Pettigrew had no desire to add to the awkwardness. “Shall we be going?” he suggested. “I think we have seen all there is to see.”

They turned to walk away, but had only taken a few steps when by common consent they halted.

Someone was coming up the lane towards them, a stoutish, pallid man, round-shouldered and unshaven, moving heavily and uncertainly. From his gait and from the state of his shoes it looked as though he had walked some way. In one hand he carried, incongruously enough, an enormous sheaf of scarlet gladioli. It was not until he was quite near to them that Pettigrew recognized Mr. Joliffe.

Joliffe was the first to speak.

“Why, it’s Mr. and Mrs. Pettigrew!” he said, in a voice that suggested he had been drinking. “This is a surprise! And Miss Greenway, too-I might have known you wouldn’t be far away on such an occasion.”

“Have you come for the christening?” Hester asked incredulously.

“Yes. I’m late, I know. I ran out of petrol down the road. Forgot to fill the tank-I forget things very, very easily nowadays, ever since-you know.” He looked from one to another of them out of red-rimmed eyes. “And it needn’t ever have happened-any of it-if I’d only known. That’s the-what d’you call it?-irony, that’s the word, the irony of the situation. My grandson! I’m entitled to come to his christening, aren’t I?”

He took off his hat with a gesture. “Good-bye. Glad to have met you,” he said, and walked past them through the lych gate, and up the path towards the church door.

Pettigrew contrived to get there before him.

“Mr. Joliffe,” he said. “The service must be nearly over, and they’ll all be coming out in a minute. Don’t you think it would be better to wait outside instead of going in now and disturbing them?”

To his relief, Mr. Joliffe accepted the suggestion quite meekly.

“Good idea,” he said. “I don’t want to disturb anyone. All I do want is to see the little chap, and his mother. And the girls of course. They used to be fond of their old granddad. But it’s my daughter I want the most, Mr. Pettigrew. It’s her I brought these flowers for”-the gladioli trembled in his hand-“my own daughter!”

Mr. Joliffe was lachrymose, pathetic and quite horrible. Pettigrew averted his eyes. A moment later the church door opened and the christening party poured out into the sunlight.

What happened next was in the nature of an anticlimax. For some time nobody noticed the presence of Mr. Joliffe at all. A cheerful throng of bonhomous Gormans elbowed him to one side while everyone took photographs of nearly everyone else. The mother, the godparents, the parson, Louisa, Doreen and Beryl were posed in varying permutations and combinations. The baby itself passed from one set of arms to another like the ball travelling down a line of three-quarters at Twickenham. It was Doreen who interrupted the orgy of photography by suddenly exclaiming, “Mum! There’s grandpa!”

Edna Gorman was being photographed at the moment, with her son in her arms. She broke her pose at once, handed the infant to Louisa, who was standing near her, and went straight towards her father. The clamour of laughter and chat that had been filling the air was suddenly stilled, and the two met in utter silence.

“Edna, my dear, forgive me,” said Joliffe. “But I had to come. These-these are for you, my dear.”

With a clumsy gesture he thrust the flowers at his daughter. She stood motionless, looking at him as though at a stranger, making no move to take them.

“Take them, please!” he pleaded. “I meant all for the best, I did indeed.”

With a sudden movement she snatched them from him. “Thank you, father,” she said, in a small hard voice. “I wanted some flowers for Jack’s grave. These will do very well.”

She turned abruptly and walked down the side of the church towards the further end of the churchyard. Mallett, who had been in the background, a silent spectator, came suddenly to life. “Not that way, Mrs. Gorman!” he called. “Not that way! Stop her, someone!” But it was too late. She had gone, and her father, still pleading and protesting, with her.

An ancient yew tree, marking no doubt what had formerly been the boundary of the graveyard, stood on the south side of the little church, level with its east end. Its branches now extended almost to the church walls, and tree and church between them effectively screened from sight the end of the churchyard where the most recent graves had been dug. Edna Gorman and her father came down the path between tree and church and stopped aghast. Between them and their objective a rough canvas barrier had been erected. A group of men, some in police uniform, were standing talking beside it. A little to one side, two others were leaning on spades, awaiting orders. As the purport of what she saw dawned upon her, Mrs. Gorman opened her mouth to scream, but no sound came. The flowers dropped from her hand, and Mallett was just in time to catch her as she fell.

Pettigrew was close behind Mallett. As he went forward to help he saw Joliffe coming back towards him, his face distorted with fear. He dodged past Pettigrew, and shambled rather than ran back along the way he had come to the west end of the church, into and through the group of men and women assembled there and on towards the lych gate. It was Tom Gorman who started the chase. “Tally-ho, boys! After him!” he cried, and Joliffe dashed into the lane with half the Gorman family in pursuit, hallooing and shouting, running after him because he was running away, they knew not why. Joliffe took a despairing look over his shoulder. They were gaining on him, and there was no escape. Then, as he ran alongside the churchyard wall, he came abreast of Tom’s horse, standing where it had been told to stand, its ears cocked, its nostrils quivering with excitement. In desperation he reached up for the reins and tried to put his foot in the stirrup. Tom shouted a warning, but it was unheard. In an instant the dun horse whipped round, tore the reins from Joliffe’s grasp with a toss of its head, and, rearing on its hind legs, struck him two appalling blows full upon the chest with its new-shod fore-feet.

“Silver Blaze,” said Mallett to Pettigrew some time later. “As you said, the answer was in my library all the time. It’s one of my favourite Holmes stories, too. I should have guessed it.”

“You hadn’t my advantages,” said Pettigrew. “I had seen this horse in action at Bolter’s Tussock and knew what he was capable of. I suppose Jack tried to sneak off on him while his master was harbouring a stag in Satcherley Copse, and paid the penalty.”

“Yes. Tom tells me that he found the body when he came back to where he had left his horse and decided that the easiest course was to say nothing about it. I have told him how foolish he has been-”

“Say no more, I beg. I have a strong fellow feeling for Tom in that respect. And after all, he was not to know that the animal was going to give a public demonstration of its lethal properties.”

“But I don’t understand,” said Eleanor. “Why was Mr. Joliffe running away?”

“If you have murdered a man and seen him comfortably buried, it’s only natural to run away when you find the police are digging him up again.”

“But Jack wasn’t murdered.”

“No. But Gilbert was.”

“Gilbert?”

“It’s obvious when you come to think about it, isn’t it? Only nobody ever did think about it. Joliffe had to ensure that Jack’s death should seem to occur after Gilbert’s. So he postponed the apparent date of Jack’s decease, but he could only do that up to Tuesday morning, when his butcher’s shop would reopen for business. There was a fair chance that Gilbert would be dead by then, but he couldn’t be sure-so he made sure.”

Hester could not contain her excitement.

“Ellie!” she exclaimed. “When we met him on that famous Saturday he had come straight from seeing Gilbert at the Grange. He said so himself.”