daughter?'

Lady Dromio’s vaguest manner returned. 'I don’t understand you at all.'

'A few minutes ago Miss Lucy volunteered the information that she had threatened to kill Sir Oliver. Can you substantiate that?'

'Certainly not. I have nothing to say about it at all.'

'Was Miss Lucy in love with your son?'

'Really, I hardly think----' Lady Dromio’s voice faltered. 'Yes,' she whispered, 'I think she was.'

'Please forgive this question. Was Sir Oliver a man scrupulous in matters of sexual relationship?'

'No!' The word came unexpectedly and almost explosively. 'He was . . . rather horrible in such things.'

'Thank you.' Appleby picked a final rose petal from his shoulder and dropped it in a waste-paper basket. Had there run, he was wondering, some deep current of emotion---and that by no means one of affection---between the dead man and his mother? Had the unsatisfactory Oliver been in some obscure way rejected in favour of the mere idea of those other sons of whom Lady Dromio had been robbed? Appleby was silent for a moment. 'Do you think,' he asked, 'that Sir Oliver had made Miss Lucy his mistress?'

But at this Lady Dromio suddenly raised oddly helpless hands. 'Go away!' she exclaimed. 'You must please go away. I have told you everything---everything that is mine to tell. And I belong to a generation that---that did not discuss such things.'

And Appleby withdrew. It was true that he had been told a lot---indeed that a complex and astonishing, if fragmentary, story had been pitched at him. And it was not a story that sounded to him like an invention. There seemed every possibility that Hyland had been right; that the death of Sir Oliver Dromio was in some devious way the issue of that forty-year-old fire.

But one thing, he realized, he had not been told---the story of the torn and shredded rose.

'AT a quarter to twelve,' said Hyland, 'Mr. Sebastian Dromio rang up the police station and when the sergeant on night duty realized what he was talking about he put him straight through to me. Dromio told me quite a story---which was odd, when you come to think of it. A bare summons would have been more natural.'

Appleby considered. 'Perhaps so. But he may have felt that when put through to you a fuller account was the proper thing.'

'That may have been it.' Hyland was gratified. 'Well, what he told me was this. He had come down this evening with no notion of meeting his nephew Sir Oliver, whom he supposed to be in America. A neighbour, a Mrs. Gollifer, came to dinner and left fairly early, driving herself home in her own car. At about half past eleven the others---that is to say Sebastian Dromio himself, Lady Dromio and the young lady who goes by the name of Miss Lucy Dromio---were sitting in the drawing-room when they heard a nightingale singing somewhere in the park, and as the night was warm they went out to listen. When they strolled back some ten minutes later they were met by Swindle with the news that Sir Oliver had been found dead in his study. Sebastian thereupon took the ladies back to the drawing-room, came along here and ascertained that the report was true, and then immediately phoned first Dr. Hubbard---who was out---and then the police.'

'All eminently correct.'

'Quite so. And yet the fellow was in the deuce of a stew. Well, I gave you a call and then came straight out to Sherris. A footman showed me into this room, where Mr. Sebastian was waiting for me. He said that he had returned to it immediately after telephoning, thinking it inadvisable to leave the body alone. He then asked me to hear the butler’s story while he went and did what he could for the ladies. He also said he proposed to ring up Mr. Greengrave, the vicar, judging that he might be of some comfort to them in this tragic moment.'

Appleby raised his eyebrows. 'This Sebastian sounds rather too good to be true.'

'Well, I see what you mean.' And Hyland considered. 'But I haven’t told you the one out-of-the-way thing he did say. It was early on in his telephone call, and it gave me the idea I’m inclined to work on.'

'Ah,' said Appleby.

'He’s been burnt,' Hyland said. 'I knew that damned fire would come home to roost on us one day.' That was queer, don’t you think?'

'Almost as queer as the metaphor it was couched in.'

'Yes, I think something slipped out there, all right.' And Hyland nodded with satisfaction. 'There’s only one way of making any sense of this thrusting Sir Oliver’s body into the fire. It was by way of a nasty pointer to that conflagration forty years ago.'

Appleby, with something like an apologetic glance at the corpse, lit a cigarette. 'So you've suggested already.'

'And I admitted I was a bit baffled. But now I think I see one possibility. Somebody was quite likely blamed for that big fire in which the two other infants were killed. I haven’t looked it up yet, but it’s conceivable even that there was negligence and that a servant was dismissed or sent to gaol. Well, that might rankle. And years later----'

'Forty years later.'

'Well, why not? For instance, the butler----'

A knock at the door made Hyland fall silent. Appleby turned in time to see it open upon an ancient creature whom he at once guessed to be Swindle. He was followed by a robust youth carrying a tray.

'Her ladyship,' said Swindle, 'has given orders that refreshments should be served. Sandwiches, coffee and'---he turned and surveyed the tray---'a caraway cake the vicar didn’t care for.' The tone in which Swindle delivered himself of this unseemly fragment of information was displeasing; it seemed to indicate that, were he to have his way, the bloodhounds who had descended upon Sherris might more suitably be regaled on a couple of bones. 'As for brandy, you'll find it on the side table. And whisky too.' He stopped and peered myopically across the room. 'At least there ought to be whisky. But after what happened to----'

Hyland interrupted impatiently. 'Never mind about the whisky. And let the man put the stuff down and go away. We want another word with you and we may as well have it now.'

With an uneasy glance at the shrouded body on the rug, Swindle gave the necessary instructions to his assistant. 'I told you all I done and know,' he said in a sullen croak. 'A man can’t do more than that.'

'Quite true. But you may know more than you think. Were you in service here when there was the big fire forty years ago?'

'The fire?' Swindle was startled. 'Yes, I was. Sixty-five years, man and boy, I’ve been at Sherris. And had six liveries under me at one time, I did. Now there’s nobbut two men, a boy and a gaggle of women. And the work something chronic.' His voice sank into a snarl. 'You should see the boiler. Urrr!'

Senility, Appleby supposed, had robbed this toad-like being of that dignity of speech which upper servants commonly affect. But he was not sure that Swindle wholly repelled him. And as if aware that some flicker of human sympathy had come his way, the butler advanced with a salver. 'Take some coffee while it’s ’ot,' he urged unprofessionally. 'It may keep you awake---which is ’ow you'll ’ave to keep to fathom this 'ere.'

Appleby accepted coffee. Hyland took a piece of the rejected caraway cake without enthusiasm, hunger apparently contending with a sense of the indecorum of this refection in the presence of the dead. 'Well, then, about that fire,' he said. 'Did anyone get into trouble over it?'

'Sir Romeo did. It sent him mad-like. They did say ’e died of it, in a manner of speaking.'

Appleby set down his cup. 'Sir Romeo was the dead man’s father? Had he always been a bit mad, more or less?'

'I wouldn’t care to say that.' Swindle was cautious. 'But none of the Dromios be common folk.'

'I see. Would you say it was good service?'

Swindle considered this technicality more cautiously still. 'We don’t a get on badly,' he said at length. 'The boiler’s the worst by a long way.'

Hyland reached unobtrusively for a sandwich. 'Who else got into trouble?'

'Grubb did. Gardener’s boy, he was then. The police---they was long before any time of your’n---raked about and raked about, and that very night they gaoled im.'

'Did they, now?' And Hyland glanced triumphantly at Appleby. 'What would they do that for?'

'Seems ’e ’ad a grudge against the master. Sir Romeo was a great one for keeping the menservants in order. A kick on the backside, ’e’d give them. And if they wouldn’t take that they could take their money.'

'Dear me!' Hyland was scandalized at this glimpse of the Edwardian baronetage.

'And it seemed as not long before the fire ’e’d done something to put this young Grubb’s back up. The lad swore something dreadful to the other outdoor servants as to what ’e wouldn’t do to master. And when fire came ’e was skulking where ’e hadn’t no business. So the police gaoled him. But her ladyship sent and got him out next day.'

'Next day!' Hyland was frankly dismayed.

And Appleby chuckled. 'A day in the local lock-up forty years ago. Somehow it doesn’t seem a very substantial----'

'You never know. You never know what does rankle.' Hyland’s tone was unconvinced. 'This Grubb may have been an uncommonly sensitive lad.'

'Lady Dromio must have been an uncommonly conscientious woman.’ Appleby was frowning into his coffee-cup. 'As I understand the matter, she had recently given birth to triplets and now two of them were tragically killed. But the very next day she sends down to the local police-station and sees that they let out a young lout of a gardener’s boy.'

'It’s wonderful'---Hyland was sententious---'what the gentry could do in those days.'

'Unquestionably. But she must have been pretty sure of what she was about.' Appleby looked sharply at Swindle. 'Do you know anything out-of-the-way about that fire the children lost their lives in?'

'Nothing at all.' The butler’s tone had become surly once more. 'Nor what concern it is of anyone’s now.'

'Very well. We'll turn to other matters.' Appleby paused. 'But one further question there. What became of young Grubb in the end?'

'Became of young Grubb!' Swindle was astonished. 'He’s old Grubb the head-gardener, of course. And as good-for-nothink now as ’ow ’e was then.'

Hyland brightened. 'We'll look up this Grubb,' he said.

'Certainly we shall.' Appleby turned again to Swindle. 'Would you mind,' he said, 'giving me what you have already, no doubt, given the Inspector here---your own account of tonight’s discovery?'

+++

And sullenly, but with a fair amount of intelligence, Swindle croaked out his story. There had been two guests to dinner: Mr. Sebastian Dromio, who had come down to stay for a few days, and Mrs. Gollifer. But as the one was a member of the family and the other an old family friend Swindle had not thought the occasion specially splendid, and when he had provided Mr. Dromio with what he judged suitable in the way of port he had considered his day’s work over and retired to his own quarters, and had there given himself to the study of household accounts. For it appeared that with the passage of years he had taken upon himself something of the function of steward to Sir Oliver, and everything went through his hands.

At half-past ten, or thereabouts, Robert had knocked on his door and informed him that Sir Oliver was home. Whereupon Swindle changed from slippers to shoes and emerged from his sanctum, apparently with the very proper intention of presenting his duty to his employer. He asked Robert, whose business it was at this hour to attend the front door, whether he had taken Sir Oliver’s bags to his room. And to this Robert replied that he had himself seen nothing of Sir Oliver, who must have come in another way. The news of his return Robert owed to his colleague Joseph. Joseph at this hour had the duty of receiving from a housemaid such shoes as had been collected from the bedrooms during dinner, and these he was accustomed to polish not in the servants’ quarters but in a sort of cubby-hole almost opposite the study door. There was nothing exceptional about this, Swindle reiterated upon a question from Appleby. Joseph did the same thing every night.

And while in his cubby-hole Joseph had heard Sir Oliver’s voice in the study. It was an unmistakable voice, so there could be no doubt about it. And Sir Oliver was in fairly continuous conversation with another man.

Rightly judging himself to be in possession of sensational information, Joseph had dropped his brushes and hurried to Robert. Whereupon Robert had hurried to Swindle---divagating only to give the news to the cook in the kitchen, the parlourmaid, housemaids and chauffeur in the servants’ hall, and two kitchenmaids who were helping William the gardener’s boy to eat a stolen veal-and-ham pie in a scullery. And Swindle, when he had informed himself of the manner of Sir Oliver’s arrival, had bidden Robert go about his business and leave any proper attendance upon their master to himself.

Appleby listened carefully to this recital. 'And did you in fact,' he asked, 'go in and see Sir Oliver?'

'Urrr!' Swindle was contemptuous of the ineptitude of this question. 'Sir Oliver made it a rule that he were never to be disturbed in there unless ’e rang the bell.'

'But surely the circumstances were rather exceptional? He had been away for months----'

' 'E wouldn’t have heard nothink of that.' Swindle shook his head decidedly. 'I stayed where I was.'

'I see. And you didn’t think to inform Lady Dromio that Sir Oliver had returned? Doesn’t that seem rather odd?' Appleby paused. 'Had you any reason to suppose that Sir Oliver desired that his presence should be unknown?'
For the fraction of a second Swindle hesitated. 'How could I have?' he asked surlily.

'Very well. But now about his manner of coming back. If he didn’t come in by the front door how could he come in?'

'Through that there french window, I suppose.'

'Would it not be locked?'

'It’s Joseph’s business to go round and fasten the windows at nine o’clock. But ’e may well have forgotten this one, good-for-nothink lout that ’e is.'

'Well, we must ask him.'

'Urrr.'

'And when we do I think we shall get an answer you don’t like.' Appleby turned to Hyland. 'Does this man understand the risk he runs in withholding information on a matter like this?'

Hyland shook his head. 'I hope he does,' he said gloomily. For it’s a very grave risk indeed. Better tell us the truth, my good man.'

It was conceivably this lofty manner of address, culled from the pages of fiction, that unnerved Swindle. He licked his leathery lips and let his eyes wander fearfully to the dead body on the floor. 'I had a wire,' he said.

'Did you, now! And have you destroyed it? Well, let’s have a look at it.'

Reluctantly Swindle produced a small yellow envelope and handed it to Hyland. The telegram had been dispatched in the West End of London that afternoon and read: LEAVE STUDY ACCESSIBLE FROM TERRACE TONIGHT CONFIDENTIAL OLLY.

'And who,' asked Hyland, 'is Olly?'

'Sir Oliver, of course. It be what ’e be called as a kid. Master Olly, her ladyship made us call him. Though, mark you, ’e was a baronet all the time.'

'Odd.' Appleby was staring thoughtfully at the telegram. 'And he signed this in that way in order to occasion less remark in the local post office, I suppose. Well, what did you do about it?'

'I came in here just before ten and found that Joseph had fastened the window as he should. So I left it on the latch and came away again.'

'It will be best to be frank with us, Mr. Swindle, Appleby folded up the telegram. 'Did any explanation of this instruction of Sir Oliver’s come into your head?'

'I thought there must be a woman in it, of course.' Whether guilefully or not, Swindle contrived to look surprised that any other explanation could be entertained.

'You mean that Sir Oliver after being away all this time, wished to have a ready means of introducing a woman into his own house in a clandestine manner?'

'Urrr.'

'Surely sixteen or seventeen would be the age for such an awkward stratagem? What attractions could it have for an experienced man of the world?'

Swindle’s face fell into an evil leer. 'There be no reckoning the queer turns will give an edge to that sort of thing. Why, ’e might have had a fancy for that there rug.'

Hyland glanced down at the gaping polar bear and the shrouded body sprawled on it. His expression indicated severe disapprobation of this unwholesome erotic lore. 'But I understood,' he said, 'that the footman Joseph heard Sir Oliver in conversation not with a woman but a man?'

'I'm not saying what happened. I’m saying what I thought ’ud be happening. Like enough Sir Oliver had some private business ’e wanted quiet for. Like enough it was urgent and ’e thought to join the family later.'

'Very well. You had left the window here unfastened. When the news was brought to you that Sir Oliver had returned you were, of course, not surprised. And you told Robert to go about his business. This was at half past ten. What happened later?'

'Nothink till an hour later, or just short of that, when I was thinking of going to bed. The family was still up, it seemed, and so young Robert ’e was on duty still. Well, ’e heard a great crash from this room ’ere, and ’e hurried to it and tried the handle and found it locked. And at the same time ’e noticed the smell. Like somebody had charred a steak bad, ’e said. Well, I sent him round to the window, expecting it might be open still---which it were, so in ’e came and unlocked the door. There was Sir Oliver in the same clothes ’e sailed in, a-lying in the fireplace with his feet on the rug and his head in the coal-scuttle as you might say and his arms a-roasting as you seen them. I got him out---Robert being good for nout but whimpering---and there were no life in him, that were plain. So I went out and told her ladyship and Mr. Dromio.'

'You say that Robert heard a crash. How would you account for that?'

'It would be the tantalus, of course.' And Swindle pointed to a remote corner of the room. 'And not just knocked over, either. Hurled bodily, as you might say.'

Appleby had already taken stock of the appearance to which the butler referred. Lying where he pointed was the splintered debris of a rosewood tantalus designed to hold three decanters; it lay amid a litter of thick shattered crystal.

'It would certainly make enough noise.' Appleby turned to Hyland. 'And it was hurled across the room about an hour after voices were first heard here.'

'And when there was already a smell of burning flesh from the body,' Hyland frowned. 'There’s something uncommonly odd in that.'

'Then within a couple of minutes the butler and footman were in the room. Whoever threw that tantalus must virtually have passed Robert on the terrace. But why should this unknown person, presumably alone with the dead man, pick up a heavy object and hurl it with what must have been tremendous force across the room?'

'Perhaps,' suggested Hyland, 'there was a third person as well.'

'More like ’e were seeing things.' Swindle croaked out this reading of the matter unexpectedly. 'And who wouldn’t be seeing things after doing the like of that?' He poked out a claw-like hand towards the rug. 'That were it. The fire it would be flicking and flaring and casting shadows. And the killer ’e would think there were someone moving there in the far corner of the room. And ’e would panic and up with the tantalus and 'url it. Same as 'im in the Bible did with the ink-pot at the Devil.

Swindle, Appleby reflected, did Martin Luther too much honour. Nevertheless his suggestion hinted at unlooked-for imaginative powers. It conjured up a real picture of something which might have happened in this sinister room. Appleby looked down at the remains of the tantalus. 'There’s not enough glass,' he said.

'What’s that?' Hyland was startled.

'It’s made to hold three decanters. There’s about enough glass there to reconstitute two.'

'Perhaps one had been broken long ago.'

'That it had not!' Swindle was suddenly indignant. 'Three there were, as ’twas fit and proper there should be.'

Hyland slapped his white-gloved hand on the table. 'The weapon!' he exclaimed. 'The blow might have been given with just such a thing as a decanter. It mightn’t even break if it was the heavy square sort.'

'It’s a possibility.' Appleby considered this for a moment. 'But why should he make off with it? Remember he didn’t simply hit Sir Oliver and bolt in a panic. He was here for long enough after his deed to permit of all the burning of the arms. And then, for whatever reason, to hurl the tantalus. Would he then pick up again the decanter he had committed the crime with, and carry it away with him? I don’t see that.'

'I think I do.' And Hyland, always suggestible, nodded with conviction. 'Panic overcame him, not at first, but slowly. And then he threw the tantalus for the reason Swindle suggests. In the confusion of that moment he might well think of the third decanter as incriminating---fingerprints on it, for instance. Indeed, there’s a rational motive in that.'

'So there is.' Appleby nodded. And as he did so the litter of crystal on the floor gleamed like split diamonds. 'Hyland,' he said, 'do you know I may have seen the fellow---decanter, and all?'

'WOULD you care to come and look at something?' said the voice.

Appleby glanced at the clock. 'My dear man, it’s nearly midnight.'

'Quite so. But that’s when these things are apt to happen. Of course'---and the ORS took on the faint irony of the bachelor---'if your wife----'

'Judith’s away visiting her people at Long Dream. When what things are apt to happen?'

'Murder.' The voice spoke in plain triumph. 'Murder most foul, as at the best it is----'

'Good heavens, Hyland, don’t tell me you’ve taken to Shakespeare.'

'Well, haven’t you taken to bees? The force must keep its cultural end up, you know. But this is most foul, strange and unnatural.'

'Why unnatural?'

'Look here,' said the voice most unfairly, 'you’re simply wasting time. Will you come? It’s a baronet.'

'No, no, Hyland---it won’t do. I’ve had my fill of murdered baronets---and especially at midnight, as you say. The annals of the Yard are glutted with them. It was hard at times to believe that any could be left alive in England. For you must add, you know, all those we were obliged to hang. . . . Who is it?'

'Sir Oliver Dromio---quite one of our local big-wigs. And a beautiful murder. Hit on the head---they think perhaps with the butt-end of a revolver---and then burnt to a cinder in his own fireplace.'

'Rubbish. Burning to a cinder takes more than that. When I was looking into the burning of old Gaffer Odgers back in----'

'To be sure---one of your most famous cases.' The voice over the telephone was momentarily deferential. 'But, you know, since you came to settle in these parts I’ve always hoped we might have something to show you one day. And here it is! Of course I can’t promise, but I do think it may be interesting. I've heard some queer things about these Dromios. Why, in this office there’s record of an investigation we thought it necessary to make into them about forty years ago.'

Appleby laughed. 'And endorsed “How will it be with them forty years on?” Well, the answer’s a cinder. I’ll come.'

'Good. I suppose Mrs. Appleby took your car?'

'No, she didn’t. Billy Bidewell came over for her with Spot.'

'Then that’s capital. I'll meet you at Sherris Hall. You must have noticed it? Big place rather falling to bits. I’d better get along there myself now. I’ve only had a telephone report so far.'

'All right, Hyland---and thank you very much. But I rather think you'll find more than a few calcined bones.'

'Possibly so. But that’s all they found forty years ago. It’s always stuck in my mind, that. I rather see this'---the voice was again full of gusto and excitement---'as a grim crime of retribution.'

'As what?'

But Inspector Hyland of the Sherris Magna police had rung off.

Appleby smiled as he hung up the receiver. A thoroughgoing fellow, this Hyland, and evidently resolved to begin at the beginning. Few crimes have their roots a couple of generations back. But a murderer would get a good start if, for a romantic police officer, he contrived to give his crime so cobwebby a décor. . . .

And Appleby quieted the dogs and got out the car. As one grows older one’s pleasures become less sophisticated, and he was fond of the smooth power locked up in the big yellow Bentley. It had bound itself up with his career; more than ten years ago it had taken him to his first big case---that queer, rather creaking case at St. Anthony’s College; the Commissioner had acted with the amiability of the truly great when he arranged that it should be sold to him shortly after his retirement. Routine had improved his technique since then, but it had also dulled his faculties; where was the sparkle now of 'done well' to retire upon his marriage. And now here he was poking out his head again.

The Bentley purred through the night. It would take more than ten years to rob that engine of its sparkle. The moon was riding high. The road was a white ribbon. The night air was close but obscurely stimulating. 'I am old, I am old,' sang Appleby, 'I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled . . .' Yes, one grows old; one’s tags and quotations begin to date; it is very sad. 'Agnosco,' Appleby chanted, '---agnosco veteris vestigia flammae. The delicious and mellow melancholy of early middle age possessed him. An owl hooted and he hooted back. He could not have comported himself so when driving down to St. Anthony’s to survey the remains of Dr. Umpleby.

The road curved and as Appleby swung the wheel he noticed a car ahead, drawn into the hedge. He slackened speed and then his eye caught something which made him pull up hard, abruptly attentive as any constable on a beat. He got out and walked back. The car was an ancient tourer with its hood let down. And a man was slumped across the wheel.

Appleby laid a hand on his shoulder. 'Hello!' he said, 'can I be of any help to you?'

The man stirred and sat up, making Appleby immediately feel officious. Still, he could hardly have passed by what might have been a corpse or a case of serious illness.

'Help?' said the man, blinking sleepily at Appleby in the moonlight. 'Dear me, no. But I am obliged to you for your kindness.'

Appleby realized with some embarrassment that he was talking to a clergyman. 'It is a mild night,' he said, 'and pleasant enough for a nap in the open air.'

'Quite so---precisely so.' The clergyman appeared to consider whether this was an adequately civil end to the encounter. 'But it is not a thing I commonly do. Indeed in my parish---I must explain that I am the incumbent of a neighbouring parish---the habit of sitting in parked cars at night gives me not a little anxiety. People come out from the towns and misconduct themselves, and the example is a bad one for our own young folk.'

'No doubt,' said Appleby. The gentleman thus discharging himself of professional anxieties, he saw, was still half asleep. Appleby wondered if he had been drinking.

'The truth is that I have been dining with a friend---with a colleague, that is to say----'

'That sort of thing can be very soporific, I am sure.' Appleby nodded sympathetically and prepared to beat a tactful retreat.

'Well, yes; Canon Newton’s conversation is so polished that it is a little like an elderly lullaby---though I should hate him to hear I had said so. The real truth is that I have a very poor head for wine. So much so, indeed, that I have sometimes contemplated a total abstention. But then one is reckoned a dull dog---and even a clergyman does not care for that. The bishop would laugh at it.'

This in a bishop, Appleby thought, was somewhat unepiscopal conduct. 'It is a difficult situation, no doubt,' he said vaguely.

'So I set off for home early. I was singing.'

'It’s like that at night. I have just been doing a bit of reciting myself.'

'Now, that is very interesting.' The clergyman was still sleepy. And sleepiness made him not morose but friendly---which Appleby judged a pleasant trait. 'My name, I should say, is Greengrave.'

'Mine is Appleby.'

'Good gracious! Are you the young man who has married Judith Raven? I am delighted to meet you.' And Mr. Greengrave shook hands---rather with the air, Appleby thought, of a cricketer bringing off a difficult catch. 'Well, as I say, I was singing; and then I fell to meditating a matter of some perplexity; and then'---Mr. Greengrave hesitated---'I had rather a curious experience. It sobered me, so to speak, and I went along cautiously. And then I grew so sleepy that I judged it safer----'

'Very wise,' said Appleby; 'very wise, indeed.'

'But I must not weary you with my affairs. I hope we may meet again.' And Mr. Greengrave made as if to proceed on his way.

Appleby stepped back. 'By the way,' he asked, 'can you tell me if I am right for Sherris Hall?'

'Sherris Hall?' There was something startled in the clergyman’s voice.

'Yes. I am making my way there in rather a hurry. I suppose it is an odd inquiry at this late hour.'

'Has---has anything happened there, may I ask?'

'Something rather serious, I am afraid.' Appleby was less cautious than he would have been before he became a private citizen. 'Inspector Hyland of Sherris Magna rang me up----'

'The police!' Mr. Greengrave’s face took on a paler shade in the moonlight.

Appleby looked curiously at the agitated man before him. His indiscretion was deliberate now. 'Yes, the police. I was a policeman myself, you know, once. Something bad has occurred, it seems. And Hyland thinks it has started up from some hiding-place no end of years back.'

'Good heavens! Only this evening----' Mr. Greengrave checked himself and looked cautious. 'The truth is,' he said, 'that I have suffered from something in the nature of an hallucination, and I am still somewhat confused. I had better be off to bed. As for Sherris Hall, take the way to the left and you can’t go wrong. Good night.'

And Mr. Greengrave departed amid a grinding of gears. Appleby watched him go, and noted that the course he steered was very tolerably straight. It did not look as if the hallucination and confusion of which he spoke had any very substantial origin in alcohol.

'Odd!' Appleby murmured, and walked back to the Bentley.

+++

But this was not his only untoward encounter on the way to inquire into the death of Sir Oliver Dromio. And inebriety of one degree or another seemed to be the rule round about Sherris that night.

He found the drive and turned into it. Within fifty yards it forked. Taken by surprise, Appleby swung right and was presently convinced that his guess had been a bad one. This was a mere track. It wound through a shrubbery and petered out. And as he brought the car to a halt and prepared to back he saw that his headlights were focused upon a sleeping man. He lay sprawled on a bench before a ramshackle shed. And on the ground, partly obscured by his dangling legs, lay an object that gleamed and sparkled like a gigantic firefly.

A tramp, Appleby thought, and slipped into reverse. But what, after all, was that object that lay at his feet, throwing back every colour in the spectrum? Had Sir Oliver Dromio been killed by a burglar, and were these the Dromio family jewels? It is astonishing how many burglars, when about to make off with a highly successful haul, get themselves hopelessly drunk on a purloined bottle of whisky. Liquor disposed freely about the house, indeed, is as effective a precaution as all but the most expensive sort of safe. And Appleby stopped the car. As he did so the man woke up and stared dead into the headlights in a sort of stupid terror.

The stupidity, it could be discerned, was natural to that coarse face. And the terror, surely, had not come upon it on the instant. Terror, Appleby intuitively felt, had been upon the man when he fell into his drunken slumber, and the same terror was with him now as he awoke to that blinding glare.

It was clear, at any rate, that constabulary work was to be done. And Appleby leapt from the Bentley. But as he did so the man---who looked more like a farm-labourer than a tramp---found possession of his wits and limbs. He staggered to his feet, grabbed the strangely prismatic object from the ground, and with surprising speed rounded the shed and vanished into the shrubbery. Appleby followed, stopped, listened. Not a sound was to be heard. Among these thick shadows the fellow was creeping away or lying concealed with the cunning of a redskin. To play hide-and-seek with him would be useless. Lady Dromio’s tiaras and necklaces---if indeed it had been these---were gone for the moment, But with the police of the countryside roused by murder the fellow had little chance of escape. Appleby returned to his car, backed to the drive, and drove ahead. He rounded a final curve and the house lay before him, its leads gleaming in the moon and yellow lights pouring from a dozen windows.

And above it two straight pillars rose into the sky. Perhaps Sir Oliver Dromio was indeed reduced to cinders. But Appleby, recalling the charred hovel and carrion stench that had marked the end of Gaffer Odgers, again doubted if anything so dramatic had occurred.

And, of course, he was right. A stench of sorts there was, but it was incongruously suggestive of no more than half a dozen sausages incautiously left on a gas-ring. Through an open french window came the warm breath of this strangely Mediterranean night. Inspector Hyland sat at a table, stiff in silver buttons and black braid; he had clearly judged the violent death of a baronet to call for an appearance en grande tenue. White gloves and a silver-headed cane lay beside him. A constable was walking up and down on the terrace outside, apparently to guard his chief from sudden nocturnal assault. Another stood by the door, his attitude suggesting an intention to collect tickets from those desiring admittance to the spectacle within.

The body lay before the fireplace on a grotesquely deflated polar bear. The bear’s mouth gaped open as if the last gasp of air had been forced out of it by the fall. The mouth of what had been Sir Oliver Dromio gaped open, too.

Would you care to come and look at something. . . . Appleby glanced from the body in its sprawled indignity to Inspector Hyland, neat and dapper at his table, naively rejoicing in being still alive. 'I should be inclined,' he said mildly, 'to send for a sheet.'

Hyland shook his head disapprovingly. 'We must wait for the photographers and people from the borough, my dear chap. Nothing must be touched till then.'

'I see.'

'Nasty, of course.' Hyland rubbed his nose, uncertain how to receive these unexpectedly unprofessional remarks. 'Very distressing for the family. They are prostrated, naturally.'

'Naturally. . . . I suppose he is dead?'

'He’s dead, all right.'

'And he has been touched?'

'Well, yes, of course. He had to be dragged out of the fire, you know. Couldn’t let him roast until we got up a battery of cameras.'

'No, one couldn’t do that.' Appleby during these flat responses was looking carefully round the room. It was insufferably hot. 'Who did drag him out?'

'The butler, Swindle. A disagreeable old man, who’s been with the Dromios for ages.'

'Is the butler prostrated?'

'Dear me, yes.' Hyland was confident. 'Terrible experience for the poor old chap. Fairly slavering.'

'Nothing known to have been stolen, I suppose? Jewels, bonds, anything like that?'

'Nothing like that---nothing like that, at all.' Hyland shook his head. 'That’s to say, of course, so far as I know at present. But I think we’ll find this is quite a different sort of affair.' He lowered his voice. 'What you might call a domestic tragedy. They were expecting Sir Oliver back, you know, and were all very edgy one way or another, it seems. And then he came back. And immediately this happened. So it doesn’t look like being the work of a cornered thief, or anything commonplace of that sort.'

'I see.' Appleby looked at the gaping jowls of man and brute on the floor. 'The result of a family reunion, you might say?'

'Well, that’s one way of putting it.' Hyland found irony disturbing.

'No wonder they are all deflated.' Appleby was glancing again at the bear. 'Or did you say prostrated? It’s more or less the same thing.' Abruptly he changed his tone. 'But how on earth did the arms get like that? There’s something queer there.'

Hyland nodded. 'That’s what they meant by saying he had been burnt to a cinder. Stupid exaggeration, of course. But the forearms and hands are just like that, as you see. I'd say it rather helps us to envisage the actual assault.'

Appleby knelt by the body. The hands and forearms had indeed been consumed almost to the bone. The jacket, of dark blue cloth, was scorched over its upper part, and on the shoulders in places charred away. Appleby shook his head. 'Helps us? I don’t know that I see it.'

'You notice how high this big fireplace is, with a mantelpiece nearly seven feet up? He must have been standing facing it, I think, when he was taken by surprise from behind. He would throw up his arms as he fell, trying to catch at the mantelpiece and save himself. But his grasp would fall short and he would go straight into the fireplace just as he was found. And Hyland looked at Appleby with a poker face. 'That all right?'

'It’s nonsense from beginning to end. If a man got a blow like that his arms couldn’t conceivably go out and above his head to save himself from a fall. He would simply crumple where he stood. And your reading of the affair implies that he was standing in front of a roaring fire before the attack was made. But who would think of lighting a fire on a night like this?'

'A man sometimes feels chilly when he’s been travelling, even when the temperature is warm enough. Or he may have been proposing to burn papers.'

'Or to roast chestnuts, or make hot-buttered toast?' And Appleby shook his head. 'I’m terribly rusty, of course. But not as rusty as all that.'

And Hyland chuckled, much pleased. 'Exactly so! The fire was lit after the murder, not before it. And it wasn’t lit for any of the common purposes for which one lights a fire. It was lit as a symbol.'

'A symbol?' Appleby frowned. 'Arson when committed by insane people is generally considered as some sort of symbolic act. But I can’t see that anything of the sort fits here.'

'No more it does. You see, we’ve come on something that goes back forty years. When Sir Oliver here was an infant there was a big fire at Sherris. His two brothers---he was one of triplets---were burnt to death in it. And there was something fishy about the whole business. We’ve got a record at the station.'

'So you told me on the telephone.' Appleby was now prowling round the study. 'You also said that this was a grim crime of retribution. But what sense is there in that? The infant Oliver can scarcely have planned to burn up his brothers himself. So why should somebody part-burn him now?'

'I don’t know.' Hyland was honest. 'But that old fire is a sort of starting-point of recent Dromio family history. And now there is this senseless fire on a hot summer night. I just have a hunch the two things link up.'

Appleby walked over to the fireplace and peered into a coal-scuttle. It would be interesting to know of anything emanating from the prostrated family by which this hunch of his colleague’s had been activated. .  . . He turned to Hyland. 'By the way,’ he asked, 'who rang you up?'

'Fellow called Sebastian Dromio. He’s an uncle of the dead man, and came down to Sherris, it seems only this evening. Pelting funk he was in too.'

'I see. Did he say anything to suggest---' Appleby checked himself. If he was going to have a clear run in this matter---and it was beginning to interest him---he must not put Hyland out of humour. He turned to the door. 'Here they are,' he said. 'Cameras, insufflators and all. And behind them your police-surgeon with his little black bag. I think I’ll go out and take a turn on the terrace. It’s a lovely night, after all.'

+++

It was a lovely night. The constable on the terrace was enjoying it. But here was one of the two approaches to the room in which Sir Oliver Dromio had been killed. The place might with possible advantage have been examined rather closely before this heavy-footed young man was set tramping up and down on it. And Appleby brought out a torch and went exploring. After a fairly intensive search he went right round the house. It seemed a long time since he had treated other people’s property in that way. But a notion of the layout of the place and its offices might be useful later on.

When he returned to the study the photographers and finger-print men had finished their work and the police-surgeon was approaching the body. He was a young man who looked as if he would be most at home on a football field, but his manner was that of one who was equally familiar with occasions like the present.

'Well, well,' he said, looking down at the sprawled form on the bearskin rug. 'I sat next to him at dinner only a few months ago. Pleasant fellow enough, he seemed to be. And now his clothes'---and the police-surgeon produced a large pair of scissors---'have come off him in the normal way for the last time. Rather a well-cut suit to treat so cavalierly. But it causes the least disturbance before having a good dekko at him. No signs of bonds on the trouser legs. But he might have been tied up, you know, for some time before he was for it. We’ll have a look at the shins.'

'I doubt there being anything like that.' Hyland was tapping his fingers nervously on the desk, and Appleby suspected that his confidence was waning as the night wore on. 'He was heard in this room, talking in a normal way, not so very long before they found him dead.'

'That so?' The police-surgeon was cutting the clothes from the body. The effect, as the white lower limbs and torso began to show, was rather that of some dark-skinned animal under the hands of a taxidermist. And the flattened polar bear grotesquely enhanced this impression. But the surgeon’s mind had taken another turn. 'Marsyas,' he said. 'Wasn’t he flayed? And a fair number of saints and martyrs too, I should imagine. Not that our late friend was anything of a saint, if report speaks true. And I doubt if he had the stuff of the martyrs in him. Take a pinch at the buttocks here and you'll see he was a flabby sort of cove.' The surgeon ignored the expression of disapproval with which Hyland received this. 'Type of the athlete taken to living soft, I’d say. And what is nastier than that? No very obvious marks of violence on the body. But of course it would still be rash to say that it was positively the knock on the head that killed him.'

Appleby stepped forward. 'Not a saint?' he said casually. 'Then I gather he had a bit of a reputation in the county?'

'Lord, yes! Vain, self-conscious chap. Attractive to women, it seems, and none too scrupulous as to how he exploited the fact. Been between a good many sheets where he had no business, if you ask me.'

Hyland frowned and jerked his head meaningfully in the direction of his subordinate at the door. But the young surgeon laughed bluffly---a nervous young man concerned to vindicate the possession of a good smoking-room manner. 'Not,' he continued, 'that there’s much in all that, is there?'

'Much?' said Appleby. 'Dear me, no. Nothing at all.'

'So there must have been something else that really offended people in Dromio. Well-nourished, isn’t he? Tummy full of comfortable dinner, and kidneys no doubt just beginning to think of dealing with half a bottle of claret. In the midst of life we are in the county morgue.'

'He offended people?' asked Appleby.

'Quite a heap. Do you know, they wouldn’t have him in the Plantagenet? My uncle’s a member and he told me so.'

Appleby, like an old actor picking up his tricks again, let an expression of discreet respect flit over his face. Your uncle, he was thinking, wouldn’t thank you for your wagging tongue. 'Is that so?' he said. 'Well, that’s very bad.'

'Just every now and then somebody would decide that he wasn’t going to know Oliver Dromio any more. Interesting to see how this damned fire and his roasting has affected the body temperature.'

'Would his business affairs be in a bad way?'

'Rotten, I should say. This place is tumbling to bits. Saved appearances by keeping up a lot of servants. Cheaper than masons and painters by a long way. My uncle has quite a decent little manor house down in Kent. Help me heave him over, will you? Nothing much, but been in the family for centuries. And he says----'

'You think there was something more than just shaky finances?'

'My dear fellow'---and the young man laughed a patronizing laugh---'they wouldn’t blackball a man at the Plantagenet just for that. Plenty of them hard put to it to pay their own sub, I’d say. Particularly with this damned government. Odd about those buttocks. . . . But what was I saying? Oh, yes. Every now and then people dropped him---and for good. I wonder if he could have taken money from women? Nothing rottener than that.'

'Nothing,' agreed Appleby. 'Absolutely un-English.'

'That’s it!' The young surgeon gave Appleby an approving glance. 'Dagos, you know, really. Came to England in the time of Elizabeth. I have an ancestor who was Lord Chamberlain at that time. Bit his tongue through, too.'

'Ah,' said Appleby. 'I have an ancestor who followed Sir Thomas Malory. Crusades, and that sort of thing. Funny jobs we come down to, don’t we? Mucking about with parvenu corpses.'

Hyland gave an expostulatory cough. Clowning of this sort was not to his taste. But the young surgeon was delighted. 'By jove, yes!' he said. 'Disgusting, isn’t it? But, you know, there’s a very decent girl in the house. Not out of the same stable at all. Old lady's adopted daughter. Clean-limbed lass. I wouldn’t mind----'

'About the time of death.' Hyland was brusque: 'Perhaps you can tell us something useful about that?'

'Nothing at all, at the moment. Fire mucks it all up. Nor---much about anything else. Have to be a P.M. tomorrow.' The surgeon stood up. 'Bloody fools, those murderers. Can’t think beyond a clout on the head. And consider all the indetectable ways it could be done! You know, the physiological poisons.' And the young man, having aired a little learning, packed his bag and made for the door. 'Family coming in to have a dekko?' he asked. 'Better get something to cover him. He looks dam’ ugly naked on that fool rug. Cremate him, I suppose. Job part done already, after all. So long.’

He was gone. Appleby went to the window and took a breath of fresh air. 'In five years,' he said, 'that youth will be the soul of tact and humanity. At the moment, he’s a bit raw.' He paused. 'By the way, is there a family doctor?'

'Yes. Old gentleman of the name of Hubbard. He’s out at a confinement and ought to be along any time. As soon as he’s been here we'll get the body away.' Hyland frowned. 'Do you know, I doubt if Dr. Hubbard will quite approve of those scissors and the skinned rabbit effect? Thomson, go and get a sheet---or a tarpaulin. And tell the sergeant to ring for the ambulance.' He looked at his watch and turned to Appleby. 'Time’s getting on. I'll give you the hang of it as quickly as I can.'

'Thank you. And it is a beautiful murder, isn’t it?'

Hyland greeted this echo of his first exuberance with a disapproving grunt. His bright silver buttons twinkled on him altogether incongruously now. A temperamental officer, Appleby thought---and brought out a pencil and notebook. 'Well,' he said, 'fire away.'

THERE was silence among the three ladies in the drawing-room. It had lasted for some time. Lucy played patience, her head bent as if she were listening to a whispered message from the cards. Mrs. Gollifer was lost in reverie. Lady Dromio stirred uneasily, rose and walked to the window. 'It must be put an end to somehow,' she said.

Mrs. Gollifer laughed. Beneath the standard lamp where she sat she looked old and ill. 'The evening?' she asked. 'It is true that I must certainly be getting home.'

'Perhaps Lucy would like the drive and a tramp home by moonlight. It is quite her sort of thing.' Lady Dromio had tossed her embroidery into a corner, much as if whatever purpose it had served was over. 'Lucy, would you care----?'

'It is so complicated.' Lucy spoke quietly, but both ladies turned to her at once. They looked hopeful, relieved.

'So many points to consider. One doesn’t know where to begin.'

Lady Dromio nodded. 'If only Oliver----'

'For instance, here are two five of Spades, and I know what is under each.'

Mrs. Gollifer sank back in her chair. Lady Dromio uttered a sound which might have been merely exasperation, or might have been desperation of a very different quality. Lucy glanced briefly at each of them in turn. Her face was pale and expressionless. 'I wonder why Sebastian didn’t come in,' she said. 'Possibly he might be able to help.'

Lady Dromio turned round. 'Certainly not!'

'Since he is a capital bridge player and must have an eye for cards in general.'

'Really, Lucy, this is most----'

'Unfilial, mama? Queen on King and here is the Knave.'

Lady Dromio was silent. She may have been reflecting on the sundry small ways in which she had found an obscure nervous release in plaguing her adopted daughter in former years. But now she turned back to the window and with an agitated gesture threw it open. 'It is insufferably close tonight. There must be a storm coming.'

'Assuredly there is that.' And Lucy nodded. 'It is the wind and the rain for all of us, I am afraid. As for Oliver'---she paused---'I think it is likely that I shall kill him.'

'Lucy, dear, that is idle and horrible talk.'

'It sounds silly, doesn’t it? Nevertheless that is what I think I shall do. To---to be stained so.'

There was something in her voice that stirred Mrs. Gollifer. 'Drive home with me,' she said. 'I can rouse Evans and send you back in the car. Or---or you might stop the night.'

Lucy was silent. But she had abandoned her cards and was slowly, petal by petal, tearing and shredding a rose which she had worn in her bosom. The clock ticked. Lucy glanced down at her hands. 'A rose is a rose,' she said. 'A rose is a rose is a rose.' She looked with the faintest of smiles at Lady Dromio, who appeared alarmed at this mysterious incantation. 'Only a poem,' she said. And there was silence again.

'It isn’t quite dark yet.' Lady Dromio spoke matter-of-factly, as if determined that something without an inner meaning should be said. 'And I think I have seen Sebastian in the garden. Probably he is prowling with a cigar. I shall go and take a turn with him. There is nothing like a cigar in a garden at night.' With nervous haste, or with an odd resolution, she stepped out to the terrace and disappeared.

Lucy looked first at Mrs. Gollifer and then at the clock, which stood at ten forty-five. 'It is funny,' she said, 'but there really seems nothing to say.'

'Then let us not try to say anything.' And for several minutes Mrs. Gollifer was silent. 'But there is surely something to be done.'

'Is it not a little late in the day? Or do you feel that the situation is happily covered by the adage Better Late than Never?'

'I said that something must be done, Lucy. I realize that, for you, the chief shock is about Oliver.'

'I love him.'

'I know you loved him. I think we have all already understood that.'

'It is not what I said. I love him. Now.'

Mrs. Gollifer’s expression flickered; there might have been read in it a mixture of perplexity, mortification and relief. 'Then,' she said, 'you can hardly feel----'

'Oh, dear me, yes. Do you remember the poem which says that each man kills the thing he loves? In certain circumstances it is likely to be true.'

But now Mrs. Gollifer was looking at the younger woman with dilated eyes. 'Lucy,' she cried, 'was Oliver . . . all the time . . . encouraging you?'

Lucy’s lips moved; she seemed to be seeking a precise form of words. 'The phrase, I fear,' she said, 'is inadequate to the specific nature of what has occurred.'

Mrs. Gollifer seemed to take unnaturally long to elucidate this grotesque little speech. When she did so, however, she began to weep.

'How does it go?' And Lucy let the shreds of the last rose-petal fall. 'Some kill their love when they are young, and some when they are old; some strangle with the hands of Lust, some with the hands of Gold. Well, that’s very appropriate. My love has been strangled with the hands of Gold, exactly.'

'We have had more than enough.' Mrs. Gollifer controlled her weeping and rose. 'Tomorrow, perhaps, we shall be of a better mind. And now I am going. Don’t stir. I shall go up for my cloak and then find my car. Kate will understand.' And Mrs. Gollifer left the room.

For a long time Lucy Dromio sat quite still, her hands limp on a table where lay the ruined rose. Then she got up and went to the window. The summer night had fallen. For minutes longer she stared into it, motionless and absorbed. She shivered. Very silently, she slipped into the garden and vanished.

+++

'Look here, what’s all this?' Sebastian Dromio strode into the drawing-room where his sister-in-law and Lucy were sitting. His entrance had rather the effect of the knocking on the gate in Macbeth. A spell painfully broke itself. Lucy picked up her patience cards and shuffled them. Lady Dromio looked about her for her embroidery.

'But, Sebastian, what are you speaking of? And is half past eleven a companionable hour at which to join us?'

'Companionable hour be damned. You don’t look companionable, either of you, if it comes to that. And there’s something uncanny about this house tonight. I don’t like it.' As he spoke to his sister-in-law thus, Sebastian cast at Lucy a considering and almost fearful glance.

'Old houses do sometimes get like that. Or any large building, for that matter. Lucy will tell you that I have been reading a most unusual novel about a big----'

'Stuff and nonsense!' Sebastian gave short shrift to this dive of Lady Dromio’s towards her old refuge. 'Either of you been outside?' he asked sharply.

'We have both of us been outside at one time or another. The night is mild.'

'No doubt.' Sebastian took an irresolute pace about the room. 'Look here, there’s something queer going on. And I knew there would be as soon as Oliver behaved in that deuced queer way this morning.'

'As soon as what?' Lucy had sprung to her feet. 'Uncle Sebastian, whatever are you saying?'

'Good heavens!' Sebastian swung round upon his sisters-in-law. 'Haven’t you told the girl?' He crossed to the window and appeared to be listening uneasily. 'Secrets all the time! And where’s Mary Gollifer?'

'Sebastian,' Lady Dromio explained, 'says that he thought he saw Oliver in London this morning. I didn’t mention it. We---we seemed to have enough on hand.'

'I see.' Lucy too appeared now to be listening. 'And did you tell----' She hesitated.

'Mary? No, I did not.'

'Well, where’s the woman got to?' And Sebastian peered round the drawing-room much as if Mrs. Gollifer might be crouching behind a sofa.

'She left nearly three-quarters of an hour ago.' Lucy was gathering her cards together and putting them away in their box. 'It was when mama was in the garden, so she went without saying good-bye.'

'Three-quarters of an hour ago?' Sebastian snorted nervously. 'Lucy, you must be dreaming. I saw the woman within the last ten minutes.'

Lucy’s eyes rounded. 'But I heard her car!'

'Well, she was down in the garden. I couldn’t think what I had stumbled on. Some blubbering old hag.'

'How dare you!' And Lucy turned upon her uncle, inexplicably flushed and quivering. 'Mrs. Gollifer is mama’s friend. Only a horrible old Edwardian bounder would speak of her in that pot-house way. And that’s what you are.'

'Lucy dear!' Lady Dromio was very pale. 'Perhaps Mary was taken ill and came back. And then perhaps she was---was reluctant to return to the house.'

'She looked ill enough.' Sebastian, who had unexpectedly winced beneath Lucy’s reproaches, now nonchalantly shrugged his shoulders. 'But that’s not all. I met Swindle some time back and he looked ill too. He looked like something out of a coffin. And when he saw me he bolted. Did you ever see Swindle bolt? It’s out of nature.'

Lady Dromio opened the window. 'I shall go and look for Mary, though I hardly believe that what you say can be true. And I advise both of you to go to bed, and to practise more moderate language in the morning.' And Lady Dromio lifted her chin and glanced from one to the other. The woman thus momentarily revealed had not entirely the appearance of one made to live a fantasy life in dream-hotels. 'Good night.'

But Sebastian had stepped to the window too. 'Well,' he said, 'for heaven’s sake let’s keep civil tongues. And I’m coming with you. There’s something queer outside this house as well as in. Not long before I saw Mrs. Gollifer I saw----' He hesitated and glanced swiftly at Lucy. 'I saw a fellow skulking in the laurels. And he appeared to me to be carrying something damned like a bludgeon.'

Lucy too was at the window. 'Is that why you went and got a revolver?'

'What the devil do you mean?'

'I can see the shape of it in the pocket of your dinner-jacket.'

'Well, yes it is.' Somewhat shamefacedly, Sebastian produced the weapon. 'Didn’t want to alarm you unnecessarily, you know.'

Lady Dromio was on the terrace. 'If Mary is being dogged by a man with a bludgeon,' she said, 'there is some cause to be alarmed. Sebastian, you may come with me. But put that thing back in your pocket.'

Sebastian did as he was bid. 'Look here, Kate, you two had better stay behind. It’s not chilly, but there’s no sense----'

Lady Dromio, however, had gone. They followed her. The air was stifling and still; frogs could be heard croaking very far away; and from farther yet, with an effect of inconceivable distance, a train whistled in the night. To the west heavy clouds were banked, but overhead the stars were clear. They moved down into the garden and behind them the house stood silhouetted in moonlight. The lawn where Lady Dromio had entertained Mr. Greengrave that afternoon gleamed like a pale velvet; across it sprawled the distorted shadows of two stone hippogriffs pedestalled high in air---a pomp with which some long-dead Dromio had thought to embellish a large formal garden which had never been brought to completion. The creatures stood with wings outspread and a raised and threatening paw; the shadows seemed crouched and waiting to strike a premeditated blow.

'It was here I saw her.' Sebastian Dromio, peering apprehensively about him, tapped a stone seat which commanded a view of the terrace now at some little remove above. 'What about giving a shout?'

'Not yet.' His sister-in-law was reluctant to make the night hideous with clamour. 'If we look in the courtyard and the avenue for her car----'

'Mama, isn’t there something funny about the house?'

They turned round, startled by the perplexity in Lucy’s voice. Then Sebastian spoke impatiently. 'Funny? I don’t notice anything funny about it. Dash it all, one can’t see much more than the outline of it.'

'That’s so. But----'

Lucy’s sentence was left unfinished---interrupted by the sound of a car door violently slammed somewhere round the side of the house. This was followed by the roar of a powerful engine starting into life, and then by a series of rapid crescendos as gear after gear was engaged in a swift acceleration.

'Well, I’m blessed!' cried Sebastian. 'Somebody going hell for leather down the drive---and without switching any lights on, either. Look, there he goes.' For a second it had been just possible to distinguish a dark, hurtling object beyond the line of elms that ran from Sherris to the highroad. 'Whoever is in that is asking for a broken neck. Surely your Mrs. Gollifer wouldn’t be so crazy.'

Slowly the uproar died away---and as it ebbed it seemed to drain from the three people standing on the lawn any reserve of nervous calm they had left. Lucy shivered. 'Nobody,' she whispered, 'would drive away like that except from---from something horrible.'

Sebastian Dromio took a handkerchief from his pocket and with trembling hand wiped his mouth. He was an old man and physical fear had suddenly gripped him. 'Better get up the servants,' he mumbled. 'Better----'

'But what is this about?' Lady Dromio’s voice was a pitch higher than usual. 'Why are we behaving in this way? We’ve seen a car----'

'And there’s something funny about the house----' Lucy had turned and was again staring at the silhouette of Sherris Hall. 'The chimneys!' she cried.

'Lucy, whatever do you mean?'

'We can’t see the kitchens from here, or the furnace, But there are two chimneys smoking, and there should be only one.' It was true that two trails of smoke, one small and the other larger, were rising straight into the sky, clear against the moonlight.

Sebastian snorted. 'Chimneys!' he said. 'Who the deuce cares whether there’s smoke from every chimney in the house.'

'I do. No smoke without fire.'

'Fire?' Lady Dromio’s voice rose still further.

'There ought to be only one---Swindle’s. Nobody else would dream of lighting a fire on a night like this. And it must be a big fire to make all that smoke.'

'Nonsense!' Lady Dromio was driven to a panic denial of the evidence of her senses. 'Nobody could light a fire at this hour. I don’t believe there is a single fire laid in the house.'

'But there is---in the study. Oliver has come home.'

There was a moment’s silence. Startlingly it was broken by a new voice---no human voice, but a nightingale’s, piercing and full from a moonlit cedar beyond the lawn. They stood transfixed and the song rolled over them in burst upon burst of triumph and agony.

'Oliver has come home.' Lucy repeated the words almost in a whisper. Then her voice rose wildly. 'And sang within the bloody wood----'

'Lucy, be quiet!' Lady Dromio turned upon her adopted daughter, her face blanched and ghastly in the moonlight.

'While Agamemnon cried aloud----'

From the house came voices, calling, and the sound of someone running along the terrace. Again the passionate song came from the cedar. They were hurrying, all three, between tall hedges, past the menacing hippogriffs, up a flight of stone steps. And to meet them came Swindle, grotesque in carpet slippers. His face was convulsed and twitching; his mouth hung open; he made as if to work it and only a horrible slobbering sound came. Sebastian grasped him and shook him roughly. 'What the----'

And Swindle found his voice. 'Your ladyship,' he cried, 'your ladyship---it’s Sir Oliver! He’s dead, your ladyship---burnt to death in his study.'

They looked at each other fearfully and in a sick silence. Unheeding, the nightingale sang out its ecstasy beyond the lawn.

IT was a quarter to nine when Geoffrey Gollifer drew up outside his mother’s house and ran indoors, almost colliding with Martin, the butler, who had held so luckless a telephone conversation with Swindle an hour before.

'Good evening, Martin. Is my mother at home?'

'Why, good evening, Mr. Geoffrey. This is a great surprise. And Mrs. Gollifer is out, sir, I’m sorry to say. Dining at Sherris and drove herself over in the car. I understood her to say you would be sailing tomorrow morning, sir.'

'And so I am, Martin. That’s what I’ve come about. It seems that when I brought my mother back from Switzerland in January I left my passport with hers. I think I’ll drive over and ask her about it. . . . I suppose Miss Lucy is at Sherris?'

'I suppose so, Mr. Geoffrey.' Martin’s tone was benevolent.

Geoffrey Gollifer glanced at his watch. 'Would you say they’d have finished dinner?'

'Why, yes, sir. By the time you arrive there I venture to think they'll be taking their coffee.'

'Good.' Geoffrey Gollifer turned to the door. Then he hesitated. 'Sir Oliver not back there yet, I suppose?'

'I couldn’t positively say, Mr. Geoffrey. But, come to think of it, it seems very likely, sir. He has been in expectation for some time. There has been quite a mystery, if I may say so, sir.'

'Mystery, Martin? Tommyrot. Lot of country gossip, I suppose.'

'As you say, sir. But I do think he may be back, and this little dinner a celebrating of the fact. Not that the mistress mentioned anything of that kind, Mr. Geoffrey.'

'I see.' Geoffrey Gollifer did not sound particularly pleased. 'Well, I think I’ll just telephone across and ask where the passports are kept. It will save time. Just see if you can get Sherris on the line.'

'Very good, Mr. Geoffrey.'

But Sherris for some reason was unobtainable. And Geoffrey frowned irresolutely. 'Dash it all,' he said, 'where are such things kept? Would my mother lock them up?'

Martin, perhaps because his mumblings to the girl of the local exchange had been ineffective and half-hearted, was eager to help. 'Very probably your passport would be in Mrs. Gollifer’s bureau, sir. I believe that one or two of the drawers are kept locked, but as likely as not the document would not be in one of those.'

'Very well, I’ll have a look. I don’t suppose my mother will mind. Just come along, Martin, and lend me a hand.'

The bureau was ancient and capacious, and for some time Geoffrey rummaged in vain, Martin making ineffective fumbling motions beside him. 'Dash it all, Martin,' he said irritably, 'don’t you think you could get through on the telephone, after all? We might be a couple of burglars.'

'Well, sir----'

'And now this drawer is stuck. Damn!' The drawer at which Geoffrey was tugging had flown open with a splintering crash. 'It must have been locked after all.'

'Yes, sir. The piece is an old one and the woodwork must have been unsound.' Martin was respectfully malicious. 'Mrs. Gollifer has always been particularly attached to this bureau.'

'And here I am behaving like a bull in a china-shop.' Irritably and rather shamefacedly, Geoffrey Gollifer was flicking over papers in the drawer. Suddenly his hand stayed itself and turned a couple of papers slowly. 'Martin,' he said, and his voice had sharpened unaccountably, 'go and fetch me a brandy-and-soda.'

'Very good, Mr. Geoffrey.'

'But first, just find Thomas and ask him to make sure that there is plenty of petrol in my car.'

It was nearly ten minutes before Martin returned. The bureau was closed. Geoffrey Gollifer was standing by the window, looking out into the gathering dusk. His passport was in his hand. 'I found it,' he said.

'I'm glad to hear it, sir.' Martin, as he set down his tray, glanced at his employer’s son in some surprise. Mr. Geoffrey, it seemed to him, had spoken with altogether disproportionate emphasis.

'Yes, I found it. I had a notion it was there---quite dimly. And---by Jove!---it was. . . . You say Sir Oliver is probably at Sherris?'

'I believe he may be, sir.'

'Well, I suppose I had better be off.' And Geoffrey Gollifer drained his glass. 'By the way, Martin, where have they put those army things of mine?'

'In your old dressing-room, sir. I put them carefully away myself.'

'Good. I'll just run up and get something.'

Geoffrey strode to the door. Martin followed. 'Can I be of any help to you, sir?'

'No thank you, Martin. I’m pretty sure I don’t need any help.'

And Geoffrey Gollifer went off upstairs. In the old way, Martin thought---with a sort of jump at the bottom and then two steps at a time. And Martin shook his head doubtfully. He was getting on, he knew, and the mistress was already hinting at a pension. But was it so bad that he had come to fancy things? For he thought he had seen a young and handsome face suddenly transformed---pale, strained, and the forehead showing beads of sweat.

+++

Smoothly the car slid away from the little inn. The hands of the clock on the dashboard were at nine-fifteen. It was growing dusk.

The two men drove silently for some time. 'Not a bad idea,' said the first, 'turning off the main road to dine. The bigger places are most of them a bit spoilt nowadays. It was a quiet spot, that.'

'Yes,' said the second, 'quite out of the way.'

The first glanced at a sign-post. 'Getting near,' he said, and paused. 'You know, I just don’t see how I can face it.'

'Oh, come, my dear chap. That’s quite morbid, surely.'

'I suppose it is. But I’ve always been a bit like that. And you just don’t know what it----'

'Say!' The second man, who was driving, braked sharply and drew into the side of the road. 'Did you see that? Looked as if it might have been a hit-and-run accident. Fellow knocked into the ditch.'

'Good lord! I didn’t notice.' The first man spoke not altogether attentively, as if his thoughts were far away. 'Better get out and look.'

'Don’t you bother, I’ll just run back.'

And the second man climbed out of the car. He was absent a couple of minutes. 'Nothing at all,' he said casually when he returned. 'Just a tramp dead drunk and fast asleep. He'll come to no harm. We'll drive on.'

And the first man nodded. 'Right-ho,' he said. 'Better face it. And the fellow will come to no harm, as you say.'

+++

Oliver’s Gollifer. It rankled, Mrs. Gollifer found as she bent down to admire Lady Dromio’s embroidery. That she should be supposed at her age to be any man’s mistress was---or ought to be---merely comical. Doubtless there were such horrible old women, and what did it matter if she were taken for one of them by a horrible old man? And Sebastian Dromio was certainly that. It had become clear during dinner that he was---worried, but he had seemed to take this as licence for being as disagreeable as he pleased---except to Lucy, for whom he seemed to have some slight affection. A horrible old man spreading a horrible slander. . . . But it was not the slander itself that really stung. It was---Mrs. Gollifer discovered with some surprise---the disgusting collocation of gobbling sounds with which Lucy Dromio had ridiculed it. Oliver’s Gollifer. . . .

She had greatly disrelished wedding herself to a Gollifer. The outlandish name had been one of two considerations which had weighed almost decisively against her going to the altar with the very wealthy man who bore it. . . . But she had gone, all the same. And Samuel Gollifer had proved a very decent fellow. They had teamed up well. She had been very sorry when he died.

It was not all that man desires (thought Mrs. Gollifer, looking thoughtfully at Lucy laying out a card-table, and at the same time letting her mind stray back across the years). But it was all that man requires---or approximately so. And, for good measure, there had been Geoffrey, her only son. Mrs. Gollifer was sometimes puzzled to know where her love for Geoffrey came from. But it was there. . . . Mrs. Gollifer’s finger made a little arabesque in air, tactfully picking out some special elegance in Lady Dromio’s needlecraft. If only, after all, Geoffrey and Lucy----

Mrs. Gollifer sighed. Unfortunately there was no possibility. of that.

The little silver clock on the mantelpiece struck half past nine. Lady Dromio looked at it and then at the empty hearth beneath. 'I had rather hoped,' she said, 'that we might have a fire. But Swindle advised against it. And no doubt it is rather warm.'

Kate Dromio, Mrs. Gollifer thought, increasingly liked conversation of a comfortable inanity. She liked the convention that life was comfortable: and unexacting---not merely on its surfaces, but basically as well. That woman in Jane Austen---or was it the Brontés? Mrs. Gollifer wondered---who just sat on a sofa with a pug: Kate liked to suggest that for her life was like that, But it was not, nor probably would Kate have found it tolerable if it were so. For in her old friend there was something lurking and unassuaged, something that Mrs. Gollifer by no means understood.

'Then for once Swindle was right in his notion of what would be comfortable.' Lucy had opened a pack of patience cards and now came to sit down beside Mrs. Gollifer. 'It’s one of those close nights that seem to go on getting warmer until midnight. And I’m sure there is only one fire in the house, Swindle’s own. He sits before it, you know, all the year round, drinking port. If we ever see the end of Swindle, which I doubt, it will surely be as the result of spontaneous combustion. He is much too wary just to tumble into the fire----'

'Good gracious!' Lady Dromio was alarmed. 'Swindle is getting rather old. And they say he walks about in his sleep. It would be dreadful if----'

'No,' Lucy shook her head. 'It will be spontaneous combustion like the man who drank too much gin.'

'I don’t think I heard of him. No doubt it comes of not reading the newspapers carefully. Such odd things, Mary dear, Lucy knows about, clever girl. Not that I don’t do a great deal of reading myself, particularly when Oliver is away and we hardly entertain at all. Or only as we are doing tonight, which is the nicest way, I think. Mary, I wonder if you have read a novel, a most unusual novel, about a big---Lady Dromio paused, frowned and looked about her. Apparently the book itself was necessary if she was to be quite sure of what it was that was big in it. 'Lucy, can I possibly have mislaid that absorbing story? The one old Mrs. Rundle recommended to Mr. Greengrave’s niece on that dreadful ship. They had storms all the way, you know. And although Mr. Greengrave himself---not that he was on board---is an excellent sailor---indeed, he was in the navy as a chaplain, I believe, when he was a young man . . . or was that old Canon Newton at Sherris Magna?' Lady Dromio paused, herself rather at sea. 'Well, Mr. Greengrave has a niece----'

'Talking of ships,' said Mrs. Gollifer, 'is there any news of Oliver returning? When I drove up and saw Sebastian on the terrace, I thought for a moment that it was he. I was quite disappointed.'

'Were you?' Lady Dromio was surprised and vague. 'But of course, Oliver has really been away for quite a long time.'

Mrs. Gollifer was silent. This was surely a company far too intimate for such ghastly insincerities. Or it ought to be that. Oh, what a tangled web we weave, when first we practise to deceive. Indeed the web can eventually become a noose. Or an ulcer. Or a secret wound through which one may be bled to death. . . . There were only the three of them in the room and Sebastian was unlikely for some time to abandon such port as Swindle resigned to him. Mrs. Gollifer stubbed out her cigarette, and knew as she did so that a resolve had formed in her mind like a suddenly precipitated crystal. 'Lucy---' she began----

Lady Dromio dropped her embroidery.

+++

Down below, Swindle stoked his own fire. He had locked the door---a very definite indication that the household was to expect no further directions or services from him that night. He poured himself out a glass of port and put on his carpet slippers. But his expression held no suggestion of a desire for slumber. Perhaps he was by nature nocturnal; certainly his complexion suggested a creature habituated to emerge from his hole after dark.

And yet Swindle in his solitude was looking rather more human than usual. Signs of doubt, of uneasiness, of an obscure internal debate were apparent in him. He sat down at his table and brought out a sheaf of papers from a drawer. These he fell to studying with concentration, occasionally making a pencil jotting in a notebook at his side. He shook his head peevishly, dolefully; at the same time the gesture suggested resolution. He made more jottings, sifted the papers with care into three piles, produced a column of figures relating to each. They represented (an observer might have guessed) bills of various degrees of urgency. Swindle turned to the drawer again and brought out three rubber bands. Whatever were the affairs in hand it was evident that he had no power to achieve more than  a preliminary ordering of them now.

Again Swindle looked uneasy. He pushed away the papers, hesitated and looked round his room as if to make quite sure that he was unobserved. He drew from the pocket of his ancient tail-coat an orange-coloured envelope and with fumbling fingers drew out the telegram inside. He read this through, frowned in indignation or protest, thrust it away again, eased himself into his arm-chair and drew the glass of port to his side. The fire was blazing, the little room stifling, everything invited to sleep. But Swindle sat wide-eyed, staring at the toes of his slippers. The house was silent. The only sound was the ticking of a watch and this watch Swindle presently produced and eyed with hostility---a handsome half-hunter on a gold chain, such as elderly and valued retainers sometimes receive from their employers. He shook his head once more, muttered some protest and rose painfully from his chair. He reached for shoes, thought better of this, and in his old slippers shuffled noiselessly to the door. Softly, he turned the lock, cautiously he put his head out and looked to right and left. Reassured, he stepped into the corridor and made his way silently, like a burglar, to the service stairs.

The time by the half-hunter had been ten minutes to ten.

+++

Mr. Greengrave had dined with old Canon Newton at Sherris Magna and now he was on his way home. If he had excused himself a little earlier than his host would have wished---perhaps a shade earlier than was civil, indeed---it was the innate caution of his nature that was responsible. The Canon was a lover of good talk, and in an age in which it is unusual to be able to converse at all this accomplishment had made his society much prized throughout the diocese. But the Canon was also a lover of good wine, and he was equally esteemed because of this. The Bishop and he, it was averred by the irreverent, bartered spiritual for spirituous advice; there were few considerable cellars in the county in the replenishing of which Canon Newton did not have a say; he even enjoyed the unstinted confidence and regard of Mr. Swindle of Sherris Hall.

It would be cruel to boil this down to the statement that Canon Newton drank. Nevertheless this was how Mr. Green- grave secretly regarded the matter. Mr. Greengrave had no head for liquor. It quickly made him argumentative rather than merely talkative, and this was an embarrassment when one’s host expected---as Canon Newton did---an unfaltering standard of polished Landorian prose. And if wine made Mr. Greengrave argumentative (so that he was uneasily aware, as he talked, of the image of some rather quarrelsome and quite unrefined person emerging volubly from a pub) it by no means left him there. The painful fact was that even Canon Newton’s good wine rapidly produced the sort of consequences exploited in comic papers---in those less seemly comic papers that do not ban drunkenness as a staple of humour. Upon Mr. Greengrave after a party the tangible and visible surfaces of life were liable alarmingly to advance and recede, tilt and rock. And although rats, mice and dogs invariably, so far as he could remember, retained the hues with which Providence had endowed them, their number was liable to become variable and uncertain, much as if they had ceased to be the creatures of God’s hand and become symbols of the higher physics. All this Mr. Greengrave disliked, and particularly when he had to drive himself through the little watering-place of Sherris Magna on the way home to his country rectory.

So he had left early and Canon Newton, after amiable farewells, had returned to the golden cadences with which he was entertaining his other guests.

The night was pleasant, although a shade close and surprisingly warm. Mr. Greengrave let down the hood of his lumbering old car and decided that fifteen miles an hour represented what it would be judicious to attempt. He also decided that although much attention must be given to the road it would be advantageous to choose some substantial but not too difficult theme for meditation. This, he felt, would assist him to maintain the higher brain centres in operation and minimize the risk of an icy nap. He might, for instance, plan out the heads of a sermon for the Sunday after next. There had been some heavy drinking at the cricket club; he might well choose a text which would enable him to take glancing notice of that. But then again an orchard had been robbed and, even more serious, a good deal of poultry had been disappearing in Sherris Parva. Only two days ago Mrs. Marple had missed two Khaki Campbells. And although it was likely enough that toughs from Sherris Magna were responsible Mr. Greengrave had by no means liked the look of young Ted Morrow when the matter had been mentioned in his presence that very morning. . . .

Communing thus with himself, Mr. Greengrave drove sedately on his way. The landscape, he noted with satisfaction, was behaving tolerably well. He looked up at the moon---a trifle apprehensively, recalling Shakespeare’s words:

  My Lord, they say five moons were seen tonight. . .

But the heavens too were behaving well; the mild luminary shone single in its element; nor did certain stars shoot madly from their spheres, a disconcerting phenomenon which Mr. Greengrave had on certain previous occasions observed.

Mr. Greengrave was so pleased by this that he forgot about his sermon---whether on pilfering or drunkenness---and began to sing. Mr. Greengrave sang loudly. The words were those of ‘Onward, Christian Soldiers,’ so that nothing but edification could have resulted had he at this time been encountered by any of his flock. Nevertheless under the inspiriting influence of this war-song Mr. Greengrave’s foot pressed imperceptibly down on the accelerator, and fifteen miles an hour was very soon exchanged for thirty. He pulled himself up with a jerk. Jollity, even of a robustly clerical sort, plainly would not do. A more chastening---nay, depressing---theme had better be sought. It was thus that Mr. Greengrave, with results unpredictable at this juncture although already imminent, turned his thoughts to the people at Sherris Hall.

From the point of view of pastoral care the view in that quarter was commonly bleak enough. But even here Mr. Greengrave, thanks to Canon Newton’s vintages, found cause for mild satisfaction now. Lucy Dromio, Lady Dromio’s adopted daughter, was a young person open to much pastoral censure, and he had himself spoken to her with some severity that afternoon. And Lucy’s reply had been to say something flattering---flattering because obscurely true. Mr. Greengrave liked finding out about people. Well, there was perhaps nothing particularly gratifying to self-esteem in a diagnosis such as that. But Mr. Greengrave---Lucy had added---had the sort of brain that pieces people together and sees what a thing is all about. . . .

Now, in a way this was outrageously untrue. Mr. Greengrave was not really at all clever (he had only to think of himself in colloquy with Canon Newton to realize this) and therefore it was impossible that he should have the marked powers of analysis and synthesis that such an opinion suggested. But in a way Lucy was right---because often Mr. Greengrave did successfully piece people together and see what a thing was about; only he did this in a substantially intuitive way. From time to time he would see, and in doing so would leave more abstractly perceptive people standing.

He had seen that in the Sherris hinterland some enigma of mystery reposed. And Lucy saw this too---or perhaps Lucy had less an intuition than some positive if fragmentary knowledge. It was a bond between them. And she had actually asked him to investigate---to tackle some ill-defined problem of family relationship troubling the awareness of each. That in a situation so nebulous the two of them might have quite different notions of where the mystery lay was an intellectual conception which did not occur to Mr. Greengrave. Now, driving carefully through the deepening summer dusk, he was about to let his mind play upon the Dromios with whatever result might come. But this never happened. For, quite suddenly he saw.

Really saw. For it was a revelation as purely visual as it was spontaneous, and it was won sheerly from the void, without preparation or labour, like some line that precipitates a great poem. And this vivid and revealing appearance, astounding in itself, of course rendered much more disconcerting what was to happen to Mr. Greengrave a few minutes later.

He continued to see the winding road to Sherris Parva, familiar in the lengthening shadows. But floating upon this he saw two faces---faces which were also familiar enough, but which had the superior reality of images compelled upon one by powerful forces deep in the mind. The two faces floated before him more or less at opposite ends of the windscreen. And then they coalesced, drifting together rather like complementary pictures viewed through a stereoscope. And at the moment of their coming together Mr. Greengrave exclaimed aloud. 'Well, I’m damned!' he said.

Instantly the vision vanished. Mr. Greengrave was astounded and shocked at what he had seen, but he was perhaps even more distressed at what he had said. What would Canon Newton think of an ejaculation so little pious---so profane,---indeed? And it was the more offensive in that what was untrue of himself had been revealed to him as a painful approximation to plain fact in the case of certain other persons. People among whom such things happened must surely feel like lost souls. . . . Mr. Greengrave drew into the side of the road and stopped his car. The thing needed thinking out. Moreover the shock of his discovery---for he never doubted that it was that---had upset whatever precarious control he had achieved over the physical world about him. The ditch was in motion; it was behaving less like a ditch than a reptile. The poplars undulated like great dark flames. The road flowed as if it were water.

Mr. Greengrave closed his eyes and laid his head on his arms, the better to cope with the situation which had started upon him. His discovery, he knew, imposed some duty, but for the moment he could by no means discern what that duty was. He was not a policeman, nor was he yet assured that there was matter in which the law would interest itself. For instance, questions of inheritance might be involved. Supposing there had been a marriage----

At this moment Mr. Greengrave’s interior counsels were interrupted by the sound of an approaching motor car. He looked up, turned round and saw that it was about to overtake him. Twilight had barely fallen; the moon was still mere tissue-paper in the sky; at close range visibility was scarcely affected. Nevertheless the shades of evening lent something insubstantial to the scene, and would have done so even were that scene not faintly gyrating under the influence of Canon Newton’s wines. The car approached. And once more Mr. Greengrave saw two faces. Once more they were familiar. But this time they did not drift together; rather it was as if by some monstrous alchemy they had been torn apart. Moreover this was no vision, no mere retinal image. To what he now saw something in the external world did after some fashion correspond.

The car passed on. To Mr. Greengrave what had happened was at once clear and humiliating. There was still only one moon in the sky and he himself (for he investigated this) had four fingers and a thumb on each hand. Nevertheless, and like any bibulous person in a vulgar print----

And then Mr. Greengrave wondered. Did not this plain betrayal by the senses cast very substantial doubt upon the reliability of that earlier and purely inward vision?

At least it would be necessary to go carefully. In every sense to go carefully, thought Mr. Greengrave. And he drove on in third gear.

AT the end of Pollard's account of his visit to Robert Dell, Henry Landfear and Superintendent Crookshank exchanged expressive looks.

'Yes,' Crookshank said gloomily. 'That's how it was done, all right. No doubt at all.'

Henry Landfear agreed, stubbing out a cigarette end in an aheady over-full ashtray.

'No doubt and no proof,' he said with finality. 'Can't you hear the whole business about the watches being torn to shreds in court, always supposing the D.P.P. would let the case go forward?'

As Pollard remained silent, he looked at him challengingly.

'Hell! Would you charge Davina Grant with her aunt's murder on the evidence we've got?'

'Not on the evidence we've got at the moment.'

'I'm not with you.'

'I'd try shock tactics to get some more. All according to the book, of course.'

'Well, if you've got any practicable suggestions, let's have 'em, by all means.'

'All right,' Pollard replied, astonished by the speed at which his mind had been working, even while he was recounting the interview with Robert Dell. 'Quite a simple plan has occurred to me. We know that Davina Grant and Akerman are going back to Upway Manor for supper after their meeting this evening, and that Peter Grant's going out with Kate Ling. We've got a warrant for Akerman's arrest on a charge of murdering the hippy. You get one for Davina's arrest. Both of them are overconfident. It's a year and over since the two deaths, and no questions asked, and they're in a state of mind which makes people highly vulnerable to unexpected accusations. We arrive at the Manor, take them by surprise, and I charge Akerman. If he keeps his head and neither of them will talk, you---the Stoneham team---are as you were. You don't execute your warrant, that's all. But from the impression I've formed of Davina Grant I think she'll go to pieces. She's crazy about Akerman, and she's a very stupid, if cunning, young woman. The whole thing may end in their going for each other: it wouldn't surprise me if Akerman's real feelings about her burst out. If this sort of fracas develops I think it's highly probable that they'll give themselves away, and it'll be up to us to freeze on to anything relevant that's said.'

During the silence that followed he watched Henry Landfear and Crookshank stare at him, digest his proposal, and then, to their own surprise, recognise that there could be something to it. Crookshank, weighed down with the sense of having failed in the original enquiry into Heloise Grant's death, was the first to speak.

'I take your point,' he said. 'All of 'em, come to that. As you say, we don't stand to lose if it doesn't come off.'

'What I'm thinking about is what we're going to look like if it does come off,' Henry Landfear said heavily, 'seeing that we seem to have missed out completely over Heloise Grant.'

'Surely,' Pollard replied, 'it won't be the first time that fresh evidence turns up about a murder in the course of an investigation into something else?'

Henry Landfear suddenly grinned, relieving the tense atmosphere.

'You're a good sort, Pollard. Well, what about it, Crookshank, if you're game? It's all right by me. Where do we go from here? Time's short.'

'Better find out what time the meeting they're going to starts, hadn't we?'

'That's easy. My wife's on the Friends of Cattesmoor committee. I'll ring her right away . . .'

The meeting, they learned, was to begin at half-past five. After some discussion it was settled that Pollard, Toye, Crookshank and support should go up in two cars at half-past six, and park farther up the hill, just out of sight of the entrance to Upway Manor, in the lane leading to Cattesmoor.

'After that,' Pollard said, 'it'll be a case of playing it by ear. Waiting on events and whatever.'

Shortly afterwards they dispersed to get a hasty meal before going into action. Back at their hotel Pollard and Toye collected sandwiches and beer and made for a table in a corner of the bar. As they ate they talked intermittently.

'I'd have wanted a month of Sundays to get his scheme worked out,' Toye said.

'The idea hit me just as we got to the Super's door. Now, of course, I'm getting cold feet.'

'You mean you're afraid they won't talk, and it'll be a washout as far as the girl goes?'

'Not quite. It's the feeling I've had all along that we haven't got to the bottom of things. What really sparked off that skeleton business. As if even now something could pop out and hit me . . . Anyway, we're committed to going ahead over Akerman. Have another pie---I've tasted worse. It may be some time before we get a chance of any more grub.'

As they ate they intermittently followed a TV news programme. Local items considered newsworthy by the producer flicked on and off the screen. A fat woman was interviewed about an alleged poltergeist in her cottage. The public were warned about faulty electric light bulbs included in a consignment of Simtraps delivered to local shops. A group of villages were lobbying County Hall about the inadequacy of their refuse collections . . . 'Finished?' Pollard asked. 'Let's push off, then.'

Punctually at half-past six Crookshank, a sergeant, and a constable drove off from the carpark at the police station. Pollard, Toye and a second constable followed at an interval of ten minutes, it having been agreed that to go in convoy was unnecessarily conspicuous. At Upway Manor Toye turned the Rover in the drive entrance, and backed gingerly up the unsurfaced lane beyond.

'Cheer up,' Pollard encouraged him. 'It's only round the first bend.'

A wait of unknown duration now lay ahead. The sergeant and the constables had brought evening papers, and sat on the bank reading them. Crookshank moved to the back seat of the Stoneham car and became engrossed in official documents. Toye produced maps and studied the landscape over the gate. Pollard strolled on up the hill towards the moor, trying to recapture the atmosphere of his setting out on the Possel Way less than a fortnight earlier. He saw that even the countryside had perceptibly changed. The hedgerows had wilted under the blazing sun and were scattered with the petals of the wild roses, while the grasses were filmed with fine dust. The moor when he reached it now had a tawny scorched look, accentuated by the yellowing light of the evening sun. He stood for a few moments gazing westward along the route of the Possel Way. The track was inviting, compelling even, he thought, and wondered if something of the feelings of the pilgrims who had used it could possibly still hang about it. Reluctantiy returning to the present he retraced his steps and joined the rest of the party. Crookshank looked up and gave him a brief nod as he passed.

Time dragged on interminably and a degree of tension began to make itself felt. Several people made an involuntary movement as a bird suddenly scuttered in the hedge. Shadows lengthened imperceptibly, and bright points of light began to stab the blue haze over Stoneham on the far side of the valley. Then, at long last, heads went up sharply. There was a moment of indecision followed by a slight stiffening as the sound of an approaching car became unmistakable. It increased to a level at which it was possible to distinguish two cars, and reached a climax as they slowed to turn into the drive. It died away rapidly and ceased. Two car doors slammed. There was an outburst of barking.

'Right,' Pollard said.

He led the way to the gates. The supporting Stoneham men faded into the shrubs bordering the short drive to the garage, while Toye and Crookshank followed him across the lawn in the direction of the house. As before there were lights in the drawing-room windows.

Suddenly Toye stopped dead.

'That's not Akerman's car outside the house. It's the B.M.W., he said.

Pollard had the feeling of the ground giving way under his feet, the sense of a premonition fulfilled increasing his dismay. He took a grip on himself as Crookshank swore under his breath, but before he could speak a male figure appeared at one of the windows and flung it up at the bottom.

'Hullo?' Peter Grant called enquiringly. 'Why, it's Superintendent Pollard! And Superintendent Crookshank . . . Nothing wrong, is there?'

'Good evening,' Pollard said, walking on ahead. 'We wanted a word with Mr. Akerman, and we've been told that he's coming here to supper with your sister after a meeting in the town. I take it they haven't got back yet?'

'No, they haven't. I shouldn't think they'll be long. But do come in, won't you? I'll shut the dog in the kitchen.'

'Car,' mouthed Crookshank as they walked to the front door. Pollard nodded, as Peter Grant appeared on the step.

'Come in,' he said, looking put out. 'I'd no idea George Akerman was coming to supper. Rather tiresome. My fiancee and I wanted to discuss something with my sister, and had our own supper early. Kate's just making some coffee. You'll join us, won't you?'

He ushered them into the drawing room and vanished, saying something about extra cups. Crookshank was at the open window in a flash, giving a low whistle. His sergeant appeared.

'Move the small car out of sight round the back of the house. Not the B.M.W., the other. Sharp!'

He drew his head and shoulders in again abruptly, knocking over a small table sending unopened letters and a reading lamp flying, and swore once again as Toye hurried to pick them up.

'Put paid to the bulb, I suppose. Try it, will you?'

Toye pressed the switch without result, and began to examine the lamp to see if the bulb had worked loose in its socket. The next moment he put it down quickly and stooped to pull out the wall plug. Pollard and Crookshank stared at him in surprise.

'The bulb's a Suntrap,' he said half-apologetically. 'Best to be on the safe side after what we heard about 'em on the box just now.'

'Suntrap? Not the sort of cut-price job you'd expect to find in a house like this,' Crookshank commented.

'How long has the scare about faulty specimens been going on round here?' Pollard asked, conscious of a constriction in the region of his spine.

'Since the end of last week. Some turned up in shops in Wintlebury. We've put out warnings.'

The crunch of tyres on gravel came from outside. A quick glance from the window showed Kate Ling's Mini Clubman being competently manhandled. Voices and the chink of crockery sounded in the hall, and Kate Ling walked into the room carrying a cake on a plate, followed by Peter Grant with the coffee tray. She wore a long flowered skirt and a silk top of a blue that matched her eyes; she gave Pollard a smile. It faded as she sensed the tension in the group by the window. Crookshank took a step forward.

'Sorry to sound abrupt, Mr. Grant, but I want to know what make of electric bulb you normally use in this house.'

Peter Grant put down the tray and faced him incredulously.

'Vestas. I get them wholesale.' There was more than a trace of annoyance in his expression and voice. 'What is all this in aid of?'

'Do you ever use a brand called Suntrap?' Crookshank rapped out, disregarding the question.

'N-never heard of it,' Peter Grant retorted, stuttering slightly in rising indignation tinged with uneasiness.

Kate put her hand on his arm.

'I have,' she said. 'This evening, for the first time as it happens. There've been dangerous faulty ones, and there was a news flash on TV warning people.'

'We'll take a look at this particular specimen,' Crookshank announced.

Toye, already prepared for action with a handkerchief wrapped round his hand, removed the bulb from the reading lamp with extreme care and held it out for inspection.

'Is this the chair where you sit when you come in of an evening to open your mail and take a look at the paper, Mr. Grant?' Crookshank asked.

'At this time of year, yes.'

'Then you and Inspector Toye here are a couple of bloody lucky chaps. See this bit of wire coming through the base of the bulb? Switch on the lamp and it becomes lethal. Fortunately I banged into the table and knocked everything over, smashing the bulb, and it led to our noticing the brand.'

Kate Ling's hold on Peter Grant's arm tightened. He suddenly burst into speech.

'Look here, I've had about enough of this. What the hell are you getting at? Nobody could put in that bulb without spotting the end of wire.'

'My point exactly, Mr Grant.'

In the pause which followed, the distant sound of an approaching car was heard. There was a sudden change of atmosphere as Pollard took over.

'Take Miss Ling into another room and stay with her there,' he ordered peremptorily. 'It's a police order,' he barked out as neither of them moved. 'Get cracking, do you hear?'

As if returning to life they turned and went, Peter's arm round Kate's shoulders as he steered her out of the room. Crookshank flung himself into the chair by the reading lamp and looked enquiringly at Pollard, who nodded approval and signed to Toye to come to the other end of the room. As two cars came down the drive and drew up outside the house, he looked down at Toye with a sense of inexpressible relief.

Car doors slammed successively. Davina Grant's girlish enthusiasm came through the open window.

'Oh, George, isn't it a welcoming old house after a long hard day? What's dear Mrs. Broom got in the fridge for supper, I wonder? Peter!' she trilled. 'Here we are!'

A moment later she walked into the drawing room. Pollard saw her eyes fly to the chair. At the sight of Crookshank reclining in it she froze in her tracks. Her hand flew to her mouth in a clumsy involuntary gesture. George Akerman, immediately behind, almost collided with her.

'Not where you expected to find him, I take it?' Crookshank enquired coolly.

Her face darkened and became ugly with fury. Pollard came forward, pointedly ignoring her.

'George Akerman,' he heard himself saying. 'I hold a warrant for your arrest on a charge of murdering a man, whose identity is at present unknown, on 1st April last year. I warn you that anything you say will be taken down and may be used in evidence.'

For a moment no one spoke or moved. He identified a curious sound as Davina Grant breathing heavily. George Akerman's expression was impassive.

'I deny the charge,' he said mechanically. A slight movement behind him indicated that the three Stoneham men had moved in.

Davina Grant took a lunging step towards Pollard.

'Youre mad! It's monstrous!' she spat at him. 'How dare you? I'm going to ring the Chief Constable.'

Turning to go out into the hall she found the way barred by uniformed men. Her name rang out from behind her. She swung round to find herself facing Crookshank.

'Davina Grant,' he repeated. 'I hold a warrant for your arrest on a charge of murdering Heloise Grant on 20th May 1975----'

The caution was lost in a peal of triumphant laughter.

'You can't prove it,' she mocked him.

The stunned silence which followed was broken at last by George Akerman.

'You killed her?'

The words dropped into the stillness like heavy stones into deep water.

Davina Grant gave a secretive complacent smile as she turned to him.

'You'd planned to marry her, hadn't you? I was watching . . . I was afraid she might be hotting up a bit when you were seeing so much of each other over that stupid Possel Way . . . What a silly man you are. Don't you see that I can give you everything she could have given, and a lot more?'

She leered at him.

With a swiftness of movement that took the encircling police off guard, George Akerman had her by the throat. Illumination flooded into Pollard's mind as he helped to drag him away.

The room was suddenly full of people, noise and shouted orders from Crookshank. George Akerman, limp and unresisting, offered no opposition to being handcuffed and led to a chair.

'Let me sit on the other side of the room,' he said unexpectedly.

'Why?' Pollard asked.

In reply he got a jerk of the head towards Heloise Grant's portrait.

'I'd like to look at that . . . I shan't see it again.'

'Move him across,' Pollard said. 'And get the car, Toye, will you? We'll take him down to the station.'

Crookshank, looking preoccupied, came up.

'She's not badly hurt,' he said. 'The ambulance is on its way. Let it get through first, will you, as the lane's narrow. The young couple are following on to the hospital in their own car. I'm leaving a chap in charge up here for the moment . . . Be seeing you later.'

+++

George Akerman was informed of his legal rights but decided to send for a solicitor.

'I'll make a statement, if that's what you want,' he said dully. 'I'm not a murderer. I never touched him. I found him with a dirty great fire blazing up against one of the Wanton Wenches. I yelled at him and started to run, meaning to give the blighter a bashing. He took to his heels, suddenly crumpled up and crashed into one of the stones . . . His face was just a bloody mess . . .'

'You should have got him to the Biddle hospital at once.'

'No point. He'd had it. Heart, I suppose. I was an II.A.M.C. orderly in the war.'

'And this was on Tuesday, 1st April, last year, the day you said you spent at home?'

'Yes. When you started nosing into things the best thing seemed to be to switch the Monday and the Tuesday round, and hope that if anybody'd spotted me they wouldn't remember which day it was.'

'So you decided the chap was dead, and then lost your head completely, didn't you?' Pollard asked.

George Akerman continued to stare at the table.

'I was in love with Heloise Grant,' he said at last. 'What price my chances with a charge of culpable homicide or whatever you like to call it hanging over my head?'

Eventually a statement was put together and submitted to him. He made a show of reading it through, scrawled his name at the bottom, and listened to Pollard's information about the immediate future with a complete lack of interest.

'All the same to me,' he muttered. 'This time I've had it for good. Life packed up on me once before, and I decided to have another go. Not this time. And that's bloody well all I'm saying.'

He relapsed into obstinate silence. When he was escorted out of the room Pollard followed, returning after a few minutes.

'I've warned them to watch out,' he said, slumping down wearily. 'A suicide would just about round things off, wouldn't it? I suppose our job's worth it. Saving half the human race from the other half. They're either stupid or plain wicked. That woman Heloise Grant giving her life to local good works and never noticing what was festering in the girl's mind . . . I expect she'll get off. Unfit to plead, or something.'

Toye glanced at him and made a characteristically practical suggestion of getting a bit of sleep in what was left of the night.

They were stuflfing papers into their briefcases when a constable arrived, 'Miss Ling would be glad of a word, sir,' he told Pollard. 'She's in Waiting Room C.'

'Miss Ling?' Pollard exclaimed. 'Still here? Good Lord, it's half-past two. We'll go along at once.'

Kate was alone, sitting at a table in the harsh glare of an unshaded electric light. She had thrown an old coat round her shoulders for warmth and there were dark shadows under her eyes, but she smiled as they came in, composed and even relaxed.

'Peter's on the line,' she said. 'The family solicitor's just rung him again. We felt we had to see you, Mr. Pollard. I---I owe you Peter's life, don't I? And we want to say how immensely thankful we are that Inspector Toye's all right. That bit just doesn't bear thinking about.'

As Toye mimibled something about it being all in the day's work Peter Grant came in looking white and exhausted, but rather touchingly dignified. Pollard thought. . . . Utterly shattering that I don t feel I've really taken it in properly,' he was saying. 'But do believe I'm grateful to you for bringing the whole ghastly business into the open. Suppose anything---anything else . . .'

. . . 'Mr. Pollard?'

'Yes, Miss Ling?' he said, wondering what was coming.

'Don't have too hard thoughts of Father. After all, if he hadn't done that crazy thing with the skeleton?' . . .

'Perfectly true,' Pollard told her. 'As a matter of fact it struck me while we've been talking.'

'Dare I tell you'---she gave him a sidelong glance---'that he's already got there himself? I'm afraid he's quite irrepressible.'

On this more relaxed note they all went out to the carpark. It was still dark, but Pollard sensed a touch of dawn freshness in the air as he stood watching the B.M.W. drive off.

'Something salvaged,' Toye commented as its tail light vanished. 'All right, all right,' Pollard retorted. 'I'll admit to feeling a bit less jaundiced. Let's go.' He smote Toye powerfully between the shoulder blades and they walked across to the Rover.

THE END

IT WAS at Superintendent Crookshank's suggestion that Mrs. Broom was induced to come round to the police station when she returned from Upway Manor on the following morning. Reliable daily women, he maintained, and she must be one of those since she'd worked up there for years, often knew a damn sight more about what was in the house than their employers did.

She was understandably apprehensive, and sat bolt upright in his office in her overall, clutching a shopping bag on her lap just as she had in Peter Grant's car when Pollard had first seen her. She was hatless, and had fuzzy mousy hair with some grey streaks and conspicuous dentures. He put her age at about fifty-five. She gave him the impression of having a mind of her own but of being chary of expressing it, as if you needed to be on your guard against life. As a working-class widow it probably hadn't been a bed of roses for her . . .

'Nice of you to come along to see us, love,' Crookshank was saying, jollying her along with an expertise which astonished Pollard. 'Of course you've been reading in the Advertiser about the rum things that've been going on in these parts, haven't you? Skeletons turning up in old monuments up on Cattesmoor and whatever?'

Mrs. Broom looked baffled and nodded dumbly.

'And I expect you know that these two gentlemen from Scotland Yard have come down to help us sort it all out?'

She nodded again and murmured barely audible assent.

'Perhaps you remember me, Mrs. Broom?' Henry Landfear came in. 'I used to visit Miss Grant at the Manor.'

At this she brightened up.

'Yes, sir, I remember you very well. Miss Grant had a lot of callers, what with all the committees she was on and the good she did. She's sorely missed, I'm told.'

'Quite true. And you must miss her yourself. She valued you, I know. Remembered you in her will, didn't she?'

'That's right, sir, and very grateful I was.'

'But you've stayed on to work for Miss Davina Grant?'

Mrs. Broom hesitated briefly. 'I felt I owed it to Miss Grant, her being so good to me.'

'Now, love, there's something we want to ask you,' Crookshank told her. 'Anything you say here's one hundred per cent private, as if you were telling Father Mulley your sins in the confessional down at the Church, so you needn't be afraid to speak out. Tell us this. Were you quite easy in your mind about the verdict on Miss Grant's death in the coroner's court?'

Pollard watched her workworn hands tighten on the handles of the shopping bag until the knuckles showed white.

'That I wasn't,' she said at last, her voice unexpectedly shrill.

'Why not, Mrs. Broom?' Henry Landfear asked quietly.

'Well, sir, for one thing Miss Grant wasn't looking poorly that morning, whatever Miss Davina said. She was joking and laughing while I was doing the drawing room, and talking about all the jobs she was going to do in the garden in the afternoon.'

'And for another thing?'

She hesitated once again, and then suddenly burst into rapid speech.

'She'd never have bin wearin' that watch. Not her best one for working in the garden, the one Miss Davina wears all the time now. Real valuable, she once told me it was. Solid gold, with her initials H.R.G. in tiny little pearls on the back. She'd always take it off for any messy work. Not that she did much o' that except for the garden, and that by her own choice, she bein' so wrapped up in it. But wear her best watch and risk gettin' the dirt in it, no never. She was a careful lady. Miss Grant was, and looked after her things proper for all she was so rich.'

'Do you mean, Mrs. Broom, that she didn't wear a watch at all when she was gardening?' Pollard asked, breaking a tense silence.

'Oh, no, sir, I didn't meant that. She was a very punctual lady, and always had an eye to the time. She'd put on her silver watch for workin' in the garden. The one Miss Davina's given me. She had it put right first as it wasn't goin' well, she said. I won't say she hasn't been generous in her way. I had a lovely coat of Miss Grant's too, and a big handbag---real leather.'

'You must value that watch a lot,' Henry Landfear remarked. 'Are you wearing it now, by any chance?'

Proudly she shot her left wrist clear of the sleeve of her overall, and showed him an old-fashioned silver watch on a grey leather strap.

'I always wears it except when I'm working, like Miss Grant did her gold one.'

'If you didn't believe that she was wearing the gold one for gardening the afternoon she was killed, why didn't you tell me when I came to see you?' Crookshank asked her.

'I didn't know nothing about what watch she was wearing, not till they said at the inquest. And seein' how the coroner put me down when I told 'im Miss Grant was well that momin', sayin' Miss Davina was best placed to know, I thought I'd keep mum, and so I have, right up to this.'

'Caution to coroners,' Crookshank remarked to nobody in particular. 'Now then, ducks, here's the crunch. We want you to lend us your silver watch for a short time. Only till tonight, it could be. Take it from us, itll be safe and sound. We'll give you a receipt for it. Don't look so worried. Our policemen are wonderful, you know. All the foreigners say so. We just want whoever cleaned it to take a look at it.'

At this Mrs. Broom looked slightly less unhappy.

'That'll be Mr. Dell down at Market Lane, for sure. He sees to the Manor clocks. Real valuable some of 'em, he told me once.'

She reluctantly unfastened the strap and handed over the watch.

'Here's your receipt,' Crookshank said. You'll get it back in a nice little box as soon as we've done with it.'

'You must have more to do up at the Manor these days,' Henry Landfear said casually. 'Miss Davina Grant's trying to carry on with all the things her aunt used to do, isn't she? The hospital Comforts Fund and the Friends of Cattesmoor and so on?'

'She'll never manage it,' Mrs. Broom replied decisively. 'She isn't the woman her auntie was, not by a long chalk. Miss Grant had it all at her finger ends. Real businesslike she was, and that way she got it all done. Now Miss Davina's runnin' from pillar to post trying to catch up with herself. Up till two o'clock this morning writin' letters, she said she was, and then off to Wintlebury to some wholesale place for the Summer Fete stalls soon as I got to work this momin'. That's three times she's trailed all the way up there these last few days, and all the stuff she's brought back locked up in one of the bedrooms, if you please. Why, in all the years I worked for Miss Grant never did she once turn a key on anything knowin' me like she did. And Miss Davina's off to a meetin' tonight, after she gets back. Real irritable she is, tryin' to fit it all in. I'll be properly thankful when the blessed Fete's over.'

Henry Landfear was suitably sympathetic.

'Well, we mustn't keep you from your dinner any longer, Mrs. Broom,' he said. 'Thank you for coming along here and being so helpful.'

A constable was summoned and instructed to show her out

'Surely she'll soon begin to wonder what all this has been in aid of?' Pollard asked, when the door had closed again.

'Her type and generation---down here, at least---is still inclined to write off the powers that be as incomprehensible,' Henry Landfear replied. 'But when she's had time to mull it over, she's sure to start talking to her cronies, so the sooner she gets her watch back, the better. What's your plan of action, Crookshank?'

'Start with Dell, sir, and hope to God that's where the watch was taken for repairs. If not, I suppose there'll have to be a circular to watch-repairers all over the coimtry asking for details of what was wrong with it.'

'Shall we be any further on if somebody reports that it had a broken mainspring, though? It couldn't be proved that it was smashed deliberately,' Pollard said.

'You seem to have unearthed the perfect crime, don't you?' Henry replied gloomily. 'Unfortunately it's our case, not yours. What are you going to do about Akerman?'

'I know we've now got official confirmation that he had a new car in May '75, but I'd still like to wait for his back history before we move. I've been on to the Yard this morning, and we ought to hear something early this afternoon. The problem is what the charge against Akerman had better be.'

After a lengthy discussion over sandwiches and coffee it was agreed that Pollard and Toye should interview Robert Dell, and that a further conference should be held at half-past four. In the meantime enquiries would be made about the meeting Davina Grant and George Akerman were attending, and when they might reasonably be expected to return to Upway Manor.

After hearing that Robert Dell was a rum little guy but a marvel with clocks and watches. Pollard had unconsciously formed a mental picture of a Disney workshop, and was surprised to walk into a small up-to-date establishment in Market Lane, presided over by a blonde with shoulder-length hair and violet eye shadow. The shelves were crowded with all types of modern clocks, from the severely functional to the grotesquely ornamental. Before he could speak, a deafening cacophony of whirring, wheezing, striking and explosive cuckooing announced three o'clock. 'You don't notice it once you're used to it,' the blonde reassured them. 'You gentlemen wanting a clock?'

'Not today, thank you,' Pollard replied. 'We'd like a word with Mr. Dell, if he's here.'

'He's in the workshop,' she replied doubtfully, with a backward jerk of her head. 'What name shall I say?'

Pollard handed her his official card. Her mouth fell open, and with a strangled sound she vanished through a door behind her. They waited, contemplating the stock. Pollard pointed out a brick red plastic squirrel with protruding eyes which supported a clock face between its front paws.

'Like me to buy you that one?' he asked.

Before Toye could answer the blonde reappeared, still open-mouthed. 'Will you step this way, please?'

The workshop at least was traditional in appearance. It had a bench with an apparent confusion of tools, and a number of disembowelled clocks in the process of being repaired. A large leather-bound ledger occupied a table in a corner. As well as taking all this in at first glance, Pollard spotted a superb grandfather clock.

'I keep him in here with me,' said a quiet voice from somewhere in the neighbourhood of his elbow. It's no place for him out in the shop with all the tinpot rubbish folks buy these days.'

Pollard looked down into a pair of bright brown eyes set in a wrinkled rosy face. Mr. Dell was about four foot ten, with a perfectly bald cranium encircled by a ragged fringe of white hair.

'Mr. Robert Dell?' he said. 'Good Lord, it's one of Thomas Tompion's?'

'It is, sir. And not for sale. Not for all the oil in the Middle East,' the little man added with startling modernity. 'You have come about stolen property perhaps? Pray be seated, and the other gentleman, too.'

Pollard sat down on a battered upright chair. Mr. Dell's face, he decided, was both childlike and extremely sagacious.

'No,' he replied. 'It's nothing to do with stolen property. I've come on a very confidential matter.'

Mr. Dell bowed without speaking.

'I won't beat about the bush,' Pollard went on. 'I'm quite sure you know why I'm in Stoneham: to enquire into the finding of that skeleton on Cattesmoor. Police enquiries sometimes lead one in very unexpected directions . . . I think you have done work for the late Miss Heloise Grant of Upway Manor for a good many years, haven't you?'

'And for her parents before her, sir.'

'I understand that the watch which she was wearing when she was killed was afterwards brought to you to be repaired?'

'That is correct,' Mr. Dell replied. 'As it was broken by her fall and registered the time when this took place, I was closely questioned about its condition by the police. I was able to inform them that the damage done was consistent with the poor lady's fall, and that I had recently cleaned and regulated it for her. It was a beautiful piece of craftsmanship, and kept virtually perfect time. I may add that I was surprised that she was wearing it for gardening as she valued it so much. It is all too easy to knock a wristwatch when one is engaged in manual work. And there is the risk of it being damaged by water or some noxious substance.'

In the ensuing pause the grandfather clock chimed the first quarter. As the mellow notes died away Mr. Dell smiled happily at Pollard.

Pollard smiled back, and took a small box from his brief-case.

'Do you recognise this?' he asked, holding out Mrs. Broom's watch.

Mr. Dell took it, scrutinised it, and opened the back for further inspection.

'This watch also belonged to the late Miss Grant,' he said. 'I have cleaned and regulated it for her from time to time. It is not in the same class as the other, of course, but very good of its kind and a reliable time-keeper.'

'When was it last brought in to you?'

Without answering Mr Dell got up and went over to the ledger. As he stood by the table turning over pages Pollard and Toye exchanged glances. In the enveloping silence the gentle remorseless ticking of a clock marked the passage of one second after another. 'This watch,' Mr Dell announced, 'was brought in to me by Miss Davina Grant in person on the afternoon of Monday, 4th August, last year. It was collected by her on Wednesday, 3rd September, in response to a postcard informing her that it was ready. I dislike the telephone intensely,' he added, returning to his chair.

'What repairs had you done to it?'

'Miss Davina Grant informed me that shortly before she died her aunt had dropped it on the stone floor of the scullery while washing her hands after gardening. The glass and the mainspring were both broken and the winder was missing. The poor lady was a great gardener. I understood that this watch was to be given to the daily woman as a memento of her late mistress.'

'What a wonderful memory you have,' Pollard told him. 'It's astonishing that you can remember all this detail when so many watches must pass through your hands. Why, it's almost a year ago.'

Mr. Dell gave the slow secretive smile of a child hugging a delectable memory.

'I'll always remember Monday, 4th August 1975,' he said. 'My grandson was born that day. Five little girls my daughter'd had, and we were on tenter-hooks, my wife and I. My son-in-law had only telephoned an hour before Miss Davina came in with that watch. And talk about coincidence: the watch had stopped at twenty minutes past one, the very moment the little lad came into this world.'

As Pollard and Toye commented a little incoherently, Mr. Dell's expression slowly became less childlike and more sagacious.

'Gentlemen of your standing, sir, don't come around asking questions about watch repairs unless it's an important matter. I can't see what the ones you've been asking me are leading to, but it's the sort of thing makes a man uneasy.'

'Unfortunately, Mr Dell,' Pollard replied, 'in our job we can't avoid making a lot of people uneasy. Not that you personally have anything to worry about, I need hardly say. It's possible you may be asked to make a formal statement about this watch. If it is, you'll hear from Superintendent Crookshank. Thank you for the information you've given us, and now we won't take up any more of your time.'

A couple of minutes later they were walking back to the police station along Market Lane.

'Why didn't she shift the hands?' Toye asked. 'If the winder had come adrift and disappeared in a flower bed when Miss Grant fell, surely she could have got hold of another?'

'Not as easy as it sounds without making yourself conspicuous. It's an old watch, remember, and winders aren't standardised. And obviously by August she was overconfident. The inquest was over, and everything nicely rounded off. No questions asked about the gold watch, except whether it was reliable, and Dell had testified to that So 1.20 was no more significant than any other time. The yarn about Miss Grant having a wash in the scullery as she came into the house is the commonplace sort of thing that's so convincing. But I think she tripped up over the time. Their normal lunch hour was one o'clock, and according to Mrs. Broom Miss Grant was a very punctual lady. Would she have come in unwashed twenty minutes late?'

Toye considered.

'You've got some points, there. But what Dell's given us isn't what you'd call conclusive, is it? Do you think they'll charge her, all the same?'

'I don't know. They're rattled, and I don't wonder, poor chaps. Anyway, it's their business, not ours, thank the Lord.'

Pollard spoke with enough vehemence to get a quick glance from Toye. As they walked in silence he faced the fact that he was feeling rattled himself, and wondered why. Whatever the Yard had managed to unearth about George Akerman could hardly affect the case against him. The identity of the skeleton had not been discovered and probably never would be, but surely Akerman's involvement in the chap's death and the concealment of the body was beyond doubt? And Geoffrey Ling had admitted to the fool's trick of moving the skeleton to the kistvaen . . . After all, Pollard told himself, that was the job I was sent down here to do, and I've done it.'

It was not until they were going up the steps of the police station that he realised that his uneasiness was in connection with Davina Grant.

He was temporarily distracted by the report on George Akerman which had come through. He was of working-class origin, won a free place at a grammar school and had been apprenticed to a printer. His war record had been satisfactory, if undistinguished, and he had subsequently had a job with a printing firm in South London. At the age of thirty he had married a girl ten years younger than himself, who had left him for another man a year later. He had divorced her, sold the house which he had been buying through a building society, and disappeared from London with a few thousand pounds left him by an uncle.

'Well, we can fill in the rest,' Pollard said. 'An entirely new pattern of life emerges. He turns up in Stoneham, buys a moribund printing works, and settles down to make a success of it and play a part in local affairs, especially on the conservation side. He develops archaeological interests, and starts moving in quite a different social circle. At the same time he lives an oddly solitary sort of life.'

'On the up and up, that's plain enough,' Toye commented.

'Heading for what? Our theory is marriage with Davina Grant and living at Up way Manor. But you know, the more I think of it, the more unbelievable it seems that a chap like Akerman could think the game worth the candle . . . that hopelessly immature stupid girl would drive him round the bend, surely . . .'

Pollard's voice trailed off.

Toye looked at him enquiringly.

'There's something pretty chilling about the way Akerman dealt with that body, isn't there? I'm beginning to wonder if his long-term plan included a fatal accident for Davina? However, I suppose all this is beside the point, as we're bringing his little game to a full stop . . . Come on, we're due with the C.C. and Crookshank.'

'Of all the frustrating cases I've ever had,' Pollard thought, as they walked along an echoing corridor smelling of disinfectant. 'Hopelessly tangled up with what looks like a perfect murder . . .'

It was as he arrived at Superintendent Crookshank's door that a possible joint course of action sprang into his mind.

ROGER Steadman, senior partner of Steadman, Hillard and Grant, Architects, had a beaky face, alert brown eyes and greying hair worn long enough to curl up at the back. The general effect was streamlined, and gave the impression that he had been stopped while in rapid movement. He sat looking incredulously at Pollard across his desk.

'Let me get this clear,' he said. 'Some type's been writing anonymous letters implying that Peter Grant'---he gave the name slight emphasis---is involved in the death of the chap whose skeleton turned up in the Starbarrow kistvaen. Right?'

'Dead right, Mr. Steadman,' Pollard replied. 'We're now satisfied that the chap was seen at the old lookout on the cliffs on Easter Monday last year, and we're interested in the following Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. Mr. Ling and his family returned home from a holiday abroad on the Friday, and the chances that the body was put into the disused well on the property after their return are remote. We're checking on anyone known to have been at Starbarrow Farm during that Easter week. Mr. Peter Grant had an understanding with Miss Kate Ling that he would keep an eye on the house while it was empty, and admits that he was there on the evening of Easter Monday, on his way back from playing in a tennis tournament at Biddle Bay, but states that he did not visit the farm again before the Lings came back. He's given us an account of his movements on the Tuesday---1st April, that is---but says he cannot remember what work he was doing on the two following days. Have you a record of his professional engagements?'

By this time Roger Steadman's incredulity had changed to indignation.

'This is absolutely preposterous!' he exclaimed. 'Not only this suggestion that he's implicated in a murder, but that anybody's making it. There's obviously some nut around. Still, I suppose it's your job to investigate this sort of thing. Yes, we keep our appointment books for a year or two. I'll ask for all of 'em to make it less obvious.'

He picked up a desk telephone and gave an order. In the rather uncomfortable silence which descended Pollard glanced round the room. Photographs and maps were pinned on the walls, and plans in preparation were spread out on a table in a window, amid a clutter of drawing implements and rolls of unused pale blue enkalon. The door opened to admit a secretary carrying three slim foolscap-size books in hard covers.

'Thanks, Miss Kellow,' Roger Steadman said, taking them. 'Keep everybody at bay for half an hour, will you?'

Before the door had closed behind her, he had opened one of the three desk diaries and was leafing through its pages.

'Week beginning Monday, 31st March, 1975,' he said shortly. 'May I ask how long you assume it would take to drive out to Starbarrow Farm, kill somebody, get a cover off a disused well, chuck the body down the shaft, make everything good, and then get back?'

'At least three hours,' Pollard replied. 'Longer, if there was a row first.'

'Well then, you're going to find it bloody difficult to pin this murder on to Peter Grant, let me tell you. On Tuesday, 1st April, he started in as a partner in this firm. Previously he'd only been an assistant. I can swear that he spent the best part of the morning shifting to his new room with all his gear. In the afternoon he was due at a site meeting at Candleford at 2.30. That's thirty miles away, and he couldn't have been back here before 4.30, and would have his letters to sign, and so on. Bit late to start out at five unless he was going to finish the job in the dark, of course . . . On the Wednesday morning we had a pretty lengthy partnership meeting, and went out to look at a site on the outskirts of the town. Grant had a client's appointment at 3.30, and was due at a Stoneham tennis club committee at 5.30. He's the secretary, incidentally. Naturally I can't swear that he went to the meeting, but you could ask the treasurer, James Cantripp. He's retired and lives at Churstow. On Thursday morning Grant had an appointment to meet a client at the chap's house, here in Stoneham, and a date with one of the planning Committee at the Council Offices at 3.15. He came to supper at my house. My son, who's a friend of his, was home for the night. Take a look for yourself.'

Roger Steadman pushed the appointments book across the desk. Pollard studied it carefully.

'These ticks beside the professional engagements mean that they were kept, I take it?' he asked.

'Yes. One's secretary keeps a record. If you turn on a few pages you'll probably come to a fixture with a cross beside it, showing a cancellation.'

'Thanks,' Pollard said, returning the book. 'This confirms Mr. Grant's statement, and seems conclusive, apart from the one point of the tennis club committee. I'm grateful for your co-operation, Mr. Steadman.'

'Sorry if I've been a bit abrasive.' Roger Steadman held out his cigarette case. 'But honestly, if you knew Peter Grant as I do . . . What a fantastic business it is. Macabre and mad, and the only handy non-compos type, old Ling, apparently not in the running at all. However, I mustn't talk out of turn. Obviously you can't discuss the situation. I suppose there's no other useful gen I could produce for you?'

'There's just one possibility that's occurred to me,' Pollard replied, 'and it's probably absurdly far-fetched. I suppose you can't think of a dissatisfied client who's a bit unbalanced, and has a grievance against Mr. Grant? I'm thinking of the anonymous letters.'

'It's by no means all that far-fetched. You wouldn't believe how bloodyminded some clients can be if anything goes wrong, or even if it doesn't. But Peter's still quite a youngster, and one keeps in touch with him over his jobs, and I can't think of anyone at all who's got it in for him on professional grounds. And in his social life he's very popular locally. In fact, the only person I know of that he's having difficulty with is his sister, over at Upway Manor. Their aunt left it to them jointly---always a mistake, and likely to lead to trouble, in my opinion. Anyway, Peter wants to live there when he marries Kate Ling in August, and he's offered either to buy her out at a proper valuation, or have the place divided into two quite separate units. It lends itself perfectly well to sub-division, as it happens, and he's drawn up an excellent plan, but she seems to be digging her toes in.'

'Why?' Pollard probed. 'Surely it's far too large for her on her own?'

'She fancies herself as the sort of local leading lady that her aunt was. Competent, benevolent, finger in every pie---you know. It's ludicrous, of course. Old Heloise was a great girl, if a shade bossy, and Davina just hasn't got what it takes. I've advised Peter to stand his ground and consult his solicitors. However, I can't see Davina trying to get her brother charged with murder. She's a snob---the dated sort---and murder's still rather non-U, isn't it? By the way, does he know that you've been seeing me about his alibis?'

'You weren't mentioned personally, but he saw at once that I'd want access to office records.'

'Good. I'll try to buck him up. I hope you'll be able to give him an all-clear shortly?'

Pollard assured him that this would be done at the earliest possible moment, and left soon afterwards. He had hardly crossed the threshold when Peter Grant dropped out of his mind. He threaded his way through the shoppers crowding the pavements, oblivious of the occasional curious glances he attracted, his thoughts on his visit to Upway Manor. The scent of roses came back to him, and the feel of turf under his feet as he stood on the edge of the lawn, listening to the sharp irregular cutting sound coming from the lighted window open at the bottom. In response to an inner uneasiness he concentrated on the memory, but although so vivid it was non-productive. He found himself walking into the police station, and forcibly switched his attention to the outcome of Toye's visit to the Mayfield Garage.

Toye had already returned, and reported that Peter Grant had been in and signed his statement. He himself hadn't done too badly at the Mayfield Garage. George Fry, the foreman, remembered Mr. Grant coming in just before knocking-off time on 1st April, last year, because of giving him a preview of the B.M.W. He'd fallen flat for it, and said he was going right back to put it to his auntie, old Miss Grant, and that he'd spend the evening tarting up his Marina before getting Mr. Callington to have a look at it next day. Fry had repeated several times that Mr. Grant was a real nice young chap, one of the best.

'I managed to bring the conversation round to changing your car,' Toye went on, 'and Fry had plenty to say about choosing your time, bearing in mind the make and the question of wear and tear. No sense in getting a brand new model every year if it was going to get the hell of a bashing the way you ran it. It'd pay you better to run your old one a bit longer if you weren't having trouble with it, as he'd told Mr. Akerman. Of course, I didn't know a thing about Akerman, and got a long story about him driving all over Cattesmoor on this conservation racket, and insisting on trading in a roadworthy Volvo Estate last summer for a new one, against his---George Fry's---advice. I didn't press for exact dates.'

'Nice work,' Pollard said. We ought to get the exact date some time this morning from the licensing people. I haven't done too badly either.'

He gave Toye the gist of his conversation with Roger Steadman, and they agreed that the job had better be rounded off by a visit to James Cantripp, treasurer of the Stoneham Tennis Club. It was settled that Toye should go out to Churstow, while Pollard made a provisional plan for tackling George Akerman.

As soon as he was alone Pollard flung himself down at the table, resting his elbows on it and cupping his chin in his hands. Why, he asked himself, had Davina Grant suddenly loomed up in his mind, ousting George Akerman from the centre of the stage? To his surprise and discomfiture his mind promptly came up with an answer: her pretensions and posturings had made her so ludicrous that he had not really taken her very seriously. Clumsy self-assertion, girlish infatuation for George Akerman, and hopeless lack of chic in spite of expensive clothes had added up to the stage figure of the frustrated spinster, always good for a laugh but little else. Mercifully his professional experience had now come to his rescue at last.

He turned over in his mind what Bill Worth, Henry Landfear and Roger Steadman had said about her. They had all drawn basically the same picture: a young woman outshone by a likeable, able and wealthy aunt. Limited and immature, too. Pollard thought, but fanatically determined to make the grade. How did George Akerman fit in, he wondered? Davina Grant was obviously sexually and emotionally frustrated, and equally obviously throwing herself at his head. And Upway Manor was the essential setting for the life she was struggling to achieve . . . hence her flat refusal either to share it with her brother or to let him buy her out . . .

Pollard shifted his position and sat scowling at the opposite wall. All this added up, he decided, and fitted in with the anonymous letters and the telephone call about Peter washing his car. It had been a mistake to assume she had not been responsible for them because she would hardly want to involve him in a charge of homicide. Wasn't the game to get him talked about and discredited, so that he might decide to leave the neighbourhood, and agree to her buying his share of the house? Crude and clumsy, but so was she. Ruthless, too, Pollard thought, remembering the vicious destruction of the house conversion plans. Not for the first time he wondered about the respective contributions of heredity and environment to warped personalities. Perhaps Davina Grant's childhood had been difficult, and on top of it had come the shock of losing her parents even before the frustration of life with her aunt had started. The phrase 'history repeats itself' came to his mind. It was immediately followed by an idea so startling that he found that he was holding his breath . . .

Some minutes later he got up and walked out of the room and down the corridor to Superintendent Crookshank's office. He found him in conversation with his chief constable. There were empty coffee cups on the desk and both men were smoking. Pollard looked down at their enquiring faces through a thin blue haze.

'Come along in,' Henry Landfear invited. 'Is the Yard about to make an arrest or just continuing with its enquiries? Anything we can do?'

Pollard drew up a chair and sat down.

'Well, there's a bit of information you could give me off the cuff,' he said. 'Miss Grant's death last year was sudden, wasn't it?'

As he expected, astonishment was followed by a slight caginess.

'Yes,' Henry Landfear replied laconically. 'She fell off a ladder when she was tying up some climbing roses, and fractured her skull. The actual cause of death was intracranial haemorrhage.'

'Were you'---Pollard hesitated fractionally---'absolutely satisfied with the verdict of accidental death?'

'What the hell----' Henry Landfear broke off and began again, speaking with deliberation. 'To answer your question. Yes, we were. Perfectly satisfied. She suffered from Meniere's disease, and her balance was liable to be disturbed. Of course she shouldn't have climbed ladders at all. but she was a strong-minded woman and didn't believe in wrapping herself up in cotton wool. From the position of the body on the ground it was clear that she had been reaching too far to one side, lost her balance, and fallen. Her watch was broken in the fall, and had stopped at five past two. There was no one else in the house. The nephew and niece who inherited the bulk of her estate were both out, and had witnesses to confirm their whereabouts. The daily woman had left before lunch as usual, and was at a Women's Fellowship meeting. Peter Grant found the body when he came home from the office at a quarter past five. In view of all this the verdict was a foregone conclusion.'

'Why I'm asking about it,' Pollard said, deciding to ignore the defensiveness that had built up, 'is that there's now no reasonable doubt that George Akerman was responsible for the death of the chap whose skeleton turned up in the kistvaen. Things have moved fast in the last twenty-four hours, and I was just waiting for official confirmation that he changed his car soon after Easter last year before putting you into the picture. The death probably took place at the Wanton Wenches stone circle at the Biddle end of Cattesmoor, and Akerman brought the body in his car to Starbarrow Farm and hid it in an old well-shaft. It was when the Lings were away. Incidentally, Ling has admitted finding the skeleton and parking it in the kistvaen. I don't believe that it was deliberate murder on Akerman's part, but I'm fairly sure that he had plans for his future which made it vital that he shouldn't be charged with manslaughter, for instance.'

Defensiveness on the part of the local man was replaced by stupefaction.

'Akerman!' Henry Landfear exclaimed. 'It's incrediblel And anyway, how the devil does Heloise Grant's death come into it?'

'Suppose Davina Grant and Akerman were going to marry, and try to step into her local status while living at 120, Upway Manor? If I'm right, her elimination was the first step.'

'First step?'

'Well, don't these anonymous letters and the phoney phone call look rather like an attempt to implicate Peter Grant in the skeleton affair, anyway to the extent of getting him talked about, so that he might decide to clear out of the area, and agree to sell his share of the house to Davina?'

A long uneasy silence developed.

'Remember that bastard Worth writing in the Advertiser when the Friends of Cattesmoor were electing a new president to follow Miss Grant?' Crookshank asked suddenly. 'Something about it being a surprise in certain quarters where it seemed to have been taken for granted that the job would be hereditary.'

Pollard suddenly realised that it was Crookshank's earlier remark about Worth's journalistic activities that he had sub-consciously wanted to follow up.

'I remember your saying that he wrote malicious articles,' he said. 'Was he just enjoying having a dig at Davina Grant, do you think, or could he have suspected something offbeat about the aunt's death?'

'If Worth had any suspicions of Davina Grant or Akerman or anybody else he certainly wouldn't have left it at that,' Henry Landfear replied, looking worried. It's simply that he's a chap with an uncanny nose for people's weak spots, and enjoys drawing attention to them. I can't deny that he's sometimes been useful to us, without realising it, of course. No doubt the girl behaved tactlessly, and that gave him a handle . . . Look here. Pollard, just what do you want done? I honestly can't see that you've unearthed anything at all that would justify reopening the enquiry into Heloise Grant's death.'

'Absolutely fair comment,' Pollard agreed. 'All I'm asking is to see the verbatim report of the inquest, and that if I stumble on anything that seems suggestive, you'll discuss it.'

They conceded that this was reasonable.

+++

In the event all the relevant records were handed over, including the signed statements of everyone interviewed in connection wiih Heloise Grant's death, and a number of photographs of the south front of Upway Manor. With an unexpected flash of imagination Superintendent Crookshank provided an electric fan which made Pollard and Toye's small room more tolerable in the remorseless heat of midsummer, 1976. In spite of this amenity they found their long stint of concentrated mental effort taxing.

Gradually a picture of the events of 20th May 1975 emerged. For Pollard with his knowledge of their setting it was a vivid one. The morning had been perfectly normal and imeventful. Peter Grant had fetched Mrs. Broom, the daily help, from Stoneham, before setting off again for his office. She had carried out her ordinary domestic work, with Heloise and Davina taking their usual share of the chores. Later in the morning Heloise had settled down to paperwork at her desk. At midday Davina had driven Mrs. Broom back to Stoneham, and then returned to the snack lunch which she and her aunt always had, the household's main meal of the day being in the evening when Peter was home from the office. When questioned, Mrs. Broom had said that Heloise Grant seemed just as usual; Davina, on the other hand, thought she looked tired, and said she had advised against the afternoon's gardening her aunt had planned to do.

'Naturally she'd tell the police that if she'd got a fake accident lined up,' Pollard observed, taking a gulp of a cold drink provided by the canteen. 'However, let's press on.'

After lunch, according to Davina, her aunt had gone to the drawing room with the day's Times for a rest. She herself had gone up to her bedsitter to get ready for her afternoon session at the Stoneham museum, where she did two stints of voluntary duty each week. A visit by a party of school-children had been booked for two o'clock, so she had left home in good time, coming downstairs just after half-past one. She found that her aunt had already gone into the garden, and brought an aluminium ladder from the gardener's shed and propped it against the front of the house, in order to tie up some sprays of the climbing roses loosened by a recent high wind. A further effort to get Heloise to take the afternoon quietly was laughed at, and she was told not to fuss. Davina drove to the museum where her presence from roughly 1.45 to 5.10 was vouched for by the caretaker and numerous other witnesses. On leaving she had gone to the Rectory with a message from her aunt. By chance she had mentioned to the caretaker that she had a call to make there before going home, and so her brother had been able to ring her at about half-past five and tell her to go at once to the hospital where Heloise had been taken by ambulance.

'Foolproof, from the moment she left the Manor, wouldn't you say?' Toye asked.

Pollard agreed.

'Cast-iron, If there's a weak spot, it's not here.'

Peter Grant's alibi was equally unbreakable. He had lunched with a friend in a bar, and spent the entire afternoon working on plans in his office, seen at intervals by his secretary and other members of the staff. After knocking off at five o'clock he had driven straight home, and been appalled to discover his aunt lying on the gravel drive at the foot of the ladder. He had at once dialled for an ambulance and managed to contact Davina at the Rectory by first ringing the museum.

'Equally cast-iron,' Pollard commented. 'He's obviously out of it. So is Mrs. Broom. She turned up at the Parish Church Hall with a pal at about two-twenty, having had a bit of dinner with the said pal on coming back from her morning job.'

The investigations by the police had been thorough. An important clue to what had happened was a length of green garden string. One end was attached to a loose spray of a climbing rose well to the right of the ladder, while the other hung loose. The angle at which the body was lying was consistent with Heloise Grant's having leant well over to the right to tie the spray to a nail in the wall. The impact of her fall had slightly shifted the ladder, which was found to be a little crooked. It was in perfect condition and very steady, and carried numerous impressions of her finger- prints, and some less well-defined specimens of her gar- dener's, but no others. As she reached the ground, her left wrist and hand had struck the large stones bordering the flower bed along the front of the house, breaking the glass and mainspring of her watch which had stopped at five minutes past two. The watch was otherwise in perfect order, and had recently been cleaned and certified as keeping perfect time by Mr. Robert Dell, horologist, of Stoneham. She was dead on arrival at the hospital. A post-mortem examination had found the cause of death to be a severe haemorrhage resulting from a fractured skull, the time of death being estimated as between three and four hours previously. As she had been lying in the sun, it was difficult to be more exact, the pathologist had stated.

At the inquest Heloise Grant's doctor had stated that while in general her health was good, she suffered from Meniere's disease, and was liable to attacks in which her physical balance was affected. He had repeatedly advised her to avoid heights and all activities in which a loss of balance would be dangerous. She had not, however, paid much attention to these warnings, being a strong character and temperamentally averse to what she called 'giving in' to her disability. She certainly should not have climbed a ladder to any appreciable height.

The coroner had summed up at considerable length, giving due emphasis to all the main points which had emerged in evidence. He also gave due weight to the possibility of some unknown person having come into the garden of Upway Manor while Heloise Grant was on the ladder attending to the roses. She could have been startled by someone calling out, turned to see who it was, and in so doing lost her balance and fallen. If such a person had been an acquaintance, he or she had not come forward in spite of all the publicity. Moreover, it was impossible to believe that anyone in this category witnessing the fall would not have taken immediate steps to get medical aid. Mr. Peter Grant had found the front door of the house standing open, and it would have been a matter of moments to reach a telephone. A more remote possibility was that someone with criminal intent had arrived on the scene with robbery in mind, and had threatened Heloise Grant by shaking or trying to move the ladder. Against this was the fact that the only fingerprints on the ladder were her own and her gardener's, and the absence of any signs of the ladder having been shifted, apart from the small dislodgement which could be attributed to the impact of her fall. After due consideration of all these matters, the coroner had concluded, the only reasonable verdict of Heloise Grant's fatal fall was one of Accidental Death . . .

Pollard pushed the papers aside.

'Some unknown person,' he quoted.

'Akerman?' Toye queried.

'On our theory it's possible. He was on visiting terms with Heloise Grant, so there'd have been nothing out of the ordinary in his turning up. But I'm sure he couldn't have come out by car or even on foot along Pilgrim Lane without somebody remembering afterwards. Her death must have been the Event of the Year in Stoneham. I suppose he might have approached the house from Cattesmoor, but how could Davina have contacted him and got everything fixed? Heloise Grant said she was going to garden in the course of the morning but no one could have known exactly when she'd have been tackling the roses . . . No, on the whole I think the odds are that Davina did the job herself. It was probably all lined up, and she waited for a suitable opportunity.'

'Just exactly how was it done without leaving any dabs on the ladder, do you think?'

'Well, try to picture the scene. Heloise Grant's on the ladder, busy with tying up the roses. Davina comes out of the house and stands talking. Asking something about the message she's taking to the Rectory, perhaps. She points out a branch on her aunt's right which has come adrift. As Heloise leans over to cope with it, Davina slips a nylon cord around one of the rungs of the ladder, steps back and heaves with all she's got. A normal woman feeling a ladder coming adrift under her might be able to save herself if there was anything to grab, but not one liable to Meniere's disease. She loses her balance and crashes. Davina lets the ladder right itself. No need to touch it with her hands, and the nylon cord won't leave any recognisable mark on an aluminium rung. You can't see the front of the house from the lane, and she knows that the chance of anyone arriving at the critical moment is negligible. So she gets busy with changing the time of the watch on her aunt's wrist.'

Toye took off his hom-rims, extracted a small piece of wash leather from their case, and polished them carefully. Pollard rubbed his eyes, tired from continuous reading, pushed back his chair and clasped his hands behind his head.

'Well, we've had it,' he said. 'There's not one bloody thing we can put forward that would justify reopening the enquiry into Heloise Grant's death, is there? At least, not one that we've managed to spot . . . All the same, I shall always feel certain that Davina managed to engineer the fall and get away with it . . . Our deadline for meeting the C.C. and Crookshank's nine o'clock, so I suppose we'd better go and get something to eat first. It's about half-past six, isn't it? I thought I heard six strike just now.'

He stretched, flexed his left arm and looked at his watch.

'Half-past seven,' Toye said, consulting his own.

'It can't be!' Pollard put his watch to his ear, shook it and frowned. 'Hell! It's stopped. I dropped it on my bedroom floor this morning, but it seemed all right. I suppose I've bust the mainspring. I'll have to----'

He broke off, still staring at the watch, and sat completely immobile and oblivious of his surroundings for several seconds. As if unaware of what he was doing he took it off, and placed it carefully on the table. Suddenly he looked up at Toye, a grin dawning on his face.

'God!' he said. 'How exquisitely simple! How in the name of all that's holy has everyone missed it, ourselves included? There were two watches, of course. One was smashed by the fall, soon after one o'clock, I should think. The other had previously been deliberately dropped and smashed, and its hands put to five minutes past two. Change 'em over, get rid of the first one, and Bob's your Uncle . . . But can it be proved?'

EVEN the habitually cautious Toye agreed that the unanimous evidence of the Hawkins family would stand up in court.

'It's the girl only having the Monday off that settles it,' he said. 'They just can't have made a mistake about the day they saw Akerman at Biddle Bay being the Tuesday.'

Pollard, who had been pacing restlessly in their room at the police station, came to a halt with his back to the window and his elbows resting on the sill.

'Let's assume for the moment that Akerman did kill our bloke somewhere beyond Biddle, and brought the body back by car and hid it in the well at Starbarrow Farm,' he said. 'He only just didn't get away with it, but it was madly risky. He's quite well-known in this part of the world, and people have days out and go places over the Easter holiday. Why did he lie about the day he did the job? Switching the Monday and the Tuesday round was a clever idea when we started asking awkward questions. After fifteen months people get a bit hazy about when they happened to see X pass in his car, unless there's some particular reason to fix it in their minds. It's now common knowledge that we're working on the assumption that the Starbarrow skeleton's that of the chap seen at the lookout soon after midday on Easter Monday. He was hiking, and couldn't have got to the Biddle area till about midday on Tuesday. All right. Akerman states that he was working at home all day on Tuesday, having done a round on Cattesmoor on Monday. Time's been on his side. The chances of anyone remembering seeing him coming or going in that industrial desert where he lives are pretty well nil.'

Toye looked up from the maps spread out on the table.

'Our chap could have got to somewhere near Biddle by Tuesday midday, but Akerman's timing seems a bit rum. He says he got to Biddle about eleven. It wouldn't have taken more than about a quarter of an hour to drive through it, and up the cliff road till it comes to an end, and on a bit further into the moor. Wouldn't our chap have kept along the cliffs? Surely that's where they'd have met? Bit public for murdering someone and stowing him into your bus, don't you think? A car full of picnickers could have followed on any minute. And if Akerman had luck and nobody turned up, why did he hang about so long? The Hawkins lot saw him driving back about half-past two, they said.'

Pollard detached himself from the window sill and came across to the table for another look at the maps.

'After the coast road peters out there's a rough track for a bit,' he said, 'but it's not a foregone conclusion that our bloke came along it. If he camped at the tin workings on the Monday night, the shortest way on to Biddle was to cut across country and strike the road on the outskirts. One side of a triangle instead of two. Brush up your Euclid, in fact. If he did that, he'd have passed very near the Wanton Wenches circle---might even have stopped off at it for a rest. Akerman was going there, and it would have been a much more secluded place for bumping anyone off. See?'

As he spoke, he laid a pencil on the map to illustrate his point. Toye agreed, with reservations.

'I'll grant you all that, sir,' he said, 'but if he did bump the chap off, how could he have got the body back to his car?'

'Akerman could have been lying about parking the car and walking a couple of miles out to the circle. He might have driven right up to it. Let's go and see if it's a physical possibility, shall we? . . . What's up? Oh, I see: the thought of crashing the car over boulders and sinking it up to the axle in bogs. Go and see if we can borrow the Land Rover again. Anyway, it's an excuse for getting out of here for the afternoon: it's like being in an oven.'

Toye vanished with alacrity. Pollard mopped his forehead, and wondered if the heat was affecting his brain. The Akerman development seemed to raise more problems rather than solve existing ones. Could it have been a prearranged meeting with the hippy, implying a previous link, so far undiscovered? If not, what could have led a man of Akerman's type to kill a stranger on sight? A violent punchup seemed ruled out by the absence of any bone injury: the skeleton's skull had been most meticulously examined. A knife? Would Akerman have been carrying round a knife? Suppose the hippy had a heart attack? Well, then, why not contact an ambulance, and say you'd found the poor devil lying on the ground?

At the sound of activity in the carpark Pollard got up abruptly and left these queries unanswered. After all, the case against George Akerman was based on pure supposition at the moment. He went out of the building into the blinding glare of the early afternoon, a wave of heat seeming to rise from the ground and hitting him. The Land Rover drew up with Toye at the wheel. With a pair of sun-glasses clipped to his horn-rims he looked even more like a meditative owl than usual.

They were soon out on the now familiar road to Biddle Bay. It was surprising what new significance it had taken on since that early morning run into Stoneham with Aunt Is less than a fortnight ago, Pollard thought. Churstow, which he had hardly registered, was now the approach to the sparking-off point of the whole business: Starbarrow Farm and the kistvaen. There, up the Holston turning, was the cottage where Aunt Is's remark about aerial photography had led to such an important breakthrough. Just short of Biddle Bay the road to Winnage and Danby Blake branched off. As they drove into the seaside resort he considered a call at the police station, but decided against it. Obviously local enquiries about the hippy set in motion by Superintendent Pratt had drawn a blank so far.

Toye negotiated the crowded sea front with some difficulty, and they bore right and began to climb steeply on the cliff road. They passed houses and bungalows at which the hippy might have called, and the two farms with deterrent notices about dogs on their gates. Farther on again, numerous cars were parked along railings, their passengers enjoying the view out to sea in the intervals of sleeping and reading the Sunday papers. Finally the tarmac surface of the road ended. A few cars had driven farther along a stony track and their more enterprising inmates were sitting out among the heather where any patches of shade could be found.

'People seem to have struck off into the moor here,' Toye said. 'See those wheel marks?'

'All right,' Pollard replied. 'Head roughly in that direction: east-south-east. I'll guide you from the map.'

They advanced slowly, sometimes diverging from their course to avoid rocks and dense clumps of gorse. A herd of grazing cattle raised their heads as they passed and stared curiously at the Land Rover, but there was no other sign of life. After about a mile and a half Pollard called a halt.

'I'll just shin up that rock pile and see if I can spot the Wenches,' he said.

Massive horizontal slabs provided foot and hand holds, and he was soon standing on the flat top. A couple of hundred yards ahead, on a gentle slope leading to a col between two rocky hillocks, was a circle formed by nine upright stones varying between four and six feet in height. Whether by accident or design they all heeled over a little in a clockwise direction, giving the impression of a lively round dance in progress, and in some way this was enhanced by their shadows of varying length, all pointing north-eastwards. For a few moments Pollard stood fascinated. Then with an effort he switched his attention to the practical problem of how near the circle it would be possible to get the Land Rover.

'I'll go ahead on foot,' he told Toye on coming down. 'We can get quite a bit closer.'

He walked on slowly, picking out the best route for the car and studying the surface intently. Was it imagination, or were there signs that a vehicle or vehicles had come this way before: a slight flattening of the grass here, and a broken stem of bracken there? Not that it need have been Akerman's car, of course. There were plenty of people interested in archaeology around these days . . . Anyway, did murderers revisit the scene of their crime? He had always been inclined to think that they did, endlessly tormented by the fear of having overlooked some vital clue to their identity.

The traces, real or imagined, led him to an outcrop of rock beyond which the ground sloped up gently to the col and the Wanton Wenches. The land Rover lurched along in his wake and came to a halt. Toye got out, and they walked towards the circle of stones. In the wide context of empty moor and cloudless sky it had a quality of emphasis. Toye eyed it disapprovingly.

'Heathenish,' he commented.

'It's saying something that seemed important at the time,' Pollard replied. 'Pity the girls can't talk.' He stood in the centre of the circle and turned round slowly, looking at the stones one by one. What's happened to that bosomy one over there?' He walked across to the most massive of the nine, and saw that it was blacked by smoke down one side. Attempts had been made to clean it, but the scorch marks remained. Rubbing with a moistened finger had no effect.

'Look at this,' Toye said, who was examining the grass at the foot of the stone. 'Turves have been cut out and replaced.'

None of the remaining stones were damaged. They returned to the car to get some shade and discuss their findings.

'Summing it all up,' Pollard said, 'I'm pretty sure that a car or cars have been out here, and obviously some vandal lit a fire by that stone. Somebody has done his or her best to clear up the mess. This may have nothing whatever to do with our case. Keen amateur archaeologists may have read about the circle and come out to see it. Vandals do get around, unfortunately, and Akerman would naturally try to repair any damage done by them. On the other hand, Akerman lied about the day he came out here, and may have lied about what he did when he arrived. Suppose he drove out instead of walking the last couple of miles, and came on our chap cooking up a snack on a fire he'd lit by that stone. Akerman sees red, beats him up and kills him, probably not intending to. Gets him by the throat and shakes him to death, or something of that sort which wouldn't cause a bone injury. There's nobody within miles, so he lugs the body to his car, stows it inside with a rug over it, collects all the clobber and bungs it into the boot, stamps the fire out, considers his next step and gets an inspiration. He has to go up to Starbarrow Farm, so why not dump the corpse in the old well? All this will have taken time, so his story of having walked to the circle and gone on further to look at a standing stone will account for his not going through Biddle Bay until half-past two. How's that?'

Toye considered deeply.

'He admitted knowing about the well, didn't he?'

'Yes, he said Danby Blake had told him about it. Besides, the farm was empty for several years, and I'm sure the Friends of Cattesmoor did some poking about. My guess is that he'd had a good look at it.'

For a couple of minutes they sat in silence, thinking things over.

'There's one thing I'd have done, if I'd been Akerman and had killed the bloke,' Toye said suddenly.

'Don't tell me,' Pollard said, suddenly grinning. 'He'd have changed his car! Right. First thing tomorrow we'll get Crookshank on to the licensing people again. If he did, not long after Easter last year, I shall begin to think that we've got the makings of a case. There's another point that's just struck me. Does Akerman report damage of these ancient monuments to the Friends' Committee? I remember Aunt Is saying that vandals had pulled down a wayside cross. It would be interesting to know if and when he reported this fire at the Wanton Wenches. I'll ring her when we get back. Tempting to stop off at Holston for a cuppa, but least said, best, at the moment, I think.'

There being nothing further of any use to be done on the spot, they lumbered back to the cliff road and started for Stoneham. On arriving at the police station they were greeted with the news that Mr. Ling of Starbarrow Farm, Churstow, was waiting to see Superintendent Pollard. Asked how he had got on with the gentleman, the duty sergeant cast up his eyes to the ceiling and shrugged. Mr. Ling had been a bit put out at having a wait.

'He can damn well wait a bit longer,' Pollard said. 'A cuppa---several cuppas---are a must. We've been sweating it out on Cattesmoor . . . I suppose Grant went out to the farm from here, and told them he'd been questioned. Kate Ling has the wits to see that it's in his interest to clear up the whole business, and put pressure on her old man. She was certain that he'd put the skeleton in the kistvaen.'

A quarter of an hour later he drained a third large cup and looked at Toye.

'Over to you, old cock. Bring him in.'

Toye tidily collected the tea tray and disappeared. A few minutes later the door opened again.

'Mr. Ling to see you, sir,' he announced passively.

'Good evening, Mr. Ling,' Pollard opened. 'I'm sorry you've had to wait. Please sit down.'

Geoffrey Ling planted himself on a chair and stared at him truculently, his lower lip characteristically outthrust.

'I've come for the purpose of making a statement,' he announced. 'Take it down, will you? . . . I, Geoffrey Bruce Ling, of Starbarrow Farm, Churstow, in the county of----'

'Just a minute,' Pollard interrupted. 'There's an official formula: I, Geoffrey Bruce Ling wish to make a statement. I want someone to write down what I say. I have been told that I need not say anything unless I wish to do so, and that whatever I say may be given in evidence.'

'Is that all?' Geoffrey Ling enquired sarcastically. 'Balderdash, and jobs for the boys. Put the whole bloody preamble down if you like,' he added, turning to Toye . . . 'What, sign it? My Godl . . . Now then, let's get on with it . . . I, Geoffrey Bruce Ling of Starbarrow Farm, Churstow, in the county of Glintshire, found a human skeleton in a disused well on my property on Saturday, 12th June last. I took it out, and during the night I put it in the Starbarrow kistvaen . . . Type it out, man, and I'll sign it.'

'Concise and to the point,' Pollard commented. 'What a nasty jolt you must have had when the post-mortem report came out, stating that death had occurred only a year or so ago. You already knew that Mr. Peter Grant had visited the farm when you were all on holiday in late March and early April last year, didn't you? How did you discover this, by the way?'

'It came out in the besotted atmosphere of my daughter's engagement to him,' Geoffrey Ling replied complacently.

Recognising a doting father, Pollard waited.

'My daughter Kate,' Geoffrey Ling resumed, resting his hands on the table and leaning back in his chair, 'has elected to marry a blameless young man of little more than average ability. He plays the game, carries a straight bat, keeps a stiff upper lip and can be relied upon to do the decent thing. So be it. If you think him capable of committing a murder and concealing the corpse in a well belonging to his affianced's father, you're a bigger fool than I take you for, Mr. Superintendent Pollard of New Scotland Yard.'

'In a case of homicide,' Pollard replied, 'it's obviously necessary to question anyone who could be responsible on grounds of physical possibility. This doesn't imply equating opportunity with guilt, but alibis have to be checked and statements verified. This is the present position in Mr. Grant's case.'

Geoffrey Ling thumped the table angrily.

'Why pick on him? What about the bloody Friends of Cattesmoor, as they call themselves? How many of them came nosing round when it got about that we were away? That preposterous medieval document---probably a fake---had been found which lost me the right-of-way case in the end. I'd had a letter from Akerman, their secretary, suggesting that we meet to discuss the demarcation of the Possel Way through my newtake, and public access to the remains of the chapel. Naturally I wrote back telling him to go to hell. I'd stake everything I've got that he came along. Brought that damned woman Grant with him, I daresay. She was behind it all.'

There was a momentary silence before Pollard abruptly switched to another topic.

'What made you open up the old well, Mr Ling?'

'Because I saw somebody else had been monkeying about with the sheet iron cover. The last time I'd looked at it was when I bought the farm. It was partly covered with grass and weeds then.'

'The lie indirect,' Pollard said thoughtfully. 'When I asked you if you had arranged for anyone to come out to the farm while you were abroad, you said no, although you had since found out that your daughter had fixed with Mr. Grant to keep an eye on the place. Asked about traces of unauthorised entry to your property, you denied having found any. Your defence there would be that you didn't know for certain that the well cover had been moved during that period.'

Geoffrey Ling grinned maliciously.

'Right on both counts. You can't get me on either of 'em. Well, get moving. I've made a statement. What are you going to charge me on?'

'Charge you?' Pollard's tone conveyed a lack of urgency. 'With failing to report finding human remains on your property? I rather doubt if that would be considered necessary. Or with deliberately obstructing the police in their enquiries? It's possible you might have to face a charge of that kind at some stage. But at the moment it's a matter of academic interest until we're satisfied that your statement stands up.'

Geoffrey Ling's expression of incredulity changed to one of furious indignation.

'What the hell do you mean?' he shouted. 'Haven't I made a formal statement and signed the blasted thing?'

'You have. It will be confirmed or disproved by the pathologist who is examining the bones and other things we found in the well, to see if they tie up with the skeleton. You wouldn't expect us to swallow your statement whole, surely Mr. Ling? You've quite a reputation for practical jokes, haven't you? Thank you for coming in. We needn't keep you any longer this evening. Inspector Toye, see Mr. Ling out, will you?'

Toye returned shortly looking gratified.

'He went out faster than he came in,' he reported with satisfaction. 'Spot on, you were, sir. Disgraceful, the way he's obstructed us. It doesn't seem right to me for him to get away with it.'

'We've got bigger fish to fry, old chap,' Pollard said absently, without looking up from an elaborate doodle he was executing on the back of an envelope. 'Sorry, no joke intended.'

'Meaning Akerman, sir?'

'Akerman, anyway. If it turns out that he did change his car soon after Easter last year, I suppose we pull him in for questioning. But I'd feel a lot happier if something in the way of a motive emerged. At the moment there are so many unanswered questions, aren't there? If it was deliberate murder, how was it done and why? If there was some sort of accident, why on earth didn't a man of Akerman's status call the police? . . . Why this fixed stare and furrowed brow?'

'You said "Akerman, anyway",' Toye insisted. 'Do you mean you think somebody else could be involved?'

Pollard hesitated.

'Yes, I think it's possible,' he said at last. 'As it stands at the moment his behaviour seems so motiveless. Only don't ask me who or how, will you? I haven't a clue. Well, anyhow, we'll start off tomorrow by checking Peter Grant's alibi. I'll leave a chit here for Crookshank, asking him to find out about any change of car by Akerman soon after Easter 75' . . . Come in! Oh, here's the pathologist's report on the metatarsals and whatever . . . Yes, they belong to the skeleton all right. I'm glad the report's only just come. I enjoyed deflating that old blighter Ling.'

He pulled the telephone towards him, grinning at the thought of how Isabel Dennis would have enjoyed the final stages of the Ling interview, and dialled her number.

'Tom again, Aunt,' he said. 'Can you supply a spot of gen? We're interested in any damage to the ancient monuments on Cattesmoor in the weeks after Easter last year. You said something about a wayside cross being pulled down, didn't you? Would there be reports of anything of this sort in the minutes of the Friends' Committee that might give an idea of when it happened?'

'Yes, there would,' Isabel Dennis replied. 'George Akerman always reports damage, and any making good he's had done. He may not have discovered it himself, but people let him know as the secretary if they find anything wrong. Hold on, and I'll have a look at last year's minutes: we meet on the third Wednesday of the month. The wayside cross business was the year before, though.'

Pollard covered the mouthpiece of the receiver with his hand as he waited.

'If you'd been Akerman, and we're right about what happened at the Wanton Wenches, how soon would you have reported the damage?' he asked Toye, who had been listening with interest.

'Not at the April meeting. Not unless someone else had written in about it. I wouldn't want to draw attention to the place so soon, just in case anybody'd seen anything of the hippy. I'd wait till the May meeting. That would be getting on for a couple of months after the Easter bank holiday when I'd normally have a look round, so it would be quite usual for me to be up on the moor again.'

'That's what I thought,' Pollard agreed. 'And after the Easter holiday there wouldn't be so many----hullo, yes, I'm still here. Aunt . . .'

No damage had been mentioned at the April 1975 committee, Isabel Dennis told him, but on 21st May George Akerman had reported that someone had lit a fire right up against one of the stones of the Wanton Wenches Circle at the Biddle Bay end of the moor. The stone was badly scorched, and the turf at the base burnt. This had been cut out and replaced, but little could be done about the stone.

Pollard commiserated, thanked her, and diverted the conversation into other channels. Finally he rang off, wondering if it had struck his astute aunt as surprising that he had not applied to George Akerman in his official capacity for the information.

WHEN Pollard and Toye went round to the police station after breakfast on the following morning they found a good deal of activity in progress. Official and civilian cars were entering and leaving the car park, while inside the building purposeful footsteps echoed in the corridors. The door of Superintendent Crookshank's office was half open, and he was visible in deep discussion with the chief constable. Round a corner they ran into Inspector Hemsworthy.

'Fight at a back-street pub,' he told them. 'We get one every so often. Thugs from Wintlebury come over on their bikes spoiling for a punch-up. Two of our chaps were hurt this time, and one of 'em's still in hospital.'

Pollard commiserated, and went on with Toye to their room. No messages had come through, so he proceeded to ring George Akerman. A quiet, rather dry voice replied by repeating the telephone number.

'Mr. Akerman? Superintendent Pollard here, in charge of the enquiry into the finding of the skeleton at Starbarrow. Could you spare me a few minutes this morning? I understand you've a very detailed knowledge of Cattesmoor, and it could help us to clear up one or two points. I can come along and see you, if that's convenient.'

'Quite convenient. Superintendent. I shall be working in my flat all the morning. It's in the house on the works site in Old Bridge Street.'

Pollard thanked him, and said that he expected to be along within the next hour.

'Misleading things, voices,' he remarked to Toye after ringing off. 'Akerman doesn't sound in the least like a chap who tramps all over the countryside, or a successful businessman either. Oh, good morning, sir,' he said, getting up as the chief constable's head came round the door. 'Sorry to hear you've got the aftermath of a Saturday night pub brawl on your hands.'

'Rather a nasty business as a matter of fact.' Henry Landfear replied as he sat down heavily. 'We've got the ring-leaders, though, and there's a special sitting of the Bench at eleven. Would to God I were Home Secretary . . . How- ever, you've troubles of your own. How's it going?'

Pollard summarised the developments of the past few days.

'It's an unsatisfactory sort of case,' he concluded. 'I feel all the time that there are undercurrents which I haven't managed to identify so far. We're having a go at Peter Grant later this morning. I'm hoping Kate Ling will have done a bit of spadework there.'

Henry Landfear grunted.

'For what it's worth I can't see young Grant being mixed up in this business. Not in character. Of course one can be devastatingly wrong about people.'

'What do you make of his sister, sir?' Pollard asked.

'I've hardly come across her. My wife thinks she ought to have gone off to a job and struck out on her own. Bit overshadowed by her aunt at home. Not that Heloise Grant would have meant it. She was damn good to both of 'em. Their father died about ten years ago. And they've come in for a packet now she's gone. No, even if the girl's digging in as mistress of the house and whatever, writing anonymous letters to put us on to her brother seems a bit improbable.'

'This is all very helpful, sir. Can you give us a line on Mr. Akerman?'

'Akerman?' George Landfear paused to assemble his ideas. 'He's one of these conservationists: National Trust, Preservation of Rural England---the lot. Quite a big noise on the area committees. Locally he runs the Friends of Cattesmoor, especially now that Heloise Grant's gone. All this is in his spare time. He owns and runs a thriving printing works in the town, called Letterpress. It used to be a one-horse show which he bought when he moved down here about 1960, I think. It's a mystery how he gets so much done. Partly because he's a solitary sort of bloke, I suppose.'

'Is he married?' Pollard asked.

'Rumour has it that his wife walked out on him and he divorced her. He lives on his own down at the works. Well, I suppose I'd better be getting back to our squalid thugs. Glad to have had a word with you. You seem to have some useful irons in the fire. Let us know if you want any odd jobs done, of course.'

Henry Landfear lumbered to his feet and departed. After consulting a plan of Stoneham, Pollard and Toye went out to their car and set off for the Letterpress works. They found them in an area of small factories engaged in light industry on the north side of the town. The gates onto the site had apparently been unlocked for them, and they drove in past a small modern factory building to an adjoining and very ugly house of dingy red brick. The ground floor of this seemed to be occupied by offices, but a side door had a card inscribed 'G. R. Akerman' over a bell push. Pollard rang, and almost at once there was a sound of footsteps coming downstairs. The door was opened by a tall man in a pale blue drip-dry shirt.

'Superintendent Pollard?' he queried. 'I'm Akerman. Come along up.'

Pollard introduced Toye, and they followed up a short flight of stairs to a first-floor flat, and into a large living room which occupied the full width of the house. Its main windows faced west with a superb view across to Cattesmoor.

'You know, there's a lot to be said for living right on the job,' George Akerman remarked, as if reading Pollard's thoughts. 'It's timesaving, and quiet as the grave here at nights when the lads have knocked off. Not a fashionable neighbourhood admittedly, but at any rate there's room to move in these old-fashioned houses.'

Pollard agreed. George Akerman's life style clearly demanded plenty of space. At the far end of the room was a large filing cabinet, and an enormous working table at the moment covered with Ordnance Survey maps. Bookcases lined the walls and books were stacked on sundry small tables. The room also had wall-to-wall carpeting, central heating, exceedingly comfortable armchairs and a colour TV set.

A reference to Isabel Dennis established a friendly atmosphere, and the conversation moved on easily to the Possel Way. As George Akerman talked, Pollard observed him closely. It was a narrow face with a determined chin, and hazel eyes which gave the impression of careful concentration on the matter in hand. It lit up attractively with an occasional smile, but in general its expression was guarded, Pollard thought, and he wondered briefly about the wife alleged to have walked out.

'Well, Mr Akerman,' he said pleasantly, taking advantage of a pause, we know you're a very busy man and mustn't take up your time. It's quite a small matter. We've been told of all your work for the preservation of Cattesmoor, and especially of its prehistoric monuments which you inspect regularly. Were you by any chance up on the moor doing just this on the Monday or Tuesday after Easter last year?'

'I can say right away that I was on the Monday,' George Akerman replied. 'I make a point of it on bank holidays. Unfortunately, some of the youngsters who come down to these parts on holiday are bloody little vandals, smashing things up just for the hell of it. We've had trouble, so I feel it's worth being around, although one can't be everywhere at once, of course. I'm not sure about the Tuesday off hand: I'll just look up last year's diary.'

'Do you close the works for both days?' Pollard asked.

'Yes. The chaps like the good long weekend, and we knock a day off the summer closure in lieu.' George Akerman extracted a bound desk diary from a shelf and stood flicking over the pages. 'No, I didn't go up on the Tuesday. I worked at home, partly down in the office, and partly up here.' He replaced the diary and returned to his chair.

'Of course you'll have followed the Press reports of the enquiry,' Pollard went on, and will realise that we're doing our utmost to trace the youth seen at the old lookout, at about a quarter to one on that Easter Monday. He was making for Biddle Bay along the cliffs, and when next seen---except by a person or persons at present unknown---had been reduced to a skeleton and deposited in the kistvaen at Starbarrow.'

'You're absolutely satisfied on the identity question?' George Akerman asked.

'Absolutely. And although the pathologist's fiuther report won't be officially out until later today, we're also absolutely satisfied about where the poor blighter spent the interval between death and premature resurrection: in a disused well at Starbarrow Farm.'

'Good God! The old well?' George Akerman, who had been following with the closest attention, stared at Pollard. 'Hence the miscellaneous deposits on the bones, of course.'

'You know about this well?'

'Yes. I knew Danby Blake a bit---the chap Ling bought the farm from---and he asked me out to lunch once. He told me he'd tried to get a better water supply by deepening an old well, but that it would have had to go deeper than he could afford to bore, and he'd had to scrap the idea and fill in the shaft.'

'Can we go back to that Easter Monday again?' Pollard asked. 'Did your tour of inspection take you anywhere near where our chap would have got to? And if it did, have you the slightest recollection of seeing a smallish long-haired type humping his gear on his back?'

'I'd have noticed him all right if he'd been within sighting distance,' George Akerman replied. 'He sounds just the sort one tries to keep an eye on. But if he didn't leave the lookout until a quarter to one, he couldn't possibly have got to the Biddle area where I was by early afternoon. Come and look at a map.'

They all migrated to the far end of the room, and George Akerman showed them his route onto the western end of Cattesmoor. He had driven to Biddle Bay and gone on through the town, along the cliff road and past the outlying farms to where the surfaced road ended. He had then parked his car, and continued on foot to inspect a stone circle.

'This one,' he said, indicating it with a pencil.

'The Wanton Wenches,' Pollard read aloud. 'Sounds all right.'

'One of our best local names, I always think. It's interesting historically, too. Puritanism interpreting a Bronze Age monument about two and a half millennia later. The usual bit of folklore about girls dancing on a Sunday and being literally petrified by an irate Almighty. It's a lovely circle, although two of the stones have had to be reerected. Well, I ate my sandwiches, and went on another half-mile to look at a standing stone, and then, as nobody was about, I decided to push off. At that point I was about twenty miles from the lookout.'

'Did you call it a day and go home?'

There was a slight pause. George Akerman let the pencil he was holding drop on the table.

'No,' he said. 'I drove back as far as Churstow, and then up on to the moor again, and along to Starbarrow. Then I----'

He broke off at the bleeping of a telephone and strode down the room to answer it. Pollard gave Toye a quick look, and appeared absorbed in map study while listening intently. He learned nothing of the caller's identity however. George Akerman merely gave his number, and after a couple of seconds said without a trace of interest or pleasure in his voice that he had callers and would ring back shortly. As he returned to the table Pollard looked up at him.

'About what time was it when you got to the farm?' he asked.

'Roughly about three, I think. I was up there for half an hour or so.' George Akerman rested a foot on a rung of his chair and contemplated Pollard. 'I expect you're wondering why I went there. Partly to vet the kistvaen, but the main object of the exercise was to spy out the land for the late Miss Grant. She was President of the Friends of Cattesmoor, and as secretary I worked closely with her. She had been keen on reopening the Possel Way for walkers for years, but the difficulty was that parts of its route were only vaguely known. Then, a few years ago, a fellow doing historical research found a document which established that it ran behind Starbarrow Farm, and that there was a chapel there used by the pilgrims.' George Akerman paused to smile reminiscently. Well, Miss Grant simply took the bit between her teeth. She had left the Friends £5,000 in her will, and privately decided to make them an immediate donation of the money instead, to spend on re-establishing Possel if it was practicable. Unfortunately, in the meantime Geoffrey Ling had bought the farm, and it was soon perfectly obvious that we'd have to take him to court to get a right of way through his land. Naturally neither Miss Grant nor I were anxious to do this unless we'd got a really good case. She found out that the Lings were away over Easter, and asked me to go up and see exactly where the path would have to go, and what chance Ling would have of pleading invasion of his privacy and so on.'

'Did you by any chance notice the well?' Pollard asked.

'Yes. I came on it when I was looking round in the newtake.'

'This is important,' Pollard said. 'Try to visualise it, will you? Did the sheet iron covering it look as though it had recently been moved?'

George Akerman stared hard at the wall behind the table.

'No,' he said. 'Definitely not. I can see it quite clearly. Chunks of rock were piled on it, and the grass and stuff had grown over the edges.'

'Returning to our hiker who was going to end up there,' Pollard said. 'If you were only at Starbarrow between three and half-past, he obviously couldn't have made it. Did you by any chance see any other walkers about?'

'Nobody at all. I was rather relieved, to tell you the truth, as I was blatantly trespassing. I was surprised that I didn't meet anyone, but it was an early Easter, and there are never so many people around when that happens.'

Pollard looked at the map again.

'Have you got the sheet that shows the old tin workings?' he asked. 'It's been suggested that our chap may have spent the Monday night there.'

George Akerman hunted out another map from the assortment on the table.

'They're on this one. It seems a reasonable idea. Some of the buildings would give you quite a bit of shelter.'

'He could have hiked on to Starbarrow easily on the Tuesday, I suppose?'

'Oh, yes. It would only be about half a dozen miles. But I should have thought it would have been more likely that he'd go back to the cliffs and try to make Biddle. Types like that usually hang around towns when they can.'

'The police over there are trying to pick up his trail,' Pollard said, 'but no luck so far. It's the heck of a long time ago for people to remember a stray youth . . . Well, Mr. Akerman, you've cleared up some points for us, anyway, and we're grateful. We'll press on and leave you in peace.'

A few minutes later they drove out of the gates into an empty street flanked on both sides by blank-eyed factories.

'Anything strike you?' Pollard asked Toye.

'It's as deserted here as out on the moor on a Sunday morning.'

'And quiet as the grave after working hours,' Akerman said, didn't he? 'Not to mention bank holidays, of course. Miss Grant's dead, and there's not a soul to contradict his story about how he spent those two days. Not that there's the least suggestion that he was involved with the hippy . . . Oh, hell, if only we could get a breakthrough of some sort, and find out what this bloody case is all about.'

'There's young Grant coming along in half an hour,' Toye suggested hopefully.

'Somebody else who'll freely admit having been up at Starbarrow at the critical time, and with a perfectly good innocent reason,' Pollard retorted gloomily, and relapsed into silence.

Canteen coffee did nothing to boost his morale, and it was only with an effort that he roused himself to find a fresh slant on the enquiry while waiting for Peter Grant to arrive. Slowly he began to work backwards along the line of the people they had interviewed, as though they were standing before him on parade. George Akerman, geographically isolated and socially detached in the midst of his many activities. Davina Grant, ambitious for status, determined, almost comically immature and quite oblivious of the fact, poor girl. Probably developing a crush on Akerman. Kate Ling. A grand girl there, and the most improbable product of her brilliant clown of a father and oddly detached mother. Ted Callington of the Mayfield Garage, whose personality and sales patter Toye had conveyed so well. Danby Blake, philosophical and undaunted. The Hawkins troupe, voluble but quite unshakeable and Mum-dominated. The local chaps: Henry Landfear, Crookshank.

At this point he halted. Pollard, suddenly alerted, concentrated on the saturnine countenance of the dour but basically likeable superintendent. He waited, but memory remained obstinately silent, and moved on again. Aunt Is, bless her. Right back to the beginning now, and the group standing ill at ease round the kistvaen. Davina Grant again, throwing her weight about, and the grey-headed Bill Worth with his barbed comments . . .

'Mr. Peter Grant to see you, Mr. Pollard, sir,' a constable announced from the door.

'Damn!' Pollard exclaimed, so vehement at the interruption that Toye looked at him in astonishment. 'Show him in, will you?'

The physical resemblance between Peter and Davina Grant was striking at first sight. They had the same rounded and rather full type of face, hazel eyes and dark hair. But there was nothing pursed or secretive about his mouth, and nothing of her latent tension in his open expression, although at the moment he looked worried.

'I suppose I've been a complete fool not to come and see you off my own bat. Superintendent,' he said. 'My girl says so, anyway. She's Kate Ling, as you know. Perhaps you'd take a look at these.'

Pollard mentally awarded Kate Ling an accolade, and read the two letters. They were all in the now familiar block capitals and on the same unidentifiable stationery. The envelopes were marked personal. One informed Peter Grant that his visit to Starbarrow Farm on 31st March 1975 was known to the writer, and that it was obvious why he had got rid of his car so quickly. The other was abusive and asked when he had hidden the body.

'When and where did you get these?' Pollard asked.

'The one about going out to the farm and the car came to the office by the second post on Friday, and the other one on Saturday. We don't open on Saturdays, but after getting the first one I was a bit het up, and went along to see if another had come.'

'Are these letters the only reason why you haven't been along to see us, Mr Grant?'

'Well, no.' The young man shifted his position and looked embarrassed.

'Suppose we help you out a bit. I suggest that when you first heard that a skeleton had been found in the Starbarrow kistvaen, it may have crossed your mind that it could have been a practical joke carried out by your prospective father-in-law.'

'Well, it did actually. Then when there were those broadcast appeals for information about the chap those people saw at the old lookout, I got a bit rattled. I mean I didn't think for a moment that---that Mr Ling had bumped anyone off, but it did look as though the skeleton had come from the farm. It would have been damned difficult to get it to the kistvaen from anywhere else without being seen, let's face it. Then the next day---Friday---I got that letter myself, and it was a pretty nasty jolt. You see, it was true.'

'What was true?' Pollard enquired.

'I had been out to the farm on that Easter Monday when the hiker bloke whose skeleton it is, according to the papers, was last seen, and I was there pretty late, too.'

'How late, Mr Grant?'

'About six. I'd been playing in an Easter Monday tennis tournament at Biddle Sports Club and went up on the way back, just to see that the house was O.K. I'd promised Kate and her mother.'

'About six,' Pollard said thoughtfully. 'Did you see anyone around up on the moor?'

'Not a soul. It was beginning to get dark. I just tried the doors and vetted the windows and came away.'

'About your car,' Pollard went on after a short pause. 'I see no harm in telling you that we have had an anonymous letter advising us to ask you why you were cleaning your old car in your garage up to midnight on the night of 1st April last year.'

Peter Grant stared at him appalled.

'My God!' he said hoarsely. That's true, too. Who on earth is it who's got it in for me like this? I'd have said I hadn't an enemy in the world.'

'Why were you cleaning it so thoroughly?' Pollard pressed him.

'I was going to trade it in the next morning. I'd been wanting a new car for ages, and when I heard I was being taken on by our firm as a partner a couple of weeks before Easter, Aunt Heloise was so bucked that she said she'd foot the bill as soon as I saw something I really liked. It wasn't a particularly good time just over Easter, but on the Tuesday evening---1st of April, I mean---I went to fill up with petrol at the Mayfield, and George Fry, a foreman who's an old buddy of mine, came out and told me that a super B.M.W. had just been delivered from the works. We went to look at it, and I decided on the spot that I'd have it. So of course I put in the evening tarting up my Marina . . . I suppose you won't believe a word of this,' he concluded desperately.

'Why not, Mr. Grant? It's a perfectly credible story, and can be checked by the foreman if necessary. Before you go, how did you spend Tuesday, 1st April? Did you go over to Starbarrow again by any chance?'

Peter Grant shook his head.

'We started up at the office again on the Tuesday. I remember it quite well because it was my first normal day as a partner, and it felt rather good. I coped with my mail, and then my secretary helped me shift into my new room, and I had an early snack and went off to a site meeting at a place called Candlebridge, where we're building a factory. It's about thirty miles east of Stoneham. The meeting went on until about four, and then I came back to the office to finish things up, and then knocked off and went to the Mayfield for petrol, as I told you.'

'Did you go out to Starbarrow again before the Lings came back on the following Friday?'

'No, I didn't. Naturally I can't remember at this distance of time what work I was doing, but there'd be a record at the office. I realise you'll have to approach the senior partners, but they're jolly decent chaps, so it's all right by me.'

Pollard glanced across at Toye.

'Got all that. Inspector? Well, Mr. Grant, we'll have a statement typed out for you to read over and sign if you consider it's a true record. Perhaps you'd look in tomorrow morning? You'll understand that we have to check up on what you've told us, but it'll be done discreetly. And one more thing. As you say, someone does seem to be out for your blood, so watch out within reason.'

Peter Grant drew the back of his hand across his forehead.

You've been awfully decent,' he said. 'Thanks a lot. It all seems so unreal, somehow. I can hardly take it in.'

'I suppose you've no idea who this someone could possibly be?'

'Absolutely none. It simply doesn't mean a thing to me.'

'When are you and Miss Ling getting married?' Pollard asked more conversationally as they got up.

'There's a bit of a hold-up over the house,' Peter Grant said, frowning slightly. 'Our aunt left Upway to my sister and myself jointly and the obvious thing is to divide it into two. I've done plans and got them through the district planning committee, and given them to my sister to study in detail, but she's not at all keen on the idea, and doesn't want me to buy her out. In fact, she's offered to buy me out, but that just isn't on. There've been Grants at Upway for two hundred years, and I hope a son of mine'll carry on some day. However, I expect we'll get things sorted out in time.'

When Toye returned from seeing Peter Grant off he found Pollard gently tilting his chair backwards and forwards with an inscrutable expression on his face.

'Reactions?' he queried, coming to a halt.

'I reckon we can count him out over the chap's death,' Toye said, sitting on the edge of the table. 'Maybe he's a good architect, but he hasn't got what it takes to lead the likes of us up the garden path. Mind you, we'll have to check on him,' he added with characteristic caution.

'Not much we can do about it on a Sunday afternoon,' Pollard replied. 'Still, it's nice to feel we've got a definite programme for tomorrow. Another thing is that it seems to me to explain Ling's caginess about the period when the farm was shut up. He's no fool at all, and I expect he soon tumbled to it that Grant had been going out there. The young couple may even have told him when they got engaged. Pulling his leg, so to speak. Then, after he'd dumped the skeleton in the kistvaen as a huge joke, out comes the report that it was only about a year old, and he suddenly realises the possible implications and gets cold feet . . . Look here, I've got the ghost of an idea at the back of my mind. A drink might get it to walk. Let's go along to that pub down the road and have a bar snack. The Red Lion, or something, isn't it?'

Half an hour later they were coming out of the pub when they met a party just arriving. It was headed by a buxom ginger-haired woman in a frock loudly patterned in emerald green and lemon yellow. She stared and beamed broadly.

'Why, it's the detective gentleman,' she exclaimed. 'Look Sam, the gentleman from Scotland Yard we saw up at the police station. Pleased to meet you again, sir.'

Shaking hands with Mr. and Mrs. Hawkins, the latter's sister and brother-in-law and young Tommy was inevitable. Pollard gathered that Linda and her boy friend were off on their own.

'Well, we never thought we'd be meetin' you again, sir, did we, Sam?' Mrs. Hawkins rattled on. 'And we nearly went to the Queen's Head, too. You never know, do you? Why, that picnic we had up on the lookout when we saw the hippy. We all but went over to Biddle Bay that Easter Monday, and up to the lookout on the Tuesday, seeing that Sam had both days off. But Linda fancied the picnic at the lookout, and as she only had the one day, that settled it. We had a nice day at Biddle on the Tuesday, though, and saw Mr. Akerman who's Sam's boss drivin' through in the afternoon, didn't we, Sam? Doin' one of his rounds up on Cattesmoor, I daresay. Very keen on what they calls conservation, he is.'

Mr. Hawkins made an inarticulate assenting sound.

'Mr. Akerman?' Pollard said, simulating merely polite interest. 'You'd expect him to be up there on a bank holiday when there are more vandals around.'

'Maybe he was there on the Monday, too. But he was drivin' back towards Stoneham that Tuesday afternoon, wherever he'd bin. Pointed him out to you and Bert, didn't I, Margie?'

That's right,' her sister agreed.

'I saw 'n too,' Tommy Hawkins suddenly contributed in a bass growl. 'Drivin' 'is old Volvo Estate. Got a posh new one soon after we saw 'n.'

DETECTIVE-SERGEANTS Boyce and Strickland, the photographic and finger-print experts of Pollard's team, arrived by car in time for breakfast the next morning. In the course of the meal Pollard briefed them on the case and the job ahead.

'That'll be a new one on us sir,' Strickland said. 'First time we've done a well for clues.'

'Lucky there's not much water in it,' Boyce remarked. 'We've left our skin-diving outfits behind.'

'It certainly isn't dry,' Pollard said, anticipating censure from Toye on this levity. 'Some water must seep in, judging from deposits on the skeleton, but it won't interfere with the job. The thing is that you chaps have got to go to work like the archaeological blokes who shift soil with teaspoons. We want the missing bones, and some of 'em are damned small. Bash about, and we'll never find 'em. I'm assuming for the moment that the skeleton came from the well,' he added cautiously.

'All right, sir,' Boyce and Strickland assured him, and exchanged brief winks.

'Well, let's get moving then. One of you had better collect some sandwiches. It could be a long job, and I don't see Ling laying on lunch for us, do you, Toye?'

'I'd be surprised,' Toye replied seriously.

A small heap of official-looking mail was waiting for Pollard at the police station. Impatient to be off, he glanced quickly through the letters and passed them to Toye for filing. It was not until he picked up the last one that he stopped short of tearing it open, and stood staring at the featureless block capitals on a manila business envelope.

'Look at this effort,' he said. 'Over to you Strickland. There might be a useful dab under the flap.'

The envelope was carefully slit and its contents, a folded half-sheet of typing paper, shaken on to the table and opened out with forceps. Its message was in block capitals similar to those on the envelope:

'Ask peter grant why he was up half the night in the garage at upway manor cleaning his car inside and out on 1st april 1975.'

'Hoax?' queried Toye. 'A sort of April Fool?'

Pollard looked up from checking the date in his diary's calendar for 1975.

'According to that sales manager bloke you talked to, Grant bought his B.M.W. on 2nd April at the drop of a hat, after havering about getting a new car for some time. For some reason he suddenly made up his mind, and cleaned up his Morris Marina ready to trade in on the night of 1st April. Of course, this mayn't mean a thing as far as we're concerned. After all, you've got to make up your mind some time about changing your car. But this letter coming on top of that phone call shows that somebody's interested in Grant's doing, and has been for the last fifteen months anyway.'

Toye asked if you could see into the garage from the road.

'Yes, you can. If you stand at the gates it's down a short length of drive and straight in front of you. But the house isn't on a road that leads anywhere, except up on to Cattesmoor. There aren't likely to have been casual passers-by, I mean. Possibly moor walkers, I suppose, but hardly after dark in early April.'

'What did the household consist of in April '75?'

'That's something we'll have to look into when we're through with this well job . . . Got anything up, Strickland?'

'Smudged glove prints on the letter and the envelope, sir, and what look like men's prints from handling the envelope.'

'Well, we'll leave it pro tem and push off.'

The two police cars set out in convoy. Pollard and Toye leading in the Rover. After several weeks of unbroken sunshine the sky was heavily overcast, and there was a hint of thunder in the still air. When they came out onto Cattesmoor from the land leading up from Churstow, they entered a vast, empty and vaguely sinister world.

'It's enough to give you the willies up here this morning,' Toye remarked unexpectedly as he drove with extreme care over the rough surface.

'Hankering after the bright lights?' Pollard asked with a grin. 'It's not the moor that's giving me the willies,' he went on, 'it's the case. As I've said before, I've got a nasty feeling that we're still only scratching about on the surface. Even if we find unshakeable evidence that the hippy from the look-out turned into the skeleton in the kistvaen during a sojourn in the well we're going to investigate, are we any further on? How did the hippy die, and who concealed his body? Here, let's have the binoculars. The farm's just coming in sight.'

A couple of minutes later he reported that nobody seemed to be around but windows were open so that at least the family had not gone off on another cruise. Fifty yards short of the farm he told Toye to stop, and Boyce and Strickland drew up behind them.

'We don't want to look like an assault group,' he said. 'I'll go ahead with the warrant. Come on when I sign to you.'

There was still no sign of life as he reached the garden gate, but the click of the latch started up a torrent of hysterical barking inside the house. The door opened, the black and white spaniel shot out and slobbered wildy over his shoes, and he was confronted by Mrs. Ling in a serviceable nylon overall. She looked at him with a kind of grave detachment, and he knew at once that she realised what he had come for . . . 'I bet it isn't the first time her crackpot husband had landed himself in one hell of a mess, he thought. She's hardened to it . . .'

'Good morning, Mrs. Ling,' he said. 'May I have a word with your husband, please?'

Before she could answer Geoffrey Ling appeared at a bedroom window. Resting his arms on the sill he surveyed Pollard with an air of reckless amusement.

'What can I do for you. Superintendent?' he enquired with mock politeness.

'Nothing, Mr. Ling, at the moment,' Pollard replied. 'I have called to tell you that, acting on information received, we are going to open up the unused well in your newtake.'

There was a short pause. Pollard realised that Mrs. Ling was signing herself off by shutting the front door.

'Well, who's stopping you?' Geoffrey Ling demanded.

'As the representative of the law I'm unstoppable, Mr. Ling. Do you wish to see the search warrant I have with me?'

'No.' As he uttered the monosyllable Geoffrey Ling vanished from sight with the abruptness of a pantomime clown disappearing down a trap door. Pollard turned and walked towards the gate.

'What on earth is going on?'

He glanced round to see a girl at another first-floor window. She had apparently just got out of bed, and on seeing him grabbed ineffectively at the shoulder straps of her nightdress. He hurried out of the garden without engaging in conversation, and returned to his support, to find Boyce and Strickland lamenting the fact that they had no binoculars with them.

'Past the farmhouse and then bear right to the newtake,' he told Toye.

They skirted the farm buildings, parked the two cars among the trees of the windbreak, and entered the newtake at the western end of the right of way. Access had been provided by the simple expedient of knocking down a small section of the encircling drystone wall. Similar rough and ready methods of clearing the track had been used. Gorse and bramble bushes, bracken, and the occasional dwarf rowan tree had been savagely lopped, and the debris flung on either side and left to wither.

'The well's on the house side, not far from where you come out again onto the public path,' Pollard said, striding ahead.

'There it is, behind this thicket.'

They squeezed through the two strands of wire forming part of Geoffrey Ling's amateur attempt at fencing, and stood looking down at a piece of heavy sheet iron under a pile of stones. Jackets were peeled off in an eloquent silence.

'Hold on,' Pollard said, pausing when half out of his. 'We'll have a photograph, Boyce, before we shift this little lot.'

In due course the stones, some of them sizeable, were removed and stacked, and the unwieldy sheet iron heaved up and dragged to one side. Immediately a revolting smell rose from the well shaft, which Danby Blake had apparently used as a rubbish dump after abandoning the idea of extending it down to the permanent water table.

'Phew!' Boyce commented, holding his nose before embarking on further photography.

The other three watched him, perspiring in the sultry heat and hitting out at the swarm of flies attracted by the stench.

'For God's sake smoke, Strickland,' Pollard said. 'I wish I hadn't given it up. Now then, Toye, let's have a look.'

The bricks lining the shaft were streaked with green slime where surface moisture had seeped in and trickled down, and some of them had fallen inwards where the mortar had crumbled away. A jumble of rusty tins, ends of rope and discarded household effects reached to within a few feet of the top, and a zinc tub, tilted to one side, was partly full of nauseous looking dark liquid.

'Maggots!' Toye exclaimed triumphantly.

'We've got to get that tub thing out without spilling the muck inside it,' Pollard said with sudden decision. 'I wonder if all this junk goes down to the bottom and it's safe to step on it?'

With an improvised rope round him as a precautionary measure, Toye, the smallest and lightest of the team, lowered himself into the shaft and succeeded in getting the tub level. He attached ropes to the handles, and steadied it as Boyce and Strickland hoisted it up. Pollard took a sample of the liquid in a sterilised bottle, and the rest was slowly and carefully poured off. In the residual mud were three small bones.

'Metacarpals, or metatarsals,' he said with a grin. 'Don't ask me which.'

In a jubilant atmosphere Toye suggested going down again for another look round.

'Cuhr!' Boyce broke in. 'Here's that girl!'

Pollard looked up and saw a figure in blue jeans advancing from the direction of the house. As he went forward to meet her, the girl stopped.

'Can I talk to whoever's in charge, please?' she called to him.

'Good morning,' he said, coming up to her. 'I'm Detective-Superintendent Pollard. You're Miss Ling, aren't you?'

'Yes, I'm Kate Ling,' she replied. 'I want to talk to you. Let's go into the barn. It's cooler in there.'

They walked in silence towards a stone building with an Early English arch over the doorway.

'Is this part of the pilgrims' chapel?' he asked.

'Quite right,' she said. 'There are a couple of filled-in windows of the same period on the other side. I'd like to restore it now that the Possel Way's been opened up, but it wouldn't be the slightest use suggesting it to Father, of course . . . Do you mind sitting on these tea chests?'

They sat down facing each other. At close range her face was her mother's with the same good brow and regular features, though without the heaviness of the older woman. Instead it was vitalised by her father's vivid blue eyes and a strong hint of his intelligence and dynamic quality. She suddenly broke the silence.

'It's the men in my life, as the women's magazines would say,' she told him. 'They're simply driving me up the wall. Take Father, to start with. You see, he's always been like this. Doing quite crazy things to annoy people who've annoyed him, I mean. He can't adjust to a situation. Mother can, of course, or she'd never have survived---oh dear, I'm not doing this a bit well! I know the police don't answer questions, so we'd better take a hypothetical case . . . Suppose a man found a human skeleton in his garden, and put it into a public place for a joke. If it's proved that he did, or if he---well, saw the writing on the wall and owned up, what would happen to him?'

'He might face a charge of failing to report a discovery of human remains to the police,' Pollard replied noncommittally. 'If he had tried to mislead the police in any way it could be a serious matter.'

'Would he be sent to prison?'

'That would depend on circmnstances.'

There was a pause during which he waited for Kate Ling to voice a familiar anxiety.

'Of course nobody who'd---who'd killed someone would throw out the skeleton ages afterwards, almost on their own doorstep,' she said, a shade defiantly. 'Not unless they were certifiable, anyway.'

'It would hardly be the sort of thing anyone compos mentis would do,' he agreed, and sensed her relief.

'Well then, there's Peter Grant, my fiance,' she went on. 'It's about him that I'm so frightfully worried. You may have found out already that he came out here while we were away on a cruise at Easter last year. Mother and I didn't tell Father, but we both thought it was a good idea for somebody to keep an eye on the place, and I did want the roses watered if there wasn't much rain. It's been a job getting a garden going . . .'

'Miss Ling, just exactly why is this bothering you so much?' Pollard pressed.

'You must know perfectly well,' she said impatiently. 'It's clear as daylight from the papers that the hippy, this skeleton in the kistvaen, according to the police, vanished into thin air just about then. And Peter's getting beastly anonymous letters. He told me about the first one last night, and now he's rung to say there's been another. Perhaps the police are getting them too, from someone who's trying to make out he's a murderer. People seem to be laying off Father now, and concentrating on Peter. I suppose it's sunk in that Father wasn't here.'

'What are these anonymous letters about?' Pollard asked.

'About coming out here, and changing his old car for the B.M.W. just then. As if---well, you can see the idea.'

'That he might have brought a corpse out here and hidden it, and thought there could be traces in the old car?'

Kate nodded without speaking.

'You know, much the best thing for Mr. Grant would be to bring those letters along to us,' Pollard told her.

'I know,' she said, beating with her fists on her knees. 'I keep telling him so! He's hopeless. He's got a thing about dragging us into it. He'll be furious, but I'm going to tell him that I've talked to you about it all, and he can damn well hit the roof. He's taking me to a dance tonight, and I'll make him listen.'

Pollard wrote down the telephone number of the police station at Stoneham and gave it to her. 'Either of you can ask to be put through to me at any time,' he said, 'or just leave a number for me to ring if I'm out. And going back to the first of your worries, anyone who had carried out the sort of practical joke we were talking about would be wiser to let the police know about it, as things have turned out.'

'Men,' she said, with a wealth of expression, getting to her feet. 'Not you: you've been great. Thanks a lot.'

She touched him lightly on the shoulder and was gone.

Pollard sat on for a couple of minutes deep in thought. Finally he emerged from the agreeable coolness of the old barn to find the rest of his team reclining under the trees, and heard that Strickland had clinched matters by finding a long bleached hair, dark near the roots, caught on a bit of wood.

+++

By teatime the various finds from the well-shaft had been handed over to the pathologist who had examined the skeleton, and Boyce and Strickland had departed for London. Over cups of tea Pollard gave Toye details of his conversation with Kate Ling.

'As far as Geoffry Ling and Peter Grant go,' he said 'we'll let things simmer for the next twenty-four hours. 'I've got a hunch that there'll be developments, anyway where Ling's concerned. In the meantime there are a couple of leads worth following up. One's finding out who was living in Upway Manor at the beginning of April last year. On the face of it the most likely person to have spotted Grant cleaning his car that night would be someone in the house. His sister, for instance, although it's difficult to imagine what motive she could have for getting him convicted for murder or manslaughter. Not money: Hemsworthy said they each got about £40,000 and a half-share in the house from the aunt last year. Young Grant's taking Kate Ling to a dance tonight; and incidentally, if he's expecting a pleasant evening, he's got another think coming. She may be besotted about him, but she's a forceful and forthright young woman. I'll go along to Upway Manor and register surprise that he isn't at home. With any luck it'll lead to a cosy chat with Davina Grant to renew old acquaintance: I think it's better for me to go alone. Less official, and easier to pump her. You take a break and go to the flicks if there's anything on you can sit through.'

Toye was doubtful, but said he would shop around. He asked Pollard what other lead he had in mind.

'We've got to put in some more work on picking up our bloke's trail after the Hawkinses lost sight of him on the cliffs. We can take it as read now that he left Starbarrow Farm as a skeleton sometime during last weekend. What we've got to find out is when and how he got there, either alive and lacking, or as a corpse. You remember this George Akerman who goes around vetting the antiquities on Cattesmoor? Well, there's just the chance that he may have spotted a hippy type sleeping rough during the week after Easter. Worth asking him, anyway. But we'll leave him till tomorrow. I want to concentrate on Davina Grant tonight.'

After they had written up their notes Toye went of to investigate the programmes of Stoneham's cinemas. Pollard sat on for a time meditating, occasionally referring to the file. In spite of the progress made during the day he still had the frustrating feeling of merely skating about on the surface of his case. What, he asked himself, was behind the anonymous attempts to cast suspicion on Peter Grant? Were they being made by the killer of the hippy, who must in that case also have it in for Grant? Or was Grant the killer himself, and the author of the phone call and the letters in an attempt to confuse the trail? Pollard found himself wanting to reject this possibility for Kate Ling's sake, but of course it called for the fullest investigation. He would leave a note at Upway Manor that evening, requesting in official language Grant's presence at the police station on the following morning. Having decided on this move and written the note, he debated the line he should take with Davina Grant in his attempt to get information on the members of the household in April 1975. In the end he decided to play it by ear, and left the police station for his hotel and a call to Jane.

It seemed probable that Peter Grant would be taking Kate Ling out to a meal before the dance, but Pollard dallied over his steak and chips to avoid all risk of finding him at Upway Manor. It was eight o'clock when he set out on foot. The clouds had dispersed, and it was a sunny warm evening.

Pilgrim Lane was almost deserted at this hour, and Pollard concluded that most of its residents must be having a Saturday evening out. A small group of youths in crash helmets and leather jackets stood round a Honda parked at the kerbside in earnest confabiilation. An old man in shirtsleves with a scraggy neck looked down at him from an upper window, contentedly smoking a pipe, a budgerigar's cage hung out to catch the last of the evening sun. A grubby small child looked up at him from a doorstep as he passed, but otherwise he met no one. The street seemed shorter than he remembered it, and he was soon beyond the builder's yard and the modem bungalows, and at the point where Upway Manor was just visible in the trees, halfway up the hill ahead. It was just about here. Pollard thought, that the B.M.W. had passed him, coming back into Stoneham. A short distance farther on he came to the first Possel-way signpost, and the road began to rise steeply. He came to a halt on the Stoneham side of the Manor gates, and stood listening intently. A few steps further enabled him to look down the straight drive into the garage. Its doors were open, and as before there was only one car, an Austin Cambridge as far as he could see. He bore left and prospected, and was relieved to see that the B.M.W. was not drawn up at the front door. There was a light in one of the ground-floor rooms, but no one was visible through its open windows.

Acting on a sudden impulse Pollard approached the house noiselessly, walking on the edge of the lawn. He noted that the slightly neglected appearance of the garden which had struck him on his first visit was now more marked. As he drew nearer to the windows he heard a curious sound coming from the room. After a second or two he identified it as something like tough paper being cut vigorously with a large pair of scissors. It stopped suddenly, and a shadow fell on one of the windows. He instantly stepped off the grass and crossed the gravel sweep in front of the house with deliberately firm tread. As he rang the front door bell deep barking and growling came from inside the hall. The next moment Davina Grant's head appeared through the nearer window.

'Good evening. Miss Grant,' he said. 'It's Superintendent Pollard. I hope I'm not disturbing you.'

In the gathering dusk it was difficult to see her expression clearly, but he sensed sudden expectation followed by disappointment, and also some embarrassment. She regained her self-possession swiftly, however.

'Superintendent Pollard!' she exclaimed. 'Why, what a surprise! Wait just a minute and I'll let you in.'

Rather a long moment, he thought, listening to sounds of hurried movement inside the room. Then he could hear the dog being reassured, and a bolt shot back. The front door opened to reveal Davina Grant holding a golden labrador by the collar.

'Won't you come in?' she said rather breathlessly. 'Don't mind Rex. He's not in the least savage once he sees we know people.'

Pollard tactfully admired the labrador, remarking that it was good sense to have a guard dog in an isolated country house.

'And what a lovely house it is, Miss Grant,' he added, looking round the panelled hall and at the elegant curve of the staircase.

She gave him a little glance.

'Well, we think so, you know. Actually it's listed Grade Two. Not that we bother about that sort of thing, but when your family's lived in a house for over two hundred years, you begin to feel part of it somehow. But do come into the drawing room.'

Amused by the Edwardian designation, he followed, and got an instant impression of a beautiful room, also panelled, and with graceful alcoves on either side of the fireplace housing displays of china. He saw that an upright chair had been thrust back from a biureau piled untidily with papers. Beside it was an overflowing wastepaper basket. There were portraits, presumably of past generations of Grants, on the walls, and some fine pieces of period furniture about the room, but also a rather surprising amount of miscellaneous litter.

'Do sit down,' Davina Grant indicated an armchair, and sank into another facing it. 'How nice to meet again, isn't it? I do apologise for all this mess in the room, but it's the Summer Fete of the Friends of Cattesmoor in a fortnight, and I'm simply submerged. It's always held in our grounds, you see. Naturally I'm carrying on the tradition.'

'The late Miss Heloise Grant was a prominent figure in the neighbourhood, I gather?' Pollard asked.

'Oh, yes. She was iavolved in endless things: the Bench, Church affairs, the W.L., the Museum and so on. And very much with the work of the Friends of Cattesmoor. She left the money for the opening up of the Possel Way, you know. It's all left me with such a lot of responsibilities. It's so fortunate that the Friends have a simply wonderful secretary in George Akerman---I mentioned him before, I think. I really don't know how I should have coped with the Fete without his help. I shall certainly try to simplify things next year, but we both felt it would be more tactful to leave the organisation unchanged this year, as it's my first in charge.'

As she talked on, flushed and bright-eyed. Pollard observed her with interest. Her pose was ungainly as she sat leaning forward with hands gripping one knee, and suggested determination and tension, he thought. And unless I'm very much out she's in love with this Akerman chap, and for a moment thought he'd turned up unexpectedly when I arrived at the door just now . . .

He took advantage of a brief pause to ask if the portrait in front of them was the late Miss Grant. The change of subject was obviously uncongenial.

'Yes, it is,' Davina replied briefly. 'It was done when she was much younger, of course.'

Hardly the portrait of a young woman. Pollard reflected. The face was squarish and strong, with shrewd eyes and a humorous mouth, but somewhat lacking in sensitivity. Apparently Davina did not take after the Grant side of her family.

'Well, I mustn't waste your time when you have so much on hand,' he said, as she remained silent. 'It was really your brother I hoped to see. There is a small matter where we think his help might be useful.'

He watched her as he spoke, and saw a sudden sharp focusing of her attention.

'He's out at a dance, and won't be back until late. Can I give him a message?'

'I'll just scribble a note on one of my cards, asking him to look in at the police station in the morning,' Pollard said.

As he wrote he was aware of her satisfaction.

'I'll make sure he gets it. I'll put it out on the hall table, so that he'll see it when he gets in. And now you simply must let me give you a drink or some coffee. It's quite a way out here from the town. Did you leave your car up at the gates?'

'I walked out. It's a lovely evening, and I wanted some exercise.'

'Walked!' Davina exclaimed with exaggerated amazement. 'But of course you really are a walker, aren't you? Why, we might never have met otherwise.'

She was on her feet, looking down at him with a provocative teasing expression. He rose politely.

'No, I don't suppose we should,' he agreed prosaically. 'Thank you, a cup of coffee would be very acceptable.'

She turned and went out of the room, followed, to Pollard's relief, by the labrador. Making a grimace he moved quickly and silently over to the wastepaper basket.

At the top, and spilling over on to the floor, were roughly cut pieces of semi-transparent glossy paper. They were pale blue and appeared to have formed part of an architect's plan. He hunted for bits with lettering on them and stuffed them into his pockets. Listening for the first sounds of Davina's return, he hastily rearranged the contents of the basket, and then turned his attention to the bureau. A large pair of scissors like one at home strictly reserved for Jane's dressmaking, lay on the top of the heap of letters and papers, but before he could examine these in any detail he heard a distant chink of china which sent him back to his chair. The next moment he rose politely once again as a trolley with coffee and cake was wheeled in.

He realised that to get the information he wanted it would be necessary to allow a cosy conversational atmosphere to develop, and endured being coyly fussed over as he was provided with refreshment. It was not difficult to introduce the subject of domestic problems in the seventies.

'Oh dear, no, I've no resident staff,' Davina told him. 'There haven't been any at the Manor for---let me think---six years, since an old retainer was pensioned off. But I'm lucky enough to have a real treasure of a daily. She's called Mrs. Broom! Isn't it delightful? She comes for three hours every day, except at weekends. Of course she has to be fetched and taken home, but my brother and I manage between us.'

'You certainly are lucky. Miss Grant,' Pollard agreed, accepting a second cup of coffee. 'I suppose you have to do quite a lot of entertaining, don't you?'

She made a moue with her tight little mouth.

'Not nearly as much as I should, I'm afraid, for anyone in my position, but I'm trying to step it up. Between ourselves, my brother isn't much help to me. He really isn't interested in anything but sport, and at the moment he's simply absorbed in his engagement. Unfortunately Kate Ling hasn't had any experience of normal social Life, as you'll have gathered for yourself, of course, so that doesn't help either.'

Pollard made a non-committal remark while deciding how best to extricate himself. He fell back on the time-honoured expedient of looking at his watch and exclaiming at the lateness of the hour.

'I must be starting off again,' he said. 'Inspector Toye will be wondering where I've got to.'

To his dismay Davina announced that she would walk up to the gates with him. As they set off, accompanied by Rex, he began to comment on the garden, and was astonished at the vehemence of her response.

'It's my worst headache,' she said. 'I can't find the time to work in it myself, and anyway I'm no good at gardening. And all the help I can get is a tiresome old man for two days a week. But it's got to be tidied up before the Fete. I'm not going to have people saying the place is going to pieces. I've had to get hold of a firm that sends round teams of gardeners, and it's going to cost the earth.'

Judging it expedient not to enquire about Heloise Grant's gardening activities. Pollard held forth at some length on the difficulties of getting gardening help in Wimbledon, managing to make the topic last until they arrived at the gates. To his alarm Davina seized his hand.

'It's been wonderful to meet again,' she told him with intensity.

Pollard contrived both to shake her hand briskly and detach his own.

'And many thanks for your hospitality. Miss Grant,' he replied cheerfully, 'and for giving me a chance to see inside your lovely house. Goodbye.'

He strode off dovm the hill with a sense of relief, and did not look back. So immature and gauche, poor girl, he thought, and pathetic, too. Sex-starved and status-starved . . . But as he began to assess the results of his visit, she dropped out of his mind.

One thing seemed clear. There had been no resident servants in April 1975. Assuming there were no visitors, the household had consisted only of Heloise Grant, Peter and Davina. This could only suggest that Davina was a likely writer of the anonymous letter about the cleaning of Peter's car during the night of 1st April. There was obviously tension between the brother and sister, but all the same, what could her motive have been? And there was also the point that much of the tension might be recent, arising from the engagement.

Pollard was suddenly struck by an idea. Suppose Davina had been hacking up plans for the subdivision of Upway Manor into two houses or flats, perhaps drawn up by Peter himself? It would be a sensible way of sharing their inheritance, providing each of them with a home. But it was easy to see that Davina would see in it a loss of her personal status. All the same, it really did seem far-fetched to suggest that she might be trying---very clumsily---to remove him from the scene by getting him involved in a homicide charge . . .

Anxious to see if the fragments in his pockets actually were plans, Pollard walked purposefully back to Stoneham, his long legs covering the distance so rapidly that several people stared as he passed. At the police station he sat down and began to fit the pieces together. His instinct to snatch up the bits with lettering on them seemed to have paid off. He was still staring at part of the mutilated heading of the plan when Toye came in.

'If your wits aren't completely addled after an evening at the movies, come and look at this,' Pollard said. 'I fished it out of Miss Davina Grant's wastepaper basket while she was making me some coffee.'

'Ethulon,' Toye remarked, looking down at the table.

'Come again?'

'It's the paper stuff architects draw out their plans on. I've got a brother-in-law working in an architect's office.'

'Quite right. And I swear that it's a plan for converting Upway Manor into two units, to use the planners' jargon: one for Peter Grant and his bride-elect, and one for Davina. And obviously she isn't on. I listened outside the window to her chopping up the plan with a dirty great pair of scissors.'

'What would the legal position be, seeing the place was left to them both?' Toye asked.

'This is it. I suppose it would depend to some extent on the wording of the aunt's will. I don't know that it's really very important from our point of view, after all. From what I gathered tonight she and her brother aren't on the same wavelength, especially over his engagement to Kate Ling, but somehow I can't see her writing that letter. If he's mixed up in our chap's death it's bound to be darned unpleasant for her: not at all right for the Lady of Upway Manor image she's cultivating so hard. On the other hand it doesn't seem very likely that anyone besides the aunt and Peter and Davina Grant were in the house on 1st April '75.'

'That throws us back on somebody snooping from the gate, then?'

'Yes. We've only got to check up on everybody in the neighbourhood and all the Easter holiday crowd. We don't seem to be making much headway, do we? Still, Peter Grant'll turn up here at twelve tomorrow. I left him my card with a polite but very definite request. And I'll be surprised if that old bastard Geoffrey Ling doesn't make a move, so we ought soon to get that loose end tied up. If he hasn't contacted us by the time we've had breakfast, we'll get on to Akerman, just for luck.'

Toye looked at his suddenly dispirited superior, and suggested a return to their hotel for a beer before going to bed.

WAVE Wanderers, the travel agency, confirmed that the three members of the Ling family had been on a Mediterranean cruise organised by them during the period 20th March to 2nd April 1975, and had spent the nights of 2nd and 3rd of April at an hotel in South Kensington as part of the package holiday. Remarking that all this had been a foregone conclusion. Pollard tossed the report over to Toye for the case file, and became immersed in the facts gathered by the Yard about Geoffrey Ling.

'Geoffrey Bruce Ling,' he read. 'Born 1917. Only child of Walter Bruce Ling, actuary. Open scholar of Harminster and Newton College, Cambridge. Placed in First Class of Classical Tripos, Part 1. Offered Oriental Languages in Part 2, and again placed in First Class. Reputation at Cambridge for brilliance and eccentricity. Took no part in university life, was quarrelsome, and settled scores through ruthless practical jokes. Called up for National Service on coming down from Cambridge in summer of 1939. Directed into Intelligence. Developed exceptional ability for deciphering and compiling codes, and continued with this work for the duration of the war and for two further years in post-war Europe. Failed to get the promotion his ability warranted owing to difficult temperament (see above). Returned to England in 1947 and engaged in work on dictionary projects in several languages. Father died in 1948, leaving him financially independent. Bought isolated cottage in East Anglia. In 1950 married Eleanor Pym. One child of the marriage, a daughter, born in 1951. Developed interest in teaching of languages to young children. Taught in several boys' preparatory schools and wrote two successful text books, still widely used in progressive junior schools. In 1970 bought remote farm house in Glintshire, and moved there in 1972. Takes no part in local life and is aggressive about his privacy, recently losing a right of way case. Has no police record,' the report concluded, 'but the institution of proceedings against him has been considered on several occasions, in connection with aggressive conduct towards persons alleged to have interfered with what he considers to be his rights.'

Pollard passed the report to Toye, and sat watching him perusing it attentively.

'Hangs together, doesn't it?' Toye said some minutes later. 'The bit about ruthless practical jokes and the skeleton. He must have been hopping mad with the Friends of Cattesmoor over that right of way.'

'All that fits like a glove,' Pollard agreed, 'but it doesn't get us much further. It just confirms that Ling's putting a skeleton into the kistvaen is in character, as we'd already said ourselves. It doesn't suggest that Ling's a homicidal type, and we're still completely stuck with the problem of where the skeleton came from. Let's see what the Yard's unearthed about the Ling females.'

'Eleanor Ling (nee Pym),' he read aloud. 'Born 1920; daughter of Harold Pym, owner of wholesale grocery business in Warhampton. Mother died 1922, and Eleanor brought up on farm of father's brother. Educated at country grammar school. Average ability but unacademic. Joined Women's Land Army at outbreak of war and remained in it for the duration. Good reputation as a worker, but described as a placid solitary type and not a good mixer. Father killed in road accident in 1944, leaving her well provided for. On leaving Land Army bought small holding near Cambridge, living alone and taking little part in local life. Married Geoffrey Ling in 1950. One daughter, bom 1951. Marriage apparently successful in spite of husband's temperament and unequal intellectual ability. Has developed interest in rural crafts.'

Toye commented that it was wonderful what some women would put up with to get a husband.

'Oh, I expect Ling's tame enough in his home,' Pollard said. 'You need an audience to be a buffoon. It's interesting about those prep schools. I've noticed before that playing to the gallery goes down jolly well with small boys, provided that whoever it is delivers the goods as well, and I'm sure Ling could do that all right. And Ling and his wife do have things in common such as liking seclusion and living in the country. I expect that when he makes an ass of himself it runs off her placid back like water off a duck's. She might draw the line at monkeying about with a skeleton, though . . .'

Kate Ling, bom in 1951, had apparently inherited her parents' preference for country life, and to some extent her father's brains. She had taken a first-class degree in horticulture and held a junior lectureship at a horticultural college near Wintlebury. The Yard's report described her as attractive and sociable, adding, as if in surprise, that she appeared attached to her parents and their home. It concluded with her engagement to Peter Grant, architect, of Upway Manor, Stoneham, at the end of 1975.

Pollard found himself reacting personally, suddenly dismayed. Would a time come when people commented with mild surprise that Andrew and Rose appeared attached to their parents? Of course the circumstances were absolutely different, but what about the generation gap? . . . He realised that Toye was looking at him questioningly, and hastily pulled himself together.

'If Kate Ling's fond of her parents,' he said, 'it's reasonable to assume they're fond of her. Let's go back to the possibility that Ling either thinks or knows that Grant went over to Starbarrow while they were all away. I asked him if he, personally, had fixed for anyone to go over and do a job, and he said he hadn't, which is probably true. But he may know that Grant had promised Kate to keep an eye on the garden, for instance. Even if he doesn't suspect his future son-in-law of hiding a corpse on the property, he could be worried that these visits might come out, and lead to Grant being suspected and Kate upset.'

'But if he suspected Grant, surely he wouldn't have chucked the skeleton out on to a public footpath when he eventually found it?' Toye objected.

'He's a hot-tempered impulsive chap,' Pollard said thoughtfully, 'and given to ruthless reactions if he thinks he's being done down. Let's concentrate on timing. He'd been at loggerheads with the Friends over the Possel Way for some time. Then they take him to court about the right of way, and he loses, and has to pay costs as well. This happened on the day we came down to Holston for our holiday: 31st May. The Friends' secretary, this fellow Akerman, rang Aunt Is with the good news just after supper. I remember her saying that Ling was insisting on clearing the route through his property and fencing it himself, and that it would look awful, but save the Friends expense. So it does---look awful, I mean, and the old bastard's made the path so narrow that you get caught up on brambles and things as you go through.' He suddenly broke off and stared at Toye. 'You know,' he went on, 'hacking a way through all that stuff must have been one hell of a job, especially for a chap without much experience of that sort of thing. Not a matter of a couple of hours, and he may have had to get hold of the tools needed. Suppose it took him ten days or so, well into the following week, sweating and cursing the whole time? Say he didn't finish till Thursday, 10th of June, the day Mrs. Ling went away, and came on the skeleton right at the end? Can't you see him being hit with the idea of scoring off the Friends by getting Possel into the news in the sort of way they'd simply detest?'

'Risky from his point of view, surely?' Toye propounded.

'Well, come to think about it, was it really all that risky? Remember that he'd only been living on the farm for four years. He probably thought the skeleton had been there for ages. He's a literary type, not a scientist, and wouldn't have reacted to its appearance as I did, for instance. If I'm right and something of this sort actually happened, he must have had the shock of his life when the pathologist announced that the thing was only about a year old. And he would have started thinking uncomfortable thoughts about the time when the house was empty in '75.'

Toye sat impassive, his eyes intent with interest behind his owlish horn-rims.

'Problem is where he could have found it,' he said at last. It wasn't buried. Wouldn't foxes and rats and whatever have pulled the body to bits if it'd just been chucked under a bush?'

Pollard frowned with the effort of visualising the Starbarrow newtake.

'There could be some sort of small building hidden by all the gorse and stuff that's grown up over the years,' he said. 'It's all tangled up, and along the path I remember it was above my head in places, on both sides.'

'How about a search warrant now?' Toye asked.

'We'd be on firmer ground if we knew for sure there was a building of sorts. If only----' Pollard stopped dead and abruptly slammed down his hand on the table. 'I've got it at last! The air photography that Aunt Is said some company with a helicopter did when the work on Possel was starting. It must have been from a low altitude to be any good, and anyway we can have the Starbarrow section blown up. If there's any building there where a stiff could have been stowed away I'm certain we'll be able to spot it. And if Ling refused to let us investigate, we'd get a warrant. You know, I ought to have thought about this air photography before. It's been trying to struggle up out of my subconscious ever since we went to the farm.'

Toye's tenacious mind reverted to Peter Grant. 'What about Grant's car?' he asked.

'Let's see if Crookshank's around,' Pollard replied, getting up. 'He'll know how to get hold of the aerial photograph, and the quickest way of extracting data about Grant's cars from the licensing people. And I've just had another idea. While I'm putting a progress report together for the A.C., you can take the Rover to the garage Grant deals with. Crookshank is sure to know which it is in a smallish town like Stoneham. Say you're not sure the Rover's ticking over properly in some way: you know enough about cars to spin a yarn. Then get the garage hands chatting and see what you can pick up about Grant's deal when he got the B.M.W.'

Superintendent Crookshank's Mephistophelian eyebrows went up as he listened to Pollard.

'Peter Grant?' he said.

'All very tentative,' Pollard replied. 'At the moment we're working on the theory that somebody parked our chap's corpse at Starbarrow Farm while the Lings were away on their cruise. Peter Grant and Kate Ling had aheady met at winter sports, and it seems quite reasonable to assume that he'd braved her old man and visited her home. If so, he knew a bit about the geography of the place. Add to this the anonymous phone call giving his car number, and we feel that we've got a possible lead. We think it's worth finding out if he suddenly got rid of his car just then, and acquired his B.M.W.'

'Meaning that there might be giveaway traces of some sort in the old one?'

'Just that. Of course he could quite well have found the chap hanging around the farm and beaten him up a bit too hard, in which case we're wasting time over this car business.'

Crookshank agreed that there was no harm in having a go, but added that he'd be staggered if anything came out of it.

'You can take it as a dead cert that Grant deals with Mayfield's Garage in West Street. It's far and away the best in the whole of this area, and the biggest, too. Ted Callington's the sales manager. He's got the gift of the gab good and proper which ought to help if you can get the chance to pump him. West Street's off High Street, the turning on the right just after Marks and Spencer. Meantime we'll be getting on to the motor licensing department at County Hall, and the firm that did that aerial survey.'

Pollard thanked him, and went off to compile his interim report for the Assistant Commissioner. Toye went out to the car park and sat for some minutes in the driving seat of the Rover, deep in thought. He enjoyed a chance of acting independently but preferred to have a definite plan of campaign before going ahead. Finally he switched on the engine and started off. Five minutes later he drove into the forecourt of Mayfield Garage Limited, noting the gleaming models on display in the show windows and the general air of prosperity. As he entered the spacious interior a number of heads turned, and he realised at once that the Rover had been identified. An obvious foreman detached himself from a trio working on an Austin Cambridge and hurried forward, wiping his hands on a rag. Simultaneously a well- groomed man in his forties with crisp fair hair and an easy manner emerged from a glass-fronted office, and arrived alongside as the car came to a halt.

'The Yard Rover, by Jove!' he exclaimed. 'Lovely job, isn't she? I'm Callington, sales manager here.'

Toye got out, introduced himself, and embarked on a description of a slight smell which had led him to suspect a possible leak from the automatic choke. He had tightened a screw, but felt it was advisable to get an expert to have a look.

'Run 'er over into that bay, sir,' the foreman said, 'and we'll do a check right away.'

Toye complied. As he got out of the car again the foreman vanished under the bonnet and became incommunicado. Finding the sales manager at his elbow Toye had no difficulty in getting a conversation going. A favourable comment on the garage's layout and equipment launched Ted Callington on an account of the ever-increasing volume of business handled by the Mayfield, in spite of dicey deliveries of new cars and the difficulties of getting skilled mechanics.

'Everybody's saying money's tight,' he said, 'but round here people are buying cars all right.'

'Not only in the lower price range from what's on the road,' Toye commented. 'I've seen a B.M.W. I could do with. Red. Looks a treat.'

'That'll be Mr. Grant's,' Ted Callington replied enthusiastically. 'Sold it to him last year, as soon as we had the chance. It boosts a garage to have cars in that class on show.'

'Mr. Grant must be a warm bloke,' Toye observed with a suitable note of envy. 'Successful businessman, I suppose?'

'He's quite a youngster, actually. Young architect in a local firm. His aunt put up the money---most of it, anyway. He traded in his Morris Marina. She was Miss Grant of Upway Manor, and what you call a local figure. She left over £100,000: fell off a ladder and broke her neck a month after buying her nevvy the B.M.W.'

'I could do with the sort of aunt who'd buy me a B.M.W. out of a display window as though it was a push bike.'

'Couldn't we all? She'd promised him a new car for his birthday and told him to look round for something he liked. He'd been havering a bit and didn't seem able to make up his mind, but the minute he set eyes on the B.M.W. he went for it flat out. It was partly she was bucked at his being made a partner in his firm so soon, he told me, that she agreed to cough up for it.'

At this point Toye was requested to rev up the engine and the conversation was broken off. He engaged in a reassuring discussion with the foreman, George Fry, who had further tightened a screw, and finally managed to extricate himself, feeling that he had contrived to learn all that Ted Callington could usefully tell him.

Back at the police station he found Pollard reading over his report on the case for the Assistant Commissioner with a dubious expression.

'I only hope this'll keep the boss quiet pro tem,' he said, putting it down. 'Well? Had any luck?'

'It went my way all right,' Toye told him. 'Callington came breezing up the minute I drove into the place, and you didn't need to try to get him talking. I said something about noticing Grant's B.M.W., and he was off. He said Grant bought it the day they put it in the show window, the Wednesday after Easter, trading in a Morris Marina, and his aunt footing the rest of the bill. But Grant had been thinking of getting a new car for some time. Callington said . . .'

'Interesting but inconclusive,' Pollard commented when Toye's narrative came to an end. 'Can't you see Counsel for the prosecution and Counsel for the Defence both turning it to account in court? I wonder what the chances are of getting hold of Grant this evening?'

The sudden appearance of Superintendent Crookshank put an end to the discussion.

'We've had a bit of luck which'll save time,' he announced. 'Inspector Hemsworthy remembered that he'd seen those aerial photographs you were talking about, Mr. Pollard, pinned up round one of the rooms at the Museum. The company that took 'em presented a set. The Museum's just for stuff of local interest, and it's run by volunteers mostly. Miss Grant who was taking that walk you met up with happened to be on duty, and seeing she was there when the skeleton was found, she understood the section you'd be wanting.'

He handed Pollard a cardboard tube. It contained a section of a photograph about four feet long and a foot wide. Toye cleared the table, and they spread out the photograph and weighted dowm its two ends. As Pollard had expected, it had been taken from a low altitude and showed the area in remarkably clear detail. He looked down at it, momentarily fascinated by this godlike view of a landscape through which he had progressed slowly and insignificantly at ground level, with not much more perception than an insect's of his surroundings as a whole. There were the buildings of Starbarrow Farm, the original long house and the subsequent additions. There, too, tiny but distinct, was the kistvaen, where his involvement in this deeply puzzling case had begun so unexpectedly . . . He surfaced abruptly as a constable brought in a powerful electric lamp and proceeded to plug it into a socket. As Toye returned to the table with a lens, Superintendent Crookshank, who had been poring over the photograph, suddenly jabbed at it with his forefinger.

'Looks to me that something's sticking out behind a sort of thicket just here,' he said.

'You're dead right,' Pollard agreed a minute later after scrutiny with the lens. It's not a building though. It's a flat surface with biggish stones on it. What's the betting that it's a well-head? Must be a disused well.'

After another inspection Crookshank became almost animated.

'That'll be it,' he said. 'When they sank a shaft for the one the Lings use now, they'll have chucked a lot of rock and stuff down the old one to fill it up. Then last year somebody bunged your chap in and put the top on again. It looks like a great flat bit of wood or metal to me. If you find the missing bones belong to the skeleton down there, you're home and dry.'

'Not quite home,' Pollard replied. 'Remember Ding, dong, bell? The lad who chucked poor pussy in wasn't the one that yanked her out again, was he? Look here, we want to be absolutely sure of our facts before we weigh in with a search warrant. Who owned Starbarrow Farm before the Lings?'

Crookshank scowled as he struggled in vain to remember.

'Blessed if I can call the bloke's name to mind,' he said 'The agents were North and Searle, though. I know Bob Searle, and he used to say it looked as if they'd got it round their necks for keeps. It stood empty for four or five years. I'll give him a ring at his place. The office'll be shut by now. Do you want that lamp any more? All right, Jones. Bring it along.'

In his absence Toye expressed admiration.

'Spot on, that air photograph, sir.'

'A bit late in the day,' Pollard replied. 'If I'd only thought of it before, we'd have saved valuable time. The real luck was that Aunt Is happened to mention it. But we're not going to stick out our necks until we've got this well-head affair identified, all the same.'

Superintendent Crookshank returned well-primed with information. The vendor of Starbarrow Farm had been a Mr. Danby Blake, a so-called gentleman farmer who had lost a packet over it and been obliged to sell up in 1965. He had come in from up the country somewhere, quite sure that with modem methods he could make a success of Starbarrow, whatever the local farmers said. He tried a lot of ambitious schemes and came to grief as everybody said he would. He was now working for a salary on Lord Landgrove's home farm at Deepacres Park, near Winnage.

'I think we'll pop over and call on him presently,' Pollard said. 'I expect he had big ideas about the water supply among other things. See if he's on the phone, Toye. Super, we're grateful to you for all this help, you know.'

Crookshank expressed gratification in a characteristically offhand manner, and took his departure as Toye handed the telephone receiver to Pollard. Mr. Danby Blake sounded mystified, but was ready to give any information he could about Starbarrow Farm.

'Not that I ever want to hear the bloody place mentioned again,' he added, 'seeing that I all but went bust over it. But come along by all means and have a drink tonight. We're the first house on the right, about five hundred yards beyond the Deepacres main gates if you're coming towards Winnage.'

After writing up their notes on the day's developments they went back to their hotel, where Pollard rang Jane. Against a distant background of small piping voices they talked in their usual motoring code about his activities, and he told her of the confusing network of local byways in the area.

'Aunt Is sent love and everything to you and the brats,' he told her, after describing the snack lunch at the cottage. 'How are they?'

'Fighting fit. Like a word with them?'

He gathered that the in-thing was now practising for the school sports, but the garden was a bit small for it. When he came home would he take them up to the Common? He promised, had a final word with Jane, and rang off. At least the generation gap wasn't making itself felt yet, he reflected, heading for the hotel dining room.

+++

Danby Blake, fortyish and suntanned, received Pollard and Toye hospitably, introduced his wife, and offered drinks. They both appeared philosophical about their changed fortunes.

'I can't say we're wildly thrilled at living in a three-bedroomed house bang on the road,' he said, indicating his surroundings with a sweeping gesture. 'All the same, there's a lot to be said for a definite job with fixed hours and a regular monthly cheque. Not to mention letting someone else do all the worrying. And Lord Landgrove's jolly decent to us, isn't he, Nan?'

Mrs. Blake, an outdoor type of about her husband's age, agreed.

'Starbarrow was super,' she said. 'Living out there was heaven in some ways. You felt as if you owned the earth. But Dan's had marvellous luck to land this job. And I don't mind admitting that the house was hell to run! We couldn't afford to modernise it properly, and any help just wasn't on, of course. I don't know myself with all the mod cons here. I must push off now if you'll excuse me: cakemaking for the village fete tomorrow.'

'Well,' Danby Blake said, when Toye had closed the door behind her and returned to his chair, 'it's this skeleton stunt, I suppose? Ling's three-quarters of the way round the bend, of course, but I shouldn't have thought he'd actually murder anybody. What can I tell you about the place?'

'What's the water supply like?' Pollard asked.

Danby Blake grimaced.

'That's a sore spot. It was water supply that bowled us out in the end. We bought the place in '58, having been assured that the house well and the small stream through the fields on the south side never ran dry. In the summer of '59 they both did, and I had to spend the earth on deepening the house well and putting storage tanks into the fields. After that we got on a bit better, and I planned to clear and improve the newtake---that's the enclosed area behind the house. I called in water engineers about deepening the old well, and they said it was a near cert, but after they'd put down a twelve foot trial bore without hitting a decent inflow of water, funds ran out, and I had to call it off. I----'

'What did you do about the old well? Wasn't it a possible danger to straying stock?'

'I had all the stuff chucked back and the timber they'd used, and whatever, and we put a dirty great sheet of iron over the hole and weighted it down with chunks of rock.' Danby Blake broke off and eyed Pollard suspiciously. 'Look here, if Ling's been fool enough to shift the cover and somebody fell in, it's his responsibility, not mine. Anyway, the shaft was filled up almost to the top. You couldn't have killed yourself, even if you did fall in.'

'Thank you,' Pollard said, 'that's very helpful information. Would it have been possible for a chap on his own to shift the chunks of rock and the sheet iron?'

Danby Blake's eyes widened.

'If he was a reasonably hefty bloke, yes,' he replied after a moment's consideration. 'Of course it would have sunk into the ground a bit after all this time, and got partly overgrown round the edges, I should think.'

'Here's an aerial photograph of the farm,' Pollard said. Would you mark the position of the well-shaft as accurately as you can?'

Danby Blake switched on a reading lamp and bent over the photograph.

'It was just about here,' he said. 'Quite near the house . . . I'm not sure you can't see a bit of the sheet iron. Amazing what detail comes out in those things.' He handed back the photograph with a wry grin, remarking that in spite of everything it made him feel a bit nostalgic.

Pollard and Toye left shortly afterwards for Stoneham.

'Keep your eyes skinned for a call box,' Pollard said. 'I'm going to ask for Boyce and Strickland to come down over-night.'

'Meaning that you're getting a warrant and opening up this dud well tomorrow?'

'This is it. We've got to have proper photographic records, and with any luck we'll find the missing bones. It's definitely a job for the boys.'

They stopped in the next village for Pollard to put through the call. Back in Stoneham he took the necessary steps to get a search warrant. It was late when at long last they reached their hotel. Pollard stifled a gigantic yawn.

' "And the morning and the evening were the second day," ' he quoted. 'I can't believe it. We seem to have been here for weeks.'

Toye, a churchman with an evangelical bias, looked momentarily askance, but agreed that he felt that way himself.

WHILE dressing on the following morning Pollard wondered how early they could decently descend on Superintendent Pratt at Biddle Bay. It seemed only fair to let the chap deal with his own immediate problems and the morning's mail first. Meanwhile he and Toye could profitably fill in time by finding out the exact dates between which Starbarrow Farm had been unoccupied in the spring of 1975. The journey out there was time-consuming, and it seemed worth trying a phone call to Geoffrey Ling, even if the net result was the slamming down of the receiver at the other end. Anyway, the immediate priority was a decent breakfast, which, if he remembered rightly, you could bank on in this particular pub. Going down to the dining room he saw Toye in a far corner engrossed in the menu, and was immediately intercepted by a posse of newsmen strategically placed near the door.

'Not a syllable,' he told them, 'until I've knocked back what hotel brochures call a full, repeat, full English breakfast.'

Unmoved by their groans and protests he joined Toye, and addressed himself to cereal, bacon and eggs with sausages, tomatoes and mushrooms, toast and marmalade and coffee, while sketching out a proposed course of action.

'Even if we get dates out of Ling,' he said, 'they'll have to be checked. We can probably push that on to the Yard, though.'

An informal press conference followed in the hotel car park. Pollard listened with enjoyment to an account of an attempt to interview Geoffrey Ling at the farm, and then diverted attention to the Hawkins family, the lookout and the disused tin workings. This handout was received enthusiastically and had the desired effect of a rapid dispersal.

'With any luck,' Pollard remarked as he got into the car, 'most of em will spend the best part of the day trying to get to the tin workings, weighed down with cameras and wearing town shoes. We'll make for the station, and I'll put a call through to Ling. You can listen in and take notes.'

At the police station they learnt that a report had come in from a man claiming to have seen a youth who corresponded with the broadcast description, in a Stoneham pub on the evening of Easter Sunday, 1975. This report was being further investigated. Several more people had visited the Starbarrow kistvaen recently, and one of these had found it empty on the Friday afternoon of the previous week. This usefully narrowed the time during which the skeleton could have been deposited there.

Pollard's telephone call to Starbarrow Farm was answered promptly by a truculent Geoffrey Ling.

'If you're the Press, then go to hell and stay there,' he was told.

'Superintendent Pollard speaking, Mr. Ling,' he replied. 'Good morning. I'm ringing you for further information. What were the actual dates when your house was unoccupied in the spring of last year?'

He sensed at once that the question was unwelcome. There was a pause followed by an abusive outburst.

'I'm not standing for any more bloody police persecution,' Geoffrey Ling shouted.

As he moved the receiver several inches from his ear. Pollard suddenly recalled a remark of the chief constable's.

'Rather an inexact word in the present context,' he commented. 'Not what one would expect from your expertise in making up crosswords.'

'Damn your eyes!' Geoffrey Ling retorted, his tone conveying, however, a hint of gratification. 'Oh, all right, since Britain's become a police state. 20th March to 4th April.'

'Thank you. We shall need confirmation, though. Were you and your wife on holiday?'

A cackle of laughter further lightened the atmosphere.

'On a relict's non-stop larder holiday, say.'

'How many letters?' Pollard asked, making a reassuring gesture in the direction of a startled Toye at the telephone extension, and mentally thanking Providence for recent sessions at the Times crossword with Aunt Is.

'Five.'

'What travel firm did you book your cruise with?' he asked.

'Wave Wanderers,' Geoffrey replied, too taken aback for comment.

After this Pollard had little difficulty in extracting the information he wanted. Geoffrey Ling, his wife, and their daughter Kate had driven to London Airport on 20th March, and flown from there to Venice, where they had embarked in the cruise ship Triton. On 2nd April they returned to London, and spent two nights in an hotel in South Kensington before driving home on 4 April.

Pollard decided to revert to the subject of the empty farm house.

'And during your absence no one was living at Starbarrow Farm, Mr. Ling?' he asked, and sensed an immediate return to wariness.

'If they were, it was without my knowledge or consent.'

'Did either you or your wife or daughter notice any sign of anyone having been on the premises when you returned?'

'I didn't. If they did, they said nothing about it to me.'

'Before you went away, did you arrange for anybody to come out and do jobs? A builder, for instance?'

'I'm not such a bloody fool as to invite people to come messing about on my property. Not that some types wait for an invitation.'

'Can you suggest any caller who may have come uninvited, then?'

'No, I can't,' Geoffrey Ling roared. 'And I'm not answering any more blasted questions, that's flat.' He slammed the receiver down violently.

Pollard pushed the telephone aside and rested his folded arms on the table.

'Interesting,' he said. 'Why does he get so hot under the collar when any interest's shown in the time when the house was shut up? Obviously he either knows or suspects something off-beat happened in his absence.'

'Can't see him fixing up for somebody to murder our chap while he was safely out of the country, can you?' Toye replied.

'No. Too complicated and dangerous, I should have thought, for anybody who isn't a professional gangster. I suppose he could be one, though. Appearances can be highly deceptive. I wonder what the Yard are unearthing about him? Let's hope they'll get a move on. Could he be shielding someone?'

Their eyes met.

'AQW 227N?' Toye suggested.

'The girl's boy friend,' Pollard said meditatively. 'Then whose was the funny sort of voice? Deep and sort of hoarse. You know, all this is wild speculation, Toye. The job right now is to try to pick up our chap after he left the lookout. We'd better make tracks for the superintendent at Biddle. Why are you looking so put out?'

'That crossword clue Ling had the nerve to try on you. I can't get there. What's a relict?'

'A widow. In this case the old girl whose C-R-U-S-E of oil never ran out when she was making little cakes for Elijah. What shameful ignorance of Holy Writ in someone who's been a churchwarden . . .'

+++

Superintendent Pratt of Biddle Bay was gratified by a visit from Pollard, and anxious to give any help he could. At the same time he held out little hope of an individual youth of hippy type being remembered from among the Easter holiday crowd of 1975.

'There are any number of that sort around these days, Mr. Pollard,' he said. 'Unless he made himself conspicuous in some way, I can't see any particular one sticking in people's minds, not after all this time. Still, we'll make a start by looking up our records. Lads like that can get mixed up in all sorts of trouble, as I'm sure I've no need to tell you.'

The records for the period were unproductive. No youth with the physical characteristics of the skeleton found in the Starbarrow kistvaen had fallen foul of the Biddle Bay police. The chief constable's idea of making enquiries at the Cottage Hospital was followed up, but again with a negative result.

'Sleeping rough as he was, it doesn't seem likely that he'd have taken a room here,' Superintendent Pratt said. 'I'll have enquiries made, though, down in what we call the Old Town, where folk aren't too particular who they take in, as long as it's cash down in advance. Sheds out at the back, you see, and old caravans and whatever. The district M.O.H. is always on about it.'

'Suppose our chap came all the way along the cliffs and into Biddle on that side,' Pollard suggested. 'Your C.C. said something about farms that he might have called at on the chance of a job or a handout.'

Superintendent Pratt produced a large scale map.

'There are a couple of farms all right,' he replied, pointing them out. 'Here, on this minor road. It goes on another mile or so, and then fades out into a path which a hiker coming westward would pick up. But I doubt if the sort of chap you're after would hang around the farms. The farmers've had so much trouble with holidaymakers that they keep pretty fierce dogs, and there are notices warning people off. I'll send one of my men along, though, just on chance, and he can call at the houses on the outskirts of the town, too. I'll ring you at Stoneham if we get on to anything.'

Pollard was suitably grateful for these offers of help, but it was clear that nothing further was to be gained by prolonging his visit. After a short friendly chat he left with Toye, feeling depressed. It was obvious that the chances of picking up the trail of the chap seen at the lookout were extremely poor. And that went for the chance of tracking down a contact between him and some unknown person which might eventually lead to the Starbarrow kistvaen. Of course he might never have come on to Biddle, in which case all the enquiries there were a sheer waste of time. Weighed down by a feeling of frustration, Pollard sat in gloomy silence as Toye waited at the exit from the car park for a chance to edge out into the stream of traffic. Pedestrians hurried past the Rover's bonnet with faintly curious glances at Toye and himself. Suddenly a brisk grey-headed figure with a full shopping basket in each hand came in sight.

With an exclamation Pollard rapidly let the window down further and put out his head.

'Aunt Is!'

'Tom!' Isabel Dennis came up to the car, her face alight with pleasure. What incredible luck! I knew you were at Stoneham, of course, but didn't think there was a hope of seeing you . . . And Inspector Toye here too . . . Where are you off to now?'

'Back to Stoneham.'

'Now listen, my dear boy. It's after twelve already. It won't take you any longer to pop up to the cottage for bread and cheese and beer than it would to fight your way into a stuffy crowded bar when you get back. You two go on ahead. The mini's only a couple of minutes from here, and I'll follow on.'

'Sounds all right, don't you think?' Pollard asked Toye, who replied decorously that it would be most enjoyable, and very good of Miss Dennis.

'O.K., then, aunt. Be seeing you. This is great,' he told her.

As they nosed their way out on to the Stoneham road he was surprised to find that his depression had magically lifted, and decided that it must be because of a temporary escape from his case into normal human relationships. For a few moments he indulged in a fantasy of arriving at the cottage and finding Jane and the twins still there.

'No, old son,' he said firmly to Toye as they turned left and began to climb up to Holston, 'you are not, repeat not, going to slope off to the pub for your snack. Aunt would be affronted. You and she absolutely clicked that time she gave you breakfast.'

'I remember that breakfast,' Toye said reminiscently. He gave Pollard a quick glance. 'We were properly up against it that time, weren't we?'

'Point taken,' Pollard replied with a grin. 'Funny isn't it, how the job you're on always seems the all-time worst? You must admit tiiis one's a stinker though, and I've got a nasty feeHng that we haven't really started to get to grips with it yet . . . Here we are, and I think I hear the mini. I bet Aunt Is knows a short cut out of the town.'

They were soon seated at a table in the kitchen window, enjoying a substantial snack which included homemade bread and tomato chutney, and cans of ice-cold beer from the refrigerator.

'This is super,' Pollard said, munching contentedly. 'Aunt, in spite of your well-known discretion, I suppose you're consumed with curiosity about my skeleton, aren't you?

'Of course I am,' Isabel Dennis replied. 'I've got a proprietary interest. After all, if you hadn't been staying here, you wouldn't have started off on Possel and got involved, would you?'

'Almost certainly true. Well, I can't see why you shouldn't have a preview of today's evening papers and news on the box. On Easter Monday, 1975, a worthy Stoneham family called Hawkins took a picnic lunch up to the old coastguards' lookout on the cliffs west of the estuary . . .'

Isabel Dennis listened with absorbed attention, at the same time keeping generous supplies of food and drink in circulation. When the narrative came to an end she was silent for a few moments.

'Now let me recap,' she said. 'You've accepted that the Starbarrow skeleton is the skeleton of the man the Hawkins family saw.'

'Yes,' Pollard replied, 'we're prepared to accept that. Anything else would be a quite unacceptably fantastic coincidence because of the tie-up with the pathologist's report, wouldn't it, Toye?'

'That's right,' Toye agreed. 'You see, Miss Dennis, it's the business of the hair, and Linda Hawkins being a hairdresser's apprentice that clinches it.'

'So there we are,' Pollard took up, 'and there we're stuck at the moment. The chap emerges from the lookout with his clobber on his back and heads for Biddle, where the chances of picking up his trail seem practically nil.'

His aunt gave him a sharp look.

'He needn't have gone to Biddle at all. If he camped overnight at the old tin workings, which seems a reasonable suggestion, he could perfectly well have headed south from there. If he did, he would probably have gone round Starbarrow and arrived within sight of the farm, as you'll have spotted for yourselves.'

'Yes, we have, actually. But at this point we run into something unexpected and interesting. Starbarrow Farm was unoccupied from 20th March to 4th April. The three Lings were on a Mediterranean cruise. We haven't actually had confirmation from the shipping company yet, but Geoffrey Ling isn't fool enough to lie about a thing like that.'

Isabel Dennis looked taken aback and then gave a wry smile.

'I suppose I've been letting my prejudice against him run away with me,' she admitted.

'Well, let's face it. It's extremely difficult to estimate the time of death accurately over a long period, and it could still be possible that the chap turned up at Starbarrow Farm after the Lings got back, and was murdered then. But if Ling killed him, would he have been crazy enough to flaunt the fact by suddenly dumping the skeleton in the kistvaen over a year later? But let's drop this problem for the moment. I think there are one or two things that you might be able to help us about. Aunt, with all your local knowledge. Had work on the Possel Way started by Easter 1975?'

'No. Heloise Grant died on the 20th of May---she left the Friends the money they used for it, as I think I told you. The actual work didn't start till the late summer.'

'In the pre-Possel era was there much walking on Cattesmoor?'

'Oh, yes. Local people and visitors often go up there, especially in the summer. You can get up almost anywhere along the Biddle-Stoneham road, although it's very rough and steep in places. The easiest way up is through the villages like Churstow. Or you can go out along the cliffs from both Stoneham and Biddle and cut inland. Here again it's rough and boggy in places, and rather nasty mists come in suddenly from the sea at times.'

'You see what I'm getting at,' Pollard said. 'Suppose our chap did spend the Monday night at the tin workings and then headed south, another bloke could have turned up to meet him at the farm without being in the least noticeable, from what you say.'

'Yes, I think that's fair comment,' Isabel Dennis agreed, 'although, of course, if you do run into other walkers in open country you tend to pass the time of day, don't you?'

'You've got a point there, certainly. Can you suggest anybody who might have been up on the moor on either the Monday or Tuesday of that week?'

'Well, there are quite a lot of local societies besides the Friends with special interests: botany and archaeology and birds and so on. They have their own expeditions but we publish a kind of communal newsletter with all our fixtures in it. If I get last year's, we can see if any parties were on Cattesmoor then. It's quite possible.'

Pollard looked through the pamphlet with interest.

'The botanists went to an arboretum near Wintlebury on the Monday. £2.20, including tea. Bring your own picnic lunch. I hope they had a good day. Nothing else seems to have been organised for that week. Is Mr. G. Akerman, President of the Archaeological Society, the same chap as the Friends' secretary?'

'Yes. Archaeology's his special thing. I suppose he might have been up on Cattesmoor on the Monday having a look at prehistoric monuments like the Starbarrow kistvaen. We have vandal trouble now and again. The wretched creatures managed to pull down a wayside cross last year. But he'd have been working on the Tuesday: he owns the Letterpress printing works in Stoneham.'

Pollard was still studying the pamphlet----

'Mr. W. Worth on the General Co-ordinating Committee,' he remarked. 'Well, well. Hardly his line, I should have thought. And Miss D. Grant's on it, too. According to him, she's making an all-out effort to step into her late aunt's shoes as a patron of local activities. What's her brother like?' he asked, skilfully bringing the conversation round to the owner of AQW 227N.

'I've only met him once, at a party at Upway Manor while Heloise Grant was alive. He's an architect, and seemed a nice sensible young man. I expect you know he's engaged to the Ling girl?'

'So I've heard. How on earth did he manage to get to know her? The farm's festooned with threatening notices to would-be callers.'

'They first met on a winter sports holiday. Not last winter, but the one before. They're both outdoor types and good at games. I've heard that Upway Manor is to be divided into two flats, one for them and the other for Davina, but apparently there's a hold-up over planning permission. It's a listed house. Heloise Grant left it to Peter and Davina jointly. They went to live with her about ten years ago, after their parents were drowned in a sailing accident.'

'What a mine of local information you are,' Pollard remarked. Well, I suppose we ought to push off, oughtn't we, Toye? This let-up's been super.'

'It's been very good of you indeed. Miss Dennis,' Toye contributed. 'A real pleasure.'

Back on the road again they talked over the facts gathered from Isabel Dennis.

'If Peter Grant and the Ling girl---Kate, isn't she?---first met at winter sports in late '74 or early '75, the affair could have been going ahead by Easter '75,' Pollard argued. 'Was it advanced enough for him to trek out to the farm while the Lings were on their cruise, to water her pet plants, or something? Father needn't have been consulted---probably wasn't. She's a horticulturalist, isn't she?'

Toye thought there was something in the idea, and that it might link up with the anonymous phone call after all. It was generallv known now that the chap whose skeleton it was had died in the spring or earlv summer of 1975, and seeing that the skeleton turned up more or less on the doorstep of Starbarrow Farm, a lot of people would jump to the conclusion that it had been kept there all the time, in a shed or somewhere. Somebodv at Churstow, say, might have remembered young Grant's car going out to Starbarrow when the Lings were away, and felt they ought to let the police know.

'I'm coming round to the idea that we ought to see Peter Grant,' Pollard said, after a pause. 'If he did go out to the place when the Lings weren't there, it's theoretically possible that either he'd already killed our bloke and taken the body there to hide, or that they met there, and either murder or manslaughter or justifiable homicide took place, and the body was hidden on the spot. Don't ask me why it was put into the kistaen to be discovered by the next passer-by fifteen months later: that's a separate issue. But quite apart from the anonymous phone call, I think we ought to take a look at young Grant. I wish I could think of a pretext which wouldn't put the wind up him at this stage, in case he's the killer. Any ideas?'

'One thing did cross my mind,' Toye said, overtaking an articulated lorry with a sudden spurt of speed. 'A B.M.W. is a pricey affair for a young architect, and it's a recent model. How long has he had it? I mean, did he trade in an older car, after his aunt died and left him a nice bit of cash? And if he did, can we trace it? If he carried a corpse about in it, I suppose there's just the chance there might still be bloodstains or whatever.'

'I'm not sure that your car fixation hasn't got on to something, you know. We can easily find out if and when he changed his car last year, and where the old one is, if he did. The interesting thing will be if the change was after Easter '75, and before his aunt died on 20 May. If it was, I think I'm prepared to tackle him about whether he went out to Starbarrow between 20th March and 4th April, and see how he reacts. And there's this George Akerman who's sold on prehistoric monuments, and keeps an eye on the Cattesmoor ones. I can't imagine that he can be any help to us, but we may as well contact him for good measure. He seems to be an observant type.'

As they approached Stoneham Pollard began to think up a report for his Assistant Commissioner which would justify carrying on the enquiry, at any rate for the present. For some reason the meeting with Aunt Is had cleared off his depression, and he felt that to be taken off the case now would be infuriating. Curiously enough, the only thing that was bothering him at the moment was a niggling feeling that there was something he ought to have asked her about, and hadn't. What it was eluded him. On arrival at the police station he learnt that information had come through from the Yard for him, and the matter vanished from his mind.

WHEN enquiries into the past history of the Lings had been put in train, and the appeals for information put out on the early evening news critically listened to, Pollard felt at a loose end. There was not even the usual expedient of filling in time by having a good square meal. He agreed with Toye that the heat made the hotel dining room unthinkable, and after a drink and a snack at the bar they returned unenthusiastically to the police station to await possible developments.

Superintendent Crookshank was off duty, but they were greeted by Inspector Hemsworthy with the news that two calls had come in since the broadcast. One was obviously a hoax. The other caller had stated that he had visited the kistvaen on the Tuesday of the previous week and that there was no skeleton in it then. He had given his name and address.

'Better than nothing,' Pollard said, 'But too far back to be much use. I simply don't believe the skeleton was put in before the weekend.'

Inspector Hemsworthy agreed. In the room provided for the Yard team Toye made a note of the information, and in the absence of anything further to do they settled down to study the meagre data in the case file.

'Ling,' Pollard said presently, resting his chin on his hands. 'A lopsided type. Good brain---a retired academic of some sort, I should think. Why this eccentric buffoon act, I wonder? Is it because Nature's given him the face for it?'

'Could be,' Toye agreed. 'He'd have been a star turn on the box.'

'After going over there this afternoon,' Pollard went on, frowning as he spoke. 'It's perfectly easy to visualise him planting a skeleton in that kistvaen simply to annoy the Friends of Cattesmoor by involving the Possel Way in a lot of sensational publicity. Hitting back at them for taking the right of way dispute to court and winning hands down. The point is that it's the wrong sort of skeleton for a jape of that sort. Not an ancient wired-up affair borrowed from a col- lege or a medical pal, but one that was walking around as recently as about a year ago decently clothed in flesh. And one whose owner seems to have spent the intervening post mortem period under unusual conditions, to say the least of it. Somehow I can't see Ling keeping a body in a glory hole for twelve months, and then suddenly chucking it out on a public path, nor killing the chap in the first place, come to that . . . Hell, we seem to have been over all this before, in one way or another.'

'Suppose,' Toye said slowly, 'the chap was a keen sales- man or something, and turned up at the farm on chance. Ling might have hit the roof and uttered threats. Brought out a gun, perhaps, or even fired a shot like the other night. Suppose the chap had a weak heart and dropped down dead. That would account for there being no signs of bone injury. Ling knows he's got a dicey reputation locally, and bungs the body into one of those sheds. I know this doesn't explain why he---or somebody else---brought it out and dumped it in the kistvaen. But if something like this happened and we got a search warrant, there'd bound to be traces of the body. We'd have something to work on, then.'

Pollard thrust back his chair and clasped his hands behind his head.

'As things are at the moment I can't see that we've enough grounds to justify asking for a warrant. The only thing against Ling right now is that his house is the only one anywhere near the kistvaen. A suggestive fact if you like, but that's all, so far. You know, I'm beginning to feel that it's a mistake to concentrate so much on the kistvaen business. The roots of this affair are so much further back, right back to the dead chap himself: who he was, and what he was doing in these parts, or, if he was brought here after death, what local contact or contacts he had. That's what we ought to be getting down to, though God knows---Come inl'

Inspector Hemsworthy appeared, followed by a young constable.

There's been another phone-call, Mr. Pollard,' he said. This one's reliable all right: the rector of the parish church and his wife. They were walking on the Possel Way last Thursday, and had a look at the Starbarrow kistvaen about three o'clock. No sign of a skeleton then, or anything unusual. Then there's been an anonymous call which mayn't be anything to do with your enquiry, but as it was a bit out of the ordinary I've brought along Constable Jackman who was on the switchboard.'

Constable Jackman was a youthful-looking blond, at the moment bright pink and rigid with self-consciousness.

'Let's hear about it, my lad,' Pollard said encouragingly.

Relaxing slightly, the constable stated that when the call came through he had given the stock response: 'This is Stoneham Police Station.'

'Nobody spoke, sir, not for a second, say, and I was just starting to repeat what I'd said when a funny sort of voice said "AQW 227N", and then rang off sharp.'

'QW's a Glintshire car registration mark, as no doubt you gentlemen have noticed,' Inspector Hemsworthy took up. 'We've checked on AQW 227N, and it's a Stoneham car. A B.M.W. belonging to Mr. Peter Grant of Upway Manor. It's a well-known local family. He's a partner in a firm of architects here. We couldn't trace the call. It was S.T.D.'

Pollard's good visual memory produced a series of pictures of the B.M.W. and its driver passing and repassing him as he made his way out of Stoneham on the previous Monday morning.

'A funny sort of voice,' he repeated. 'Do you mean a disguised one, Constable?'

'That's right, sir. Not what you'd call natural. Very deep it was, and sort of hoarse.'

'A man's voice?'

Here Constable Jackman was less definite.

'I took it for a man's at the time, sir, but on thinking it over, I'm not a hundred per cent sure. I mean I couldn't swear to it.'

'This is the Mr. Peter Grant who's engaged to Mr. Ling's daughter, I take it?' Pollard asked Inspector Hemsworthy, who dismissed the constable with a jerk of his head, and sat down on the chair indicated.

'Yes, he's the chap,' he replied. It was that made me wonder whether there might be a link with the skeleton business, although I shouldn't think it's likely. What it could be is that somebody saw the car going out to Starbarrow Farm last weekend, and after the broadcast this evening thought they'd just let us know without giving themselves away.'

Pollard looked up.

Interesting that you should say that. Inspector. We met a lady just as we were coming off the moor above Churstow this afternoon. She informed us that one of your chaps who was out there making enquiries about cars using the lane last weekend was wasting his time. He wouldn't get anything out of anybody. Churstow v. The Rest, in fact.'

'She was right enough there,' Inspector Hemsworthy replied with asperity. 'The chap's just got in, with nothing whatever to report. Not a single soul had seen or heard or smelt a car in that lane any time during the last fortnight for all he could find out. Disgraceful obstruction, that's what it is. But there could quite well be somebody afraid to speak up in front of the neighbours who had some sense of public duty, and who'd phone in without giving a name when there was a chance.'

Pollard considered further.

'How long has the engagement been on?'

'Last Christmas it came out in the Advertiser, with both their photos.'

'That's six months ago. You'd think Churstow people, for instance, would know about it, and hardly think it fishy if young Grant's car made trips out to the farm. And incidentally, the girl was at home last weekend. We had it from her mother this afternoon.'

Inspector Hemsworthy repeated his belief that there was nothing in the phone call. 'Just another nut, most likely,' he said. 'We get plenty of 'em on the line.'

'How did Mr. Ling react to the engagement?' Pollard asked, casting round for any further possible explanations.

'I wouldn't know, Mr. Pollard. Are you thinking he might be trying to chuck a spanner into the works?'

'It's a possibility, I suppose,' Pollard said doubtfully. 'He's a peculiar bloke. Is there any reason why he might object to Mr. Grant personally?'

Here Inspector Hemsworthy was emphatic. Mr. Peter Grant was a thoroughly good young chap and popular in the town and round about. Fine tennis player and fond of country life. Nice bit of money left to him by his aunt last year, too. He and his sister each got about £40,000, people said, as well as a half-share in the house, and he was doing well in the firm from all accounts.

'I can't see what more any father could want for a daughter,' he concluded.'

They had just decided to take no steps in connection with the anonymous telephone call when the duty sergeant knocked and entered.

'Excuse me, sir,' he said, uncertain to whom he should address himself, 'but there's a party arrived wanting to see Superintendent Pollard about the appeal for information on the telly. They say they saw a young fellow who matched up with the description over at the old lookout Easter Monday last year.'

'They?' Pollard queried. 'How many in the party?'

'Five, sir. A Mr. and Mrs. Sam Hawkins, their daughter and her boy friend, and a younger lad. 17, Capstick Way's the address. Too many to come in here, so I put 'em in Waiting Room B, pending instructions.'

'Some hope of getting reliable information from a gaggle like that about what they think they saw last Easter Monday twelve month,' Inspector Hemsworthy commented acidly.

The sergeant stood his ground.

'It's the chap's hair they're on about.'

Pollard, who had listened with some amusement, looked up with sudden interest.

'Hair?' he asked. 'Do you mean these people say they noticed that he'd had it bleached, but it was beginning to grow out darker?'

'That's what they're saying, sir,' the sergeant replied stolidly. 'From what I could make out it was the girl first spotted it, she pointed it out to the others. Made a joke of it, saying he'd better come along to Crowning Glory in the High Street where she works.'

'Do they strike you as the sort of people who'd come along here with a cock-and-bull story just for a giggle?'

'I wouldn't say so, sir. Hawkins is a superior sort of working-class chap with a job at Letterpress, a local printing works, he says, and his wife seems sensible enough, even if she's a talker. Both in their forties, I reckon.'

'Well,' Pollard said, 'with an age range of about fifteen to forty-five in the party we can soon spot it if they've imagined the whole thing on the strength of the broadcast. Let's go and try them out.'

On going into the waiting room he immediately identified a close-knit matriarchal unit dominated by Mrs. Hawkins, an ample woman with permed ginger hair and a briskly competent expression. Her husband, an easy-going type in shirt and trousers, reacted sheepishly on being identified as the leader of the family, and his wife attempted to take over.

'Just a minute, please, Mrs. Hawkins,' Pollard interposed. 'Scotland Yard requires full personal particulars from witnesses before statements can be made. My colleague here, Detective-Inspector Toye, will take them.'

As he expected, this created an impression, and while Toye collected the information, he himself was able to observe the family closely. Linda Ethel Hawkins (18), apprentice hairdresser, looked a bright little piece, he thought, not as aggressive as her mother, but very much on the spot. Paul Hoggett (21), Post Office worker, was the solid type. Thomas William Hawkins (14) was so fascinated by his surroundings that he missed out on Toye's request for his full name, and was sharply told by his mother to speak up and not be so daft.

'Now then,' Pollard said, when the operation was concluded, let's have a large-scale map. Inspector. I want you to show me exactly where you all were, Mr. Hawkins, when you saw a young man on Easter Monday of last year, whom you think was the one described on the News tonight.'

Sam Hawkins located the spot without difficulty. Stoneham was situated on the river Riddon, about three miles from the coast. West of the estuary the land rose steeply to Cattesmoor, and a footpath led up to the top of the spectacular cliffs which formed the coastline for the whole distance to Biddle Bay. The footpath continued for some miles along the cliff top before petering out. After a short distance it passed to the left of a small roofless stone building at a lower level, described on the map as 'lookout (disused)'. This provided some shelter from the wind, and the Hawkins family had intended to have their picnic lunch there.

'That's all quite clear, thank you, Mr. Hawkins,' Pollard told him, returning the map to Toye. 'What time did you arrive at this place?'

'Quarter to one, near enough,' Mrs. Hawkins said. 'It's a pull up to get there, and I remember I took a look at me watch half-way, when I stopped to get me breath. Just past the half-hour it was then. I was glad enough when we came in sight of the lookout, feelin' ready for a nice sit-down and me lunch.'

Tommy Hawkins seized his moment.

'I ran on afore the others,' he volunteered in a voice of uncertain pitch, 'an' looked down into the place. Roofs gone, see? An' I saw the bloke in his sleepin bag, smokin a fag, with all his clobber chucked around.'

'What did he look like?' Pollard asked.

'Couldn't see much 'cos of the sleepin' bag, only his face, all smothered in hair.'

'What colour was this hair?'

'Darkish. Same as Paul's. But he had a lot o' mucky yellow hair on his head.'

'You're an observant chap, Tommy,' Pollard congratulated him. 'We'll be seeing you in the Force one of these days. Now, what did all the rest of you notice about this fellow in the lookout?'

Mrs. Hawkins was voluble about hippies and layabouts who made a filthy dirty mess of the places where decent people liked to go and enjoy themselves. They'd had to go further along the cliff and climb up on a bank to have their picnic. Then, just as they'd finished eating, they'd seen the hippy come up out of the lookout and start along the path. At this point Pollard cut in deftly.

'I think this must be where you come in, Linda, isn t it?' he asked, and smiled at her.

'Well, being in hairdressing, it was his hair I noticed special,' she said, shyly at first, but gaining confidence as she went on. 'You could see at once he'd had a bleach---a cheap one, I'd say. His hair was in a dreadful state. Then as he went past I could look right down on the top of his head, us being up on the bank, and the bleach'd grown out from the scalp a couple of inches, and the new hair was quite dark like his beard. So I whispered to Paul who was next to me and Mum on the other side, and---and said joking like, that he ought to come along to Crowning Glory where I work.'

'Did you actually see the darker hair next to the man's scalp for yourself, Mr. Hoggett?' Pollard asked.

'Yea, I saw it,' Paul Hoggett replied.

'I saw it with my own eyes,' Mrs. Hawkins announced, 'and I'll stand up in court any day and say so.'

They were all agreed that the chap had been wearing dirty blue jeans and a brown windcheater, and carrying a rolled-up sleeping bag and bulging rucksack on his back. His height had been much the same as Paul's, five feet six and a half inches. Their estimate of his age ranged from sixteen to twenty-four. He'd walked straight past them without a word, heading towards Biddle Bay, and they'd watched him out of sight a goodish way along, where the path took a dip.

Pollard told the Hawkins family that their information could turn out to be important, and thanked them for coming forward so promptly. It was possible that some of them might be called upon to give evidence in court at a future date. Linda especially might be needed as a witness, and Inspector Toye would type out a brief statement of what she had said, and ask her to sign it, if she agreed with everything in it. Leaving Toye to get on with this job, he started off for their temporary office feeling positively elated. He had no doubt that the youth seen at the lookout on Easter Monday of the previous year had ended up as the skeleton found in Starbarrow kistvaen. However devious the route linking these two points, at least there was now somewhere to start from. In a corridor he unexpectedly ran into the chief constable, and told him of the latest development.

'I seem to remember from the Kittitoe case that you know this area well,' he said, 'so perhaps you can clear up a point that's puzzling me. Even if the chap was sleeping rough, surely he'd have some sort of overnight shelter in mind? He couldn't possibly have made Biddle Bay by dark, starting off so late in the day, and all that north coast of Cattesmoor seems uninhabited moorland on the map.'

'My guess is that he made for the old tin workings,' Henry Landfear replied. 'They're marked on the one-inch map, but you probably thought it just meant shafts and bits of rusty old machinery lying around. Actually there are several stone buildings still standing in various stages of decay. They'd give more protection than the lookout, come to that. That's the sort of thing that gets passed round in footloose circles.'

'How far are they from the lookout?' Pollard asked.

'About eight or nine miles. After that the path gives out, and there's nothing till you get to the farms this side of Biddle. He could have made Biddle the next day all right. Farms? They might be worth contacting, perhaps? He could have tried a bit of scrounging. More hopeful than enquiries in Biddle itself after this time. It would have been full of visitors in Easter week.'

Henry Landfear agreed, and advised a personal call on Superintendent Pratt at the police station.

'He's a very decent chap, and I know he'll do all he can for you at that end. But I agree that it's not promising, unless your bloke got run in, for instance, or was involved in an accident.'

Pollard thanked him and went on his way. When Toye reappeared they spent some time studying large-scale maps of the district. Assuming that the youth seen by the Hawkins family had pushed on towards Biddle Bay, the old tin workings seemed a credible---in fact, the only credible---spot for him to spend the night of Easter Monday. However, after an interval of fourteen months it seemed a waste of time to search for any traces of him there. It was possible, of course, that he had been seen by other walkers, either on the Monday afternoon or on resuming his way towards Biddle Bay. After all, it was a holiday season.

'Most likely he'd meet up with somebody nearer Biddle,' Toye said. 'Look, there's a road out to the farms which must be good enough for cars. It goes a bit further, and then there's a mile or two of footpath marked. People would take their cars as far as they could, and then park 'em and have a bit of a walk. What about putting out another appeal for information?'

'It's an idea,' Pollard replied, 'but we'd better wait and see if anything more comes in from the first two. We don't want to muddle the public. And of course there are other possibilities. We don't know that the chap didn't think better of it and turn back to Stoneham. And there's another highly suggestive possibihty, isn't there? Look at the map. If you cut across the moor roughly south from the tin workings, you land up either at or very near Starbarrow Farm, don't you?'

'You wouldn't expect a chap like that to have a map,' Toye propounded. 'How would he have known where he'd fetch up?'

'The C.C. thinks a certain amount of information about possible pads circulates among the rootless.'

They sat in silence for some moments, visualising a possible arrival at the farm and its outcome.

'Hold it,' Pollard said suddenly. 'What was the date of Easter last year?'

'30th March,' Toye replied, consulting a pocket diary.

'Remember that Ling said the place was unoccupied for a few weeks at the end of March last year?'

They looked at each other.

'If it's true, and it ought to be easy to check up on, could it be that the chap blundered into some funny business? Here, this is the wildest speculation. We've no evidence that he didn't make for Biddle. We'll go over there after breakfast tomorrow and get some enquiries started.' Pollard yawned prodigiously. 'I'm for bed,' he concluded. 'This day seems to have been going on for ever.'