Nurse Kettle was clearing up. She appeared not to hear this remark and presently bustled away to wash her hands. When she returned, Syce was sitting on the edge of his improvised bed. He wore slacks, a shirt, a scarf and a dressing gown.
“Jolly D.,” said Nurse Kettle. “Done it all yourself.”
“I hope you will give me the pleasure of joining me for a drink before you go.”
“On duty?”
“Isn’t it off duty, now?”
“Well,” said Nurse Kettle, “I’ll have a drink with you, but I hope it won’t mean that when I’ve gone on me way rejoicing, you’re going to have half a dozen more with yourself.”
Commander Syce turned red and muttered something about a fellah having nothing better to do.
“Get along,” said Nurse Kettle, “find something better. The idea!”
They had their drinks, looking at each other with an air of comradeship. Commander Syce, using a walking-stick and holding himself at an unusual angle, got out an album of photographs taken when he was on the active list in the navy. Nurse Kettle adored photographs and was genuinely interested in a long sequence of naval vessels, odd groups of officers and views of seaports. Presently she turned a page and discovered quite a dashing water-colour of a corvette and then an illustrated menu with lively little caricatures in the margin. These she greatly admired and observing a terrified and defiant expression on the face of her host, ejaculated, “You never did these yourself! You did! Well, aren’t you the clever one!”
Without answering, he produced a small portfolio, which he silently thrust at her. It contained many more sketches. Although Nurse Kettle knew nothing about pictures, she did, she maintained, know what she liked. And she liked these very much indeed. They were direct statements of facts, and she awarded them direct statements of approval and was about to shut the portfolio when a sketch that had faced the wrong way round caught her attention. She turned it over. It was of a woman lying on a chaise-longue smoking a cigarette in a jade holder. A bougainvillea flowered in the background.
“Why,” Nurse Kettle ejaculated. “Why, that’s Mrs. Cartarette!”
If Syce had made some kind of movement to snatch the sketch from her, he checked himself before it was completed. He said very rapidly, “Party. Met her Far East. Shore leave. Forgotten all about it.”
“That would be before they’were married, wouldn’t it?” Nurse Kettle remarked with perfect simplicity. She shut the portfolio, said, “You know I believe you could make my picture-map of Swevenings,” and told him of her great desire for one. When she got up and collected her belongings, he too rose, but with an ejaculation of distress.
“I see I haven’t made a job of you yet,” she remarked. “Same time to-morrow suit you?”
“Admirably,” he said. “Thank you, thank you, thank you.” He gave her one of his rare painful smiles and watched her as she walked down the path towards his spinney. It was now a quarter to nine.
Nurse Kettle had left her bicycle in the village, where she was spending the evening with the Women’s Institute. She therefore took the river path. Dusk had fallen over the valley of the Chyne, and as she descended into it, her own footfall sounded unnaturally loud on the firm turf. Thump, thump, thump she went, down the hillside. Once, she stopped dead, tilted her head and listened. From behind her at Uplands came the not unfamiliar sound of a twang followed by a sharp penetrating blow. She smiled to herself and walked on. Only desultory rural sounds disturbed the quiet of nightfall. She could actually hear the cool voice of the stream.
She did not cross Bottom Bridge but followed a rough path along the right bank of the Chyne, past a group of elders and another of willows. This second group, extending in a sickle-shaped mass from the water’s edge into Bottom Meadow, rose up vapourishly in the dusk. She could smell willow leaves and wet soil. As sometimes happens when we are solitary, she had the sensation of being observed, but she was not a fanciful woman and soon dismissed this feeling.
“It’s turned much cooler,” she thought.
A cry of mourning, intolerably loud, rose from beyond the willows and hung on the night air. A thrush whirred out of the thicket close to her face, and the cry broke and wavered again. It was the howl of a dog.
She pushed through the thicket into an opening by the river and found the body of Colonel Cartarette with his spaniel Skip beside it, mourning him.
CHAPTER IV
Bottom Meadow
Nurse Kettle was acquainted with death. She did not need Skip’s lament to tell her that the curled figure resting its head on a turf of river grass was dead. She knelt beside it and pushed her hand under the tweed jacket and silk shirt. “Cooling,” she thought. A tweed hat with fisherman’s flies in the band lay over the face. Someone, she thought, might almost have dropped it there. She lifted it and remained quite still with it suspended in her hand. The Colonel’s temple had been broken as if his head had come under a waxworker’s hammer. The spaniel threw back his head and howled again.
“O, do be quiet!” Nurse Kettle ejaculated. She replaced the hat and stood up, knocking her head against a branch. The birds that spent the night in the willows stirred again and some of them flew out with a sharp whirring sound. The Chyne gurgled and plopped and somewhere up in Nunspardon woods an owl hooted. “He has been murdered,” thought Nurse Kettle.
Through her mind hurtled all the axioms of police procedure as laid down in her chosen form of escape-literature. One must, she recollected, not touch the body, and she had touched it. One must send at once for the police, but she had nobody to send. She thought there was also something about not leaving the body, yet to telephone or to fetch Mr. Oliphant, the police-sergeant at Chyning, she would have to leave the body, and while she was away, the spaniel, she supposed, would sit beside it and howl. It was now quite darkish and the moon not yet up. She could see, however, not far from the Colonel’s hands, the glint of a trout’s scales in the grass and of a knife blade nearby. His rod was laid out on the lip of the bank, less than a pace from where he lay. None of these things, of course, must be disturbed. Suddenly Nurse Kettle thought of Commander Syce, whose Christian name she had discovered was Geoffrey, and wished with all her heart that he was at hand to advise her. The discovery in herself of this impulse astonished her and, in a sort of flurry, she swapped Geoffrey Syce for Mark Lacklander. “I’ll find the doctor,” she thought.
She patted Skip. He whimpered and scratched at her knees with his paws. “Don’t howl, doggy,” she said in a trembling voice. “Good boy! Don’t howl.” She took up her bag and turned away.
As she made her way out of the willow grove, she wondered for the first time about the identity of the being who had reduced Colonel Cartarette to the status of a broken waxwork. A twig snapped. “Suppose,” she thought, “he’s still about! Help, what a notion!” And as she hurried back along the path to Bottom Bridge, she tried not to think of the dense shadows and dark hollows that lay about her. Up on Watt’s Hill the three houses — Jacob’s Cottage, Uplands and Hammer — all had lighted windows and drawn blinds. They looked very far off to Nurse Kettle.
She crossed Bottom Bridge and climbed the zigzag path that skirted the golf course, coming finally to the Nunspardon Home Spinney. Only now did she remember that her flash-lamp was in her bag. She got it out and found that she was breathless. “Too quick up the hill,” she thought. “Keep your shirt on, Kettle.” River Path proper ran past the spinney to the main road, but a by-path led up through the trees into the grounds of Nunspardon. This she took and presently came out into the open gardens with the impressive Georgian façade straight ahead of her.