“I say,” the colonel reminded him. “There are ladies present, Littlefield.”

“Did I curse without knowing it, Colonel? When did ‘ripe’ get to be a swear word?”

Blount-Buller cleared his throat. “All a bit indelicate, wouldn’t you say?”

The debate went on, but I’d lost interest in it. I didn’t much want to walk over to the gully’s rim, but I forced myself, and had a look at the rope cables that had given way, sending poor Orris to his death.

I remembered the words of the clown who’d driven us from the station at Pattaskinnick. Good strong rope, he’d called it, and then he’d gone on to describe how rain could soak into the rope, and how it would swell when it froze, severing fibers, and go on thawing and freezing until it had sustained enough invisible damage that it would, as he’d put it, snap like a twig.

I looked closely at the good strong rope and saw where it had snapped like a twig. And then I turned my head quickly, to make sure nobody was standing too close to me. I was, after all, right at the edge of the gorge, and a quick shove would send me plummeting to a fate worse than Orris’s.

And someone might be inclined to supply that little push.

No one was standing dangerously near me, but I drew back from the brink all the same. Greg Savage was saying something, but I wasn’t paying attention to the words, just waiting for a pause. When one came along I grabbed my chance.

“The body has to stay where it is,” I said. “That’s the way the police will want it.”

Someone wanted to know what the police had to do with it. “You don’t need the police when someone dies accidentally,” I was told. “Not when it’s an obvious accident, not out here in the country. All you need is for a doctor to sign a death certificate.”

I hadn’t known that, and still wasn’t sure it was true. But it didn’t matter.

“It wasn’t an accident,” I said. “There were two ropes securing the bridge on this side of the creek, one on the left and one on the right. These were stout ropes, fully half an inch thick. There’s no reason why they would have snapped.”

“They weren’t steel cables,” Miss Hardesty said. “Rope is rope. It’s strong, but it doesn’t last forever.”

I started to say something, but there was a gasp from Lettice. “My God,” she said, and clutched her husband’s arm. “We were the last people on that bridge!”

“We were the last to cross it,” he corrected her. “The guy down there was the last person on it.”

“Dakin, we could have been killed!”

“We could have been struck by lightning,” he said, “or swept away in a flash flood. But we weren’t. And we weren’t on the bridge when the ropes broke, either, which was lucky for us and not too lucky for that poor slob who was.”

Calling Orris a slob, while perhaps unimpeachable on grounds of fact, seemed to me a clear case of speaking ill of the dead. But I let it go, figuring the lousy maid service the Littlefields could now expect to receive from the scowling Earlene Cobbett was answer enough.

“One rope might break,” I said. “But not two, not both at once.”

“I wonder,” the colonel said. “If one rope was frayed or weakened by the elements, wouldn’t its fellow be similarly stressed?”

“To a degree,” I admitted. “But not to the point where they’d both go at the same instant.”

“I see your point, Rhodenbarr. But say one rope gives way. Wouldn’t that place additional stress on the other? And wouldn’t that be enough to finish off an already weakened rope?”

“There’d be a delay,” I said. “One rope would give way, and there’d be a few seconds while the fibers parted on the other one. Probably enough time for anyone on the bridge to get the hell off it.”

“Perhaps,” he said, “if he had his wits about him. Orris was by no means an imbecile, but none would call him quick-witted. He was unquestionably slow.”

“And he crossed the bridge every day,” Nigel Eglantine put in. “He wouldn’t have been thinking about it while he crossed it, as those of us who are nervous on bridges might. His mind would have been occupied with thoughts of what he was going to do next-starting up the Jeep, plowing the drive.”

“There you are,” the colonel said. “He’d scarcely have noticed when the first rope failed. He’d have registered the sound, and by the time he’d identified it, well…”

“Bob’s your uncle,” Carolyn said.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Just an expression,” I said. “It seems to me it would take a lot longer than that for the second rope to give way, but it’s not a hypothesis we can test, so let’s let it go.”

“Then there’s no reason to assume it was anything other than an accident,” Dakin Littlefield said.

“But there is,” I said.

“Oh?”

“The rope ends,” I said. “The fibers don’t look frayed to me. I’d say somebody cut them most of the way through. When Orris walked onto the bridge, it was literally hanging by a thread. Well, two threads, one on each side. And they did give way at once, and before he’d taken more than a step or two.”

Someone asked how I knew that.

“Look at the bridge,” I said, and pointed across the gorge, where the thing hung down from its two remaining ropes. “It was covered with snow,” I said, “like everything else in the county, and most of the snow’s spilled into the gorge now. But you can see footprints at one end, where Orris’s weight compacted the snow underfoot. He only got a chance to make two footprints.”

This brought fresh sobs from Earlene Cobbett, whose freckled face was now awash with tears.

“I’m not a forensics expert,” I said, with just the faintest sense of déjà vu. “The police will have someone who can examine those rope ends and determine for certain whether or not they were cut. But it certainly looks to me as though they were, and that just strengthens the argument for leaving Orris’s body where it is. I suppose someone could go down there to inspect him, just to make sure that he’s dead, but I don’t really think there’s much question of that, not with his head at that angle.”

“I say,” the colonel said. “Whole thing’s a bit rum, eh? Someone right here at Cuttleford House set a trap for this man and murdered him.”

“Not exactly,” I said.

“Not exactly? But you just said-”

“Let’s get back to the house,” I said, “before we freeze to death, or somebody puts a foot wrong and winds up in the ditch with Orris. And then I’ll explain.”

CHAPTER Fifteen

“Someone set a trap,” I said. “That much is true. The ropes supporting the bridge were cut through to the point where the slightest stress would finish them. But it wasn’t a trap for Orris.”

We were back inside Cuttleford House, the whole lot of us crowded into the bar and spilling over into the room adjoining it. Nigel Eglantine was pouring drinks and the Cobbett cousins were handing round trays of them, offering us a choice of malt whisky or what we were assured was a fine nutty brown sherry. It wasn’t even noon yet, but nobody was saying no to a drink, and most of us were going straight for the hard stuff.

Rufus Quilp was among us, I was pleased to note, and so was Miss Dinmont, her wheelchair now once again in the capable hands of Miss Hardesty. They had been the only members of the party who had not rushed out to the fallen bridge, and I had not been surprised at their absence. Neither Miss Dinmont’s wheelchair nor Mr. Quilp’s great bulk could have had easy passage through the deep snow. All the same, I was happy to see them again, comforted by the knowledge that neither of them had seized the moment to kill the other, nor had some third party knocked off both of them.

“What do we know about the sabotage of the bridge?” I went on. “First, let’s set a time. We know the bridge was intact when the Littlefields arrived last night. That was around ten or ten-thirty. The snow continued to fall after their arrival, because by this morning their footprints were completely covered.” I paused significantly. “And so were the footprints of the person who sabotaged the bridge. Orris walked through two feet of virgin snow to get to that bridge. Whoever sabotaged it must have done so not long after the Littlefields crossed it.”