Date: 1934-12-31T15:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Crime; Mystery; Murder
Description: TThe story opens with the members of the Parochial Church Council meeting to discuss the sorry condition of the churchyard, “a wilderness of nettles varied by cheap marble monuments.” Upon beginning to rehabilitate the graveyard, a murdered body is found — and then a second! What is going on? ————— “Not often is a murder mystery a comedy, too, but that is what James Quince makes of “Casual Slaughters”. The murder is wicked enough, but the humor lies in a Devon church council’s self-assumed duty to investigate it after Scotland Yard has retired satisfied with a coroner’s open verdict. The villa
Publisher: MobileRead.com
Rights: Public domain where copyright is “Life+70” or less.

CASUAL SLAUGHTERS

(1935)

JAMES QUINCE
(James Reginald Spittal)

MobileRead Edition
2023

The story opens with the members of the Parochial Church Council meeting to discuss the sorry condition of the churchyard, “a wilderness of nettles varied by cheap marble monuments.” Upon beginning to rehabilitate the graveyard, a murdered body is found — and then a second. What is going on?

—    —    —    —

“Not often is a murder mystery a comedy, too, but that is what James Quince makes of Casual Slaughters. The murder is wicked enough, but the humor lies in a Devon church council’s self-assumed duty to investigate it after Scotland Yard has retired satisfied with a coroner’s open verdict. The villagers are pawkily drawn, their sleuthing is unsubtle but effective, and their ultimate finding is quite Solomonic. An unusual and intriguing yarn.”
(— 1935 contemporary newspaper review)

James Quince was the pseudonym of James Reginald Spittal (1876-1951), a British clergyman, who was at one time the vicar at Holy Trinity church in Lambeth. He wrote three detective novels: The Tin Tree (1930); Notice To Quit (1932); Casual Slaughters (1935).

This ebook is in the public domain where copyright is “Life+70” or less.

Let me speak, to the yet unknowing world,

How these things come about: So shall you hear

Of accidental judgments, casual slaughters;

Of deaths put on by cunning, and forc’d cause;

And, in this upshot, purposes mistook

Fall’n on the inventors’ heads: all this can I

Truly deliver.

Hamlet, ACT V., Sc. 2.

ONE

The Fateful Resolution

It had been one of those singing days when spring is turning into summer, and lifting every muddy lane and ragged hedge into radiance. All day the sun had shone with approval upon Bishop’s Pecheford; all day the village, as quiet and uneventful as its name, had basked in warmth and virtue.

The members of the Parochial Church Council straggled into the dingy schoolroom; as they crossed the threshold they were glorified in the red searchlight of sunset that slanted through the west window and lit up each newcomer with an apparent gaiety better suited to a funeral or a whist drive than to a business meeting.

We had been summoned for seven o’clock. The Rector, who had been looking impatiently at his watch, called upon us at ten minutes past the hour to begin the meeting with prayer. We stood up in silence. The Rector does not fire off collects at us on these occasions; he suggests to us what we shall pray about and leaves us to it. The room was very still.

Someone opened the door and, obviously intending to wait reverently upon the mat until prayers were over, pulled it gently back again without shutting it. It was Mrs. Tawton—I should know anywhere that carrying whisper, which mingled strangely with our intercessions: “Worms? My dear, don’t talk to me about worms. I never see anything like what they are this year. My garden … not worms? … oh, your Beryl! … what? them worms? … Ah! Well now, you take and get some of that stuff Miss Chawleigh’s got to the shop. It’s them little black bottles up over the telegram forms. My Eliza was that bad, poor child, and I just gave her one dose…”

The whisper was lost as we joined in the Lord’s Prayer. Then we sat down and Mrs. Tawton came in with Mrs. Hemyock, mother of the afflicted Beryl.

“I call on the Secretary to read the minutes of the last meeting,” said the Rector.

I am the Secretary. My name is Blundell. An axed Lieutenant-Commander who lives precariously upon Rhode Island Reds has so much experience of keeping accounts without balances that I could not refuse to take on one more when I was appointed.

I read the minutes.

“Any points arising…?” asked the Rector.

“Yes, sir.” It was Mr. Churchwarden Bradworthy who spoke. “I never miss—I’m not like some—but the Commander didn’t read out my name.”

“Sorry,” said I. “My mistake, I’m sure.”

“Mistake!” cried Mrs. Tawton. “There warn’t no mistake. Farmer Bradworthy, you warn’t here last time.”

A murmur of assent encouraged Mrs. Tawton.

“You warn’t,” she repeated.

“I was then,” said the Farmer crossly. “I call to mind that evening well; I made a mistake in the time and com’d here half an hour too early, so I went up to the Shoe, and when I got back you was all coming away. But I was here, and my name ought to a’ bin down.”

There was a pause for a moment while we all digested the implications of the Churchwarden’s claim.

“I don’t see that,” said Caleb Murcom slowly. “Look ye here now—”

Caleb was not allowed to develop his argument. Mrs. Tawton saw it coming and give it an edge that the slow and kindly Caleb would never have added.

“Putt down Farmer Bradworthy,” she said to me, “putt down old Puddicomb and that reskel Tabb while you’re about it. I’ll wager they was at the Shoe. Ain’t that right, Farmer?”

“There ain’t no call—”

“Address the Chair, please, ladies and gentlemen,” said the Rector. “We will ask the Secretary to make a note on the minutes that Mr. Churchwarden Bradworthy was in attendance. That will, I think, be the correct phrase. These difficulties will not arise in future if we are all punctual. Is it your pleasure that the amended minutes be signed as correct?”

Caleb was beginning to murmur again. “I don’t see—” but the Rector affected not to hear, glanced at the upheld hands, said “Carried,” and launched the business of the evening without delay.

It concerned the condition of the churchyard, a wilderness of nettles varied by cheap marble monuments of the sort that come over from Italy as ballast in colliers. In theory the yard had in past years been kept in order by successive rectors; now under modern legislation the care of it had devolved upon the Council. I had got up the legal position and explained it.

“I don’t see that,” said Caleb Murcom. “Supposing as how passon had a mind to putt ens ship in?”

“I don’t think we need go into that,” said the Rector. “I don’t keep sheep.”

“No, zur,” Caleb said, shaking his head in the agonies of thought and putting up a hand to steady it as though it might shake too fast. “You haven’t no ship; us all knows that. But I mind when I was a boy passon Crook putt ens ship in. Look ye now, zur, suppose when you’m dead another passon puts ens ship in; what’ll us do then?”

“Turn ’em out,” the Rector answered. “Do whatever you like with them. I must impress on you that you—the Council—are entirely responsible for the churchyard. You can have it as it is now, a disgrace to the county, or you can make it as beautiful as your own gardens. But it’s up to you. I’ve no more responsibility than any of you.”

Perhaps of all the revolutionary changes of modern times none had ever impressed the members of the Council as much as this. Farmer Bradworthy stirred uneasily in his chair.

“Do you mean, we’ve got to pay for keeping the place vitty?”

“Certainly.”

Unexpectedly Mrs. Hemyock, a silent member, who prides herself on being practical, joined in. Mrs. Hemyock is a newcomer; no relatives of hers are buried at Bishop’s Pecheford.

“I think them as has graves ought to mind them.”

There was a horrified silence, broken at last by Farmer Bradworthy.

“I don’t mind minding my own graves, and I suppose I’ve as many in the churchyard as anyone; but I won’t pay for other people’s, and that’s flat.”

“What I think we have to consider,” the Rector put in, “is that even if all of us in the village did our duty by our own there’d still be many neglected graves. Mustn’t we take the churchyard as a whole and improve it?”

“That’s right,” said Mrs. Tawton. “Let’s have a whist drive and dance. Everybody would come for the churchyard.”

“Ah!” added Caleb, brightening up. “Us’ll have skittling for a pig, too, and bowling for a duck. If someone will give us a pig and a duck, that is.”

“I don’t mind if I give a pig,” said Farmer Bradworthy.

“Perhaps, ladies and gentlemen—” the Rector began: a portent stopped him. We had carried on the discussion, after our usual custom, seated; now Farmer Knowstone—“know” rhymes with plough—rose slowly to his feet and stood looking gloomily at a map on the wall facing him. He is the head of the important family of Knowstones of Mummybottom, as his farm is surprisingly called.

“We gave a duck three year agone,” he said solemnly, “and it were not appreciated.” Still gazing fixedly at the map Mr. Knowstone sat down.

“Ladies—” began the Rector again, only to meet with the same fate.

“I’ll give a duck,” exclaimed Mrs. Tawton scornfully, creating a sensation due to our knowledge that she does not keep ducks and would therefore have to buy one in order to encourage the bowlers.

“Ladies and gentlemen”—at last the Rector got his word in—“without in any way reflecting on whist drives and dances, which are very well in their place, do you think that they are quite the right means of raising money for the churchyard?”

“Us’ll have skittling and bowling too,” expostulated Caleb.

“Well, I wonder whether they are quite suitable, either?”

The meeting, not quite seeing what the Rector was driving at, sat still and stared at him. Whist drives and dances, bowling for ducks and skittling for pigs, are the four orthodox methods of giving to good causes. One can of course raise money by means of draws, when so many as a hundred threepenny tickets may be sold, each representing the hundredth chance of obtaining some object worth half a crown; but it is known that the Rector has an objection to our having draws for church funds. There are also church collections, but they are something of a formality and have no part in a scheme of serious giving. We eyed the Rector warily: surely he was not going to take the same line about dances and ducks as he had taken about draws? We waited for an explanation. It came.

“We shall all be corpses soon,” said the Rector genially, “and I shouldn’t like to think when I’m dead that people can’t keep my grave tidy without playing games over me.”

“Us don’t play to churchyard,” objected the puzzled Caleb. The others, however, appreciated the finer points of the argument, and were impressed.

“What do ’ee think to do with the yard, then?” someone asked.

“What I should like to see,” the Rector answered, “is a place as well kept as any of our own gardens. The mounds levelled so that a lawnmower could run over the grass, the edges clipped, the shrubs put in order.”

The sexton, Mr. Barlow, is not a member of the Council but attends in an advisory capacity. He thought this to be a suitable moment for advising.

“Ay, ’tis they mounds,” he said, “my liddle scythe, I cut he short to get round ’em like, but it takes howers and howers.”

There was a murmur of assent, broken sharply by Mrs. Hemyock.

“I shouldn’t like my mounds to be done away with.”

“You ain’t got no mounds,” retorted Caleb.

“Not here, I haven’t, but my family all has mounds.”

“Let ’em,” said Mrs. Tawton tartly. “It’s no business of ours what mounds your family has to Bideford or Barnstaple or wherever it is. I say Rector’s right. Silly things. Let Mr. Barlow do away with them.”

“We shall have all the village atop of us if we do,” said the gloomy Mr. Knowstone.

“We must not let that weigh with us,” the Rector said; “we must try to do the right thing whether it is popular or not. But of course no one would suggest that we should remove mounds when the relatives of the deceased wish that they should remain.”

“Shiftin’ mounds won’t cost much,” said Farmer Bradworthy thoughtfully.

“Ay,” Mr. Knowstone agreed. “One thing at a time, I say. If we settle about mounds today that’ll leave us something over for next time.”

“Is it your pleasure then,” asked the Rector, “that we defer the question of further and more expensive improvements? Agreed?”

There was no doubt of our complete unanimity on this point. The horrible danger of being called upon to give actual money for the churchyard had been passed and there was a general sense of relief.

“What’ll my orders be, then?” Mr. Barlow asked.

“We’d better have a resolution to put the matter in order: ‘That the Sexton be instructed to keep new graves level and to remove old mounds when no possible objection can arise’—something like that, I should think. If that resolution meets the case will someone move it Tawton? Thank you. Mrs. Tawton moves—Mr. Bradworthy seconds—those in favour … those against … carried unanimously … no, I beg your pardon, carried with one dissentient. That closes our business, ladies and gentlemen. We will stand…”

This is rather the Rector’s way. He exercises great patience with us during the earlier stages of meetings; then he gets hungry and the thought of dinner intervenes to cut our proceedings short. Otherwise I don’t see why they should ever end.

Barlow, as a colleague, waited for a moment of confidential talk when the others went home, and we walked down the hill together.

“These new-fangled Councils do seem to be so much good as a rotten potato. I likes to get my orders from passon, and I likes to give my orders to the rest of ’em. There’s that Widow Widgery come yesterday bothering about where her grave is to be, and her not sick yet, let alone dead. I says to her, ‘Ye’ll lay where you’re told,’ I says. They mounds now. There’s only one of them that’s been putt of late years that I can shift without someone making a hullabaloo. That’s old Sarah Mant’s. Single old lady, she were, not related to none of us. No one will worry about her.”

“Buried up by the south door, wasn’t she?” I said. “Under the tower?”

“That’s her. If I get that mound level there’ll be quite a bit of flat just there. I’ll do it tomorrow. Good night, zur.”

“Good night, Barlow.”

TWO

The Dead Hand

I had meant to run through some bills with the Rector after the Council Meeting but there had been no time, so I looked in on the following morning. We were sitting in the study with our minds on coke, when suddenly there was a noise in the hall and Barlow burst in unannounced. Ordinarily he is a wholesome-looking ruddy person; on this occasion his face was a blotchy white and streaming with sweat. He stood at the door staring at the Rector and gasping as if he had run a mile instead of a hundred yards, which is the distance between the rectory and the church.

“What on earth’s the matter, Barlow?” the Rector exclaimed, while I got up and put a hand on the man’s arm, fearing that he had some sort of fit.

“O zur! O zur!” Barlow got out at last in a cracked voice. “Come ’ee quick and exterpize her!”

“Sit down. Calm yourself. I can’t exorcize people in such a hurry as that. Has to be done with deliberation, you know bell, book and candle… There, that’s better”—as Barlow sank into a chair—“now take your time and tell us all about it.”

“’Tis Sarah Mant. Her’ve come out of her coffin.”

“Come out of her coffin?” The Rector took this surprising news with complete calm. “Come out of her coffin? Well, well, she shouldn’t have done that. What makes you think Sarah has taken such a rash step? Is she walking?”

The matter-of-fact atmosphere of the Rector’s study was having a marked effect on Barlow and he was able now to give us his story.

“’Tis like this, zur. My orders is to level they mounds where nobody minds. So I thinks to myself this morning I’ll go and level Sarah Mant’s, because nobody don’t mind her. Well, I takes off the turves and puts them alongside and then I levels the mound. I was going to putt the turves back and I see there’s nobut clay for them to lay on. So I thinks to myself I’ll take out half a spit of clay and putt in a bit of loam for the grass to grow in, and when I puts in my spade it comes up against something. I don’t know what ’tis but I eases it up and it’s a hand. But I take my Bible oath I putt Sarah five foot farther down than that. You remember, zur?”

“I remember very well. It was in that wet spell, and you had some trouble with the water at the bottom, didn’t you?”

“Yes, zur!”

“Well, no one can possibly say it’s your fault if Sarah has come up. Let me see: how long ago was it?”

“’Twas in September. I mind because my nephew to Barnstaple moved that Michaelmas and I was going to give him a hand with his things but I had to stay because of digging Sarah’s grave.”

“Eight months ago. Well, Blundell, do you think, now Barlow is rested, we’d better go round and have a look?”

“I’m ready,” said I. I was indeed more than ready, having the seaman’s affection for the supernatural and being considerably less hardened than the Rector to the village habit of invoking it.

“Come along then,” said he.

•   •   •   •   •   •

A late fourteenth-century church and an early nineteenth-century rectory adjoin each other at Bishop’s Pecheford: their shapes are different but their cubic capacity must be about the same. A park-like garden matches the size of the house. Along the churchyard wall is an avenue of evergreen oaks known as ‘them furriners’ which add to the untidiness of the graves by shedding enormous quantities of stiff little leaves in early summer.

We took the path by the lawn, went through a gate at the side of the churchyard, and up to the south door by the tower. There the soil from the mound had been scattered over the surrounding grass; a parallelogram of bare earth marked the grave of the late Miss Mant. Something irregular stuck up from the clay. Barlow took up a strategic position behind me; the Rector bent down and moved the object delicately with a pencil which he took from his pocket. He then wiped the pencil on the grass and stood up.

“I apologize, Barlow,” he said. “I confess that I thought you’d made a mistake. You were of course perfectly right about the facts, although perhaps you were hasty in your explanations. I doubt whether Sarah is to blame in the matter. But before we go further we must have other assistance. Does anyone else know of this?”

“No, zur. I came straight to you when I found ’er.”

“Very well. On no account mention it to anyone. For the moment it would perhaps be as well to throw a tarpaulin over the grave. You might get one now, would you?”

Barlow went off to the sexton’s den on the north side of the church. The faint air of weariness which one associates with the Rector was completely dissipated.

“A man’s hand, Blundell! We must have the doctor and the police before we touch it. I think not Beer: he’s quite a good village policeman but too stupid for this. I’ll get on to the Chief Constable and see if he can come here at once and bring an inspector or a detective with him. Will you go and secure the doctor?”

“Right,” said I.

“Tell him we’ll let him know when the police will be here.”

By this time Barlow had returned carrying the tarpaulin that he uses for covering graves which have to be dug in wet weather. We laid it carefully over Sarah Mant and her unknown visitor.

“That’ll do for the present,” said the Rector. “We’ll be back soon. Don’t lose sight of the grave, Barlow. If you do a job on this side of the yard you can keep an eye on it.”

“Yes, zur,” said the reluctant sexton, who evidently wished to be anywhere else and immediately went off to trim the hedge as far away from Miss Mant as he could go.

I found the doctor just preparing to start out on his rounds. He is a locum tenens, and much more popular in the village than our regular medico, who had to go away for a year for his health. The people say that he is a smart man with medicines and praise his homely manner. Mr. Bradworthy told me that as soon as he came into the house he made them all as comfortable as if he’d been a farmer himself. He seems to have wandered over a considerable portion of the known world, and says he prefers doing temporary work to settling down in one place. He impresses us all by mixing up a different medicine for each patient, whereas our own doctor has a red one for all affections of the chest and throat and a green one for stomach trouble. This is convenient, because often it enables parents to send a child to ask for a ‘bottle of the red’, or hand in an empty jar to be filled with ‘the green’ without troubling the doctor to come round. Also, as Caleb pointed out to me once, “Faces be different like, but one stummick be the spit of another stummick,” so why have different medicines? It is something of a compliment to the locum tenens that notwithstanding logic and convenience most of us are on his side in the matter.

The doctor’s name is Williams; he has a somewhat dissipated air but his conduct gives us no reason to suppose that he has earned it. My only objection to him is that he is too hilarious for my liking and has acquired in his travels in America the habit of addressing people by official titles one step higher than their rank.

He was tightening plugs when I arrived and waved the tommy-bar in greeting.

“Hullo, Captain!” he cried. “You don’t mean to tell me that you want doctoring?”

“Not I: fit as a fiddle. I’ve a message from the Rector.”

“Nothing the matter with him, is there?” The doctor turned his back as he spoke and gave a final twist to the fourth plug.

“No. But they’ve found a corpse in the churchyard.”

Dr. Williams’s hand and tool were still for a moment: then he burst into a roar of laughter. I could see no cause for merriment.

“You Pecheford people will be the death of me,” he said, wiping his eyes. “A corpse in the churchyard! Where on earth do you expect to find corpses if not in churchyards?”

“Yes, but this isn’t an ordinary corpse, it’s—”

“An extraordinary one, eh? Come in and have a drink and tell me all about it.”

So saying the doctor took me by the arm—a gesture I hate—and led me into the house.

“What’ll you have? Whisky or—”

“Nothing, thanks. Too early in the day for me.”

“What! Not even when you’re on such a funereal errand? Nonsense. Look here: half an inch of whisky and as much soda as you like. No use telling me an old salt like you won’t be the better for a little drop: there you are—help yourself to the soda—here’s luck!”

I had to take the drink produced from the dining-room sideboard and handled with the swiftness of a bartender or, as it would perhaps be more charitable to say, of a dispenser. While I was engaged with the siphon the doctor tossed off his own allowance of whisky without any soda water at all.

“That’s better,” he said. “Now sit down, Captain, and tell me about your corpse.”

“It’s not my corpse; I told you that I had a message from the Rector—”

“No, no! Of course not. My dear fellow, I apologize. Certainly not your corpse. Whose then?”

“I mean I’ve had nothing to do with it. Barlow found it, and reported to the Rector—”

“Ah! Barlow’s corpse then, on the principle that findings is keepings. Barlow’s corpse, ha, ha!”

“I don’t see anything funny about it. Barlow was levelling the mound on a grave near the south door when he came on a hand. The Rector is ringing up the police. When they come whatever is there will be dug up and the Rector thought that a medical man ought to be present.”

“What the devil for?”

“I don’t know,” said I, nonplussed. When I came to think of it there didn’t seem much for a doctor to do at the actual excavation.

“I see, Captain. Little compliment to doctor. Kills hundreds of people: seldom has subsequent opportunity of viewing his handiwork. Rector thought it would be nice for me to be there. Of course I will, certainly. What time?”

“I’ll let you know when the Rector has arranged with the police.”

“Then I will not go out until I hear from you again. Right! No hurry about my patients today, none of them want expediting out of this world. Ha, ha!”

I escaped from the house inwardly resolving that however much Pecheford invalids might enjoy Williams’s humorous bedside manner I, for my part, should insist on having any other doctor if I were ill.

The shortest way from the doctor’s to the rectory is through the churchyard, where I found Barlow still attacking the fence. It began to present a curiously ragged appearance in the corner which was farthest away from the south door.

“Steady on, Barlow!” I said. “You’ll go right through this hedge if you’re not careful. How about moving up a bit?”

“’Tis that tarpaulin, zur,” said the unlucky sexton in a hoarse whisper, wiping his forehead with the back of his hand. “Her rises up and her valls down. I bain’t feared of no man, zur, but it isn’t comfortable to be here in this churchyard with Sarah Mant.”

“Nonsense, Barlow! That wasn’t Sarah’s hand you dug up. If you’d looked a little closer you’d have seen that it’s a man’s hand.”

“A man! Well, now, I am a proper fule. A man! Do you mean someone has gone and buried a man atop of Sarah?”

“That’s what it looks like. We shall know better when we can dig him up.”

“A man! Well, someone has got a good cheek. To come burying here to Bishop’s Pecheford where I be sexton and me not to know! Well, if us find out who done it I’ll have something to say to un.”

Indignant but relieved of all his fears Barlow moved up the line of the hedge and began to trim it with scientific accuracy. I went on to the rectory.

“Ah, here you are,” said the Rector. “There seemed to be a crowd of people on the line, and I have only just got through. The Chief Constable will be here in an hour. Did you catch Williams?”

“Yes, and he is standing by.”

“Let him know, there’s a good chap. Barlow is on guard, I suppose?”

“Yes. He’s greatly cheered because I told him the hand belonged to a man. He’s not shy of strange corpses: it was Sarah who alarmed him.”

“Ah, I suppose so… We ought to have someone to help him—Vinnicombe, do you think?”

“Nobody better.”

“I’ll go and collect him. We’ll meet in the churchyard.”

Vinnicombe is the blacksmith and a very capable chap. He is a grave, solid, ham-faced young man: by virtue of his calling he ranks as a dentist and veterinary surgeon and he carries on something of a practice as a physician too. He would have made a very good general practitioner if he could have had the training; as it is he does all he can to obtain useful knowledge, and is a pastmaster in all the arts of the St. John Ambulance Association. Whenever there is an accident he is sent for, and has generally cleaned wounds and set broken legs and given the right antidote for poisons before any doctor puts in an appearance. ‘Send for Vinnicombe’ is always our cry in time of trouble. I have not myself had occasion to test him in these human relations, but find that he undoubtedly handles the inside of a two-seater with more care and competence than the casual experts in garages have to show.

The Rector went off to fetch Vinnicombe; I had no inclination to risk further offers of hospitality from the doctor so wrote a message on a card to the effect that the Chief Constable was on his way, and sent Barlow with it. The sexton was able to go on this errand without disobeying his orders to keep an eye on the grave. The doctor’s house flanks the churchyard on the north side much as the rectory does on the south.

The Chief Constable was slower in starting or took longer on the way than we had expected. We waited, watching the russet leaves dancing with unbecoming merriment on the tarpaulin over the grave. Barlow, now quite unperturbed, pointed out to me the undoubted fact that the tarpaulin itself moved in the wind exactly as though the hand underneath were pushing at it. Barlow seemed to take this as a further proof of the impertinence involved in the whole transaction of burying without the concurrence of the lawful sexton.

“Look at un!” he exclaimed. “Tes like a diddy-guy in under.”

A diddy-guy is the image which appears on the fifth of November and jerks its limbs in response to the persuasion of small boys. I wondered whether this could be the actual truth and the hand turn out to be a dummy. I hoped not, for it would have been too terrible for the Rector to have brought the Chief Constable on a fool’s errand. Vinnicombe, who never wastes words, shook his head solemnly. The doctor gave a guffaw.

“Remember, Barlow,” I said, “that the poor remains lying here are those of a fellow-creature.”

“Ay, but they ain’t no call to lay top of poor old Sarah Mant. Wouldn’t ’a dared to do it so long as her was alive.”

At that the doctor again guffawed. I was about to explain to Barlow the unsuitability of his comment when a car stopped at the lych-gate and the Chief Constable got out.

I know him fairly well from meeting him on British Legion business, in which he is a great stickler for red tape; his name is Mannering—Major Arthur Mannering, D.S.O.—and he has smartened up the appearance of the County Police wonderfully since he took them over. He is a dapper man himself, the spatted and manicured sort, and his detractors say that he got his D.S.O. for having the best-looking pair of fieldboots in the B.E.F. I don’t know whether that is so or not, but have always wondered why the Chief Constable kind of job, which really needs efficiency, is given to soldiers, who seem to value spit and polish for its own sake and not, as in the senior service, as means to an end.

With Mannering was a stout man in a bowler hat, whom he introduced to us as Inspector Collins.

“Sorry to trouble you to come over,” the Rector explained. “I hope the reason won’t turn out to be serious, but, as I told you on the telephone, our sexton here was levelling a mound on this grave—take off the tarpaulin, Barlow, would you?—and this is what he found.”

Mannering and the Inspector bent down and examined the pathetic hand. Then the Chief Constable stood up and shook his head.

“Very irregular,” he said. “You can’t exhume a body in a grave-yard without an order from the Home Office.”

“True,” the Rector answered. “It would indeed be highly improper to dig up the rightful tenant of this grave. She is a lady called Mant—”

“Sarah Mant,” put in Barlow.

“Sarah Mant—who was buried six feet deep on the twenty-ninth of September last. We have no reason at present to suppose that she has been disturbed, although it would appear that a body, or part of a body, has been illegitimately superimposed upon her grave.”

“Well, sir,” said the still doubtful Major, “the responsibility rests with you. It must not be supposed that my presence here gives countenance to—”

“It’s his funeral,” interrupted the doctor, patting the Chief Constable’s arm, which was hurriedly removed. “His funeral, eh? Not yours! Ha! ha!”

“You see,” the Rector went on placidly, “technically the body, or portion of a body, to which this hand belongs, has not been buried. Had it been buried there would be an entry to that effect in the register.”

“True,” said Mannering thoughtfully. “That certainly makes a difference.”

“Putt it this way,” said Barlow, getting impatient. “’Tis my bounden duty to God and the King to bury to this here churchyard. No one else can’t bury. Putten corpses in ground ain’t burying.”

“Go ahead, Barlow,” said the Rector. “I take all responsibility. You clear one side, and you, Vinnicombe, the other.”

The two men, each with spade in hand, started to dig, shovelling away the earth at the edge of the grave and gradually getting nearer to the form that their work revealed. It was soon evident that there was more than an arm: a body and legs, still decently covered with earth, were outlined. At the upper end the projecting figure seemed disproportionately short.

Gently, now, the two spades cleared away the earth from above the naked body of what had once been a man. With one consent, and for dreadful reasons into which I will not enter, the witnesses moved to windward. Barlow and Vinnicombe stood back and wiped their foreheads. The splendid generosity of nature was too much even for them.

“How will us shift her?” Barlow asked.

“Best lay that tarpaulin in under,” said Vinnicombe. “A liddle push will bring her on to it. Then us can lift her suent.”

The two men arranged the tarpaulin while the rest of us watched in silence. Then the spades were inserted behind the body and levered it gently up and forward… I never turned a hair when I directed the cleaning-up of a turret transformed by a shell-burst into a butcher’s shop, but suddenly a horrible sensation came over me. I was going to be sick. Before I could move there was a gasp and a thud. The Chief Constable had fainted and had fallen like a log, his head lying at the edge of the grave. The call to do something saved me; the Inspector and I lifted the unconscious man and laid him a dozen paces away on a flat tombstone, letting his head hang over the edge. We left him there and returned to find that this part of the hideous task was over; the earth-grimed body was lying on the tarpaulin and clear of the grave; Barlow was in the act of turning over the edges of the tarpaulin so as to hide the horror.

The doctor, who, like Vinnicombe and Barlow, seemed quite unperturbed and had taken no notice of Major Mannering’s faint, broke the silence.

“A little late for artificial respiration, I’m afraid.”

The Rector, as white as a sheet, gripped me by the arm.

“There’s no head!” he cried.

“No head!” The Inspector and I echoed together.

“No head!” repeated the doctor, mimicking us. “Perhaps if you dig long enough you’ll find it.”

“Excuse me, sir,” said the Inspector, remembering his duty to his superior officer. “Would you kindly have a look at the Chief Constable?”

The doctor looked round.

“Where did you put him? Oh, I see. He’s all right. If there’s any blood in him it can’t help running into his head. The Royal College of Physicians couldn’t do more. Though what the devil use he thinks he is with nerves like that… eh, Inspector?”

“I wish you’d come and have a look at him all the same, sir,” said the embarrassed policeman. “He mightn’t like—”

“No, of course he wouldn’t. Quite right, come along!”

Mannering had not moved. The doctor and the Inspector had taken one step towards him when Mrs. Tawton came round the church, with a bunch of flowers in one hand and a trowel in the other, and let out a scream of astonishment as she barged into our group.

“Oh! Is he dead?” she cried, dropping the flowers, and pointing the trowel at the Chief Constable.

“Not a bit of it,” the doctor replied. “Only resting!”

“Whatever does it mean?” Mrs. Tawton asked, looking in bewilderment from one to the other of us.

The Rector shrugged his shoulders and resigned himself to the inevitable. We had not expected anyone to wander into the churchyard, but the discussion of the previous night had evidently stirred Mrs. Tawton’s conscience and she had come to tidy up her graves. It was obviously undesirable to let the village into the secret until the body was safely away, and Mrs. Tawton is like a local paper published in hourly editions, but it is never possible to content her until she has got to the bottom of whatever news there is.

“A—oh!” she screamed again, catching sight of the grave, and dropping the trowel. “Whatever have ’ee done with Sarah Mant?”

“Nothing at all,” the Rector answered. “No one has disturbed Sarah, as far as we know. The corpse of a man had been buried under her mound. We have dug him up. There he is, under the tarpaulin. That’s all.”

“Oh my! Who was he?”

“We don’t know. Identification may be difficult, because he has no head and he has been buried a long time.”

“Is he in that?” Mrs. Tawton, her eyes sparkling and her whole soul thrilling with ghoulish delight, pointed to the tarpaulin. “May I look?”

“No, you mayn’t.” The Rector became severe. “There’s nothing you can do at present, thank you. But I should be obliged if you would not mention the matter to anyone in the village for an hour or two; we don’t want a crowd round.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t think of saying a word on no account.”

Mrs. Tawton hurried off to tell the village that she had promised not to say a word about what was happening in the churchyard. Mannering had recovered sufficiently to sit on his tombstone with his head in his hands. The doctor called to us.

“Better take him along to my house. A spot of whisky is indicated. Won’t hurt any of us.”

This indeed seemed an admirable plan. I had not wanted the doctor’s whisky before, but the suggestion was very welcome now and we acted upon it, while Barlow was dispatched to the rectory to fetch a jug of beer for Vinnicombe and himself.

Mannering soon revived in the warmth of whisky.

“Sorry I made a fool of myself,” he said. “I’ve always been bad at that sort of thing. Shouldn’t like your job, doctor.”

“Why? What do you mean? Do you want me to do the post mortem?”

“Well, I suppose our surgeon will have to do it. But you’d like to be present and assist, wouldn’t you? I think as you’ve been with us so far you ought to be in at the death.”

“Ha! Ha!” guffawed the doctor. “Bit late for that, what? But I’ll come whenever you want me.”

“You’ll take the body to the mortuary?” the Rector asked.

“Yes,” Mannering answered.

“How?”

“Well, I can telephone for an ambulance. But that’ll take some time. We’d better move it as soon as possible… Yes, by Jove, look!”

Along the road, visible from the window, a stream of people was flowing towards the yard.

“Go and keep ’em out, Inspector, will you? As I was saying, we’d better lose no time. Of course we can lock it up here in a barn or something, but it would be better to get straight away. I can’t take it in my two-seater. What do you gentlemen suggest?”

The Rector looked at me: I looked at the Rector. We both knew that there was only one suitable vehicle available in the village but we did not like to suggest it. The doctor, however, had no such misgivings.

“Baker’s van,” he said. “Just the shape. Instead of the loaves.”

Vinnicombe, summoned from the yard to advise, confirmed the doctor’s opinion. The baker proved to be delighted at the idea of a little extra profit: he is a prosperous gentleman called Bastow who can afford to give his children a secondary education.

A second tarpaulin was found to enclose the first; the grim remains were made into a neat parcel, carried through an eager crowd representing almost the entire population of the village, and dropped gently into the van. The Inspector mounted in front with Bastow. The baker let in his clutch. The last I saw of this temporary hearse was the legend in big letters on its back:

BASTOW’S

BREAD

BEST

FOR

BREAKFAST

The Rector and I walked back in silence. At the gate he spoke.

“Do you have Bastow’s bread?”

“No. I get mine from a man who comes from Exeter.”

“Could you get a daily loaf extra and smuggle it in here? A brown one, of distinctive appearance, that I can reserve for my personal eating.”

“Yes, rather. But suppose I tell my man to call here?”

“My dear chap, no! If I got my bread from Exeter the village would turn Umpteenth Adventist.”

THREE

A Fat Man in Bed

Fowls are the most exacting of created beings. We chicken-farmers have longer hours than anyone else on the land although we cannot claim to do the hardest work. I am fortunate however in my assistant, Ernest. He is the second of the Tawton boys and takes after his mother in that he is vividly interested in all that goes on round him. For a time I had the elder son, Algie, a strange, gaunt youth whose only accomplishment was sleeping. He arrived punctually every morning because his mother drove him from his bed and through his breakfast, but at no time in the day did he ever seem to be quite awake. I could not trust him to do any work when I was not there to watch him: he would curl up like a cat under a tree or in the corner of a fowl-house and sleep peacefully until I returned, a slim edition of the Pickwick Fat Boy.

I was glad that my Rhode Island Reds had Ernest and not Algie to look after them during the interrupted days which followed the discovery of the body in the mound. The village was full of questions and theories: whose was the headless corpse?

“You must wait for the inquest,” I said to Farmer Bradworthy, who found me collecting eggs and was somewhat indignant that the exhumation had taken place without the assistance of the church-wardens. “Some clue may turn up in the doctor’s evidence about the post mortem.”

“I never knowed any good come of inquests yet,” said the farmer, shaking his head and settling his back against a fowl-house door as though for a prolonged talk. “Remember when that Brodbury woman was found in the pond? ‘Death by misadventure’, they called it, when we all knew that Brodbury had pushed her in.”

“But, hang it all! You can’t say that, when there was no evidence that he’d had anything to do with it.”

“Evidence? Depends what you call evidence. Anyone could see that Brodbury was carrying on with that Liza Pratt, and sure enough he married her six months after his wife was drowned.”

“Well, if you don’t want evidence I suppose you can say who the man was in Miss Mant’s mound and who put him there.”

“Reckon I could make a good guess.”

“Who?”

“Did you notice how that Mrs. Hemyock was all agin the idea of levelling the mounds? Voted agin it, she did, the only one. What for, I’d like to know?”

“Might be a dozen reasons,” I expostulated.

“Ay, might be. These yer chickens of yours might be Plymouth Rocks, but they isn’t. That Mrs. Hemyock don’t belong to Pecheford. She’s a stranger. Come here seven years agone and said she was a widow. Seems to have a bit of money, too. Suppose her husband comes along and wants a share of it; Mrs. Hemyock gives him a drop of weed-killer in his tea and buries him.”

“And cuts off his head so he shan’t be recognized if he’s dug up? She doesn’t look to me as if she had strength enough to tackle a job like that.”

“Women is stronger than you’d think when their minds is made up. Lookee here now. If a man had done the job wouldn’t he have buried the corpse deeper? If it had been yourself now—”

“I really have no experience; but I can imagine that if I’d been in a hurry I should have been content with the mound.”

“Ah, well! Time will show. But mark my words, it’ll turn out that this was a woman’s work, not a man’s.”

With that the farmer detached himself from the fowl-house, gave me a look of concentrated meaning, and went away.

The next person to come and inform me of the trend of public opinion was Mrs. Tawton. I caught sight of her on the road and tried to hide from her in one of my fifty fowl-houses. I heard her inescapable voice.

“Ernie! Where are you? Ernie!”

“Here, Mother.”

“Look alive then, and mind you don’t let the chickens grow under your feet. Where’s Mr. Blundell?”

“In that house there.”

“Oh, he is, is he? You go in and say I’d be thankful for a word with him.”

There was no help for it. I had to emerge.

“Good morning, Mrs. Tawton,” I said. “I’m awfully sorry, but I’m very busy—got to get these eggs off by train.”

“Oh, I won’t keep you, not a minute,” Mrs. Tawton began, speaking with commendable rapidity. “Only there’s just one thing I had to come and ask you about because you’re on the Nursing Committee and I wouldn’t for the world say anything against anybody but the rest of them are no better than a pack of fools and there’s no sense to be got out of them and that whist drive is tonight and I do think something ought to be done about it.”

Mrs. Tawton stopped for breath. I hurriedly put up a defence.

“Then go to the Secretary; I’m not—”

“No, I know you’re not, but what’s the good of going to her? Might as well go to one of those Rhode Island Reds of yours, though they are good birds and I’m not saying anything against them, but you know what I mean—we don’t want it said afterwards that the Nursing Committee took prizes from them as had no business to give them and somebody has got to win that prize for sure and what will she think afterwards of having it in her house? You wouldn’t like it yourself, Mr. Blundell, now, would you?”

“I’m afraid I don’t know what prize—”

“Why, you know as well as I do there’s four prizes besides the booby-prize which is no more than a bottle of scent that I happened to have by me myself from that sale in the summer when no one wouldn’t buy it; the gents’ prize is a bottle of port from Mrs. Rumsley at the Shoe and that box of cigarettes that you gave yourself, and the ladies’ is a fowl from Farmer Knowstone and that re-pussy leather bag from Mrs. Hemyock.”

No orator could have led up to his point more deftly or made it with more emphasis. One had a picture of the blameless bird unequally yoked with a thing of iniquity.

“Well, what about it?” I asked.

“Oh, Mr. Blundell! How can you? With that poor man took away to Pecheton in the baker’s van and there’s them in the village as is prepared to swear that they saw that murdering woman carrying a sack by the church one night in the autumn and—”

“Stop! You really mustn’t say things like that. You’ll get into serious trouble.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t, only to you—”

“Well, don’t. I shouldn’t wonder if there’s a law against listening to slander. If not there ought to be.”

“But whatever shall us do?”

“Mind your own business. And for Heaven’s sake don’t let Mrs. Hemyock know that these monstrous stories are going about. Really, Mrs. Tawton, you ought to know better.”

“Let that there bag be a prize?”

“Of course! And I warn you, if there’s any trouble I shall inform the police that you’ve been spreading these ridiculous stories.”

Mrs. Tawton, who had shown signs of weeping, patted each eye firmly with her pocket handkerchief. When her vision was cleared she turned upon me a look of sorrow and reproach, and went away without another word.

“Thank the Lord,” I muttered, and turned to continue my quest of eggs, nearly colliding as I did so with Ernest, who must have been immediately behind me during my conversation with his mother and now stood grinning with fiendish joy.

“Sir!—Sir!—do you think her cut off his head?”

It was too much. Fortunately for Ernest a chicken-farmer’s first thought is for his eggs. I laid the basket down, but by the time I had done so the intelligent child had disappeared.

At last I was able to go on with my job, but did so with only half a mind on Rhode Island and its children. Evidently the thing was serious. Seeing that Farmer Bradworthy, representing the solid conservatism of the village, was in one mind with Mrs. Tawton, who is the most progressive of us, prospects for the unfortunate Mrs. Hemyock looked black indeed. Something must be done to protect her from cold-shouldering or what (in less exalted quarters than the Bradworthy-Tawton aristocracy) might prove to be actual insult. I couldn’t see how to rescue her, but made up my mind to go and consult the Rector as soon as I had packed and dispatched my box of eggs.

Luckily the station is near. I sent off the box and went up the hill to the rectory, where I found the padre nailing up an ancient Gloire de Dijon which wanders over the front of his house.

“Hullo, Blundell!” he called from his ladder. “Wait just half a minute and I’ll be with you.”

I waited. As I did so I was aware that someone was coming up the drive; whoever it was suddenly stopped and turned away. Looking round I recognized the back of Mrs. Tawton. The Rector descended.

“I’ve done you a good turn,” said I.

“It is a habit of yours. How specially?”

“Mrs. Tawton was coming to tell you that Mrs. Hemyock is a murderess. When she caught sight of me she fled.”

“Is that so? But I’ve had the information already, from Barlow. Barlow wants to have the law of Mrs. Hemyock because ‘her broke the ground all unbeknown to the lawful sexton’.”

“I had Bradworthy first. He spotted guilt when Mrs. Hemyock opposed the mound-levelling.”

“Dear, dear! Bradworthy, Tawton, Barlow? All the estates of our little realm combined. And how do they propose to deal with this Messalina?”

“Mrs. Tawton wants to make trouble over a prize Mrs. Hemyock has given for the whist drive tonight.”

“Ah! That is serious. A whist drive is the nearest approach to a religious ceremony that we have. This must certainly be stopped.”

“Yes, but how on earth—”

“Come in and light a pipe and let’s think.”

When we were established in chairs and had encouraged thought with a few puffs of tobacco the Rector asked me a question.

“How do you get a fat man out of bed?”

“I don’t—”

“Quite so; but if you had to, what would you do?”

“I don’t know,” said I honestly.

“I’ll tell you. You put another fat man in.”

“Meaning?” I asked, quite unable to see the connexion.

“Meaning that the village has got into its head—or bed—the idea—or fat man—that the corpse was Mr. Hemyock. The only possible way of getting rid of that idea is to put in another. Human heads, particularly if they are rural, seldom have room for two ideas at once.”

“But—”

“But we don’t know anything about the man and can’t know until we get the doctor’s report? Quite so. It is necessary therefore for us to form a theory that will distract the village mind. Can you think of one?”

“Perhaps if you were to confess to having done the deed yourself,” I suggested.

“But do you think they’d believe it?” the Rector answered gravely, shaking his head. “They’ve never felt quite comfortable with me as their parish priest because it doesn’t amuse me to shoot rabbits. It would take a week at least to accustom them to the idea of my murdering people and beheading them. But, from what you say, something has to be done this very day.”

“No bid,” said I.

“I think I see a way—and, by Jove, it may be the truth. Do you remember that Circus—Sampson’s, wasn’t it came here in the autumn?”

“Yes.”

“Now, just when did it come? I can get the exact date because I baptized the clown’s baby—can’t get at the Registers without going to the Church, but here are the Parish Magazines—October ought to do: yes, here’s Sarah Mant, buried September 29th: no baptisms. Try November—here we are: Victory Stanley Percy Mumm, son of William and Eliza Mumm—Eliza was the Signora Astardelli, I remember, a strapping lass who jumped on horses—October 3rd. Good enough?”

“The date’s all right. But—”

“There was a contortionist feller. The India-rubber Man, they called him. And a mysterious-looking, solemn Indian in charge of the elephant. He was just the lad, that young Indian, to keep the heads of his enemies. Have you got the theory?”

“The Indian murders the contortionist, keeps his head and buries the rest of him?”

“Precisely.”

“But you can’t get the village to think that, surely?”

“Oh, can’t I? What’s the use of a Publicity Agent? Why does H.M. keep a Postmaster-General? Just hand me one of those telegraph forms in the rack by your elbow.”

I passed the form over and the Rector rapidly wrote out his message.

“That’ll do, I think,” he said. “‘Sampson’s Circus. Was any of your Company missed during your visit to Bishop’s Pecheford last September? Rector.’ Perhaps you’ll kindly send it off for me? Ask Miss Chawleigh whether Sampson’s left any permanent address with her; if so send it off. You can explain that there is reason to believe that a quarrel among the circus men was the beginning of the trouble. Miss Chawleigh is sure to have lost the address if she ever had it, so our device won’t cost much. If by a miracle she’s got it do the thing handsomely and send the telegram reply-paid. In either case the village will have created a circumstantial legend of a circus murder in half an hour.”

H.M.’s Postmaster-General binds down all village postmasters to secrecy and then arranges, as in the case of Pecheford, that telegrams shall be telephoned in the hearing not only of people in the shop but of those who loaf about outside the windows; incoming telegrams also are repeated loudly at the telephone by Miss Chawleigh as she takes them down. Thus no pretence at privacy remains and all our telegrams are shared in common; often we receive congratulations or condolences on their contents from passers-by before the children have got out of school and are available for delivering yellow envelopes. There is, however, always a chance that no one may be within hearing when a telegram is sent and I was glad to find a satisfactory audience at the post-office. Fanny Bastow, the school-teacher, daughter of Baker Bastow, had just been buying stamps; the little triangular paper bag in which, by courtesy of our polite village, they are sold, was in her hand. She was now discussing with Mrs. Bradworthy the merits of a forbidding variety of dried fish, flat and grey, which lives on the floor of the shop in a box very convenient for the purposes of a waste-paper basket. “Oo!—I couldn’t touch it—isn’t it awful?” I heard Fanny say.

“The men eat it,” replied the severe Mrs. Bradworthy.

“Excuse me, Miss Chawleigh,” I interrupted, “this is urgent. A telegram for Sampsons of the circus—have you got their permanent address?”

“Why, um, let me see. I’m sure they gave me one. Now whatever can I have done with it? Just a moment…”

Miss Chawleigh is middle-aged and pretty; she has fair hair that has never been tidied and a heart that has never been annealed. When people are hard up she gives credit for stamps and postal orders, a method of trading not provided for in the post office regulations. Miss Chawleigh has a multitude of small shelves and drawers devoted in theory to postal business, but the chemical department of the village shop has flowed ovcr into them; insurance stamps lie cheek by jowl with corn-cures, and the keys of some savings-boxes were lost until old Caleb Murcom bought a supply of liver pills and, in the innocence of his old heart, came back to ask how he was to apply to his liver the power of the keys.

“It must be somewhere,” exclaimed the postmistress, emerging from her ill-assorted treasures.

“I shall find it if you give me time. But you want it now?”

“It’s very urgent,” I said solemnly. “There is a suggestion that one of the circus men disappeared just at the time when the man in the mound—”

“Oo!” yelped Fanny Bastow, and then tried to look as if she had said nothing. She is a highly educated young lady whose beautiful native accent is oddly overlaid by refined Cockney. We all turned on her in question.

“What do you know about it?” asked Mrs. Bradworthy sternly.

“Oo, nothing—I never—I only—” poor Fanny stammered in embarrassment.

“Why now, come to think of it,” said Miss Chawleigh with unconscious ruthlessness, “don’t you write to one of the circus young men?”

“Too bad,” I put in, really horrified at this unveiling of the poor girl’s private affairs. “It is no business of ours, Fanny. Don’t say a word.”

“A pother about nothing,” exclaimed Mrs. Bradworthy scornfully. “If you know the address the gentleman wants why not say so?”

“I don’t,” cried Fanny, “indeed I don’t. I only wrote once to the next place they went to.” It would have rejoiced the pitiless hearts of the children if they could have seen two distinct tears sliding down their teacher’s cheeks. “I don’t know where the circus is. But I do know that one of the men disappeared.”

“What!” said I.

“There now!” exclaimed Miss Chawleigh.

“You knew the man who is buried in the mound?” probed Mrs. Bradworthy.

At that poor Fanny went fairly off the deep end, denying all knowledge of anything and anybody except that when the circus was at Pecheford a young man was said to have run away. I should have got no more out of her, but pressed for details by the farmer’s wife she stated that there were two young men who had to do with horses; that they had quarrelled and fought; that the one who had the worst of it had run away in the night without giving notice to Sampson or saying anything to anybody. Fanny did not know his full name, but had heard him spoken of as Jake. The other young man was the one to whom she had written one letter—Tom Meshaw.

“Did he reply?” asked Mrs. Bradworthy.

“No-o-o,” wailed Fanny.

“Then—” began the inquisitress, who, apparently reckless of oncoming hysterics, was undoubtedly going to point out the probability that Mr. Meshaw had murdered and buried Jake. I thought it was time to stop this irregular cross-examination.

“That’ll do,” I said. “Guesses are no use to us, only facts. It’s all right, Fanny, thank you very much. Don’t say a word to anyone and we won’t either”—I looked for an answering nod from the other two ladies and got it; it is curious, considering our seemingly reckless love of scandal, that from that moment, as far as we were concerned, Fanny’s part in the affair was sacred. It very soon became public property, but that was entirely due to her own communicativeness, not ours.

The girl dried her eyes and left the shop; Mrs. Bradworthy followed her; Miss Chawleigh let out a squeal of delight.

“To think of it being there all the time! Look!”

Sure enough, pinned up above the corner of the counter, with some other addresses, was Sampson’s business card: 14 Gartergate, Nottingham. I dispatched the telegram, which had suddenly become serious and was no longer a mere device to abstract suspicious attention from Mrs. Hemyock. I added the words: ‘If so, please send description.’

On my way home I met two people who had already encountered Mrs. Bradworthy. Both of them stopped to tell me that the man in the mound was one of they circus chaps.

•   •   •   •   •   •

The whist drive went off without a hitch. Blacksmith Vinnicombe’s wife got the prize presented by the now blameless Mrs. Hemyock. No reply had yet come from Sampson.

FOUR

Enter Inspector Lawless

‘Henry Lang disappeared October 2nd medium height dark broken nose age about 25 Sampson.’

I handed the pink paper back to the Rector, who was mooning round his study taking books out of their shelves and putting them back: a habit of his when he is thinking hard.

“What do you make of it, Blundell?” he asked.

“If you murdered a man with a broken nose and wanted to conceal the fact I suppose the very thing you’d do would be to deal separately with the head.”

“Since you insist on putting it in this personal way…”

“Oh, sorry! If one murdered—one would remove the head—only it sounds so French.”

“I am not objecting to your wording. I was going to ask you to continue to take me as your sample murderer. Let us take it for granted that I buried the body. What did I do with the head?”

“I can’t imagine. Buried it deep somewhere else?”

“No, not I. Surely only a very stupid murderer would do that. He would be preserving the very thing that he wants to get rid of. I might bury the skull, but first of all I’d hammer it into small fragments and burn them.”

“That sounds sensible.”

“Well, it doesn’t look as if our murderer were a fool, does it? The mound he so carefully rearranged over the trunk of his victim was good for a thousand years with ordinary luck. And even now it looks as if he’d hidden the identity of the corpse.”

“Probably life in a circus is sharpening to the intellect.”

“Ah! Now you’re identifying the murderer with Fanny’s young friend. What was his name?”

“Meshaw.”

“Well, you may be right. Meshaw seems to have some intelligence. At any rate enough not to encourage Fanny’s advances as a permanency. But we shall know more after the inquest tomorrow.”

“Unless they turn it into a mere formality, and adjourn.”

“And if they do—hullo! Here’s the very man coming up the drive. The doctor. Probably oughtn’t to say anything until the inquest, but even doctors are human.”

“If I may make a suggestion,” I said, “whisky seems to have a very humanizing effect on this doctor.”

“What! At this time in the morning? No, I daren’t. What would the village say?”

We could not argue the point because Dr. Williams was shown in and shook hands warmly with us both.

“Morning, Canon, how are you? Morning, Captain, how are you?… Say, listen, Canon, I’m in a hurry—can’t stop—it’s about that poor little kid Lily Blackall at Pear Tree Green.”

“Lily? Isn’t she incurable?” asked the Rector.

“Incurable—hell! I never saw her till this morning. Your poor boob of a doctor said she was incurable because he didn’t know what was the matter. I know what’s the matter, but I can’t do anything for the child here. Wants the nearest thing there is to a new stomach and you’ve got to go to London or New York for that. But it’s going to cost money. What about it?”

“Why, of course. We’ll find the money somehow. Won’t we, Blundell?”

“Certainly,” I agreed, knowing very well that there would be very little Parochial Church Council about the money that the Rector would find.

“Good. Give me carte blanche? I’ll go and fix it pronto. So long.”

“Half a minute! What about the post mortem?”

“Post mortem? What post mortem?”

“Why, on the man in the mound.”

“Oh, that! Not much to go on. Police doctor’s job. I don’t know what he’ll say; I’m only cheering party. I guess all it amounts to is that this chap was about the usual size for a man and not over fifty, and had a bit of rheumatism some time or other. No cause of death visible, except the chap’s head being off. But that’s enough for most of us, what? Ha! Ha!”

With a friendly wave of the hand the doctor dashed off

“A rough diamond,” said the Rector.

“Undoubtedly rough,” I agreed.

“Well, I hope he succeeds in curing that child. I hadn’t seen that side of him before. He seemed to have forgotten about the other business. Makes me ashamed of myself, Blundell. I’m afraid I haven’t thought much about anything since Barlow started digging.”

“Quite right, too. You’d have thought fast enough about anything else important. But while we are on it: what are you going to do with this telegram?”

“I suppose we must hand it over to the Chief Constable. You know, I feel about this murder very much as the doctor does about Lily Blackall. I can’t believe that our local policemen will make much of the business, unless indeed it turns out to be a simple case. But I’ll ring up the Chief Constable now and tell him all we know.”

I watched the process of telephoning, wondering what news came over the wire in exchange for the Rector’s information that gave him such evident pleasure. At last he hung up the receiver.

“Splendid!” he cried. “They’ve got a man down from Scotland Yard; don’t want anyone to know about him at present. He’s coming over to lunch here. So you’ll stay, won’t you? Don’t leave me to cope with Scotland Yard singlehanded.”

I accepted the Rector’s invitation and hurried home to put in a couple of hours’ work first. My unfortunate fowls were being left too much to the tender mercies of Ernest, and even now they were not to have as much attention from me as I could have wished. Ernest was waiting for me with a grin.

“Two young ladies to see you, sir.”

“Great Scott! Who?”

“School-teacher and Sister. Said they’d wait until you came in.”

“All right, I’ll go in. You’ll have to do my work as well as your own, Ernest.”

“That’s right, sir. Don’t you worry.”

I made a mental note that I should have to raise the excellent Ernest’s wages if he kept my fowls alive, and went in to greet my visitors. “Sister” is the name the village gives, I don’t know why, to the Parish Nurse, Mabel Fair. She is rather a magnificent creature, a Primo Carnera among the village maidens, who run small as a rule. She can’t weigh much less than twelve stone, none of which represents fat, and would look well as a Rugby forward at Twickenham. With her big grey eyes under level eyebrows she makes a striking picture in her uniform: there’s a sort of clean strength about her which must help to cure her patients. She is a foreigner from Plymouth and tends to keep herself to herself, or so the village complains.

The two girls got up as I entered and Nurse explained the situation.

“Fanny thought of something else that she ought to have told you. So I came with her.”

“Very good of you, Nurse,” I said inadequately. Indeed my gratitude was extreme; Fanny would have no weeping fits while this large, sensible young woman was there to prevent them.

The teacher had come to impress on my mind that there had been nothing wrong in her relations with the Circus and the nurse had advised her to tell me the whole story. Knowing that teachers are like a harem of Caesar’s wives in the matter of reputation, I was only too ready to hear and be convinced.

The Circus had been at Pecheford only three days. Tom Meshaw was a trick rider. Fanny formed a romantic affection for him, after the manner of unattached young women, when she saw him in the ring sticking on to horses at all the improbable angles at which athletic grace can shine. She had danced with him: a feature of Sampson’s Circus is the Dancing Tent. He had professed love at first sight in the language that doubtless needed little alteration as one went from one village to another. Fanny had foolishly promised to meet Tom Meshaw after the show was over on the second night. Here obviously was the point of danger to her reputation. But Tom did not turn up. Fanny waited for a time and went home. Tom apologized the next day and explained that there had been a fight and he couldn’t get away. Jake, a mere underling of a groom, had complained that Tom had neglected his horses and said that he wouldn’t do Tom’s work as well as his own. Hence the row in which Jake had been so soundly beaten that he had bolted in the night.

I listened to all this respectfully, but did not see that it advanced Fanny’s or any other cause. The girl seemed to have come to an end, but—

“Go on, Fanny,” bade the nurse firmly. “Tell Commander Blundell where you and Tom Meshaw arranged to meet.”

“It was in the field above the churchyard—but this is what I didn’t want to say and Sister says I must. If people knew I went to meet a man in that field I don’t know what they’d think. Can you keep it secret, please, sir?”

“You may be sure I’ll keep your name out of the whole thing if I can. But make a clean breast of it.”

“Tom said be there at midnight. I waited and waited, just the other side of the churchyard wall. Then I heard someone coming from the north side of the church, and I peaked over, thinking it was Tom, but it wasn’t. It was someone carrying a great bundle and he went round the corner of the church. I was frightened and I ran away across the field. I went past the fairground and some of the circus men were standing about. I saw Tom there. So it couldn’t have been him that buried the man in the mound.”

“And the man in the mound couldn’t have been Jake?”

“No, sir.”

“Well, you were quite right to tell me. If Meshaw is accused, of course you’ll have to give evidence, but now that you’ve given it you may be sure that he won’t be accused. About this man you saw: can you describe him?”

“No, I couldn’t even say it was a man. It might have been a woman. Of course I don’t believe in ghosts…” I could not suppress a grin, knowing that Pecheford believes firmly in ghosts, whatever it may say… “But at the time I did think it was something not quite right. I only just saw it for a moment and the moon wasn’t showing much: there were clouds.”

“What was he or she dressed in?”

“I don’t know. It all looked black.”

I felt that my interview with the two young ladies had been well worth while. When lunch time came I found the Rector engaged in an animated discussion on Norman architecture with a big man who looked more like a pre-war squire than a detective. The visitor rose to greet me and I, who am not short, had to look up at him; he must stand six feet three in his socks. He looked down at me out of blue, very blue, eyes, set well away from a Roman nose; his smile was friendly and the lines round his mouth good-tempered. He was dressed in well-cut, well-worn tweeds: altogether, he looked, as I have said, just as squires did in the days before they became hungry and worried.

“This is Commander Blundell—Detective-Inspector Lawless,” said the Rector.

“We’re old friends,” said Lawless with a smile. “At any rate Commander Blundell has been a good friend to me.”

“How so?” I asked, searching my memory without success.

“You’ll hardly remember; I’m in such a small way. But you’ve sent me several sittings. I go in for Rhode Island Reds—Lawless of Letherhead?”

“Why, yes! Of course I remember. And I remember too that you’ve done very well with them in the West Surrey Show.”

“It’s a good hobby for a policeman,” said the detective, turning to the Rector. “I detest fowls. They are the least interesting and most exasperating of God’s creatures. They are virtuous and law-abiding. They make me perpetually glad to spend my time with criminals, who are far more lovable.”

“You throw a light on a wide and obscure subject,” the Rector answered. “I have often wondered why people spend their spare time over such dreary games as golf and billiards. No doubt it is that they may value the pleasures of toil.”

Lunch kept us talking on such topics; after our coffee we settled down to business. I gave all my up-to-date information about the Circus men and Fanny’s midnight vision, beginning with the sending of the telegram at the post office.

“Splendid!” Lawless exclaimed. “You know, Rector, your idea of sending that telegram was worthy of the S û reté; there’s a fine imaginativeness about it that’s more like the French methods than ours. It’s an amazing bit of luck to have secured this evidence from Miss Fanny Bastow. She gives us the date and hour when it seems that the body was buried. We ought to be able to make something of that. And she’d probably have kept her own counsel if your happy thought had not disturbed her.”

“She won’t have to come forward?” I asked anxiously.

“No, oh, no! No need whatever. I doubt if I need even see her: you probably got all the information she had. She saw a figure, man or woman, carrying a large bundle, coming round the church at midnight on the second night of the Circus. Which way round the church?”

“From the north: that is, from the direction of the doctor’s house.”

“Right. You can set Fanny’s mind at rest about Tom Meshaw. He won’t be accused of murdering John Lang, alias Jake, alias several other names. That gentleman is very much alive.”

“Good.”

“Ye-e-s. That depends on the point of view. Some of my colleagues might be glad if Jake were somewhat less alive… Since our corpse isn’t Jake, who is he? Is there no one absent from the village unaccounted for?”

“Not a soul,” the Rector answered.

“What is the village theory?”

“There is, or was until we diverted it by means of the Circus, only the absurd one that a certain Mrs Hemyock murdered an imaginary husband. This theory rests on no other basis but that Mrs Hemyock, who is a member of the Parochial Church Council, opposed the removal of the mounds.”

“Is that so? It does not sound promising. We are driven then to the hypothesis that the corpse was not an inhabitant of Pecheford. Now the doctors are singularly unhelpful. They say that your churchyard is inhabited by a remarkably active corps of worms and that they have practically nothing but a skeleton to go on, and a dull one at that—I mean no bones have even been broken and there’s nothing identifiable. All they tell us is that the man was five feet eight or thereabouts and not old—probably under fifty. The only other point, which is of course very important, is that he had suffered at one time from rheumatoid arthritis. There is only a trace of this. He doesn’t seem to have had more rheumatism than most middle-aged men have met with, but only one in a dozen of them will have had it in this form.”

“It’s not much for you to work on,” I said.

“It’s not. But it cuts out eighty per cent. of the people who were missing from their homes last autumn and have disappeared. I’ve tabulated the possibles remaining on the list. I’ll read the names out to you and I want you to stop me if I come to one which has even the remotest connexion with Pecheford. But please forget the other names: some of these people are not known to have disappeared.”

Lawless then read out the list. It included a Scottish Baronet, a Major in the Engineers, a Suffragan Bishop, a varied selection of tradesmen—“they disappear in bad times like flies,” Lawless said—and a surprising number of other people of all sorts from every part of the country. None of the names seemed to have anything to do with the village.

“Drawn blank?” asked Lawless. “I was afraid so. Then I think our first problem—I say, I’m talking as if we three were collaborating in this business; I really beg your pardons—”

“Quite right,” said the Rector. “Anything we can do to help…”

“Rather,” I added.

“I’m glad,” said Lawless. “Fact is, I’ve been in a Devon village before. I came away feeling that I’d never met with such kindness and courtesy, but that I should have to stay seven years at least before I should get any information. We’ve a name in the Yard for places like this: we call them Oyster-beds… Well, as I was saying, our first problem is to find out what happened on the night of the second of October. The village was full of excitement and commotion because of the Circus. That’s bad. Means that things might pass unnoticed that would have been a topic of conversation at other times. On the other hand it fixes the date in people’s memories. Now I’ll try you first, Rector. What do you remember of the day and night of October 2nd?”

The Rector went to his desk and fetched a book.

“I’m not a Parson Woodforde,” he said, “future generations will not enjoy my diary. But I keep a letter-book and a record of visits. Let’s see. I wrote letters in the morning—by the way, Blundell, I wrote to Dr. Wanborough about old Spike’s pension—I wrote again later—can’t get an answer out of the chap. Visited Bradworthy’s cowman—had a boil on his neck and cut it off himself with a razor and nearly died. Took some of the children to the Circus in the afternoon. Nothing about the evening, but I remember that I stayed in. Let the maids go to the Circus. They came home about eleven and I went to bed as usual about half-past. No alibi, Inspector, if that’s what you’re looking for.”

“I haven’t cautioned you,” said Lawless with a laugh. “I rather thought that if you and the Commander had been guilty you wouldn’t have started digging up the mound. Weren’t you at the church during the day?”

“Oh, yes! 7.30 a.m. and 6 p.m. Those are my usual times. But I noticed nothing out of the way.”

“Now, Commander?”

“I don’t think I left the farm all day. In fact I’m sure I didn’t. I went to the Circus on the following evening. I had Phillips, the White Leghorn man, to lunch. Came all the way from Rugby to compare methods.”

“How did he come? By train?”

“No. He made an early start from Rugby and came by road.”

“H’m. Longish morning unless he had a fast car?”

“No, just an ordinary saloon; a Morris, I think.”

“Ah! What was in it?”

“I don’t know. But, Inspector, surely you’re not suspecting…”

“I’m not suspecting anyone. I’m collecting facts. I’m specially on the look-out for someone with a car that may contain a large bundle. I should like more facts about Mr. Phillips. What do you know of him?”

“Nothing personally. I’ve corresponded with him and met him at Shows. Of course, as you know, he is one of the leading breeders of pedigree fowls. I was rather flattered that he thought he had anything to learn from my little farm.”

“When did he get to you?”

“One o’clock.”

“And after lunch you took him round?”

“Yes.”

“And then?”

“He went off about half-past three. Said he had to get on to Exeter.”

“Did he go to look at the church? Most visitors do, don’t they?”

“I don’t know. He didn’t say anything about it, anyway. I shouldn’t think he’s that kind of man.”

“Does he know the neighbourhood?”

“Yes. He learnt his business first on a farm at Tiverton.”

“Did you discuss local matters? Did you for instance happen to mention Sarah Mant’s funeral?”

“Not that I remember.”

Lawless sat in silence for a minute or two looking over some notes that he had been making in a small black pocket-book.

“Thank you both very much,” he said at last. “If we can get other people to give their recollections of that day as clearly, we shall do well. Now I should like, if I may, to use the telephone and then have a look at the churchyard.”

“What are your movements afterwards?” I asked. “Where are you going to stay?”

“I expect I can get a bed at the village inn, can’t I?”

“I can give you a better one. I eat deplorable food, but it’s no worse than what you’d get at the Horseshoe. I shall be delighted to have you and if you stay with me you’ll easily be accounted for in the village as a student of Rhode Island Reds.”

“It’s very kind of you. Of course I shall be only too glad to come if I shan’t be in the way.”

So that was settled and Lawless went off to the telephone.

FIVE

The Flower Show

There was the rumble of a cart in the drive. A small pony appeared in front of the window; then a small cart laden with planks and an incredible number of chairs mounting precariously towards heaven. Vinnicombe led the pony; Barlow brought up the rear.

“What’s this?” exclaimed the Rector, and added, before I had time to answer: “God bless my soul! I had forgotten the Flower-Show.”

So had I. We looked at each other in frank amazement. It seemed impossible that one medium-sized decapitated body should have availed to drive out of our heads an event in village life of such outstanding importance.

There is nothing in urban experience to compare with a Pecheford Flower-Show. For one glorious afternoon and evening of the humdrum year all of us, save the bedridden, give ourselves up to sheer enjoyment of a crashing band and hot tents and, not least, the spectacle of naked hatred, anger and envy given free by those exhibitors who have not won a prize.

Two big marquees, one for the Show itself, one for the tea, are put up in the rectory field. Down the slope in the distance is the clay-pigeon shoot. Scattered about the rest of the field are side-shows of the coconut-shy kind, the Working Party Stall, the White Elephant Stall, and the Palmist’s Tent. This last is a special feature at Pecheford. The people at our big house are no use whatever to us at other times, but Lady Chulmleigh, who was once on the stage and is reported to be of Romany extraction, comes every year to the Show, sits in a small tent and tells our characters and fortunes with uncanny skill. People come for miles to be “done” by her.

The load of chairs swayed past the house; a lorry with the marquees followed. The tents would all be erected during the afternoon; the exhibits would arrive early the next morning; then the tent would be cleared and the judges, professional gardeners from another parish, would come in. At two o’clock the public would be admitted and all of us who had sent in vegetables or flowers or loaves or cakes or eggs would know that we were to have a year of exultant boasting or of gnashing of teeth.

“Ah, well!” said the Rector philosophically. “There’s not much for us to do until tomorrow; that’s one blessing.”

But as though in immediate contradiction a note was brought in: a casual note from Lady Chulmleigh to the effect that she was sorry she had to be in London and could not keep her promise about the Flower-Show.

“Bad news?” asked Lawless, returning from the telephone and looking from one to the other of us.

“Annoying news,” said the Rector, and pointed out of the window. “See those tents going up? That’s for the Flower-Show tomorrow. And a feature of our show is the Palmist’s Tent. Palmist has cried off. The trouble is it’s not the kind of job that one can put people on to at short notice.”

“No,” said Lawless thoughtfully. “I wonder, now—perhaps your difficulty and mine may have a point of contact.”

“How so?”

“Why, my difficulty is to pump all your people about their recollections of anything unusual at a certain date. If I do it openly they’ll dry up. Your palmist could have done it neatly. Pity you can’t…”

“A Memory Competition!” the Rector interrupted, rubbing his hands. “The very thing! People will pay threepence and have their memories tested and there must be some really first-class prizes… Blundell, who’s got the biggest turkeys?”

“Farmer Knowstone.”

“The very man! Do you remember that he complained because his pig or duck or something was not appreciated? We’ll make such a fuss about his turkey that the old wrong will be forgotten. And a goose—Bradworthy will give us one. Our competition will be lifted out of the common rut of pigs and ducks.”

“Who shall conduct it?” I asked.

“Not I,” said the Inspector, with a smile. “I’m not sure what the Chief Commissioner would say. But I should very much like to listen.”

“You shall,” the Rector assured him. “The back of the tent is always wrapped in mystery. How would you like to take the job on, Blundell?”

“Heavens, no!” I protested. “Not in my line at all. How about Nurse?”

“Splendid. She’d do very well. She’s got brains and understands our language and the people trust her. You haven’t met her yet, Inspector, but when you do you’ll immediately confide all your troubles to her… There’ll be a turkey in a crate at one side of the entrance and a goose at the other and memories will flow like mountain streams.”

•   •   •   •   •   •

We are notoriously lucky, like the late Queen Victoria, with our Flower-Show weather. This year it was well up to its tradition. The shade temperature was 80; the marquee temperature was just over boiling point, or so one would have gathered from the look of its inhabitants.

At two o’clock the early arrivals—competitors anxious to know their fate—filed into the tent, professional gardeners to the left, cottage gardeners to the right, towards their respective exhibits. I, who was on duty at the door, noticed that Baird, the doctor’s Scotch gardener, bore away from his own magnificent exhibits—his is a famous garden—towards the humbler side. He went straight to the Cottagers’ 1st Prize Broad Beans, took up one of the pods, squeezed the end of it and put it down again. He then turned round and called loudly:

“Send in the judges.”

One of them was already in the tent; the other hurried in.

“What’s the matter, Mr. Baird?” the senior asked.

“The matter is this. For twa three years this mon Tabb has taken the first prize for beans. Well I kenned whaur they grew. This year I detairmined to stop his cheating. I slipped a wee splinter of match into the ends of the pods as they hung in my gairden. Look for yersels.”

The horror-stricken judges looked. From the end of each pod they squeezed a wee splinter. There was dead silence in the tent. Later on we broke into camps and argued fiercely about the rights and wrongs of the case; at the moment I think we all felt as I did myself. We all knew that things “not quite right” sometimes happened in connexion with flower-shows; none of us except the old Covenanter would have been capable of the cruel ruthlessness which brought shame on one of ourselves in front of men from other villages. Baird stood triumphant like John Knox when Queen Mary was broken.

“Is Tabb here?” asked the judge.

“No,” several voices answered.

I looked round. Two or three men, talking and laughing loudly under the influence of cider, were approaching the tent. I could do nothing to warn the unfortunate Tabb, who made his way in and walked straight to his exhibit. The people shrank away from him.

“Tabb,” said the judge, “were these grown in your garden?”

“O’ course they was.”

“Then how did these match-ends get into them?” The judge demonstrated with a pod as he spoke.

Tabb staggered as if from a blow and turned white. He struggled for a lie.

“They… I put ’em…”

The hopelessness of his position overcame him: he looked round and saw Baird.

“You—” he screamed, clenching his fists. “You done the dirty on me! You’ll swing for it. Take your ———— beans! They’re the last you’ll ever swaller. I see yer: yer didn’t know, did yer? I see yer under the wall. I see yer with that corpse you buried to churchyard.”

“Now, Tabb, now—” said the judge, in gentle expostulation, and thereby diverted the flow of Tabb’s language to himself.

“You’re a judge, aren’t you? You judges beans and peas and potaters? You ain’t no use to me. I’ll take that man”—pointing a quivering finger at Baird—“before a real lawful judge that’ll hang him by the neck until ’e’s dead. I’m a gen’leman, I am. I wouldn’t ’a said nothing about ’im. But I see what I see and now ’e’s done the dirty on me…”

“Well, you think it over first and then tell the police about Mr. Baird,” the judge said mildly. “Now you’ve a second prize for parsnips as well. I’m afraid you’re disqualified.”

Tabb dashed to the stall where his parsnips lay, tore off their blue prize ticket and threw them on the ground.

“I shakes the dust of this ’ere tent off of my feet,” he said, not without dignity, and carried his words into effect.

Detective-Inspector Lawless joined him and they left the field together.

•   •   •   •   •   •

We had arranged to start the side-shows at three o’clock, by which time the public might be supposed to be sated with giant cabbages and seven-bloomed sweet peas, and at that hour Nurse Fair took her place in the tent, looking more magnificent than ever in her indoor uniform of Cambridge blue and white. Lawless had not turned up, being busy, I imagined, with Tabb or Baird. I could see nothing for it but to take his place at the back of the tent myself, handing on my duties as a steward to one of the others. Caleb Murcom was on the door; he is frequently chosen for this task at all kinds of frivolities because it is inconceivable that he should steal the threepences. The Rector himself had superintended the arrangement of the flanking crates wherein a turkey gobbled and a goose hissed at appropriate moments; he had also written the legend inscribed on the tent:

MEMORY COMPETITION

3d. ONLY

WIN A TURKEY OR A GOOSE

We had arranged a routine of examination for Miss Fair: it worked out something like this, to give an example:

“Nurse: Carry your mind back to the second night of the Circus.

Mrs. Tawton: It don’t need much carrying, mine don’t.

Nurse: What did you see on your way to it?

Mrs. Tawton: I saw the sky, and the church, and the hedges…

Nurse (interrupting): Did you see anything unusual? People or motor-cars for instance?

Mrs. Tawton: Only them as belonged to the Circus.

Nurse: And coming back?

Mrs. Tawton: Nothing that I can mind.

Nurse: Thank you. Your number is on the ticket. Please don’t tell anyone you were asked about that special date: if people knew the question was coming they would prepare for it and your chance of winning would be gone.”

A stream of threepenn’orths came in rapid succession, gruff labourers, shrill housewives, giggling girls and their young men. They remembered many interesting events but nothing that seemed to be of use to Lawless. I began to weary of so futile and stuffy an afternoon. At last I pricked up my ears at the familiar voice of the impudent Ernest.

“…people in motor-cars for instance?”

“Yes, I did that. I saw a Southampton taxi, and you don’t see that every day.”

“A Southampton taxi, in Devon! Are you sure?”

“OR something it was. OR means Southampton. I knows all the meanings of the letters.”

“Do you remember the number?”

“No, Miss. I nearly do but not quite. There was an eight in it, I’m sure; that’s all I know. It was a Fiat, Miss.”

“Where was it?”

“At the doctor’s.”

“What time was that?”

“About half-past seven.”

“A taxi—not an ordinary car?”

“Well, any’ow, it had got ‘Licensed to carry 6 persons’ on its be’ind, Miss,” said Ernest with supreme contempt for female ignorance.

Nurse gave him the usual caution and dismissed him.

I did not know whether this information would mean anything to Lawless, but it was clear that he ought to have it as soon as possible. It was also clear that Nurse was perfectly well able to keep track of anything important without help from me.

I was about to slip out of the tent when surprise and embarrassment kept me still. The doctor was speaking.

“Great Christopher! So it’s you, Mabel! Selling three penn’orths of memory? Ha! Ha! What’s it all about?”

“It’s a Memory Competition, Doctor Williams. Carry your mind back to…”

“Can’t do, darling. I never carry my mind back. I carry it forward. I’m carrying it forward now to a day when you’ll be kinder.”

“Please don’t begin again—”

“I tell you it’s no use your fighting against me. You’ll have to give in sooner or later. I’m serious. You’re the only girl for me, Mabel.”

“It’s not fair of you. It’s—it’s—unprofessional—”

“Unprofessional? My girl, it was all I could do not to kiss you this morning by that old fool’s bedside—he’s past noticing anyhow. And you wanted me to, I swear you did. My gad! I’ll do it now.”

There was a quick scuffle, a sharp exclamation of surprise or pain, and then the doctor’s laugh.

“Ha! ha! you little spitfire! How the devil did you do that? Well, I like a girl of spirit. You’ll come to me yet.”

I slipped out of the tent. We had arranged it so that the back of it was against a gap in the hedge between the field and the rectory garden and we could get in and out unnoticed. I hurried round. The doctor had gone; another competitor was about to enter and I asked him to wait.

“Are you all right, Nurse?” I asked anxiously.

“Perfectly, thank you.”

“I’m sorry this should have happened.”

“I’m not. Frankly, I’m glad that you were here. I can take care of myself, but when a doctor makes advances to a nurse it is the nurse who is blamed. I hope that Dr. Williams will cease his attentions, but if he does not and any scandal arises you will know that it is not my fault.”

“I can’t understand it. The man must be mad”—I saw my error and blundered on—“er—I mean—not mad, of course, to fall in love with you—but in this almost public place—”

“I have been trained not to discuss doctors,” said the nurse primly.

I made way for the waiting competitor and found Ernest arguing with Caleb Morcum.

“You been in once,” the old man was saying, “you can’t go in agin not without you pay agin.”

“But I wanted to tell Sister something. I got no more threepences.”

“Can’t ’elp that.”

“Can I be of any use?” I asked. “Shall I give Nurse a message from you?”

The boy’s face lit up.

“Yes, please, sir. Will you tell her I remembered some more of that number? Tell her 388 something. I’m sure that’s right.”

“388 something. Right you are. And, Ernest, do you know where the Rector is?”

“Yes, sir. Just gone into the ’ouse with a big gentleman.”

“Thanks. And how are you getting on, Caleb? Lots of money?”

“Doing fine. My ’ands zmells proper copperified.”

I hurried over to the rectory to report.

“Come in, Blundell,” said the Rector. “Here’s Inspector Lawless wanting to know all about Baird. I’ve warned him that none of us would believe a word from Tabb.”

“Tabb may be the world’s biggest liar,” Lawless observed, shaking his head, “but he is speaking the truth, or what he believes to be the truth, this time. I’ll stake my reputation on it. He was taken off his guard and in too violent a passion to invent things. When I tackled him afterwards he shut up like an oyster. I had to tell him that he would be an accessory after the fact unless he carried out his threat to give evidence against Baird. Of course his difficulty is that he had no business to be where he was on the night of October 2nd.”

“Poaching?” asked the Rector.

“Yes. His best way to the spinney where he operates is over the wall of the doctor’s garden. I made him take me to the place. At midnight he had crept through the garden and was about to climb the wall at the back. He heard a sound behind him and crouched down by the wall and stayed quiet. He saw Baird come from the potting-shed carrying a bundle and put it up on the wall at the side of the garden—that’s the churchyard wall. Then Baird got over himself and pulled the bundle down on the other side. That’s all that Tabb saw. It was no business of his, he says, and he went on to the spinney.”

“He didn’t see Fanny?” I asked.

“He didn’t see Fanny. But he is quite certain he saw Baird. Says what Fanny says about the light of the moon and is ready to swear that he saw Baird and that Baird was wearing his usual clothes. He’ll be a reluctant witness, oddly enough. Now his passion has cooled he’s sorry that he should have said anything to make trouble for Baird about any murders Baird may have committed.”

“Yes, I understand that,” mused the Rector. “Tabb’s heart is blackguardly but kind. He’s fond of animals. Have you seen Baird?”

“Yes. Baird is impenetrable, knows nothing at all, good or bad. Says that on the nights of the Circus, as on every other night, he went to bed at ten o’clock. Beyond that he won’t say a word. I can’t apply for a warrant on the evidence, but he can’t get away. Beer is keeping him under observation now and I’ve sent for a man to relieve Beer. I’m afraid we’re blocked now until we can find out something about the corpse.”

“You haven’t asked what you missed at the Memory Competition,” I said.

“No, I haven’t. How has it been going?”

“Splendidly. You can safely recommend the plan to any parish that wants to make a little money. It was great fun, too, although rather stuffy. There was only one rememberer who had anything to say that could be of use to you.”

“Who was that?”

“Ernest Tawton, a boy who works for me. He is an intelligent lad and a motor-car fan. On the night of the Circus he was passing by the doctor’s drive and saw a Southampton taxi-cab. It was OR 388 something. A Fiat. So you can easily find out all about it.”

Lawless had sprung to his feet.

“Cheers!” he cried. “Your idea, too, Rector—I said you two would do the discoveries. That’s the first real light we’ve had yet. I’ll get on the line to Southampton right away and find out what a Fiat—OR 388 something—was doing in Pecheford that night. A taxi—was he sure of that?”

“‘Any’ow it ’ad got Licensed to carry 6 Persons on its be’ind’.” I tried to convey the hauteur of Ernest as I quoted him.

SIX

Tracing the Taxi

“I’ll ring up and ask the Southampton police to find out who’s the owner of this taxi,” said Inspector Lawless, “but I’d rather make the inquiries myself. Have you a Bradshaw handy?”

“I’ll run you over,” I offered.

“But what about your chickens?”

“Well, I’m neglecting the poor birds scandalously as it is, and Ernest will look after them. I should like a blow.”

The real truth of the matter is that this detective business grows on one. I was anxious not to miss OR 388 something when he was run to earth. I have a neighbour, a major of marines, who is in the fowl trade, and I knew that he would keep an eye on Ernest. I do the same for him when he is away. On the way to Southampton Lawless gave me quite a series of lectures on the business of a detective; I am a bad listener when I am driving and the noises emitted by my car, which is fast but aged, really take up most of my available attention, but I remember certain scraps that are worth recording.

“It’s a great pity we’re allowed to write books when we retire—you know, big volumes of reminiscences with a picture of a bald-headed policeman at the beginning. It’s destroyed the legend about our intellects. Fact is, we’re a dull lot. It’s only the stupid criminals that are found out. Take Crippen, for instance. He’d never have been caught if he hadn’t run away; his wife was safe enough under the floor. Luck is nine-tenths of detection. Half the time all we can do is to sit round with our hands out hoping for clues to fall into them.”

I managed to pass a lorry which wanted all the road.

“You have to know something about human beings, though,” I said.

“Yes, that’s so, of course; just as in your business you have to know something about fowls. You know which of your birds is capable of laying an egg; I know, or I ought to know, which of the Pecheford people is capable of committing a murder. Take Baird, now. I can see that the Rector thinks he can’t be our man. But he’s the type that holds human life of little account. Just the sort to over-insure a leaky ship and say it was his duty to his children—over-virtuous. John Knox type. Scotland’s full of them.”

“How about me?”

“You? Oh, no! You’re a professional killer. I don’t say that you mightn’t commit a murder with a torpedo or a twelve-inch gun, but you would be incapable of cutting up your neighbour with a knife.”

“The Rector?”

“Ah, that’s different. Most clergymen are bloodthirsty, like pacifists and anti-vivisectionists. I don’t mind telling you that I should have inquired very carefully into his movements on the Circus night if it hadn’t been for the fact that it was he who arranged for the mounds to be levelled.”

The Southampton police had identified our taxi. It was registered by William Higgins, 12 Brown Street, Shirley. We went to the address without delay but met there with disappointment and a widow. William Higgins was dead. An ex-serviceman, gassed in the war, he had owned his taxi and driven it bravely until his weakened lungs had failed to stand up to a chill and he had died of pneumonia. But his books, Lawless suggested, would show what he was doing on a given date? No, he kept no books. No books, no accounts, no diary of any kind.

“Was your husband frequently kept out all night?”

“No, very seldom.”

“Then perhaps you will remember an occasion last spring when he went to Devon?”

“Oh, yes! He told me about that. It puzzled him.”

“Do tell us all about it.”

“Will picked up a gentleman outside the Docks Station. The gentleman wanted to get to some place in Devon and found that if he went by train he couldn’t get back in time to catch his boat the next day. So he jumped into the first taxi. My husband said he didn’t deserve his luck, because our Fiat is a good car. They went to some out-of-the-way village and it was dark when they got there. The gentleman told my husband to wait and he wouldn’t be long. Then another gentleman came out and said, no, not to wait, the gentleman was going to stay the night, and paid for the taxi.”

That was all Mrs. Higgins knew. Her husband had said nothing further about either gentleman; he had had exciting adventures on the way home, connected with an overturned bus at Salisbury, which had needed all his powers of narration.

“Back to the town, please,” said Lawless as we regained the car. “We’ll try the Atlantic Hotel. The chances are a hundred to one that our man was staying there. It is next door to the station where he got his taxi and it’s the jumping-off place for all the boats.”

“There are other reasons for going there,” I pointed out. “You seem to require no food. But when I’ve driven for five hours and called on a police-station and a taxi-driver’s widow, I like some.”

“You are right,” said Lawless gravely. “It is the hand of Providence that guides us to the Atlantic. Let us hope that the food and the information will be alike good. You might stop at the police-station on the way and we’ll report.”

Here to my sorrow—for I was getting inconveniently hungry—we had a further delay. The Rector had telephoned and asked that I should ring him up immediately we came in. It was very urgent. It took some time to get through and in my empty state I had most depressing visions of the death and damnation of all my fowls. What else could account for the Rector’s pressing need to communicate with me? At last I heard his voice.

“That you, Blundell?”

“Yes. What’s up?”

“I’ve had the doctor’s sister here.”

“Didn’t know he had one.”

“Yes, you do—our own doctor, I mean, Wanborough, not the locum. Mrs. Hillyer, from Torquay.”

“Oh, Mrs. Hillyer? Yes. I met her when she stayed with Wanborough.”

“She says Wanborough is missing. He’s a shocking letter-writer and they didn’t expect to hear from him often but when months went by without news she wrote to the people to whom he was going in South America. They say he never came and they’ve heard nothing of him. I could only tell her that her brother certainly left Pecheford: introduced his locum-tenens and started off. As a matter of fact I happened to be at the station and saw him go. Queer business, isn’t it?”

“It is indeed.”

“You’d better tell Lawless and he’ll have to put someone on to trace Wanborough’s movements from the time he left here. You ought to tell him too, though I don’t like to think of it, that Wanborough and Baird never did get on. Wanborough told me himself that if Baird had not been such a thundering good gardener he’d have sacked him. Fact is Baird never took the trouble to conceal his contempt for his employer. My own impression was that Wanborough was afraid of the man and hadn’t the guts to sack him.”

“You think Wanborough may be the man in the mound?”

“Well, obviously Lawless will inquire into that as a possibility. I don’t know whether the chap fits the measurements, but I should think he does. It’s no good theorizing, but the man in the mound needn’t have been killed locally. A local man might have murdered him anywhere and brought him home to a safe hiding-place.”

“All right; I’ll tell Lawless what you say.”

I did so. The detective sat staring in front of him and hummed a whole verse of ‘Land of My Fathers’.

“Why?” I asked, rendered miserably impatient by hunger.

“Why what?”

“That tune. You’re not at a Welsh football match.”

“Oh, sorry! I didn’t know. They tell me I always do it when I’m thinking hard. We do seem to be getting through the outside wrapping of this case, don’t we? Let’s go and eat.”

“Thank God!” I said.

We had a grilled sole and an undercut that a child could have carved with a stainless steel knife. And a perfect Stilton. And beer in tankards. Not until we sat with our coffee and cognac in a corner of the lounge, feeling charitably disposed to all our fellow-creatures, whether murderous or not, did we get back to the subject of Pecheford and its mysteries.

“Now, tell me about Dr. Wanborough,” said the Inspector, when both our pipes were lit.

“Well, I can’t believe that anybody has murdered him. The fact is he’s rather a worm. In our kind of district we get some splendid doctors who come because they are keen on sport; Wanborough is not that sort. He came to the county for health reasons about five years ago. Was rheumatic, I believe—”

“Ah! Rheumatoid arthritis?” Lawless cried.

“By Jove! Yes, I think that it was. That would fit—”

“Sorry I interrupted. Go on.”

“Perhaps it was the fact that the chap wasn’t ever really fit that made him so dull. None of us got to know him very well. You see; he and the Rector and I are all bachelors, and when the old doc was alive—he was a bachelor too—we were rather cronies. But Wanborough never took any interest in anything. Did his job after a fashion—visited the sick—ladled out medicine—but wouldn’t help with village things. Subscribed, of course, but as little as he could; mean as they make ’em. That was what made the trouble between him and Baird. He inherited Baird and one of the best gardens in the district. Wanted Baird to dig up the flower garden and grow potatoes on it for the market. Baird wouldn’t and Wanborough hadn’t the pluck to sack him—or else he knew very well that he had a good man and was getting value for what he paid him. Anyhow from that time on Baird bossed the garden and stood no interference from Wanborough.”

“How did he and the Rector hit it off?” Lawless asked.

“Badly. The Rector didn’t like him as a man and didn’t like the way he had of sneering at religion. And he didn’t believe in him as a doctor. Had a man from Pecheton—that’s our little market town—when he needed medical advice himself and when he was specially anxious about a case in the village. Naturally Wanborough didn’t like that.”

“Naturally. In fact if Wanborough had murdered the Rector it would have seemed not unreasonable?”

“Perfectly. As it was, the only way he could spite the Rector was by refusing to pay tithe.”

“Oh! He did that?”

“Yes, but it amounted to only a pound or two in the year and the Rector took no notice. Wanborough tried to stir up an agitation about the tithe but it fell flat. We are a fairly honest lot in the West.”

“As far as you know, Wanborough had no other way of annoying the Rector?”

“Not that I know of.”

“But if, for example, he had found out something to the Rector’s discredit he’d have had no compunction about using it?”

“I should think none whatever.”

“H’m. Was anyone else at loggerheads with Wanborough?”

“Yes. Farmer Bradworthy. It was over an Employer’s Liability case. Wanborough gave evidence that a labourer had died owing to an injury received on the farm. Bradworthy had to pay up. I don’t know the rights and wrongs of the case, but Bradworthy told Wanborough that if he ever saw him on the farm again he’d shoot him as vermin.”

“A regular farmer’s threat. Is Bradworthy the kind of man to carry it out?”

“Heavens, no!”

“What about Tabb? Had he any grudge against the doctor?”

“Well, yes. I suppose Tabb ought to have been grateful, but he wasn’t. He stole some of Wanborough’s fowls. Baird traced them to him. The doctor said he wouldn’t prosecute if Tabb paid back the full retail value of the birds. Tabb was the laughing-stock of the whole village over it.”

“You seem to be a nice loving community.”

“So we are. It’s just these little incidents that keep village life sweet.”

“By the way: about that meeting of the Parochial Church Council that arranged for the mounds to be levelled. Did Barlow understand his instructions aright? Was it to be expected that he would go and dig the top off Miss Mant’s grave?”

I thought carefully before I answered. There was something guileless about Lawless’s ‘By the way’ that made me think that he attached special importance to this question, though I couldn’t see why.

“Yes,” I said. “Beyond a peradventure. The terms of the resolution were quite clear, that the sexton should keep new graves level and remove the mounds from old graves where no possible objection could arise. Anyone voting for that must have willed that Sarah Mant’s mound should be removed among others. Why do you ask?”

“Surely you see,” Lawless answered. “Your councillors wouldn’t vote for digging up a corpse that they themselves had buried. Now let’s go and see the management and find out whether they’ve any information about the missing doctor.”

The management turned up its books and jotted down the facts as it found them. I have the half-sheet with the hotel heading before me as I write.

‘Dr. W. J. Wanborough, Bishop’s Pecheford. Registered October 1st. Room 59. Leaving by R.M.S.P. Nirvana October 3rd.

‘Telephoned 10 p.m. October 2nd voyage postponed; luggage to be kept until further notice. Asked amount of bill. Was informed £1 3s. 2d. Amount received October 4th.’

“That all?” Lawless asked.

“Yes, sir.”

“What became of the luggage?”

“It’s here, sir.”

“What! All this time?”

“Yes, sir.”

“You haven’t made any inquiries about it?”

“No, sir.”

“But that seems extraordinary. Do people often behave like this?”

“Oh, yes, sir. I assure you nothing surprises a hotel in a great port. Only the other day, sir, a gentleman claimed against a shipping company for losing three trunks marked ‘Not wanted on the voyage’. They were here all the time; he had merely forgotten to send them on board. And another, gentleman, sir, coming home, has left seven parrots with us. Unfortunately he didn’t stay in the hotel and so didn’t register and we don’t know his name and address.”

“Dr. Wanborough paid his bill: did he send a cheque?”

“I’ll see, sir.” The clerk turned up another book. “No, sir. He sent a pound note and stamps.”

“Thank you very much. Good day.”

“Good day, sir.”

We left the hotel, not without regret on my part—the village lady who looks after me at Pecheford can cook only one thing properly and that is a slimy mess called junket—and made our way to the car.

“Nothing more to do here,” said Lawless, “except that I’ll ask my colleagues to try to trace that telephone call. It was presumably either from Dr. Wanborough himself, or, if he has been murdered, from the murderer. So just stop at the Police Station, will you?”

There was nothing to delay us this time and we started home. All the way to Salisbury Lawless sat hunched up with his eyes shut and I thought he was asleep, but when the engine was quiet going down a hill a faint humming was audible. As we passed through Wilton the detective gave himself a shake and came to life.

“I wish you’d cast your memory round and see if you can think of anyone else who had his knife into Wanborough?”

“Well, of course, there’s Vinnicombe,” I answered, “though the knife was the other way round. I mean Wanborough had his knife into him. Vinnicombe—you met him, Secretary of the Flower-Show, ham-faced chap—he’s blacksmith and farrier as his father was before him. The old man was all the doctor there was in the village and I should say that a third of the villagers take themselves and their children to Vinnicombe for doctoring, as well as their animals. Vinnicombe always claimed that he played the game and sent cases on to the doctor if necessary, but you can see that the position makes for trouble.”

“I can indeed.”

“If I were to break my leg or get mixed up in a sheaf-binder I’d as soon have Vinnicombe as any doctor. He’s a dab at first-aid, and has certificates all over the parlour. Speaker, too; preaches in the chapels round about and is a light in local politics. The most efficient chap in Pecheford.”

“Anyone else?”

“I can’t think of a soul.”

“Any strangers about?”

“There’s a new doctor—the locum tenens—you had a talk with him yesterday, didn’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Well, you really know as much about him as I do. I can’t stand the man myself, but I’ve nothing against him except his laugh and his manners.”

“He told me he came through an advertisement in the Lancet.”

“I believe that is so. Wanborough spent a day running him round and introducing him. Said he was highly qualified and all that. He seems to be keen on his job; I’ll give him credit for that.”

Lawless relapsed into silence and we talked no more about Pecheford and its mysteries. At two o’clock in the morning I drove into my garage.

SEVEN

An Impostor

The telephone bell rang when we were at breakfast. It was Southampton wanting Lawless.

“They’ve traced the call,” he said when he came back to the table, “and it tells us nothing about the sender except that it came from the doctor’s house at 9 p.m. Presumably by that time Wanborough was already dead, having let out that he was staying at the Atlantic. Of course there’s nothing to be done about the pound note; you might as well try to trace a penny. Our murderer was no fool; he effectively prevented inquiries at the Southampton end.”

Lawless went off on his own errands after breakfast. For my part I devoted myself wholeheartedly to Rhode Island Reds; Ernest had done his best, but there were arrears of work to be made up. Mercifully no one interrupted me. My time was short because a busy if futile afternoon was in store for me; the Diocesan Field Club was to visit Pecheford and the Parochial Church Council had invited them to tea.

They are a curious collection. According to Caleb Morcum “they be half knaw-all and half knaw-nort”; some of the knaw-alls great authorities on their subjects—archaeology, botany and so forth—some of the knaw-norts bordering on idiocy. It is odd that such an ill-assorted collection of people should like to wander about the country together, but they seem to enjoy one another’s company.

The pick of this bunch, Blenkinsop, the famous Exquay surgeon, who is more proud of his F.S.A. than of all his degrees, read a paper in the church about its architecture. I took him over afterwards to the Victory Hall, where we were to have tea. On the way, in the narrow lane, we met the doctor. Blenkinsop stopped and stared. The doctor, with a wave of his hand to me, was going on.

“Why, Countis!” Blenkinsop exclaimed.

“I think you’re making a mistake, sir. Ha! Ha! My name is Williams.” The doctor hurried on.

“Good God!” cried the other. “I could have sworn… extraordinary resemblance… who is that?”

I explained.

“Who did you think he was?” I asked.

“A man I was at Soph’s with. We were friends in those days; we used to sow wild oats together. A brilliant man, he was. But a sad business. Let us thank God if we don’t have such temptations as he had. Disqualified, years ago. But I’d be glad to show friendship for him now.”

“Williams was at St. Sophia’s Hospital, too,” I said.

“Was he? Common name, Williams. There was a Williams in my time, but not this man. What is his Christian name?”

“I don’t think I’ve heard it.”

“It doesn’t matter.”

I thought however that it mattered very much. All sorts of unpleasant possibilities seemed to arise from what Blenkinsop had said. I left him with the others in the Victory Hall and buttonholed the Rector, who was patiently listening to the erratic conversation of one of the knaw-norts.

“Have you got a Medical Directory?” I asked.

“Yes, an old one.”

“May I borrow it?”

“Of course. You know where it is: in the same shelf with Crockford and Every Man’s Own Lawyer and Whitaker.”

“And what’s the doctor’s Christian name? Williams, I mean, not Wanborough.”

“John.”

I hurried across to the rectory and found the Directory. There seemed to be an incredible number of Williams’ who had turned to the medical profession and a considerable proportion of them were called John. It was a relief to find that no more than one John (and only John) Williams hailed from St. Sophia’s; there was also a John Percival Gubbins Williams who had been at the same hospital.

Blenkinsop had finished his tea and was sitting silent in the midst of a conversation about Roman camps. I got him away into a corner and produced the Directory.

“Is this the Williams you know?” I asked, pointing out John.

“Yes,” said the surgeon slowly. “That’s the man I knew.”

“Then the man you took for Countis must be John Percival Gubbins Williams. He’s the only other Williams who was at Soph’s.”

“It may be. I don’t know him personally, but I’ve heard of him. He’s in Canada, you see, or was when this Directory was published… let’s see… five years ago. To the best of my belief he’s there now.”

“Our Williams has been in the States.”

“Is that so? Well, Mr. Blundell, if you take my advice you’ll leave well alone. Let sleeping dogs lie. You’ll pardon my putting the question, but is it really any business of yours whether this doctor is the man he professes to be or not?”

“No business of mine whatever except that it is a duty of a citizen to help the police in investigating a murder.”

“What!”

“You know, of course, of our tragedy here. We’re all more or less under suspicion. The murdered man—I’m giving you confidential information now and I must ask you to respect it as such—was almost certainly Dr. Wanborough. The police are searching for a motive and have so far found none. You’ll see how important it is that they should know the antecedents of all the people who had dealings with Dr. Wanborough.”

“This is a blow,” said the surgeon. Indeed he could not have looked more grieved if the honour of one of his own family had been concerned. “If you are working with the police, it is my duty to tell you that I have no doubt whatever of the identity of Dr. Wanborough’s locum tenens. The man has brought disgrace already on my profession and my old hospital. He is Countis, William Bury Countis. He was disqualified for performing an illegal operation; he has twice served terms of imprisonment for selling drugs. Even now I would rather shield him in the hope that he is trying to go straight, and it goes against the grain to speak of him. But if a question of murder is involved I must do so. He undoubtedly obtained his position by fraud.”

“Then I may tell the detective from Scotland Yard what you have told me?”

“Certainly. I wish I could think that I was mistaken. But I am never wrong about a face.”

The knaw-alls and knaw-norts flowed over into our corner, exclaiming that it was time to go. The Rector and I bade them farewell and I walked back with him. On the way we met the doctor, looking even more cheerful than usual. He stopped.

“Who was that boob took me for his aunt or someone? Ha! ha!”

“Mr. Blenkinsop, the surgeon.”

“Never saw him in my life. Never heard of him.”

“He thought he’d known you at Soph’s.”

“Soph’s? I wasn’t there, thank God! I’m a Bart’s man. Ha! ha! So long!”

The doctor went, not too steadily, on his way, leaving a faint smell of whisky on the air. The Rector sniffed with some disgust.

“That’s the first time I’ve seen the man the worse for drink,” he said.

“He’s probably worried,” I replied.

“I particularly remember that Wanborough said he was a St. Sophia’s man.”

“So do I. I’m interested in Soph’s because I was a patient there once.”

“But what’s this about Blenkinsop?”

By the time I had finished answering the question we had reached the rectory. I went in to put back the Directory on its shelf. The parlourmaid met us on the doorstep.

“Mrs. Hillyer to see you, sir,” she said to the Rector. “In the drawing-room.”

We looked at each other in dismay.

“We haven’t very cheerful news for her, have we?” the Rector exclaimed. “You must come and help me through with the interview.”

Mrs. Hillyer is a dull woman, not unlike her brother, and rendered physically unattractive by pockmarks such as are not often seen in these days. She looked at both of us as though she suspected us of having made away with Wanborough.

“Before I came to see you,” she said to the Rector, “I wrote to my brother’s great friend, Dr. Brown, at Romsey, to know whether he had any news. I got his reply this morning, and I have brought it for you to see.”

The letter was as follows:

Dear Mrs. Hillyer,

I shouldn’t worry about your brother if I were you; it’s only by some special act of providence that he ever writes a letter, and I have no doubt that he is enjoying himself in South America and has quite forgotten that we don’t know where he is. The last I heard from him was just before he sailed. He had hoped to have time to come over from Southampton and see me, but he wrote that he would have to go home to Pecheford to get rid of a scoundrel whom he had taken on as a locum tenens. He had got this man through an advertisement and his testimonials were excellent, but your brother had found out somehow that they were forged. A narrow escape! There might have been nasty trouble.

That’s the last I heard of him. It was just his way not to write to tell us what happened. I should have liked to know how he exposed the impostor.

Yours sincerely,

James Brown.

I looked at the Rector and the Rector looked at me. Neither of us wanted to be the one to put Mrs. Hillyer in possession of the facts. She probably divined our hesitation, for she spoke with some asperity.

“Whatever is all this mystery about my brother?”

“I’m afraid you must prepare for a shock…” the Rector began, but he was interrupted. The door opened and Lawless came in.

“I beg your pardon,” he said.

“Detective-Inspector Lawless—Mrs. Hillyer,” said the Rector, forgetting Lawless’s temporary incognito.

Lawless bowed.

“Will you forgive me if I ask you to wait a moment while I have a word with these gentlemen? I shall detain them for very few minutes.”

“If you have anything to say about my brother, Dr. Wanborough,” Mrs. Hillyer said fiercely, “I think I ought to hear it.”

Lawless plumped into a chair as though the breath had been knocked out of him.

“I’m afraid you must prepare for a shock…” he began. There seemed to be a marked lack of originality about our way of breaking bad news.

“I am perfectly prepared for shocks,” Mrs. Hillyer observed grimly.

“I am afraid your poor brother has passed away…”

“Do you mean he’s dead?” Mrs. Hillyer asked with extraordinary distinctness of enunciation.

“Yes,” Lawless replied, leaving his mouth open with astonishment when he had got out the monosyllable.

“Then why don’t you say so? Only fools say ‘passed away’ when they mean ‘dead’.”

The Rector heaved a sigh of relief.

“I entirely agree with you,” said he warmly. “The phrase is an unfortunate one. And, if you will allow me to say so, now we know that you are able to discuss the matter with calm and detachment it will help us greatly in explaining just what has taken place.”

Mrs. Hillyer grunted a loud and clear grunt.

“There can be little doubt that the man in the mound is Dr. Wanborough,” the Rector began.

“No doubt whatever,” added Lawless. “I’m satisfied that the measurements…”

“Who is the man in the mound?” asked Mrs. Hillyer.

“Why, haven’t you seen the account in the papers…?”

“I never read about such things.”

I caught Lawless’s eye. He seemed to be asking for help. I gave Mrs. Hillyer so rapid a résumé of the facts that she had no chance of interrupting.

“The man in the mound is the name we gave to a decapitated corpse, buried unofficially on the night of the second of October last and recently unearthed by accident. Measurements and rheumatic joints support the theory that the corpse is that of Dr. Wanborough, who was last seen by a taxi-driver who deposited him in Pecheford on the evening of that day when his errand was to eject a criminal who had obtained the locum-tenency under false pretences.”

“A criminal?” asked Lawless with a start.

“A criminal. Recognized by Mr. Blenkinsop, F.R.C.S., as William Bury Countis, a disqualified doctor who has twice served terms of imprisonment for selling drugs. The betting, if I may put it that way, is that Countis murdered your brother to escape exposure. Inspector Lawless’s difficulty will be to prove this to the satisfaction of a jury.”

“A difficulty which is being overcome,” Lawless said with satisfaction. “What I came in to say is that Baird has come across—your brother’s gardener, Madam—”

“I know him,” said Mrs. Hillyer.

“A Scot with, on the one hand, a very strict religion, which regards circuses as works of the devil, and, on the other, a strong feeling about the undesirability of wasting sixpences. It would appear that these two reasons, working together, prevented Baird from attending the Circus openly, but he found an excuse for walking through the fields at the back of all the tents and merry-go-rounds and so managed to see something of the show without failing in his duty to God and his pocket.”

“You amaze me,” said the Rector. “Was Baird not speaking the truth when he said he went to bed at ten o’clock?”

“On the contrary, the strict truth. Baird never breaks his rule of retiring to rest at ten. But although he went up to his room at that hour he went out immediately afterwards and finally went to bed, in the dark, so as not to draw attention to what might have seemed to be a breach of his rule, at half-past twelve.”

“An example to us all,” said the Rector.

“At 12.30, then,” Lawless continued, “Baird looked out of the window. A somewhat elusive moon gave sufficient light for him to see Dr. Williams go into the potting-shed and come out wearing an old hat and coat that Baird keeps there for wet weather. Dr. Williams then fetched out a large bundle which he balanced on the churchyard wall. He got over the wall himself and pulled the bundle down. What he did afterwards is unknown to Baird.”

“In fact,” suggested the Rector, “what Baird says he saw Williams do is what Tabb says he saw Baird do?”

“Perfectly,” Lawless answered. “But on questioning Tabb further I find that all he is prepared to swear to is that he saw Baird’s hat and coat. The evidence we have is sufficient, I think, to justify the arrest of Williams. I thought so before hearing this very important further evidence which Commander Blundell has reported to us from Mr. Blenkinsop. Perhaps the Chief Constable may decide to apply for a warrant for Williams’s arrest not on the charge of murder but that of obtaining money on false pretences. I am going to see the Chief Constable now.”

“Do you mean,” asked Mrs. Hillyer sternly, “that the man Williams may escape hanging for lack of evidence?”

“I hope not,” Lawless answered.

“An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth,” said Mrs. Hillyer with her dreadful distinctness.

“I’ll do my best to secure them,” Lawless promised. “Anyhow, I’ll be back tomorrow morning with a warrant for Williams’s arrest on one charge or the other. In the meanwhile the village constable will detain him if he tries to get away.”

But when the morrow dawned William Bury Countis, known to us as Dr. John Williams, once of St. Sophia’s Hospital, was lying dead upon Sarah Mant’s grave.

EIGHT

The Coming of the Fear

It was the Rector who found the body. There had been a storm in the night: a great elm had been blown down in the garden and had fallen athwart the path to the vestry; the Rector had been obliged to go round by the south door for his 7.30 a.m. service. The force of the gale had abated, but the wind, still high, was driving curtains of rain against the grey old church. The evergreen oaks, whose abundant foliage had been waiting to be pushed off by the next growth, were almost bare. Among the graves the leaves had piled like snow in drifts. A heap larger than the others arrested the Rector’s attention. He came near and with incredulous horror saw there, lashed by the rain, the body of the doctor, lying on its back with arms outstretched and glazed eyes staring at the sky. By some macabre trick of muscular contraction the body lay easily, one hand lifted, with outstretched fingers; the knees bent; one foot raised from the ground. It was a pose of sheer enjoyment such as the limbs of a child might hold for a moment while it played on the sand, and as though to complete the illusion the teeth were showing in a grin.

The Rector had seen death too often to doubt its reality here. He hurried back, and the Chief Constable was roused from his bed to hear that the corpse of yet another of the Pecheford doctors had been found in the churchyard.

It was perhaps excusable that he should be a little pettish at receiving such news before breakfast.

“What! Again?” he exclaimed, astounded.

“I regret to say so,” said the Rector.

“My dear sir! I wish you would bury your doctors properly.”

“I’m sorry,” said the Rector.

“It’s most unfortunate,” Mannering grumbled. “Inspector Collins and the detective from Scotland Yard should be on their way already to arrest the man. And you tell me he’s actually lying dead on the very grave that you dug the last doctor out of?”

“On that very grave.”

“Well, I’ll come out as soon as I can. Collins and Lawless will be with you shortly. You’ll see that nothing’s touched, won’t you?”

“Yes.”

“And you might let Constable Beer know? But—good heavens!—Lawless told me that he had put Beer on to watch the doctor to see that he didn’t get away.”

“In that case I won’t disturb the constable’s vigil.”

So saying the Rector rang off, feeling that the law might show a little more gratitude to the helpful citizen. Just as he put the telephone down there came a ring at the front-door bell, a remarkable event at 7.45 a.m.; he answered it himself, finding Lawless and Collins on the doorstep.

“Good morning, Padre,” said Lawless cheerily. “Could you tell us if anyone is ill? We can’t find the doctor, and we think he may have gone to a case. Beer, who was supposed to be watching him, didn’t see him go out.”

“He has escaped from my jurisdiction and yours,” said the Rector gravely. “You will find him on Sarah Mant’s grave.”

I knew nothing of all this at the time. I had been hard at work since six o’clock on two of my fowl-houses that had been blown down in the night. My informant was Ernest, who is supposed to come to work at eight o’clock, and on this morning did not turn up until nearly nine, by which time the rain had stopped and the sun was shining.

“Confound you, Ernest,” I said. “Why choose this of all mornings to be late?”

“Please, sir, may I have a day off?”

I stared at the boy in astonishment.

“What on earth for?”

“Sir, there’s bin another murder. The churchyard is shut off and Mr. Beer won’t let no one in. They do say it’s the doctor, sir.”

“You certainly can’t have a day off. Get to work and feed the fowls while I go to see what’s the origin of this silly tale. Get to it!”

The boy reluctantly went to his duties; I hurried to the churchyard and joined the same group that had so lately stood round Sarah Mant’s grave. The Chief Constable with Inspector Collins, the Rector and Barlow and Vinnicombe, were there; and the doctor himself was there too, no longer laughing callously over the poor remains of a dead man but lying in his strange, frozen posture of joy, a ghastly babe-in-the-wood, half buried in leaves. Kneeling by the side of the body were two additions to our group, Lawless and the Police Surgeon.

“All right! All right!” I heard the latter say testily. “I don’t want to move it yet. But hurry up with your camera and let’s get done!”

Lawless went off while we stood waiting and returned with a camera. He took photographs of the body from half-a-dozen angles. Then the rain-soaked thing was removed, with due decorum this time, to an ambulance, while all the village stood by in dead silence, horror-stricken. Old Mother Garvin, the last white witch of Pecheford, was there leaning on her great-grandson’s arm; she is 97 and had not been out of doors for years. It was she who broke the silence when the car had gone.

“Ai-ee! Ai-ee!” she wailed, pointing with a trembling finger at one and then another of those nearest her. “Ai-ee! Ai-ee! Who will be the third? Who will be the third?”

A shudder went through the crowd. A girl screamed; another fell headlong in a faint, unnoticed. Farmer Bradworthy standing by my side, the stout, powerful man, was shaking as though with ague.

“Ai-ee! Ai-ee! There must be a third!”

The Rector came up to the old woman and took her gently by the arm.

“Come, Granny,” he said, “better go home now. Bill and I will take you up along.”

With her great-grandson on one side and the Rector on the other the old woman slowly tottered up the hill to her cottage, which stands above the church. As she went she continued her eldritch wailing.

The crowd broke into groups, the Parochial Church Council somehow coming together. Bradworthy, his red face strongly mottled, gripped me by the arm.

“We’ll be murdered in our beds,” he cried.

“Nonsense, man!” I answered. The horror was upon me, too, but I did not understand why they were all so terrified.

“’Tes no nonsense,” said Mrs. Tawton, agreeing for once with Bradworthy. “I mind when I was a little girl, if I broke two things, whatever they was, my mother used to give me a jam-pot or summat and tell me to break it in the yard. She know’d there must be three broke if there’s one.”

“Ay, ’tis true of the beasts,” put in Farmer Knowstone. Unchanged in his habitual gloom, he was the only one of us all who, by contrast with the rest, seemed the cheerfuller for his terrors.

“Did you ever know a dog worry two ship but what he’d worry three?” asked Caleb Murcom.

“Bless my soul, yes, often!” I replied. “A dog is just as likely to worry two sheep or four as three.”

They all looked at me with pity, not unmixed with contempt.

“’Tes the will of Them Above that there be three,” said Barlow the sexton, who by virtue of his profession has next right to the clergy to interpret the decrees of Providence.

“’Tes not the will of Them Above that us don’t do nothing to stop it,” said Mrs. Hemyock sharply. “Didn’t I say no good would come of shifting them mounds?”

Encouraging nods from every head but mine showed what our feeling in the matter was.

“If so be you leave the dead be they’ll leave you be,” said Caleb Murcom, very slowly. “If so be you disturve the dead, they’ll—”

“’Tes not the dead I’m thinking about,” interrupted Mrs. Tawton, “’tes the living. There’s a murderer among us.”

“That’s certain,” the stalwart Bradworthy groaned, his ague reappearing. “We’ll be murdered in our beds.”

“It’s no good our talking like this and getting the wind up,” I protested. “Let’s get back to our work now and leave it to the police.”

“The police!” The echo came from several voices in accents of scorn.

“The police don’t know nothing,” said Mrs. Tawton roundly. “Couldn’t find out who murdered our old doctor, and now the new doctor’s a corpse hisself.”

“And him that putt them both to death is going round seeking what he may devour,” so old Murcom summed up.

We all looked round nervously; I’m bound to admit that I was infected by the common fear. I have known the same feeling in the spine on a dark night at sea when I have had reason to believe that a torpedo was travelling invisibly and soundlessly towards the ship on whose deck I stood.

“What can we do?” asked Knowstone dolefully.

So suddenly that we all shied like nervous horses, the Rector came round the corner.

“What can we do?” he repeated. “Why, our jobs! You farmers and farmers’ wives: it’s up to you to set an example to all of us.”

The group began to break up, but the movement was checked by the excited voice of Mrs. Tawton.

“Sir!—this Church Council—you told us last time that us was responsible for all that happened to churchyard—us was to do this and us was to do that—well, then, I say that us ought to find out who done these murders and see him hanged.”

“I say so, too,” said Mrs. Hemyock.

Bradworthy and Knowstone exchanged a word or two in whispers.

“The Churchwardens is in agreement,” said Bradworthy, voicing them both, “if so be there’s no expense.”

“Very well, then,” said the Rector. “After the inquest. We can’t do anything until then. Commander, will you find out when the inquest is to be and summon a special meeting of the Council for that evening?”

I agreed to do so. The members of the group went their several ways.

“What do you make of it?” I asked.

“I’m completely stumped,” said the Rector, who looked worn and white. “So is Lawless. The obvious explanation is that the man committed suicide: went up to the top of the tower and threw himself down. But the tower door is locked and the key is in its usual place in the vestry. So that won’t do.”

Then, making his accustomed effort to look on the bright side of things, he added:

“It won’t be such a bad thing, Blundell, if it leads our fellow-Councillors to pull together, even if it’s on a rope round one of our necks.”

I shall never forget the strain of the days that followed. Terror brooded over the village. The men went about in twos and threes, carrying billhooks and bulging as to the hip-pocket with spanners, clasp-knives and other details for use in warfare; the women, when the men were out, barricaded themselves in their houses. When I went into the Post Office to buy stamps I found the counter littered up with bolts and padlocks; there had been no room for them anywhere else in the crowded shop, and it was thought that under the circumstances the King would not mind their sharing his bit of space. Rumsley, publican, who keeps the Shoe, was depressed to the depths of despair.

“Might so well shut the house when the mootors lights up,” he told me, “men won’t come in after dark.”

“But I expect they drink more during the day to keep their courage up,” I suggested hopefully. “Hasn’t the sale of rum gone up?”

“Maybe it have, sir; maybe it have,” the innkeeper admitted cautiously.

Fanny Bastow, the teacher—it was she who fainted when Granny Garvin wailed—had to be escorted to and from the school by the older boys. Of all the women I think the only one who went on with her work calmly and steadily by day and night was the Parish Nurse; even she looked white and strained.

Baird, who at no time took any part in our village life, was never seen outside his garden. It was as well, for, though we feared everyone, we feared him most. It was known that he had been suspected by the police of the first murder, and to Pecheford, with its undogmatic easy religion, it seemed that the dour Covenanter, to whom every kind of amusement was sin, might take his gloomy pleasure in putting other people to death. At the same time we could not bring ourselves to a certainty that he was guilty, the notion of a gardener murdering his own employers being, as Caleb Murcom put it, ‘agin nature’.

Barlow, the sexton, went about simply dithering with fear and would not work alone in the churchyard. I heard Vinnicombe reasoning with him.

“Take shame, man! You that’s in the church, a’most like the passon, as you might say, to be afraid of dying!”

“’Tes all very well for you to talk. You don’t have to spend howers and howers to churchyard. ‘Man coometh up and is cut down like a flower’ I says to myself and…”

“You ain’t much like a flower, a tough old man like you. More like couch-grass, you are. Wants digging up, not cutting down. Have sense!”

Beer, the village constable, a tall, thin, quiet, sleepy man, who above all things hates to be mixed up in any kind of row and is indeed the last person to whom we turn for help when a row is on, seemed to brighten up under the reprimands and curses that he had earned by his inefficient watching and to be relatively merry.

But the people who really enjoyed themselves were the children.

“What game are you playing?” asked Mrs. Garvin minima of the two youngest, bluest-eyed and most innocent of her little ones.

“Bloody murder, mummy,” they lisped.

NINE

The P.C.C. Plans

Thus, fearing or playing according to our ages and dispositions, but at one in being obsessed by one idea, we waited for the inquests. There had been an inquest on Wanborough at which formal evidence only was taken and which had been adjourned. Thus the real inquests on both the doctors were taken in succession. The Rector and I had to attend. According to my instructions I summoned a meeting of the Parochial Church Council for the following Friday evening, but at the urgent request of some of the members this was cancelled and it was agreed that we should meet on Saturday afternoon so that all the members could get home in daylight. Nothing brought home to me more forcibly than this detail the reign of terror in which even the most solid and unimaginative people in the place were living.

The alteration in the date proved to be a happy one as the second inquiry dragged on through Saturday morning.

It was a dreary afternoon. The school had been scrubbed out during the morning after the imperfect manner of landsmen. Dirt and yellow soap, soaked together into the boards, mingled in a dank mist with the smell of stale child. A steady rain was falling and, finding no way along the choked gutters, came down in cascades on the windows.

For the first time in history we all arrived punctually and there was a full attendance. Churchwardens Bradworthy and Knowstone, Mrs. Tawton and Mrs. Hemyock, Caleb Murcom and Sexton Barlow: all who had been present on the last occasion when the mound-levelling resolution had been passed were there. In addition were our representatives of Youth, Fanny Bastow who as a rule contributes nothing to our debates except giggles, and Bill Garvin who grins.

The Rector explained that this was a special meeting which would do no business except that for which it had been summoned and called on the Secretary to make a statement about the inquests.

“The verdict on Dr. Wanborough,” I began, “was ‘Murder by some person or persons unknown’. The Coroner explained that the police had no doubt whatever about the identity of the murderer, but were unfortunately unable to press the charge against him because he was dead. It would therefore, he said, be wasting the jury’s time to hear evidence to prove who might or might not have killed Dr. Wanborough. The medical evidence was to the effect that it was impossible for the doctor’s injuries to be self-inflicted…”

“I should think so,” Mrs. Tawton interrupted. “Cut ’is own ’ead off, indeed!”

“…and the jury brought in the verdict I have read.”

“What about Baird?” asked Farmer Bradworthy.

“Have they found the ’ead?” Farmer Knowstone demanded.

“Nothing was said about Baird,” I answered. “No, they have not found the head.”

“Perhaps it will be as well,” suggested the Chairman, “for the Secretary to tell us about both inquests before we discuss either of them.”

I proceeded, therefore:

“In the case of Dr. Countis, better known to us as Dr. Williams, the jury brought in a verdict of ‘Death from natural causes’.”

The Councillors came to their feet as if I had struck up “God Save the King”, all but Bill Garvin who is a large young man and for lack of chairs had been sitting wedged into a child’s desk. His involuntary effort to get up merely succeeded in lifting the lid of the desk and crashing it down with a noise like stage thunder. Everyone spoke at once—“Not murdered?”  “Us knows better”—“How do they make that out?”—“A lot of thick ’eads!”  “Well, I’m jiggered!”

“Ladies and gentlemen,” said the Rector, “I assure you that your surprise was fully shared by the Secretary and myself. He will explain to you what led the jury to arrive at this verdict.”

The Councillors sat down again and listened open-mouthed—literally, physically, widely open-mouthed.

“The doctors’ evidence was that they found no injury to the body except that the right arm was broken. The condition of the liver was that of a man who had been a heavy drinker for many years. There was a thickening of the valves of the heart. The contents of the stomach showed that the deceased must have drunk a bottle of whisky within two or three hours of death. I can’t attempt to put all this in technical language, ladies and gentlemen, but the gist of it was that Dr. Countis was in a fairly rocky state when any sudden shock might be the end of him. The doctors agreed that if he fell heavily on his arm and broke it the shock would be sufficient to account for his death.”

“If he’d been knocked down?” put in Farmer Bradworthy.

“Yes, quite so, but then there was no injury, no bump of any kind, to suggest that he’d been knocked down.”

“Sooicide?” suggested Farmer Knowstone in his sepulchral tones.

“The same argument applied. There was no reason inside or outside the body to suggest suicide. In fact, to go on with the evidence, there was every reason against it. It was proved that Dr. Williams, as he called himself, was really Dr. Bury Countis, a bad hat who had been disqualified and done time. He got the job by forged testimonials. Dr. Wanborough found out about him and came back here to turn him out. It is supposed that he murdered Dr. Wanborough and was faced with the difficulty of disposing of the body. He cut off the head, which could easily be identified, and buried the rest of the body where he thought it would not be discovered for centuries. He either destroyed the head or hid it. He knew, however, that in course of time Dr. Wanborough’s disappearance would become known and that his frauds would come to light. He borrowed money…”

Groans from two or three members testified to this.

“He didn’t borrow from me,” said the Rector, “but he had £30 to pay for poor little Lily Blackall to go to London for treatment and he pocketed it.”

“He collected several accounts that were due to Dr. Wanborough. In one way and another he got together £700. Notes to that value were found in the inside pocket of his waistcoat, together with a passport, made out in the name of Dr. John Thompson, and two 1st class tickets for Marseilles. The doctor was about to start his journeys again.”

“Who’s Dr. John Thompson?” asked Mrs. Tawton.

“Oh, anyone. The police say that the dodge is to take a name which may apply to half a dozen doctors in the Medical Directory, and then if one gets into difficulties through being identified with one of them to switch on to another. Countis’s troubles began when Wanborough introduced him to us as a Sophia’s man. He tried to make it Bart’s later but it was too late.”

“Two tickets for Marseilles?” Mrs. Hemyock queried.

“Yes, no one knows why.”

“Churchy lar fam!” said Caleb Murcom.

The old man is so very much the last person from whom one would expect a French quotation that the Council turned round and stared at him. He winked knowingly. Fanny giggled. The Council then stared reprovingly at her.

“Who was these ’ere doctors that said he died a natural death?” asked Bradworthy.

“The great pathologist, Sir Philip Bonnington, as well as the police surgeon.”

“Do you believe them?” said Mrs. Tawton tartly.

“I’m only telling you what happened,” I protested. “I don’t want to mix it up with any opinions of my own.”

There was a long silence broken at last by the sexton.

“Me and my dad and my grand-dad have been sexton to Pecheford nigh on a hundred year. Us have buried all sorts. But they all had some call to fall down dead.”

“You’re right, Barlow. Doctors don’t know everything,” remarked Bradworthy.

“What’ll us do?” asked Mrs. Hemyock.

“Looks to me,” said Mrs. Tawton, “like as if we’d got to find out what the man died of, for its nonsensical to suppose he killed himself by slipping in the mud. And we’ve got to find out about them two railroad tickets. And how he broke his arm.”

“And who put him on that grave,” Mrs. Hemyock added.

“Afore the ladies gets to work and finds out everything,” said Farmer Bradworthy, who is chairman of the Parish Council, the secular counterpart of the P.C.C., and knows all about the conduct of meetings, “it appears like we ought to have a resolution to settle what we’ve got to find. It looks to me that these doctors and coroners is no more use than side-pockets to a toad. I move that this man, whatever his name was, Williams or Countis, was murdered.”

“Does anyone second the resolution?” asked the Rector.

Everybody wanted to do so except Mrs. Tawton and Mrs. Hemyock, who were bridling at Bradworthy’s masculine sneer, and the Representatives of Youth.

“Any amendments?”

There were no amendments. The resolution was carried unanimously.

“Now, ladies!” said Farmer Bradworthy.

“Well, I say it’s our business to deal with churchyard. That’s what you told us at the last meeting.” Mrs. Tawton was very properly addressing the chair. “You said we was responsible. If we don’t do nothing we shall be no better than the Parish Council”—a hit at Bradworthy—“all talk and no water and no drains and no lights, so that this village is no better than a heathen island…”

“I think perhaps we are wandering a little from the point?” the Chairman suggested delicately, just in time to keep Bradworthy quiet.

“First someone murders Dr. Wanborough and cuts off his head and buries him on top of Sarah Mant. We’ve got to find out who done that. The police thought Baird did it; we know that because they told that booby Beer to watch him, as if Beer could see anything that wasn’t straight in front of his nose. Beer, indeed! The man’s a proper momp… Then someone murders Dr. Williams and throws him on top of Sarah Mant and now he’s dead and can’t answer for himself the police say he murdered Dr. Wanborough and then died of a drop of liquor. ’Tes all very well for detectives and doctors and coroners that don’t live to Pecheford, but us knows better. Who’s to be the next to go? That murderer is still here and there’s got to be three.”

Mrs. Tawton stopped, out of breath.

There was a murmur of agreement. The rain splashed upon the windows and made little eerie sounds as it trickled down the chimney into the stove. A pall of heavy cloud hung over the school and darkness lay in the corners of the room. One could feel the return of the terror which had lifted from us for a space.

Suddenly there was a loud thud as a heavy body bumped against the door.

“A-ow!” screeched Fanny.

TEN

A Legacy from Scotland Yard

The door flew open and Detective-Inspector Lawless stumbled in.

“I beg your pardon,” he exclaimed. “I missed the step and…”

“And the step has needed mending for the last twenty years,” interrupted the Rector. “It is for us to apologize. Come in!”

“But don’t let me interrupt. You’re in the middle of a meeting. I only looked in for a moment to say good-bye.”

“Good-bye!” echoed the Rector, voicing general regret. “You’re not going away, surely?”

“I am sorry to say that I am. The County authorities have notified Scotland Yard that they have no further need of my services.”

It was evident that there was no further need to conceal the detective’s identity, and the Rector introduced him in due form.

“Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to introduce to you Detective-Inspector Lawless of Scotland Yard. Inspector, you know us all individually, I expect; corporately, we are the Parochial Church Council.”

“What, you a detective?” exclaimed Mrs. Tawton in astonishment.

“We thought you was a gentleman,” said Mrs. Hemyock.

“And you that innocent learning all about chickens!” Farmer Bradworthy added with a great laugh.

“Yes, ladies and gentlemen,” Lawless said when he could get a word in. “I’m a detective and I’m afraid I’m a bad one. I haven’t been of much use in Pecheford.”

“Don’t say that, now,” Mrs. Tawton said encouragingly. “You haven’t had much time. And we was just discussing how we can help you.”

“Yes, Inspector,” the Chairman added. “You came in at the exact moment when we were considering how we, who are responsible for the churchyard, can take steps to avoid such regrettable irregularities in it in the future. And we proposed to begin by discovering just what really happened to the two doctors. I was hoping that you would make use of us in some way. Can nothing be done to keep you in charge of the case?”

“I’m afraid not,” said Lawless shaking his head. “You see: there is no case.”

“No case?” said three or four voices.

“Let me explain. The Chief Constable called in Scotland Yard to account for the first of what you, sir, so admirably call regrettable irregularities. I am confident that my report on that case would have justified the arrest on a charge of murder of Dr. Countis. Dr. Countis is dead, however, and must appear before a higher tribunal. Scotland Yard’s part in the proceedings has therefore finished. The Chief Constable has not asked for its help in investigating the cause of Dr. Countis’s death.”

“Does he think he can find it out by hisself?” asked Bradworthy.

“He thinks that there is nothing to find. The Coroner’s jury has brought in a verdict of death from natural causes. The Chief Constable is not bound to accept that verdict but in this case he does so. He holds that the doctors’ evidence leaves no other alternative. The case is therefore closed.”

“Closed!” cried Mrs. Hemyock. “And we got to go on being murdered.”

“Wull you answer a question?” asked Farmer Knowstone, solemnly beating his right hand in his left. “Do you hold with that there verdick?”

“My personal opinions don’t matter,” Lawless answered. “I will be perfectly frank with you. I don’t see what other verdict the jury could have come to after the doctors’ testimony. You must remember that they had the highest medical authority in the country swearing that every effort had been made to find evidence of murder and that the post mortem had revealed nothing at all. Countis wasn’t killed, for instance, by any poison known to medical science. At the same time the doctors were clear that the general state of the man’s health was such that if he had fallen heavily—if he had fallen, for instance, on his arm with sufficient force to break it—he might have died of shock. That being so the County Police are quite justified in saying that the case is closed and no further investigation is necessary.”

“I want an answer to my question,” Farmer Knowstone said. “Do you hold with that there verdick?”

“What does it matter? It’s neither here nor there. The Chief Constable knows all I know and he accepts the verdict. My advice to you is to do the same and…”

“Do you hold with that there verdick?” repeated Farmer Knowstone, now beating his left hand in the right. This time he beat down the defence as well. Lawless was silent for a moment, and then seemed to come to a sudden decision.

“No! I don’t,” he cried. “I met Countis and talked with him and had a drink with him. I don’t believe that he was in the least likely to die without very good reason. I believe he was murdered, though I don’t know how or by whom.”

“Then you did ought to stay and find out,” said Bradworthy.

“It’s impossible. Don’t you understand? Scotland Yard can’t carry on inquiries against the wish of the Chief Constable.”

“Well, I’ve been brought up to believe that Them Above helps them that helps themselves,” put in Mrs. Tawton. “If we can’t find that murderer and have him hanged it won’t be for lack of trying.”

“Ah! That’s the sperrit!” exclaimed Knowstone. I had never seen him so worked up, and murmurs of applause showed that the meeting was of the same opinion as he.

“More power to your elbows,” said Lawless with a smile. “I’ve nothing to teach you, Mr. Knowstone, about cross-examination. You got out of me what I had never meant to say. And mark: you have one great advantage over me. If I suspect a man I’m not allowed to ask him any questions—I’m permitted to say ‘Who are you?’ and that’s all. I mayn’t ask him where he was on the night when Countis died. I mayn’t ask him when or where he last saw Countis. It sounds fantastic, but it’s true. The new regulations make England a paradise for criminals who have the sense not to talk.”

“But if us asks questions,” said Mrs. Tawton, “a man have got no call to answer if so be he doesn’t like.”

“True. He can tell you to go to blazes. But he won’t have a fuss made in the House of Commons and have you ruined like a policeman. So you needn’t mind what he says.”

“Who do you suspect?” asked Bradworthy. “Was it Baird?”

“I suspect no one or everyone. I don’t suspect Baird specially; he knew more than he wanted to say about Dr. Wanborough’s murder, but that tells nothing about Dr. Countis’s. Don’t begin by suspecting people if you’re going to turn detective. Begin with the facts.”

“I do wish you could stay and help us,” said Mrs. Hemyock. “Couldn’t you stay for a holiday, like?”

“Quite impossible. I’m sorry. I have to report at the Yard tomorrow. I rather expect to be sent up to a case in Northumberland. But I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I made a few notes of what I found on the body and so forth. If you have them you’ll be able to start investigating where I should have started if I’d been allowed to stay on. The Chief Constable doesn’t want them and there’s no earthly reason, bar red tape, why I shouldn’t hand them over to you. But perhaps it would be just as well to say nothing to anyone about them.”

We thanked Lawless warmly.

“If one of you can come with me,” he said, “I’ll hand them over now.”

“Can’t you come back and explain them?” asked the Rector.

“I’m terribly sorry; I shall only just have time to catch my train. But write and ask me anything you want to know.”

I thought I should have to go with Lawless myself, doubting whether anyone else would be willing to come back alone carrying even a notebook—I didn’t know then that there was anything more gruesome—dealing with the murder. But young Garvin made a successful effort this time to extricate himself from his desk and came forward with a silent grin. He and Lawless went off together.

“What are your wishes, ladies and gentlemen?” the Rector asked. “Shall we adjourn this meeting or will you wait?”

“Make one bite of it,” answered Bradworthy. “Might so well finish while we’re here.”

We were all in like mood, and we spent the time until young Garvin’s return in a discussion of the odd state of things revealed by Lawless whereby professionals paid to detect crimes are forbidden to take the obvious steps in that direction.

“Might so well send for the doctor when you have a bellyache and tell him he musn’t ask what you’ve been eating.”

Thus old Caleb Murcom had just summed up the position when Garvin returned with a small notebook and a large brown paper parcel.

“Which shall we begin with, ladies and gentlemen?” asked the Chairman.

“I’d like to see what’s in that,” said Mrs. Tawton, pointing to the parcel.

I opened it and put out on the table a curious assortment: a pair of Wellington boots, a pair of trousers, a note-case, a pencil, a knife, a keyring, a cigar-case, a matchbox.

“No, don’t touch,” said the Rector, as Mrs. Tawton’s hand, accustomed to feel things at jumble sales, was stretched out. “Better read about them first.”

The notes were long and detailed, made by Lawless to fix all manner of Pecheford things and people in his memory as well as to record clues. They contained a list of wearing-apparel found on the body which would have done credit to a laundry. But Garvin helped me to disentangle what was relevant.

“Mr. Lawless said it’s them bits marked with red you want, and you’re to take care how you open the matchbox.”

We looked with new interest and indeed awe at the matchbox, and I read out the notes underlined.

“Trousers. Sticky mark on knee. Gum? Bit of cloth adhering. Where from? (Ordinary gum; been analysed).” The words in brackets were written in red pencil.

“Gum-boots. Light, nearly new, sevens, fit Countis. Burst. Why?”

“Two hairs on coat. Whose?”

Then followed in red pencil, evidently added for our benefit: “In matchbox.”

Across the middle pages of the notebook was a neatly-drawn map of the scene of the tragedies showing the roads and the surrounding houses.

Very gingerly I opened the matchbox. One by one we looked in and saw two long yellowish hairs. Then, still gingerly, I unfolded the trousers. The sticky mark was sticky no longer, but it held firmly a fragment of dark blue cloth, smooth and heavy, about three inches long by one inch wide. The trousers were also dark blue but of serge. The Wellingtons presented exactly the problem that Lawless had stated so succinctly. They must have received cruel usage and looked as if they had had trees several sizes too big forced into them. I said so, thus starting into movement the tongues that we had held for an unwontedly long time.

“But no one ever puts trees into gum-boots,” said the Rector.

“Nay, ’tis the ’uman foot done that,” Mrs. Tawton said. “I got a little pair of them boots for my little Bengy to go to school in and that great stupe Ernest put them on and bursted them just the same as that.”

“Baird’s foot, now; ’twould be just the size,” suggested Knowstone sombrely.

A shiver went round the meeting. What a grim tale of horror these relics had to tell if we could hear it! Bradworthy, who has feet of pronounced size, endeavoured to hide them under his chair.

“There’s plenty of people wears good-sized boots,” he pointed out.

“Yes,” agreed the Chairman. “It wouldn’t be a bad thing to make a list of them. Now these hairs?”

The ladies rapidly totted up a list of women and girls with yellow hair. There seemed to be about thirty possible claimants, but, as Mrs. Tawton suggested, it is very different to see ’air in a matchbox and ’air on the ’ead.

“We’ll find her,” she said with determination, “we’ll hold these hairs up against the heads of all of them until we find her.”

“What do you make of the trousers?” asked the Rector.

Here we were stumped. What had Countis been doing to get this inappropriate patch stuck on a perfectly good pair of trousers? Had he done it himself? If so, why? Had someone else done it? Fanny, to our surprise, emerged from her silence to emit something other than a giggle, feeling no doubt that as the scholar of the party it was her duty to do so.

“The Borgias,” she said, “used to employ various ways of poisoning. Perhaps that gummy stuff, held on with the patch, was some kind of poison that the modern chemists don’t know of.”

“The Borgias? Who are they?” asked two or three of us at once, to the embarrassment of Fanny.

“The Borgias? Don’t you know? Oh—Italian people—used to poison people.”

“Used to? They’re dead, then?” put Mrs. Tawton sharply.

“Oh, yes!” admitted poor Fanny.

“Then I don’t see what they’ve got to do with it. Seems to me what we’ve got to find out is what Dr. Countis or whatever his name is was doing that night.”

“There we all agree with you, Mrs. Tawton,” said the Rector. “The question we must now decide is how we are to set about it. You have all the Inspector’s clues before you, ladies and gentlemen: how do you propose to start the inquiry? Shall we act together or separately? Shall we take one clue at a time or shall we try to get infirmation on all of them at once?”

“I propose,” moved Churchwarden Bradworthy, “that you and the Commander tackles Baird.”

“I second that,” said the other warden.

Mrs. Tawton, seeing the Rector and me looking doubtfully at each other, supported the resolution.

“Do ’ee now! We can’t understand the half of what Mr. Baird says; we’ll ask questions of Pecheford people, not Scotch.”

“Very well,” consented the Rector. “If the secretary is willing he and I will go to Mr. Baird.”

“I’m at your service, sir,” I said.

“Then,” the Rector added, “I take it that the meeting would prefer to take men rather than measures—to question people and find out anything we can rather than to investigate Inspector Lawless’s clues?”

“That’s right,” said Mrs. Tawton. “We’ll bear them in mind, these trousers and the like, while we’re going round.”

“Are we going round to all the village?” asked Bradworthy.

“Not all at once, certainly,” the Rector answered. “Suppose we take the houses nearest to the churchyard first and see what we can learn from them. The doctor’s house is empty, and Inspector Lawless will have looked it over thoroughly; I don’t think we need worry about it. There’s the smithy and the Parish Nurse’s cottage along the lane, besides Baird’s. Suppose we ask Mr. Bradworthy and Mrs. Tawton to go to Mr. Vinnnicombe, and Mr. Knowstone and Mrs. Hemyock to see the Nurse?”

“I’d rather let Fanny go to Sister,” said Mrs. Hemyock. “They’re friends like.”

“Very well. Is that all right?”

Fanny giggled assent. Knowstone however shook his head.

“I knows more about beasts than women,” he said. “Leave me out. Send Caleb here; he understands women.”

Caleb bowed gravely to the compliment and was as gravely appointed.

“Then suppose Mr. Knowstone and Mrs. Hemyock go to the Horseshoe? And Mr. Barlow and Mr. Garvin to see Miss Chawleigh at the shop? Right! Then, ladies and gentlemen, I think that’s all we can do tonight. Will it be your pleasure to meet again on Monday evening and report? Same time?”

We agreed.

“One caution,” the Rector added. “I think we shall do well to say nothing whatever about the clues. Remember them all the time but don’t breathe a word about them. Good-night, ladies and gentlemen.”

“What time shall we do Baird?” I asked when the Council had gone.

“Ten o’clock suit you? And, Blundell, can you manage a frock-coat and black trousers and a top-hat with a mourning band?”

I stared at the Rector with speechless amazement.

“I think so,” he said. “I know something about Scotland. We’ve got to make Baird feel that we’re a kirk session or something of that sort. I think you can leave the moth-balls in the pockets.”

ELEVEN

What the Gardener Knew

I created a sensation as I walked up to the rectory in a frock-coat, dress trousers—the only black ones I possess—and a top hat which was already furnished with a mourning band. It comes out for two varieties of functions only and the last had been a funeral and not a wedding.

I found the Rector similarly attired and we marched in dignified silence to Baird’s cottage. It faces the coach-house, now a garage, and the empty stables, in the yard between the doctor’s house and the church.

Mrs. Baird, a silent and depressed woman, let us in and went to fetch her husband from the garden. We stood together with our backs to the window and our shining hats in our left hands, trying to look as much like forerunners of the day of judgment as possible. Indeed the atmosphere of the front room, with its framed texts on the walls, its great Bible on the table, its tight-shut windows, helped us to throw ourselves into the part.

Baird came in, a big raw-boned man, smelling wholesomely of earth and bonfire but, I am bound to admit, with nothing else about him that appeals to me as wholesome. He has a hairy face, on which he elects to keep his chin clean-shaven, and cold blue eyes shut down by jutting ginger eyebrows. He has no friends in the village. Although the most imperturbable of men he was visibly impressed with the funereal appearance that we presented. I should suspect that his jaw dropped, but the hedge on his upper lip is cut-and-laid over his mouth.

“Mr. Baird,” the Rector began in his most sepulchral tones, “we are the representatives of the Parochial Church Council of Bishop’s Pecheford. We are conducting an inquiry into the lamentable deaths of your late employers. We come to take any information that you have to give.”

“I’ve nought to say,” Baird answered sullenly after an appreciable pause.

“Think again,” said the Rector quietly. “You will not refuse to reply to the lawful Council of the Church in this place.”

“I’m not an Episcopalian.”

“We are none of us either Episcopalians or Presbyterians in this matter. We are the Church in this country dealing with crime. With murder, Mr. Baird, the same in England as in Scotland. It is laid upon every Christian as a duty to help.”

“I’m ready to do my duty. The man Lawless came to question me. He said he was a detective. I told him this: let the law summon me as a witness and I’ll say in open court on oath what I have to say.”

“Think again, Mr. Baird. You told Inspector Lawless more than that. You told him that you were out on the second night of the Circus and that you saw Dr. Williams bury a body in the churchyard.”

“And if I did?”

“You told the Inspector because he threatened that you would be summoned as an accessory after the fact. Now, Mr. Baird, I do not threaten you. There is something more at stake than your reputation or an offence against the law of man. You were ready to accuse Tabb, Mr. Baird. Why were you not ready to give information that might convict a greater criminal?”

Baird was silent, looking fiercely under the over-arching eyebrows, betraying his discomfort by restless movements of his hands and of his big boots.

The Rector pointed to the great Bible, raised his voice and rolled his r’s.

“What is said of those who hold aloof?” he declaimed.

“‘Curse ye Meroz, said the angel of the Lord, curse ye bitterly the inhabitants thereof, because they came not to the help of the Lord, to the help of the Lord against the mighty’.”

Baird capitulated.

“What do you want me to tell you?” he asked.

“First, what you know about the death of Dr. Wanborough; secondly, what you know about the death of Williams or Countis,” said the Rector comprehensively.

“Sit down, sirs,” said the gardener. “I acknowledge your right and I will tell you what I ken. I have nae doot but that you’ll respect my confidence.”

“As far as is lawful,” the Rector replied with caution.

“First about Dr. Wanborough. I was oot the nicht. I saw Dr. Williams bring the body round by the church. I watched him tak’ the mound awa’ from the grave wi’ a spade, lay the body there and put back the mound.”

“You saw that? Where were you?”

“Under the big elm behind the churchyard wall.”

“What took you there?”

“I am shamed to tell ye. I went to see the circus folk, not to go in, but to pass by in the field at the back. I yielded to worrrldly vanity. I was on my way back.”

“Did you see Fanny Bastow?”

“Ay, I saw her when she went away.”

“But, Mr. Baird, why did you not report the matter immediately to the authorities?”

“Shall a mon spy upon his employer? Was it anything to me what Dr. Williams did? Could I suspect that he’d committed murrder?”

“Surely you must have had suspicions. What did you think he was doing?”

“I’ll tell ye. Ye mind what Burke and Hare did in Edinburgh? They did wrong, but there’s many a doctor has helpit himself to a corpse that was handy, to improve his knowledge, and thocht no evil. It was my belief that Dr. Willams had taken the body of the wumman Mant oot of her grave and was putting back what was left after his experiments.”

“You interest me extremely, Mr. Baird. I confess the idea would never have occurred to me.”

“The surgeons at Exeter were of opinion that the woman suffered from an inoperrable tumour. It was the first case that Dr. Williams attended when he came and he differed. He stated in my hearing that the surgeons suffered from inoperrable tumours in the brain. What wonder that he should wish to verify the facts?”

“As you put it I am bound to say that it seems most reasonable. Now about Dr. Williams himself, or Countis as we must now call him. Do you know how he came by his death?”

“I do not.”

“When did you last see him?”

“It would be aboot a quarter past ten on the nicht of his death. He came for the loan of a bottle of whisky. He told me that he had run oot and Rumsley had refused him because he came after hours. Ye’ll understand, sir, I get whisky from home and I’m no willing to pairt with it to all and sundry, but I let the doctor have a bottle under the circumstances.”

“Did he pay for it?”

“He said he would pay for it the morn.”

“Was he sober?”

“Not preceesely sober. He was full of wild talk, but not overcome by liquor.”

“Wild talk—what about?”

“Oh! Juist havers. How he would go back to America and mak’ a fortune. How there was a lassie waiting to go with him. All about himself and his cleverness.”

“I see. How long was he with you?”

“Not mair than ten minutes.”

“Where did he go afterwards?”

“I canna tell. He went oot of the yaird gate, and turned to the left down the lane. If he’d been going hame he’d have crossed the yaird to the back door.”

The Rector got up and I followed his example.

“We are deeply indebted to you, Mr. Baird, for speaking to us so frankly and I trust that the cause of justice will be served.”

With that we gravely shook hands and left the big gardener to his pious home and his imperfectly pious thoughts.

“What I don’t quite understand,” I observed, “is that the tale he told Lawless differs from the tale he’s just told us. In the first edition he watched Countis doing his burying act from the window.”

“I think I see his reasons. His highly prized reputation might suffer if it were known that he had been hidden in a field so near Fanny. Hence his first account. On further reflection he would notice that it was physically impossible for him to see from the window all that he claimed to see. A remarkable mind.”

“It’s not altogether surprising that Mrs, Baird looks somewhat harassed.”

“Blundell,” the Rector answered, “if ever I show impatience with the vagaries of my little flock remind me of this interview. Think what it would be to have the cure of the souls of a couple of hundred Bairds!”

TWELVE

The P.C.C. as Sleuth

When the Council met I summarized Baird’s evidence about Countis and the whisky bottle.

“I will now call,” said the Chairman, “upon Churchwarden Bradworthy and Mrs. Tawton to report on their visit to Mr. Vinnicombe.”

“Ladies first,” said Bradworthy with a polite grin. “What’s more, you did most of the talking.”

“No, you, Mr. Bradworthy, please!” protested Mrs. Tawton.

“Suppose you start off, Mrs. Tawton,” the Rector suggested, “and Mr. Bradworthy will correct you if necessary.”

“Well,” Mrs. Tawton began, “we thought we’d go in just when Mr. Vinnicombe would have finished his tea, and we timed it just right. We didn’t want to start off with saying we was the Parochial Church Council so I says it’s a fine day, Mr. Vinnicombe, and he says yes, and that onseasonable stormy weather do seem over.”

“And I asked him,” the Farmer added, “how he’d got on with my mare that don’t like being shod and has to be thrown, and he says no trouble at all.”

“Then I says straight out,” Mrs. Tawton continued, “‘Do you know what Dr. Williams—or Countis as he’ve got to be called now—what he died of?’”

“‘How should I know?’ Vinnicombe says.

“‘You be as good as a doctor and better,’ I told him.

“‘You send for me when a cow drops down dead to churchyard,’ Vinnicombe says, ‘and I’ll tell ’ee what she died of. I don’t reckon to know about gentlemen.’

“‘When did you see the doctor last?’ I asks.

“‘Well, that I don’t rightly remember,’ Vinnicombe says. ‘What for do you want to know?’

“‘We’re from the Parochial Church Council,’ I told him, ‘and we’re investing the corpses…’

“Investigating,” Bradworthy corrected.

“Well, investing or investigating, it’s the same thing isn’t it? And if you think you can tell better than me you’d better do it yourself, Mr. Bradworthy.” Mrs. Tawton was distinctly ruffled.

“Please go on,” said the Rector pacifically. “Mr. Bradworthy only meant to make the point quite clear. You were investing or investigating?”

“‘Investing the corpses in the churchyard which is a disgrace to the Council and which we meant to stop and two murders was enough and we didn’t want a third.’

“‘Two murders?’ Mr. Vinnicombe asks, surprised like.

“‘Yes,’ I says.

“‘Nonsense,’ he says, ‘the coroner’s jury said ’twasn’t no murder last time.’

“‘Do you believe them?’ I asks him.

“O’ course I believe them,’ Vinnicombe says. ‘It stands to reason they know better than us do. What do you want to stir up mud for?’ he says, ‘you and your silly Council, you leave well alone and attend to them hot-water pipes to the church afore the cold weather comes on. That’s your business,’ he says, ‘not interfering with corpses and such-like.’”

Bradworthy laughed.

Mrs. Tawton turned on him.

“That’s what you did to the smithy,” she cried. “Laughing like a great stupe just when I was trying to think of something to answer back that insulting Vinnicombe.”

“Go on, Mrs. Tawton,” said the Rector encouragingly. “You are giving us a very good account.”

“No, I shan’t. Let Mr. Bradworthy tell the rest.”

“There ain’t much more to tell,” said Bradworthy, still chuckling over Mrs. Tawton’s discomfiture.

“Vinnicombe he says to his wife ‘Get a glass of rhubarb wine for Mrs. Tawton,’ he says, ‘and a glass of cider for Farmer,’ and ‘have a cigar,’ he says to me, and we has drinks and I puts the cigar in my pocket and lights a pipe and we talks a bit about Baird finding them match-ends in Tabb’s broad beans and then we come away.”

“The Council is greatly indebted to you both for your help,” said the Chairman gravely. “I will now call on our representatives who went to see Mr. Rumsley of the Horseshoe. Mr. Churchwarden Knowstone and Mrs. Hemyock?”

This pair had evidently come to a previous arrangement about the order of reporting, and wasted no more time in beating about the bush on the Council than it had wasted in the village inn. Knowstone rose to his feet.

“We told Mr. Rumsley we was from the Parochial Church Council to find out how the doctor came to lay dead in our churchyard. ‘And about time, too,’ he say’d, ‘I’d want to know the reason why if I found corpses in my cellar, and I’ll tell you what I know but it ain’t much.’ Then he goes off and fetches his account book and shows us what Dr. Williams had: £43 he owed for whisky and Rumsley is hopeful to get it back out of the money that was found on the body. ‘A powerful lot he used to carry and never show it,’ says he. ‘I never see him the worse for it until the night he died. It was past 10 o’clock and Tabb and the rest of them had all gone and I’d locked the door when the doctor comes and knocks and I goes to the door and he says he’s run out of whisky and can I let him have a bottle. And I says ‘No, I can’t, it’s past closing time.’ I won’t sully my lips by telling you in the presence of a lady what he said to me; he carried on something awful but I made allowance for I see he’d had too much drink already. So I tells him to go home and have a sleep and I shuts the door. And that’s the last I saw of him. A terrible night it was, raining cats and dogs.’”

Knowstone sat down and immediately Mrs. Hemyock got up.

“I corroborates the evidence of Mr. Knowstone,” she said succinctly.

“The Council is grateful for so clear a statement,” the Chairman said. “Mr. Barlow and Mr. Garvin were to interview Miss Chawleigh at the shop. Will they kindly report?”

“Got nothing to say.” Thus briefly reported Barlow, Garvin confirming with a grin.

“Nothing?” asked the Rector.

“No, she didn’t know nothing. Got enough to think about, she says, what with the shop, and you never know when them pussivantin’ Post Office Inspectors are coming round, without remembering when she last saw the doctor or the passon or anyone.”

Garvin nudged his colleague violently.

“What you shoving me for?… Oh, yes. Bill ’ere, ’e asks Miss Chawleigh have you sold any gum lately? And she says yes. I only ’ad two bottles and Sister she’ve bought them both.”

The Council laughed, tickled at the idea either of Bill Garvin as an investigator or of the Nurse’s being implicated in murder. I noticed that Fanny Bastow and Caleb, however, looked very grave.

“That was an excellent piece of investigation,” said the Rector. “You seized the opportunity of following up one of our clues and the Council is obliged to you. Now, I think, we have only one more report… let me see… Ah, yes, it was Miss Fanny Bastow and Mr. Murcom who were to visit Miss Fair. Will they kindly report?”

Caleb rubbed his fingers through his hair and scratched the back of his head.

“Might so well ask a toad to report when he’s been trod on,” he said. “That’s what Fanny and me feels like. Us finds Sister sitting at a table in her front room sticking photographs into a album. ‘We’m Church Council,’ I says. ‘What do you know about the murder of Dr. Williams?’ Sister goes as white as a sheet and looks at me and looks at Fanny and says ‘Are you mad or drunk?’ she says. ‘Me drunk!’ I says, ‘me that never touches a drop!’ ‘Who sent you?’ her says. ‘Why, you know who be Church Council,’ I says, ‘Rector and Churchwardens and the Commander and the rest of ’em.’ ‘Go back to them…’ her says and then Fanny here interrupts her to quieten her like—‘Mabel’ her says—‘Don’t call me Mabel’ her says, ‘I never want to see you again. I never see such impudence. Go away, both of you. Go!’”

The old man had given his account of the interview with extraordinary spirit and delivered the word “Go!” like a pistol-shot. It was unnecessary to tell us that they went. A horrified silence was broken by a sob from Fanny.

“I don’t know what to do,” she cried. “I’ve always been her friend and I wouldn’t have gone if I’d thought of anything like this. But I must tell what I saw. She was sticking in the photographs with gum out of a new bottle and there was a mark on the carpet by the side of the table that looked just as if a bottle had upset there… and the hair!”

Fanny choked with sobs.

“Calm yourself,” said the Rector severely. “There is nothing to get excited about. The hair?”

“Oo-oo!” yelled Fanny. “The hair in the matchbox! It’s Mabel’s for sure!”

The silence was broken by nothing but Fanny’s gulps of grief as we sat in frozen horror for a full minute. Then Mrs. Tawton got up and went to the sobbing girl.

“Have done now, Fanny,” she said incisively. “Get up and come along with me… She’ll be all right in a minute, sir.”

The two ladies vanished and we heard them walking up and down the larger of the two rooms of the school.

“Her never told me nothing of all that,” Caleb said querulously, “not a word.”

“I think it would be well if we did not discuss the matter until Mrs. Tawton and Miss Bastow have returned,” the Chairman observed. “When they come back I shall ask the Secretary to give us a summary of the main points that have come up so far in the reports that have been made.”

I was glad of a few minutes in which to look through my notes; the delay, however, was very short. A composed if somewhat bedraggled Fanny was led back by Mrs. Tawton.

I summarized the results as best I could.

“We seem to have learnt something, Mr. Chairman, from everyone but Mr. Vinnicombe. Rumsley of the Horseshoe tells us that shortly after 10 p.m. Dr. Countis had already drunk rather more than was good for him and was quarrelsome. Baird informs us that at 10.15 p.m. Countis succeeded in borrowing a bottle of whisky from him, and that instead of going home with it Countis put it in his pocket and turned into the lane which leads past Nurse Fair’s cottage. From that moment we know nothing of what happened to the doctor. But we learn from Miss Chawleigh that Nurse has twice recently bought a bottle of gum. Miss Bastow finds Nurse using one of these bottles for sticking photographs into an album and sees a mark on the floor which looks to her as if it might be composed of the contents of the other bottle. Miss Bastow also suggests that there is a resemblance between Nurse’s hair and the specimen found on the doctor’s coat.”

“Thank you,” said the Chairman, who was looking worried, a rare condition for him to be in. “Before we go on I want to remind you, ladies and gentlemen, of Inspector Lawless’s warning not to suspect anyone. There may be a dozen explanations of the facts that are before us. Are there any questions you would like to ask on the reports?”

“I’d like to ask one,” Bradworthy answered. “I’ve never been in Nurse’s cottage and I’d like to ask Miss Bastow to explain about that gum—just where it was—what the room’s like and that.”

Teacher conquered flapper in Fanny and she gave us a very clear account.

“You go up the path to the door; there’s a little porch and the door opens into the sitting-room. The window is in the wall on your left next to the door. The fireplace is in front of you. The room’s just about square. There’s a table in the middle. When we went in Mabel—Nurse—was sitting with her back to the fire and the album and photographs and gum in front of her.”

“Look ’ee here now,” Caleb exclaimed, getting up from his chair, moving it to the Chairman’s table and sitting down opposite the Rector. “Look ’ee here now. I takes this ink-pot and puts it here: that’s the gum-bottle. I takes this minute-book and puts it here: that’s the album. Suppose I wants to throw anything at you, zur, I picks up the pot like this, and…”

“Pray put it down again,” urged the alarmed Rector. “I’m sure that throwing an ink-bottle at me won’t really help us to know what happened.”

“Nurse ain’t the sort to throw gum-bottles,” said Bradworthy.

“Much you know about it!” Mrs. Tawton was rounding on the Churchwarden. “If Nurse was worked up to it she’d throw anything that was handy; anyone would.”

“You would; I’ve no doubt of that,” Bradworthy replied with a chuckle.

“You just try me,” cried Mrs. Tawton fiercely. “And I won’t hit you on the knees o’ your trousers neither.”

“Now, ladies and gentlemen,” the Rector said, “let’s stick to the point. You haven’t told us yet, Miss Bastow, where the stain was that you thought might be gum.”

“There’s a light grey carpet with pink flowers on it,” Fanny responded. “The stain was just in front of the table—that is, between the table and the window, but close to the table.”

“What manner of table is she?” asked Knowstone. “Firm and solid, like, or wobbly?”

“Well, it’s got four legs,” Fanny answered doubtfully, “but it does shake a bit.”

“Any more questions?” asked the Chairman. “No? Then we must settle what we are to do next. Does anyone wish to move a resolution?”

“I move we find out whether this hair in the box is the same as Nurse’s,” Bradworthy replied, “but I don’t see how we’re to set about it.”

“There’s my great-grammer,” said Bill Garvin to our united astonishment. It was unheard of for Bill to engage in our discussions. “She’s been bad ever since Dr. Countis was took away and Nurse is tending to her. If I was to ask her she’d pluck a hair or two out of Nurse’s head as soon as look at you.”

“Ah, that she would,” said Knowstone admiringly, “just the kind of thing she would do.”

This proposal was going to be accepted nem . con. but the Chairman blocked it.

“I don’t think we could very well do that,” he protested. “We are the Parochial Church Council and everything we do ought to be open and aboveboard. Is there no other way?”

“’Tis Tabb’s day to go round for the rubbish tomorrow,” Bradworthy suggested. “P’raps there’d be some combings of hair in Nurse’s box.”

Tabb’s scavenging round is the one great modern improvement that Pecheford Parish Council has instituted and Bradworthy is very proud of it. Also it is the nearest thing to an honest day’s work that Tabb ever does, although his detractors deny that honesty enters into his motives for taking on a job that necessitates messing about round people’s back doors. Whether the Rector would have thought this plan open and above-board we never knew, for it was nipped in the bud.

“Stuff and nonsense!” exclaimed Mrs. Tawton. “Who ever put combings in the dust-bin? The fire’s the place for them. Everybody with any sense knows that.”

“If two of the ladies was to take a hair out of the box and go round with it to see Sister they might be able to see whether ’tis the same.” This was Knowstone’s suggestion, but it met with no luck.

“Not me!” cried Mrs. Tawton. “Not after the way Nurse spoke to Fanny here.”

“Not me neither,” said Mrs. Hemyock shaking her head.

As for Fanny no one had the rash thought of sending her again to brave her friend’s wrath.

“Would you go, sir?” asked Bradworthy. “You and the Commander? I know it looks as if we give you all the hard jobs, but you’ll know how to talk to the young woman.”

“Very well,” the Rector agreed, “one or both of us will go. But remember: not a word of all that has passed here must go beyond the Council.”

We all agreed to that and proceeded to arrange a further set of interviews. This time, however, the Rector avoided the Bradworthy-Tawton combination. Bradworthy and Mrs. Hemyock were put together, Caleb Murcom and Mrs. Tawton, Knowstone and Barlow. Bill Garvin, who has less spare time than the rest of us, was let off; Fanny also expressed an earnest wish to do no more questioning.

“Tomorrow evening at the same time, ladies and gentlemen,” said the chairman. “And remember—no talking!”

THIRTEEN

Ministering Angel

“I wish to heaven Lawless hadn’t gone,” said the Rector with a groan. “And I wish we hadn’t touched this business. Mabel Fair! Who in the world could have thought of her?”

“But you don’t think—” I began.

“I’m not jumping at conclusions. I hope she’ll turn out to be innocent. But you may be certain that Fanny knows Mabel’s hair when she sees it—that’s point one. The gum, point two. Then who was to have the second ticket Countis had got? That’s point three. Point four: I happened to be visiting old Torrington, who’s dying, one day when the Nurse was there and Countis came in. I couldn’t help noticing his manner to her. I’m afraid there may be some very dark mystery here.”

“Whatever there is I’m sure it’s not the Nurse’s fault,” I said. “You remember that when she did the Memory Competition I was listening at the back of the tent? Well, Countis came in and tried to kiss her. She resisted him and told me afterwards that she was glad that I was there because Countis pursued her and she was afraid that there might be a scandal.”

“Dear, dear! The girl alone in the cottage at night—we ought never to have allowed her to live alone. Countis drunk and determined to have her and get her to come away with him. What would she do, Blundell? A strong, powerful woman! If she killed him I’m not sure that one could blame her. Suppose her alone with the corpse in the cottage: what can she do? If she calls for assistance her reputation is gone, whatever story she tells. She’s strong, remember: if the thought of the churchyard comes into her mind it is easy for her to pick the man up and carry him to the place where he himself laid his victim.”

“There may be a dozen other explanations of the facts,” I protested.

“Of course there may. And there was no sign of violence on the body, except the broken arm. We’ve got to find the true explanation of the facts if we go on. What I’m doing is to form the worst explanation and what I’m asking myself is this: are we prepared to go on? The police have thrown the whole thing up; we have started inquiries little thinking whither they would lead.”

“I don’t see how we can stop now.”

“Yes, you and I can put an end to this silly investigation. You never supposed any more than I did that any serious results could come of setting people like Murcom and Fanny to do detective work. But I’m to be blamed, not you, for starting them: I thought it would do them good and pull them together and that their failure to find out anything would quiet the village down. Now there seems to be a chance that our clumsy efforts may end in hanging a girl like the Nurse for murdering a man like Countis.”

“Surely,” I interrupted, “nothing points to murder; manslaughter perhaps, but you’re not hanged for that.”

“Good heavens, man! What does it matter? Don’t be so literal. Hanging or hard labour, what’s the difference to a girl like that? I tell you frankly I’d rather do anything than have any scintilla of responsibility for such a travesty of justice.”

“What can we do?”

“Destroy the clues before they can turn into evidence. Report to the Council that the hair isn’t Nurse’s and the stain on the floor isn’t gum. Get the girl to go for a holiday and send in her resignation. The whole thing would die down directly; in fact if the village thought that Mabel Fair was guilty it would help them to settle down happily when she’d gone.”

“And the clues—the things themselves, I mean: Lawless’s parcel?”

“Oh, damn the clues! Burn the whole infernal bag of tricks! Have an accident, if you like!”

I suppose I looked surprised.

“Yes, I know,” the Rector said with a wry smile. “Neither the sentiments nor the expression of them are befitting. But if you fall into a hole you may have to splash a lot of mud about while you are getting out. Where I went wrong was in falling into the hole in the first place: starting the inquiry, the silliest thing, as I see it now, that a parish priest could do. Don’t you understand?”

“Yes, I see the point. But I think you’re looking on the black side of things before you’ve looked for a lighter one. Let’s go and see the Nurse. If the worst comes to the worst I’m with you and we’ll have that accident. If there’s another explanation, Lawless’s assortment may be as useful for clearing Mabel Fair as for condemning her.”

“I expect you’re right,” the Rector agreed thoughtfully, “although the longer this business goes on the more difficult it will be to stop it if we want to do so. Very well: we’ll go tomorrow.”

“Hadn’t you better go alone?”

“Bless my soul, no! Why?”

“She’d be much more likely to talk to you by yourself.”

“That’s just what I don’t want. My only excuse for being in this at all is that I’m acting under the directions of the P.C.C. I’m in a false position. I’m like those queer clergy who take on the job of J.P. and give their parishioners fourteen days.”

“Then shall I go without you?”

“No, thanks, old chap; it is very good of you to offer. Indeed I dallied with the idea: that was what I was driving at when I said you and I or one of us would go. But I should know that I was shirking. Anyhow I feel better about it now I have learnt that you are game to join with me in destroying evidence and doing everything else improper and illegal if need so requires.”

•   •   •   •   •   •

I am not an admirer of the Juno type. Mary Pickford represents the sort of female size and appearance that appeals to me. But when Nurse Fair opened the door to us and stood back to let us in, it struck me for the first time that she is really beautiful. I had always before seen her clothed in uniform and in the mannered efficiency which nurses are trained to put on when they do up their official buttons. Now she was paler than her wont and wearing mufti: a plain black dress. Her hair, which I had never noticed before, is glorious. I could describe it if it were a ship or a fowl, but have no skill with words for a girl’s looks: I have seen that shade, however, on a tropical sea before a storm, a very dull gold which would be leaden if it were not for the flashes of bright light that waver continually on the surface. The Nurse wears it long, rolled up somehow at the back of her head; her forehead is broad and low and her eyebrows run almost straight across it, two pencil strokes darker than one would expect from her hair. She looks at you out of steady grey eyes wide apart. I expect her mouth and chin are both bigger than agrees with prettiness, but I think they fit with beauty; at any rate they are as good a guarantee as one can have of generosity and strength of will. I can’t imagine Mabel Fair doing anything mean or silly; I should expect, on the other hand, that anything standing in her way when her mind is made up would simply smash.

She asked us to sit down; we did so and as she remained standing I for one felt like a schoolboy summoned to an interview with the head.

“We have come to offer you a sincere apology,” the Rector began. “I fear that there has been a misunderstanding, for which I, as Chairman of the Parochial Church Council, am entirely to blame.”

Nurse Fair looked down at him gravely and silently; it was evident that my unfortunate leader would get little help from her.

“We are conducting an inquiry into the circumstances attending the death of the late Dr. Countis,” he went on, “and members of the Council are going to every house to see if we can learn anything to throw light on the subject.”

“You sent Caleb Murcom and Fanny Bastow here?” said the Nurse quietly.

“Most unfortunately I did.”

“That’s not quite accurate,” I interrupted. “The Rector had no more to do with it than any other member of the Council.”

Neither of them took any notice of me. Mabel Fair went on in the same tone.

“You sent Caleb Murcom and Fanny Bastow—a pantaloon and a hysterical girl—to accuse me of murder?”

The Rector leapt to his feet and raised his hands in protest.

“Good God, no!” he cried. “The idea of your having anything to do with it had never entered my head. If it had I should never have allowed this inquiry to begin. We sent Bradworthy and Mrs. Tawton to Vinnicombe, Knowstone and Mrs. Hemyock to the Horseshoe, and so on—it was pure chance that these two were unhappily chosen to come to you.”

“Caleb Murcom asked me one question: what I knew of the murder of Dr. Williams.”

“I know; I know. It was inconceivable folly to let him come here. But I do beg you to believe that when I sent him round to see you, with that fool of a girl, I had not the least suspicion that you were likely to know anything at all.”

“Do you mean that you have suspicions now?”

“None—that is—” the Rector hesitated, as well he might, in defining this uncompromising statement,—“none that you have done anything wrong.”

There was a glint of anger in the grey eyes.

“I suppose that I must thank you,” the girl said coldly, “for coming to apologise. Is there anything more to be said?”

“Yes!” the Rector cried. “There’s another thing for which I owe you apologies. We ought never to have let you live alone here in this lonely cottage. I know that it was your wish and that you wouldn’t like to live with a family in the village, but if you could have someone here with you—”

“What makes you think of this just now?”

“The earnest wish for you to have protection in case it should ever happen that a drunken man should attempt to force his way in here at night.”

“Ah! You know of that? You send your agents to question me about what they call the murder of Dr. Countis? And then you tell me that you suspect me of nothing wrong?”

“Yes, I do,” said the Rector firmly, sticking to his guns.

Some of the stiffness went out of the girl’s manner. She waved the Rector back to his chair and sat down herself.

“Tell me what you know,” she said.

“We know that Dr. Countis had been drinking heavily for some time and that he was the worse for drink on the night of his death. At 10.15 he got a bottle of whisky from Baird and was seen to start down the lane. As far as we know Baird was the last person to see him alive. That’s all we know: now we come to suspicions. The reasons which have led to the suggestion that the man came here are three. First, Countis boasted that if he left the village he would not go alone. He was undoubtedly intending to bolt, for he had by hook and by crook got together £700 and had two tickets for Marseilles in his pocket. Secondly, hairs were found clinging to his coat which are said to resemble your hair. Thirdly, you are known to have bought two bottles of gum lately and there was a large stain of gum on some of Countis’s clothing.”

“All this—” the girl began.

“Wait a minute. I don’t know whether you saw Dr. Countis that night and I don’t want to know. If you did I most strongly advise you to say nothing except to a solicitor whom you can trust. I can only repeat that I regret from the bottom of my heart that you have been distressed by my inexcusable clumsiness. Come, Blundell, we must go.”

“Wait! You have gone too far to stop now. I had every reason for hoping that Dr. Countis’s visit to this cottage would be known to no one but myself, not because I have anything to be ashamed of—I haven’t—but because of village chatter. It did not occur to me that anyone would think that I had killed the man.”

“I don’t think—” the Rector began.

“Perhaps not, but your Caleb Murcoms will. I shall tell you the truth and trust to you, if you believe me, to do what can be done to establish it in people’s minds.”

“I shall most certainly believe whatever you say.”

“Dr. Countis was an extraordinary man. I worked under his orders for seven months and, as far as the work itself went, was very happy. He was far and away the ablest doctor I have ever met. It is easy, now we know his history, to see that there was a kink in him, perhaps that he was scarcely sane, but his strange career had prevented his becoming a specialist and had given him a wide experience. A village nurse does not often find herself working under a general practitioner of first-class intellect who, if he’d gone straight, might have been at the head of his profession. That was one side of him. Then there was the other. What had led him astray, I think, was abnormal vanity: the conviction that nothing could be wrong if he did it and that he had a right to enjoy every kind of pleasurable sensation that there is. Hence drink and drugs—do you see what I mean?”

“Yes.”

“When he came he fell in love, if one can use the phrase in this connexion, with me. Yes, it is the right phrase I think, as far as it can be used of an abnormally selfish person, because he was quite sincere. He determined to annex me, to add me to his list of fulfilled desires, to marry me if I wished to marry. He had never wanted anything, he told me, more than he wanted me, and I have no reason to doubt that at the time he believed what he said. I was flattered. I knew nothing against Dr. Countis then, remember, and why should I have doubted his romances about a brilliant past and the brilliant future which he wished me to share? What put me on my guard was first of all his amazing conceit—he was sure that I was ready to fall into his arms—and secondly his unprofessional conduct. No decent doctor would try to seize opportunities of making love to a nurse while they are actually engaged together on a case. By chance Dr. Countis admitted in Commander Blundell’s hearing that he had no scruples of this kind.”

“He gave himself away completely,” I said.

“He never came here. He threatened to do so and I told him that if he did I would complain to the Committee and resign. Don’t misunderstand me: I was not in the least afraid of him—I am quite well able to take care of myself but a breath of scandal about my relations with a doctor would have ruined my career. Now we come to the night of Dr. Countis’s death. I spent the evening making scrap-books for the County Nursing Association Bazaar. I promised a dozen, and it is a longer job than I thought— as you see, they are not finished yet.”

The girl pointed as she spoke to the table on which were book and photographs and gum just as Murcom had described them after his visit.

“I went to my room at 10 and undressed. I was hoping that I should not be called out, for it was a terrible night of rain and storm, but I was expecting Mrs. Crediton at the Crossways to send for me. You remember her baby was born the following day?”

“Yes,” the Rector said.

“It must have been about half-past ten when I heard a knock, threw on a dressing-gown and went to the door, expecting to see Crediton or his boy. I left the lamp in my bedroom; it throws a fair amount of light in here when the bedroom door is open. I opened the door and before I could see who was there Dr. Countis came in and shut it. Even then I suspected nothing; he seemed perfectly calm and I supposed that I was wanted urgently on some case.”

“‘It’s time to go, Mabel,’ he said quietly.

“‘Please do not call me Mabel,’ I answered. ‘Time to go where?’

“Then he laughed. You know his usual laugh—well, this was different, a dreadful high laugh with no mirth in it.

“‘Never mind where,’ he cried. ‘What does it matter? Time to go! They’re on my track, the hounds. That prim fool Blenkinsop has put them on the scent. Time to go! But I don’t go alone this time, Mabel darling, I’ve come for my sweetheart. Aren’t you glad?’

“Then I saw his face as he moved into the shaft of light from the bedroom door. It was dead white and his eyes glittered. He reeked of whisky. I knew that he had been drinking heavily for some time, although I had never seen him drunk. He was not drunk now in the ordinary sense of the word, but he must have been very near delirium tremens. I played for time.

“‘I’ll think it over,’ I said, ‘If you’ll come again in the morning I’ll let you know.’

“He laughed again. ‘In the morning? We shall be far away in the morning, darling. Far away—my wife and I.’

“With that he dropped something he was carrying; I did not know at the time what it was but I heard the breaking of glass. Then he made for me with hands outstretched. I dodged behind the table and pushed it against him, hoping that it would send him over. He grasped it, however, and we stood with the table between us. It must have been then that the gum-bottle fell over and the gum trickled down on to his trousers and the floor.

“‘Now, now!’ he cried angrily. ‘None of that! What do you mean? I know you’re longing for me. Don’t you understand? I’m going to take you away.’

“I dropped the table, hoping to get through into the bedroom and slam the door before he could reach it. But he was too quick for me. He caught hold of my dressing-gown and clutched me to him and began kissing me. I’m strong, but he had the strength of madness. I should have been lost, but, thank God, I know something of jiu-jitsu. I got hold of him in such a way that if he did not leave go his arm would break. The pain seemed to make no difference to him; he pressed on until I heard the bone crack. Then he released his hold and stood back. He seemed to be sobered. ‘You little spit-fire!’ he said and laughed quite naturally. ‘I must have this seen to. I’ll be back soon. Get your things ready, darling.’

“Then he went away quietly, shutting the door after him. I locked it and then I think for a moment I fainted; a thing I haven’t done since I was a child. When I came round I found myself on the floor, the room reeking of whisky—I shall hate that smell as long as I live. I was frightened. The man might keep his promise and come back perhaps with a weapon to make up for his having only one arm. I tried to think of some way of barricading the windows, but before I could collect my wits there was a knock on the door again. I cried out in terror, ‘Who is that?’ You can never know what it meant to me to hear Crediton’s honest voice. I called to him to wait in the porch, hurried on my clothes and that’s all.”

There was silence for a moment. Then the Rector broke it.

“Not quite all. You went with Crediton. You were with his wife, doing everything to help her through a hard time until the baby was born at noon or thereabouts on the next day. And no one suspected that you yourself had had any anxiety or strain, or that anything was wrong.”

The girl smiled.

“I can’t tell you what is in my heart. I think you are the bravest woman alive… Come, Blundell.”

“One moment,” I said, “I should like to ask a question. Could Countis have picked up a fragment of blue cloth, three inches by one, in this room?”

“No,” the Nurse answered, surprised. “Why?”

“There was one sticking to the gum on his trousers. You’re sure?”

“Quite sure.”

“Did you notice his boots?”

“He was wearing Wellingtons.”

“You didn’t notice anything special about them, did you? Whether they were new or old, for instance?”

“I didn’t notice anything at all. But I can see him as he stood in the light of the lamp and I am sure he was wearing Wellingtons.”

“Thank you,” I said. “I congratulate you warmly on your courage and presence of mind. Good-bye.”

FOURTEEN

The Trouser-Leg Clue

I returned, wondering whether my unhesitating admiration for Mabel Fair was due to her as a woman or an actress. Whatever had happened in that cottage her nerve and endurance were undoubtedly beyond praise. The Rector evidently believed every word she said, but then he had approached the interview with the fixed intention of doing so. Had Countis, full of wickedness and whisky as he was, really left the house with his broken arm in the amiable mood that the girl had described? Or had he died in the struggle? Had the nurse really fainted or had she been very actively employed in carrying the dead doctor to the churchyard? Had she invented that faint in order to account for her time between Countis’s arrival and Crediton’s? I found it difficult to believe that anyone full of vigour and self-possession would faint while there was anything to be done, but I know so little about women that I was shy of forming an opinion. The method I have of judging of their ways is by thinking of them as a cross between sailors and fowls, the only creatures that I really understand. Generally it works very well, but it is not always to be trusted.

Then a happy thought struck me. It would be possible anyhow to find out how long that faint, if it were a faint, lasted. At what hour had Crediton knocked at the door? Crossways, where the Creditons live, is a mile and a half away; I had just made up my mind to get the car and go to question them when by happy chance Crediton himself passed by. I stopped him.

“You remember the night before your baby was born?”

“I do that. Never bin out on a wetter.”

“What time did you get to Nurse’s cottage?”

“Church clock struck eleven when I was waiting at her door.”

That was that. Mabel Fair was cleared. It would have been quite impossible for her to have carried the corpse to the churchyard and returned before eleven o’clock. A load was lifted from my mind and I realized thankfully that I could go home and do some work with a clear conscience until the Council met in the evening. But my neglected fowls were not the only people needing attention.

Ernest met me at the gate. He has been somewhat uppish since he won the first prize in the Memory Competition.

“Mr. Beer’s a-waiting for you,” he said, with a delighted grin which meant “What have you been up to?”

Our long and apologetic policeman had been so naturally ignored by us all when real crime had to be investigated that I greeted him with the expectation of some complaint about the trespasses of Rhode Island Reds. I was soon undeceived.

“I’m sorry to trouble you, sir,” said the constable with his usual dreary slowness, “but lookin’ at it on all sides I thought it would be best to come to you before I said anything to anyone else.”

“Well, what is it, Beer?”

“Of course I thought myself it was a funny way for the doctor to die, laying a-top of Sarah Mant like he was, and of course I know that you and the church people thought so too, and of course I heard you was trying to find out whether he really died natural like the coroner said.”

“Well? I don’t want to hurry you, but let’s get to the point, for I’ve a lot of work to do.”

“I was going to ask you, sir, if you found out anything the Inspector would like to know, if you’d kindly tell me and let me tell him. Of course, sir, I know I did drop off to sleep that night I was to watch, but the Inspector made such a lot of it you wouldn’t believe, and I’d like to do anything I could to get a bit of favour, like.”

“By all means,” I agreed, getting up. “I’ll gladly tell you anything I think it is good for the Inspector to know.”

“Thank you, sir,” said Beer without moving. “From information received I understand you’ve proved that Nurse Fair murdered the doctor.”

“What!” I cried.

“Yes, sir. That’s right, isn’t it?”

“It couldn’t be much more wrong. What put that into your head?”

“Well, sir, we don’t usually say who gives us Information Received. But I don’t mind telling you. ’Twas Tabb, sir.”

“What the devil does Tabb know about it?”

“Tabb comes to me and says, ‘One good turn deserves another,’ he says, ‘do you hold with that?’ ‘I don’t know but what I do,’ I says, cautious like. ‘My meaning is,’ he says, ‘if I help the lor will the lor help me? You’re always watching me and worriting me; if I give you a bit of information that’ll help you a bit will you lay off?’ ‘I make no promises,’ I says, ‘but what I can do I’ll do,’ I says. ‘Well, you can’t say no fairer than that,’ Tabb says. ‘You know them church people are nosing round trying to find out who murdered Dr. Countis?’ ‘I’ve heard tell of it,’ I says. ‘They’ve found out ’twas Nurse Fair,’ he says. ‘I don’t believe it,’ I says, and I didn’t neither; sounded to me as if bees was swarming in Tabb’s head. ‘I’ll tell you what I know and you can judge for yourself,’ he says.

“And this is what he told me. Farmer Bradworthy came to him this morning and told him to save up any hairs and any bits of glass he found in Nurse’s dust-bin. So Tabb empties the bin into a sack and takes it round, and he and the Farmer sifts it. Sure enough there’s a lot of broken glass and they pieces together a whisky bottle.”

Beer paused.

“Well, why not?” I asked.

“’Twas Baird’s whisky,” said the constable solemnly.

“And why the devil shouldn’t it be Baird’s whisky?”

“I don’t know,” Beer admitted. “Tabb seemed to think that Farmer Bradworthy seemed to think that it showed that Nurse murdered Dr. Countis.”

“Go home and don’t talk nonsense,” I said. “Tell Tabb he’ll have to get hold of a better tale than that if he wants to keep your eye off his poaching.”

I got rid of Beer, but it was obvious that no time was to be lost in dealing with Bradworthy. I hurried over to the farm full of wrath. But the conversation took an unexpected turn.

“You’re quite a stranger,” said the hospitable farmer. “Have a cigar.”

I began to refuse, but Bradworthy was poking at me with the thing and I had to take it. I looked at it.

“Where on earth did you get this?” I cried.

“Vinnicombe’s,” the farmer answered with a grin. “Never could smoke ’em myself. Nor cigarettes. A pipe’s the only kind of smoke that is any use to me. Vinnicombe wanted to end up friendly like when he’d been telling Mrs. Tawton and me off for not minding our own business, so he gives me a cigar. And I wanted to be friends same like he did, so I says, ‘Thank you kindly,’ and puts it in my pocket. Ain’t it a good one?”

“A perfectly good one, I should think. Don’t you recognize it?”

“Can’t say I do. Don’t know much about them.”

“You’ve seen its brothers and sisters. Look. Both ends are cut square and not pointed, and one end is larger than the other. Where have you seen a cigar like that?”

“I dunno.”

“Why, in the Inspector’s parcel. Dr. Countis had cheroots like this in his case the night he died. You hardly ever see cheroots nowadays. It’s a hundred to one that no one for miles round ever smoked them except Countis.”

“Whew!” the farmer whistled. “Vinnicombe? They do say it’s the quiet ones you have to watch. But ’tis a fair puzzler. Vinnicombe had no call to want to do the doctor any harm.”

“And why on earth,” I added, “should he sit tight and say nothing all this time if Countis had been to his house that night and left unharmed?”

“’Tis a fair puzzler. How about that scrap of blue cloth now. Would the doctor have picked it up at Vinnicombe’s, do you think?”

“You ought to know better than I. You went there on the visit of inquiry.”

“I’m no gude for seeing what’s in a house. I can tell you what’s in a field but not indoors. Now my missus, she’s the one to see all that’s inside. She’ve an eye for other people’s furniture and clothes and that.”

“Why not ask her?”

“No harm trying. She’ve not been to Vinnicombe’s not for years, but we’ll see.”

The farmer went to the door of the parlour and called:

“Pretty!”

Mrs. Bradworthy, large, stern and efficient, answered most improbably to this diminutive of a diminutive which had been attached to her small person forty odd years ago, and came in ornamented as to her hair and clothing with goose’s feathers.

“Excuse me, Mr. Blundell,” she said, “but you know what it is yourself when you have to get birds ready for market.”

“I do,” I answered, “but I’ve no experience with such big fellows as yours.”

“Tain’t geese we want to talk about,” said the farmer. “Mr. Blundell wants to know where Dr. Countis could have got a scrap of blue cloth on his trouser legs.”

“Lor, Mr. Bradworthy, what do I know about the man’s trousers?”

“It’s not so much the trousers we want to know about,” I explained. “The problem is this. On the night Countis died he messed his leg with gum. We know where he did that. But somehow and somewhere the gum picked up a scrap of blue cloth. I’ll show you.”

I had luckily brought with me the little suitcase, into which I had put Lawless’s oddments, thinking that we might want to refer to the match-box and its yellow hairs. I opened the case, took out Countis’s trousers and showed Mrs. Bradworthy the gummy leg.

“Well, I don’t know where that come from,” she said; “there’s lots of people use those rugs made of bits of cloth. I don’t like them myself; nasty dirty things I call them. It looks like this come off an old one that was moulting like.”

“There now!” cried the farmer. “We’ve all been pondering and pondering over that scrap of cloth; why didn’t I think of showing it to you first off?”

“None of us thought of rugs,” I said humbly. “Where could it have come from?”

“Let me think now. Mother Garvin, she’ve got one. So have Lushfords to the Mill, but theirs is nearly new. Vinnicombes now, they’ve an old one that that half-baked Sarah Vinnicombe ought to have throwed away years agone.”

“There now!” Bradworthy exclaimed again in admiration.

“Then there’s Martin’s to Muccombe and Widow Copworthy and—”

“That’ll do, now,” said Bradworthy, interrupting his wife just as she was warming up. “That’ll do now. If Vinnicombe has that kind of old rug that’ll give the Commander enough to think of for today. If we wants to know more we’ll come to you.”

“Then I’ll get back to my geese,” said Mrs. Bradworthy, and did so.

“Ain’t she a wonder?” Bradworthy chuckled. “To think that that woman can tell ’ee what’s on every floor in the village! Ay, and she’d say just as easy what pictures there is on all the walls.”

“Marvellous,” I agreed.

“But I don’t like this business. What are we going to do about it?”

“I suppose we must tackle Vinnicombe and ask him to explain that cigar and the rest of it.”

“I don’t like it. What if we find Vinnicombe did the doctor in?”

“Well, but haven’t we been looking all along for whoever did the doctor in?”

“Yes, that was all right as long as we was thinking about foreigners like Baird and the Nurse. But ’tis different about Vinnicombe. We don’t want to get him into trouble. He’s one of ourselves. And from all accounts this man Countis wasn’t one to make a fuss about. Can’t we drop this business?”

“I don’t see how we can now we’ve got so far,” said I, a little startled at the idea that it would have been pleasanter to convict Mabel Fair than Vinnicombe. “You’d have to move a resolution to that effect on the Council.”

“I’ll do it. There’s not been a horse on this farm for fifty year that Vinnicombe or his father haven’t shod. I’ll have no hand in getting him into trouble.”

“You won’t carry your resolution. I doubt if you’ll find a seconder. Someone will say ‘What about the third that is to go?’”

“That’s true,” said the farmer, running his fingers through his hair.

“You’ve helped to bring suspicion on Nurse Fair. You’ll have to clear her if she’s innocent.”

“’Tis God’s truth,” said Bradworthy ruefully. “What’s more; no one can say I’m superstitious, but it’s not sense to suppose there won’t be a third. What do you think now? Shall you and me go to see Vinnicombe friendly-like?”

“I’m game,” I said.

FIFTEEN

By One and Two and Three

There is no spreading chestnut tree outside the Pecheford smithy. A petrol pump has taken its place. But there is every other sign that from time immemorial horses have been shod and tools mended on the site of the present incongruous block of buildings. The Vinnicombes live in a smart red-brick cottage; leaning up against it affectionately is a long shed with cobb walls and a thatch. Here the blacksmith carries on his ancient and modern trades and petrol flows perilously near to sparks from the fire. The main road through the village runs a few hundred yards away and strangers wonder why there is no petrol pump in Pecheford. Which, to our thinking, proves the amazing ignorance of foreigners, for surely everyone ought to know that to get petrol you must bear to the left of the church and run down a narrow lane.

As Bradworthy and I neared the smithy a sudden thought came to the farmer and he stopped short in his tracks.

“That mat’ll be in the front room,” he said.

“Well, what about it?” I answered.

“How will we get there?”

“Why, we’ll knock at the door; Mrs. Vinnicombe will let us in and leave us to look at mats while she tells her husband that we’re here.”

“Might do for you,” said Bradworthy, shaking his head. “You’re gentry; Vinnicombes would think me mazed if I went and knocked at their front door. The smithy’s the place I go to.”

We seemed to have reached an impasse. I could see nothing for it but to let the mat wait and take Vinnicombe first. I said so.

“Nay,” said Bradworthy, “we don’t know what to say to the man until we see that mat. Look here, Commander; you go in like you say and have a good look round. I’ll come five minutes later and go to the smithy and say I was to meet you there. How’s that?”

“Splendid!” I cried. “You’ve a good head for a plot. But don’t be more than five minutes, for I don’t want to start on Vinnicombe without you.”

The farmer turned into the churchyard; I went on and knocked at the door. According to plan, Mrs. Vinnicombe opened it. She is what we call a heavy woman, of remarkable girth and weight, but one of the most enthusiastic dancers that the village possesses and a great deal livelier than her competent husband. Intellectually she resembles my Rhode Island Reds.

“Why, it’s Mr. Blundell!” she exclaimed with a ponderous coquettishness. “Come in, sir. It is me you want or the master?”

“It’s always a pleasure to see you, Mrs. Vinnicombe,” I said, trying to rise to the occasion. “But it’s really Mr. Vinnicombe I’ve business with. Is he very busy, do you think?”

“Sit you down and make yourself at home and I’ll see. He’ve been up all night but he don’t seem none the worse for it.”

The lady vanished. Immediately I looked eagerly at the hearth. Alas! There was no rug, scrap-made or other. Instead, a brand new Axminster carpet, thin and gaudy, covered the floor. It was a few inches too wide for the room and had been cut and turned in where it faced the fireplace. Presumably it had been bought at a sale, where its cheapness had covered its lack of fit. When, I wondered, had it been bought? When Vinnicombe first heard of the damning fragment that adhered to Countis’s trousers?

I had not much time to contemplate the gigantic green roses on the carpet before Vinnicombe and Bradworthy, who had evidently found five minutes too long for a sojourn among the tombs, came in together, the farmer showing his embarrassment by a forced liveliness, the smith looking like a wary ham.

“Hey, Commander! How do?” cried Bradworthy. “You got here before me after all. We’re lucky; we’ve caught George here just as he’s finished a job. Been curing Tommy Martincombe’s warts.”

“Good morning, sir,” said Vinnicombe.

“Good morning, Vinnicombe. You’re always busy, I know, and we won’t keep you long. Mr. Bradworthy and I thought it would be only right for us to come and tell you of some evidence about Dr. Countis’s death which will be put before the Parochial Church Council this evening.”

“Ay, friendly-like, George,” Bradworthy put in.

“We have ascertained that Dr. Countis called at Nurse Fair’s cottage on the night of his death. He had been drinking heavily. His arm was broken. A pot of gum had been upset and the gum had run on to his trousers. He left Nurse Fair’s cottage at or about 10.30 p.m. When his body was found in the churchyard a scrap of blue cloth was adhering to the gum. It has been reported to us that you had at that time”—I wished I knew how long that staring Axminster had been on the floor—“a rug from which the scrap may have come. Now we are aware that you said you had no statement to make when our representatives came to see you. But under the circumstances we thought it right to tell you how things stand before the Council meets.”

Vinnicombe pondered in silence for a minute or two, gazing at a handsomely framed certificate on the wall which set forth what the St. John’s Ambulance Association thought of him.

“What I’d like to know,” he said at last, “is what right your Church Council has to interfere.”

“No right whatever,” I answered, “except that it is the duty of every citizen to help the police.”

“But the police don’t want no help. They’ve dropped the case.”

“Won’t do, George,” said Bradworthy. “That shows the police is helpless. Well, if they’re helpless, they want help all the more. D’you see?”

Vinnocombe shook his head slowly. The argument was a little too ingenious for him.

“Take it like this, Mr. Vinnicombe,” I suggested. “For the credit of the village we are determined to get to the bottom of the business. We believe we can do it, if everyone helps. If not we shall have to report to the police such evidence as we have.”

“And then there’ll be a lot of talk for months and months,” said Bradworthy persuasively. “And Beer is nosing around. He wants to know where you got that cigar you gave me.”

I think that this artistic, if not quite truthful, touch impressed Vinnicombe more than anything else.

“You say your Council meets tonight?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Well, I don’t mind if I come to meet them. No disrespect to you, gentlemen, but I’d rather say what I’ve got to say to the whole lot of them and get it done with. You say what time you’ll be ready for me and I’ll be there.”

“You’re sure that’s all right for you? Mrs. Vinnicombe said you’d been up all night and if you’d rather make it tomorrow…”

“No, I’ll get it done with. Being up all night is all in the day’s work to me in a manner of speaking.”

“Very well. Meet us at the school at eight o’clock?”

“I’ll be there.”

•   •   •   •   •   •

“So far so good,” I observed as the churchwarden and I got into the lane.

“I suppose so. But he’s a dark horse, is George. I always say he’s got the best headpiece in the village. What’s he want to bottle it up for tonight for, I should like to know? You’d think he’d have been glad to have a talk with us about it first. Looks to me like as if he wanted to make up a good tale.”

“From what I know of Vinnicombe he won’t tell any tale that isn’t fairly convincing.”

“That’s so. About that new carpet, now. He’ll tell the truth about that because someone is sure to know when he bought it. It’s a pity my missus isn’t on the Council. She’s a better match for George than anyone else I know.”

“Well, have a talk with her about it. She may be able to give you some tips.”

“I will that. And that reminds me I’ve got to drop into the shop to buy half a pound of New Zealand butter for her, so I’ll say good-bye till tonight.”

“I’m going there too for stamps. But New Zealand butter! Don’t you make your own?”

“Lord love you, no! Too much trouble these days. We sell all our milk to the factory. Might make cream, now, but not much of that. You’ll mostly find us Devon farmers eat New Zealand butter.”

In the Post Office we found Mrs. Knowstone buying an apron and looking singularly funereal. The postmistress was speaking.

“Well, I never! What I always says is we’re here today and gone tomorrow. And her that strong and healthy-looking, too! My hopes is strength will be given to your poor husband to bear it.”

I made a mental survey of the ladies of the house of Knowstone, wondering which of them could have gone to a better world. I have no doubt that Bradworthy was similarly occupied.

“’Tis a sore trial for us all,” said the bereaved lady lugubriously. “But Them Above knows best. If we knew what she died of it wouldn’t seem so hard, but to have her took and no one any the wiser…”

Miss Chawleigh interrupted with a sudden, most startling squawk and clasped her hands with such energy that a geometrical figure of tins of salmon clattered to the ground.

“A-oh-oh! That’s the third!”

“The third?” Mrs. Knowstone, repeated dully.

“Of course! There was Dr. Wanborough and Dr. Countis and now your lovely young sow! The third!”

“What, you think…” began the other more cheerfully.

“I’m sure. There had to be three. And it’s the mercy of Providence that He’s content without a human when it might have been you or me. Don’t you think so, Bradworthy?”

The farmer’s face showed a solemnity the death of no ordinary human could have brought upon it.

“Do you mean to tell me, Mrs. Knowstone,” he asked, “that your husband’s Large Black that he was going to show to Barnstaple has passed away?”

“That’s right. Him and Vinnicombe was up with her all night. She suffered something cruel, poor dear. The end came at six o’clock this morning and Vinnicombe thinks it must have been something wrong eternally so it’s a mercy she was took, but he says the only way to find out for sure would be a autotopsy.”

“But don’t you see, Mr. Bradworthy? Don’t you see, Mr. Blundell?” cried the postmistress, all impatience at our dullness. “Don’t you see that’s the third?”

“Do you think a sow counts?” I asked, hardly able to believe that the cloud of fear that overhung the village could be lifted so easily.

“Why, for sure! Not just any common pig, perhaps, but that beautiful young sow! Everybody will hold that there’ve been the three.”

“’Tis an ill wind blows nobody any good,” said Bradworthy sententiously. “I’ll not deny I’m glad the three is made up. But there’s many people in the village we could better have spared than that sow.”

“I should think so,” exclaimed Mrs. Knowstone indignantly. “She were one in a thousand. But I do feel wonderful consoled, Miss Chawleigh, with your putting of it. It do make it more easy to say the Lord’s Will be done. You really think this’ll end the deaths?”

“Why, of course it will. ’T would be going against the Bible to doubt it. Your poor sow was of more value than many sparrows.”

“She was that. And not insured either,” said Mrs. Knowstone, looking again on the black side of things.

“Don’t you worry about that,” Bradworthy said confidentially. “When this gets round there’s not a soul in the village but will subscribe to make good the loss as far as may be. ’Twill be a great relief to all, and that’s the truth.”

“I’ll have a list here,” cried Miss Chawleigh, “and I’ll see that everybody puts their names down for something. And, Mr. Bradworthy, will you drop in and ask Mr. Rumsley at the ‘Shoe’ if he’ll have another? We don’t want no goings-round and worritings; it’ll all be done quiet-like. And Mr. Blundell: will you ask passon to give something for the top of the list like he always does? Five shillings will do nicely. And mind: don’t let him give it to Rumsleys; it looks better for him to be up in the Post Office here and not in the ‘Shoe’.”

Bradworthy and I agreed in chorus. I gave my modest contribution, the farmer reserved his to encourage Mr. Rumsley. Mrs. Knowstone cheered up marvellously. Miss Chawleigh, with a dramatic gesture, swept her stock of bolts and bars into a corner inhabited by sad-looking onions. We separated happier than we had been ever since the reign of terror began; the good news spread through the village; streams of small donations flowed in at the Post Office and the ‘Shoe’.

“Five shillings?” said the Rector when I approached him on the subject. “Most gladly. How could they be better spent?”

“I’ll remember that when my Rhode Island Reds come to untimely ends.”

“Ah, but remember too that the ends must be definitely due to the interference of Them Above. Has it ever struck you that the mercantile world must have got its phrase ‘The Act of God’ from the Pechefords of this world? Calamities of a horrid and unexpected sort—here and in the City of London, in farmyards and in insurance offices—those are the deeds in which the Father of Heaven is supposed to delight.”

SIXTEEN

The Final Session

Once more the schoolroom was arranged for the Parochial Church Council, and, as if to mark the new cheerfulness of the village on its deliverance from the shadow of the Third, the walls were decked with the children’s ideas of sweet peas, done in gay crayons on black paper in the true spirit of modern art which portrays not what the object looks like in nature but the queer notions that it excites in the mind of the artist. The models, which were now slightly wilted, stood in jam-pots on the table and helped to make us all feel as we came in that we were in a new and brighter world.

Bradworthy, however, still looked worried.

“Did you remember to ask Mrs. Bradworthy for tips?” I inquired.

“I did, and what do you think she said?”

“You don’t really mean to suggest that I should guess at what goes on in Mrs. Bradworthy’s mind?”

“Well, I don’t know. You might do so well as I do after all these years. What she said was: ‘It don’t matter what you say to Vinnicombe as long as you keep on at him. Don’t let him go under an hour whatever you do.’ What do you make of that, now?”

“I don’t know what to make of it.”

“She’ve got something up her sleeve, you mark my words. Lord! She’s a deep one, is Mrs. Bradworthy. She wouldn’t say another word.”

Farmer Knowstone received our condolences on the passing of his sow with the melancholy importance of a chief mourner. The knowledge that the lists were mounting in the Post Office and the ‘Shoe’ no doubt made his bereavement considerably easier to bear.

Fanny and young Garvin came in together, he presumably having gallantly continued the escort which had now become unnecessary for the purposes of protection. Old Murcom arrived with a large rose in his button-hole. Mrs. Tawton and Mrs. Hemyock came, happily immersed once more in the enduring ailments, not the probable murders and sudden deaths, of their children. Sexton Barlow had been celebrating the occasion at the ‘Shoe’ and brought with him a faint smell of small beer.

The Rector was late. Such a thing had never happened before. We looked at our watches and at one another. I think that in some of our minds there was a horrid doubt whether Knowstone’s Large Black had really satisfied Them Above’s demands. There were no more doctors: what if Passon?… When our Chairman at last appeared we greeted him with warm applause.

“I must apologize for being late,” he said, “but the matter upon which I have been detained is one that concerns the Council. I have had a visit from Mrs. Hillyer, the sister, as I think you all know, of the late Dr. Wanborough. She is the sole executrix of her brother’s will. He had a valuable collection of relics of prehistoric man—flint implements and the like—which he left to the Devonshire Association for the Advancement of Science, Literature and Art. Mrs. Hillyer had everything in the case containing that collection packed up and sent off; she has now received a letter from the secretary of the Association which she has handed to me. In it, after paying a tribute to the late doctor and thanking Mrs. Hillyer for her promptness in fulfilling her brother’s wishes, the Secretary writes as follows—I will read you the actual words:

“You will not however think me ungrateful for this most valuable bequest if I call your attention to one object about which we think that there is some misunderstanding. I refer to a skull upon which there is a label ‘Prehistoric Devonian Man’. At first sight the skull certainly presents an appearance of great age, but experts to whom it has been submitted agree that this is due to staining with a solution of permanganate of potash and careful treatment with dust. They report that the skull is not only modern but formed part of the skeleton of a living man not more than a year ago. We fear that the late Dr. Wanborough may have been the victim of a hoax; meanwhile I am forwarding the skull to you, carefully packed, by parcel post.”

“’Oax?” asked Caleb Murcom, sticking at the unfamiliar word, “what’s ’oax?”

“O my!” cried Mrs. Tawton. “Is it the pore man’s own head?”

“A hoax,” said the Rector, “is a kind of practical joke. In more senses than one it would indeed appear that Dr. Wanborough was the victim of a hoax. But the grim jest was also a well-conceived plan to conceal his head, which Dr. Countis must have placed among the prehistoric relics. Let me continue, ladies and gentlemen. On receiving the parcel Mrs. Hillyer took it without delay to Mr. Cary, the dentist at Pecheton, to whom her brother was accustomed to go. Mr. Cary has no hesitation in identifying the skull as that of the late Doctor Wanborough. He has indeed a cast of the mouth so that a mistake is impossible.”

“Well, now, weren’t that clever?” said Farmer Knowstone, whose face brightened and shortened while all the rest of us were horror-struck. “Who’d have thought, now, of looking among they old flints and the like for the doctor’s head?”

“Prehistoric man, indeed!” Mrs. Tawton exclaimed. “I’ve heard people say that the doctor wasn’t just up to date, but it wasn’t right to call him Prehistoric.”

“Well, ladies and gentlemen,” said the Chairman, “we must not delay further over the matter. I call on the Secretary to make a statement upon the progress of the inquiry since our last meeting.”

I did so, summarizing Nurse Fair’s account of the proceedings at her cottage and the result of Bradworthy’s and my visit to Vinnicombe. I had just finished when there was a knock at the door and the blacksmith came in, Sunday-clad and almost oppressively clean, his ham-like face very grave. The Rector received him with elaborate courtesy and established him in the chair on his right hand.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, “you will wish me to express to Mr. Vinnicombe our sense of the honour he does us in attending this meeting. Mr. Vinnicombe is not a member of our communion, but he recognizes that in this matter we are acting on behalf of the whole village and he has most kindly consented to help us. He has information to give us relating to the death of the late Dr. Countis which he has hitherto withheld, no doubt for good reasons. I will ask you to listen carefully to what he has to say and then I am sure that he will be willing to answer any questions that you may wish to ask, I am right in saying that, Mr. Vinnicombe?”

Vinnicombe bowed gravely.

“Thank you. I will ask you then to make your statement in your own way.”

The Chairman sat down; Vinnicombe stood up.

“Please remain seated,” said the Rector. “We are aware that you, like Mr. Churchwarden Knowstone, were up all night on a sad errand, and you must be fatigued.”

“Thank you, sir,” Vinnicombe began, “but I’ll stand up all the same; it comes more natural-like to me to stand up when I’ve got anything to say. And first off about me keeping quiet like I’ve done. I’ll tell you straight, I didn’t want to be mixed up in this business, but there was more to it than that. It’s true that Dr. Countis called in on me that night, but I’d nothing to say that could do anybody any good and if I’d spoken afore Nurse did, I might have made trouble for her. And that’s a thing I wouldn’t do.”

There was a murmur of approval.

“Of course now Nurse has spoken it’s right for me to speak too, because I can tell you what Countis did after she’d got rid of him. My wife, she’d gone to bed and I was just making a move to do the same when I heard a knock at the door. I opened it and the doctor came in. He’d never been in the house before; you all know there’d been a bit of feeling between me and Dr. Wanborough about people coming to me for accidents and their little ailments. Well, there never was no cause because when I saw people needed a doctor of course I sent them on, but Dr. Countis, he made a to-do about it worse than Dr. Wanborough and wouldn’t hardly speak civil to me when we met. So I was surprised to see him. Well, he came in and I could see he wasn’t himself. Not drunk, but a deal of liquor inside of him. He looks at me and laughs. ‘I never thought to be one of your patients, Vinnicombe,’ he says, ‘but I guess you’re a good bone-setter.’ Then I noticed that he had his right hand tucked into his coat. ‘That vixen of a nurse have broke my arm,’ he says, ‘and I reckon you’ll make as good a job of it as any of these hick doctors in these parts.’ Well, I didn’t like that kind of talk. ‘I don’t like the responsibility,’ I says. ‘If you set quiet here I’ve got a car in the shed that I’ve been decarbonizing for a gentleman, and I’ll fetch it round and run you into Pecheton in no time to Dr. Smith.’”

“‘Damn Dr. Smith and you too,’ he says. Excuse me repeating his language. ‘If you won’t do it, I’ve got a car of my own and Baird can drive me into Pecheton. Have you got a drop of whisky anyway?’

“‘I wouldn’t have any more of that if I were you,’ I says. ‘I’ll make you a nice cup of hot coffee in two twos.’

“At that he started swearing crool. ‘I’ll kill you like I killed Wanborough,’ he cried, and he up and aimed a blow at me. Of course I just moved aside and he slipped down on the rug. I suppose that’s when he picked up that little piece of cloth on his knee. I helped him up and that’s the only time I ever touched him. ‘Thank you for nothing,’ he says, and off he goes.

“Now, sir and friends, that’s all I can say and I’ve told you straight just what happened.”

Vinnicombe sat down. If you can imagine a York ham glowing with conscious rectitude you will know what he looked like.

“Thank you very much,” said the Chairman. “Now, ladies and gentlemen, you have heard what Mr. Vinnicombe has said. Have you any questions you’d like to ask him?”

“That cigar, now, George,” said Bradworthy. “The one you gave me. Wasn’t that one of Countis’s?”

“It was. I found it on the rug the next day. It must have fallen out of his pocket. I don’t smoke them myself, but I see it was a good one, and so I gave it to you.”

“What was your wife doing all the time?” asked Mrs. Tawton. “Can she collaborate what you’ve said?”

“My wife she’s a heavy sleeper,” Vinnicombe answered with a somewhat cheerless smile. “When she once goes to bed it takes a lot to rouse her. And Countis didn’t make no noise to speak of.”

“Then she didn’t know nothing at all about it?”

“Nothing at all.”

“Did you take notice what boots the doctor had on?” Mrs. Tawton asked again.

“Boots? Let me think, now. I seem to remember that he had a pair of Wellingtons, but I couldn’t be sure.”

The flow of questions ceased. We were probably all a little dazed and disappointed. The interview on which we had set such hopes was ending without bringing us an inch nearer our goal.

“Ask ’im something,” whispered Bradworthy, mindful of his wife’s admonition.

“Have you formed any theory about the cause of Countis’s death?” said I, doing my best.

“Me? No, I haven’t. I didn’t see that there was any call to after the coroner’s verdick. There don’t seem no doubt that Countis changed his mind about going to Baird for the car and went into the churchyard. He might have slipped and fallen heavy-like and died of shock.”

“’Twas a wet night, wasn’t it?” Bradworthy was bravely trying to keep the ball moving.

“Wet? Cats and dogs wasn’t the word for it.”

There was a pause. Bradworthy nudged me violently, but I could think of no more questions. The Chairman got up.

“Ladies and gentlemen, you have no more points to raise? Then we have only to thank Mr. Vinnicombe again for the help he has given us. Mr. Vinnicombe’s statement is entirely consistent with all that we know from other sources, and his reason for holding it back was an honourable one. We shall have to consider what bearing it has on the further course of our inquiry; meantime we need not detain Mr. Vinnicombe any longer.”

The Rector and the blacksmith were shaking hands and we were all gazing at them in submissive disappointment when a confused noise outside the door and the rattling of the handle turned our heads in that direction. The door swung open. As in a frame we saw the gaunt form of the most masterful of all the farmers’ wives in the parish linked arm-in-arm with Vinnicombe’s abundant lady. We looked round. The Rector and the blacksmith were still in the act of shaking hands, but with their faces turned to the door, like tennis champions frozen by the camera.

SEVENTEEN

Mounds For Ever!

The two ladies advanced. I had sufficient presence of mind to jump up and offer them chairs. Mrs. Vinnicombe, whose eyes were red and whose hat was awry, sank into hers and put a handkerchief to her face; Mrs. Bradworthy remained standing and wasted no time in preliminaries before beginning her attack.

“That man’s a liar,” she cried, pointing a finger at her victim. “I don’t know what he’s told you, but it’s lies. Never mind! I’ve got the truth out of his wife.”

Vinnicombe, with the smile and sigh that befit a man whose excellent intentions are misunderstood, sat down again, as calm as ever.

“You mean, I think,” said the Chairman suavely, “that Mrs. Vinnicombe is able to supplement her husband’s statement and even possibly correct it. The Council is grateful for all the help that it can get. Now I am not sure what will be our best procedure. Perhaps Mr. Vinnicombe would like to add anything he has omitted?”

Vinnicombe smiled again patiently and shook his head.

“Then, Mrs. Vinnicombe, would you be so kind as to tell us what you know?”

The poor lady squirmed on her chair and darted a hand towards Mrs. Bradworthy.

“No! You—you!” she exclaimed.

“That no doubt will be best. If Mrs. Bradworthy will be good enough to repeat to us what she has learnt?”

“That won’t take long, not the gist of it won’t,” said the churchwarden’s wife fiercely. “George there smothered the doctor in a quilt and Sarah sat on him till he was dead.”

A gasp of incredulous horror went up from the Council. The only people unmoved were Vinnicombe himself and the Chairman.

“Is that correct, Mrs. Vinnicombe?” asked the latter blandly.

“In a manner of speaking,” sobbed the unlucky woman.

“Do you know, Mr. Vinnicombe,” said the Rector confidentially, “I really think you’ll have to tell us all about it. We’ll forget about your former statement if you’ll start again. Don’t you agree?”

“There don’t seem nothing else for it,” said the blacksmith, rising from his chair again and facing us, still to all appearance an embodiment of rectitude. The proverbial pin would have made no less than a clatter during his narration.

“I’ll not deny, friends, that I’ve departed from the strick letter of the truth, but there was good reason for it, as you’ll see. What I told you about the way Countis came in and the way he carried on was just what happened. But when he started to go home he never got to the door. Half way he stops and lets out a shout. ‘There’s that hound again,’ he cries, ‘take it away! Take it away!’ and with that he commences to run round the room. Well, of course, I’ve seen D.T.’s before and I knew what to do; I went and gripped hold of nothing where the doctor was looking and made as if to choke it. ‘It’s all right,’ I says, ‘I’ve strangled him. He’s dead.’ But it didn’t have no effect. By that time the doctor was in a corner screaming ’orrible and making as if to keep the beast off him and he wouldn’t take no notice of me.

“I knew what that meant: he’d be doing himself an injury, him with his injured arm too, and I’d have to overpower him. I thought quick how I could do it without hurting the man. If he’d got a simple fracture I didn’t want to make it compound nor yet comminuted. Then I see my wife peaking round the door and the idea come to me. ‘Fetch the quilt off the bed!’ I says to her. Then Countis thinks there’s another hound behind him and jumps out of his corner and dashes around like as if he’d been a mad dog himself. I couldn’t wait, so I snatches up the rug from before the fireplace and gets behind him and puts the rug round him like a strait-waistcoat, trying not to hurt the bad arm. Then I kicks his legs from under him and brings him to the ground and there he lays kicking something awful. When my wife comes with the quilt I says ‘Pull off his boots,’ I says: they were only rubber but new and had a sharp edge to them. So she lays down the quilt by the side of him and pulls off his boots. Now that quilt…”

“I’ve known that quilt this thirty year,” interrupted Mrs. Bradworthy, who in her hour of victory was beginning to eye Vinnicombe less fiercely.

“I daresay you have,” the blacksmith agreed, “I daresay you have. That quilt belonged to my wife’s aunt to Chulmleigh and when she died it comed to us. ’Tis one of they great big ’uns; more like a feather-bed than a quilt. Well, we lifts the doctor on to the quilt and wraps it round him outside the rug so he shouldn’t hurt himself. And here came my difficulty, friends. I had to get an injection from my cupboard in the smithy to keep the man quiet. I keep all sorts for beasts just the same as for men. I couldn’t send my missus for it, she not knowing how to putt her hand on it, and there was Countis thrashing about under the quilt and rug and all like a fish just landed. So I says to her, ‘sit on his chest,’ I says, and I indicated the spot for her on the side of his good arm. So down she sat and I was back in half a minute with the squirt and the bottle and all for a subcutaneous injection. And now, friends, if you blame what happened on anyone you must blame it on me and not on Mrs. Vinnicombe. In the hurry of the moment I’d not made due allowance for ’er width. She sat where I told her but spreading out like when her weight came down on her—on her—” Vinnicombe hesitated, trying to remember the word used in First-aid Manuals for the part concerned.

“Be’ind,” prompted Caleb Murcom.

“Sit-down,” corrected Mrs. Tawton reprovingly.

“On her sit-down—she’d covered over the man’s mouth. He’d passed away.”

Vinnicombe stopped, took out his pocket-handkerchief and gently smoothed his brow with it. After the strain of silent listening the Council found relief in gasps of astonishment and dismay. I don’t think any of us had believed that Mrs. Bradworthy’s summary could have been so terribly accurate. Something like a chuckle came from Caleb Murcom; a loud sob from Mrs. Vinnicombe.

“Your statement is most graphic,” said the Chairman encouragingly. “No doubt you had strong reasons for not immediately notifying the authorities?”

“Yes, sir, I did have, and I trusts myself to the judgment of any man with a feeling heart. First of all, friends, you must remember that we didn’t know then what we all knows now. Countis wasn’t smothered. If he had been the doctors would have found it out at the post mortem as sure as eggs is eggs because they were trying to find any manner of way he might have been killed. There’s not the slightest doubt what happened; the man’s state was such that a gasp for breath was too much for him and his heart gave out. But my wife and me, we didn’t know that. We thought he’d been smothered. We tried artificial respiration for half an hour, but it wasn’t no good.

“Now I’m one that doesn’t like unpleasantness, and ’tis my duty to protect my wife from such. When I married her I married her to church, though as you know, friends, I don’t altogether hold with you in religion though I believe we are all going the same way. I married her to church and when I promised to love, honour and obey—”

“No, no!” voices interrupted. “That’s what her done, not you!” and Sexton Barlow monotoned sonorously: “For better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, till death…”

“Them’s the words,” cried Vinnicombe, moved at last to some excitement. “To love and to cherish—now I ask you, friends, was it loving and cherishing to up and tell that she’d sat a man to death, and him a doctor? Putt yourselves in my place: would you have done the like?”

There were murmurs of approval; the blacksmith’s subdued eloquence was winning us to his side.

“What I had to settle,” he went on, “was where to putt the corpse so there wouldn’t be no unpleasantness for no one and plenty of reason for the man dying without the doctors nosing around and finding he’d been smothered. Any sort of suicide or accident would do. Now I’d always suspicioned that ’twas Countis that murdered the man in the mound and I thinks to myself a man that far in drink would be just the one to have a fit of remorse and go to that grave to kill himself. And then it all come clear in my mind like a flash. Sarah Mant’s grave lies at the foot of the tower; don’t it? Well, if Countis was found there with a broken arm, everyone would think he’d gone up the tower and throwed himself down. Coroner wouldn’t think to look for any other cause of death.”

Barlow’s chair made a loud scraping sound as it shot back on the bare boards. The Rector bent forward.

“But…” he began.

“Just a moment, sir,” said Vinnicombe, now master of the situation, with a wave of his hand. “Let me finish and then I’ll be pleased to answer any questions. ‘It’s all right,’ I says to my wife, ‘I’ll carry him over to church yard.’ ‘’Tis raining cats and dogs,’ she says, ‘you’d better putt on his gum-boots, for yours are no good.’ Well, I putt them on with my mind on the church tower like and not thinking proper what I was doing. They was sizes too small for me but they give a bit when I stamped on the floor with them. Then I saw ’twas a foolish thing to do, for of course the corpse would want them on and I shouldn’t have nothing to come home in. So I puts them back on him and puts on my ordinary boots and takes him up on my back and carries him to churchyard and chucks him down on Sarah Mant’s grave.”

The blacksmith paused at this point, but no one ventured to ask questions.

“All I had to do then,” he continued impressively, “was to show that the man had throwed himself from the tower. I fetches the key of the tower door out of the church and I takes Countis’s handkerchief out of his pocket. I unlocks the door and climbs the tower and puts the handkerchief on top under the flagstaff. Then I comes down and leaves the door open with the key in it.

“Now sir and friends, I’ve told you the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.”

Vinnicombe sat down, more dignified than ever, and crossed his arms on his chest. The Chairman got up.

“There is one question I am obliged to raise,” he said. “When Inspector Lawless examined the body, the first hypothesis he formed was that Countis had thrown himself down from the tower. Before the removal of the body he and I looked at the tower door. It was locked as usual and the key was hanging up where it is always kept in the vestry. These facts led the Inspector to abandon this theory and I confess that the difficulty still remains in my mind. Perhaps, Mr. Vinnicombe, you can throw a light upon it?”

“No, sir,” said the blacksmith, shaking his head. “I may have me thoughts but that’s different from facts. All I know is that I left that door like I’ve said.”

“Will Mr. Barlow tell us—” the Rector began, looking round to the place where the Sexton had been sitting and giving a start as he saw no one there. “Dear me! Surely he was here just now?”

From the darkness outside the edge of the lamp-light, so far had Barlow’s chair receded, came a sort of groan.

“Now, Mr. Barlow,” said the Chairman sternly, “please come forward and tell us what you know about this.”

The sexton got up slowly and advanced to the table where he stood facing Vinnicombe.

“How was I to know what you done, George?” he asked earnestly. “If you’d only passed the word, o’ course I’d have backed you up. How was I to know? Tell me that!”

“Never mind what Mr. Vinnicombe did,” said the Rector shortly. “Tell us what you know.”

“Why, that morning, zur, as soon as you sent for me, I hurried down to churchyard and going round by the far side of the tower I see the door open and o’ course I thought I’d left it open myself, after the last bellringing, and thankful I were that I’d found it myself and no one to make a rumpus about it. So I locks the door and hangs the key up in the vestry again and never thinks about it again till this moment, I swear I didn’t. O George! George!”—the sexton passed the back of his hand over his eyes—“if only you’d give me just a ’int!”

A murmur of sympathy and emotion came from the Council with the marked exception of its Chairman, who eyed his assistant with strong disapproval and rapped on the table.

“You sit down, Mr. Barlow,” he ordered. “Ladies and gentlemen, are there any more questions you wish to ask?”

“That handkerchief,” said Mrs. Tawton. “Did anyone ever find it?”

“Not likely,” Barlow answered shaking his head. “Last time I was top of the tower was when I took the flag down after Revel Sunday. She’d be laying up in a corner unless she’d been washed through one of them there garboils.”

No other questions were forthcoming. Bradworthy, after a whispered conversation with his brother warden, rose to his feet.

“Mr. Chairman,” he said, “speaking on behalf of the churchwardens I move a vote of confidence in Mr. Vinnicombe. There’s no one will deny he acted like a man and all he done was for the best. You’ll bear me out, ladies and gentlemen: I’ve always said he had the best head-piece to Pecheford, and ’twas a proper beautiful plan he made. I’ll bet there’s not one of us here, not even the passon, could a’ made a better plan for getting rid of a body.”

“I’ll second that,” said Mrs. Tawton, glad, I think, to be able to join with Bradworthy. “If all husbands thought in this auspicious hour as much about their wives as Mr. Vinnicombe do seem to do the world would be a better place.”

“Ah, and he had crool bad luck,” Caleb added. “If Barlow’d had the sense to putt two and two together there wouldn’t have been all this pussivanting.”

The Chairman stood up.

“Mr. Churchwarden Bradworthy moves, Mrs. Tawton seconds, a vote of confidence in Mr. Vinnicombe—those in favour?”

There was an outburst of handclapping, in which our two visiting ladies joined, Mrs. Bradworthy with vigour, Mrs. Vinnicombe unobtrusively.

“Carried with acclamation,” said the Rector. “Does anyone wish to move a similar resolution about Mr. Barlow?” he added as one who is past surprise.

There were cries of “No, no”  “Thick ’ead!” and, from Caleb, “Gawd ’elp him!”

“No? Then I think ladies and gentlemen, that our special task is fulfilled, and I am sure that we shall all earnestly hope that no further bodies will be put into our churchyard except such as are decently buried in graves lawfully dug. We have made a united effort which will encourage us to vigorous co-operation in other and brighter causes in the future. We have received great help from all our friends in the village, and this evening we are able to thank Mr. and Mrs. Vinnicombe and Mrs. Bradworthy most warmly for their assistance. That closes our business.”

“Wait a minute!” exclaimed Mrs. Hemyock. “I’ve a word to say. I move that the sexton be told never to shift no more mounds to churchyard.”

“I second that,” cried three or four voices.

“Any amendment?” said the Chairman rapidly. “Those in favour?… Carried unanimously!”

THE END