“Not to say opinion, sir,” he said. “Not to say that. One thing I did make sure of was not to disturb anything. He’s lying on a patch of shingle screened in by a half-circle of willows and cut off on the open side by the stream. He’s lying on his right side, kind of curled up as if he’d been bowled over from a kneeling position, like. His hat was over his face. Nurse Kettle moved it when she found him, and Dr. Lacklander moved it again when he examined the wound which is in the left temple. A dirty great puncture,” the sergeant continued, easing off his official manner a point or two, “with what the doctor calls extensive fractures all round it. Quite turned my chap’s stomach, drunks-in-charge and disorderly behaviour being the full extent of his experience.”
Alleyn and Fox having chuckled in the right place, the sergeant continued. “No sign of the weapon, so far as we could make out, flashing our torches round. I was particular not to go hoofing over the ground.”
“Admirable,” said Alleyn.
“Well,” said Sergeant Oliphant, “it’s what we’re told, sir, isn’t it?”
“Notice anything at all out of the way?” Alleyn asked. The question was inspired more by kindliness than curiosity, and the sergeant’s reaction surprised him. Oliphant brought his two freckled hams of hands down on the driving-wheel and made a complicated snorting noise. “Out of the way!” he shouted. “Ah, my God, I’ll say we did. Out of the way! Tell me, now, sir, are you a fly-fisherman?”
“Only fair to middling to worse. I do when I get the chance. Why?”
“Now listen,” Sergeant Oliphant said, quite abandoning his official position. “There’s a dirty great fish in this Chyne here would turn your guts over for you. Pounds if he’s an ounce, he is. Old in cunning, he is, wary and sullen and that lordly in his lurkings and slinkings he’d break your heart. Sometimes he’ll rise like a monster,” said Sergeant Oliphant, urging his car up Watt’s Hill, “and snap, he’s took it, though that’s only three times. Once being the deceased’s doing a matter of a fortnight ago, which he left his cast in his jaws, he being a mighty fighter. And once the late squire Sir Harold Lacklander, which he lost him through being, as the man himself frankly admitted, overzealous in the playing of him, and NOW,” the sergeant shouted, “NOW, for the last and final cast, hooked, played and landed by the poor Colonel, sir, and lying there by his dead body, or I can’t tell a five-pound trout from a stickleback. Well, if he had to die, he couldn’t have had a more glorious end. The Colonel, I mean, Mr. Alleyn, not the Old ’Un,” said Sergeant Oliphant.
They had followed Watt’s Lane down into the valley and up the slope through blinding rain to the village. Oliphant pulled up at a spot opposite the Boy and Donkey. A figure in a mackintosh and tweed hat stood in the lighted doorway.
“The Chief Constable, sir,” said Oliphant. “Sir James Punston. He said he’d drive over and meet you.”
“I’ll have a word with him, before we go on. Wait a moment.”
Alleyn crossed the road and introduced himself. The Chief Constable was a weather-beaten, tough-looking man who had been a Chief Commissioner of Police in India.
“Thought I’d better come over,” Sir James said, “and take a look at this show. Damn’ bad show it is. Damn’ nice fellow, Cartarette. Can’t imagine who’d want to set about him, but no doubt you’ll be able to tell us. I’ll come down with you. Filthy night, isn’t it?”
The Yard car had drawn up behind Oliphant’s. Bailey, Thompson and the driver got out and unloaded their gear with the economic movements of long usage and a stubborn disregard of the rain. The two parties joined up and led by the Chief Constable climbed a stile and followed a rough path down a drenched hillside. Their torches flashed on rods of rain and dripping furze bushes.
“They call this River Path,” the Chief Constable said. “It’s a right-of-way through the Nunspardon estate and comes out at Bottom Bridge, which we have to cross. I hear the dowager rang you up.”
“She did indeed,” Alleyn said.
“Lucky they decided it was your pigeon anyway. She’d have raised hell if they hadn’t,”
“I don’t see where she fits in.”
“She doesn’t in any ordinary sense of the phrase. She’s merely taken it upon herself ever since she came to Nunspardon to run Chyning and Swevenings. For some reason they seem to like it. Survival of the feudal instinct, you might think. It does survive, you know, in isolated pockets. Swevenings is an isolated pocket and Hermione, Lady Lacklander, has got it pretty well where she wants it.” Sir James continued in this local strain as they slid and squelched down the muddy hillside. He gave Alleyn an account of the Cartarette family and their neighbours with a particularly racy profile of Lady Lacklander herself.
“There’s the local gossip for you,” he said. “Everybody knows everybody and has done so for centuries. There have been no stockbroking overflows into Swevenings. The Lacklanders, the Phinns, the Syces and the Cartarettes have lived in their respective houses for a great many generations. They’re all on terms of intimacy, except that of late years there’s been, I fancy, a little coolness between the Lacklanders and old Occy Phinn. And now I come to think of it, I fancy Maurice Cartarette fell out with Phinn over fishing or something. But then old Occy is really a bit mad. Rows with everybody. Cartarette, on the other hand, was a very pleasant, nice chap. Oddly formal and devilishly polite, though, especially with people he didn’t like or had fallen out with. Not that he was a quarrelsome chap. Far from it. I have heard, by the way,” Sir James gossiped, “that there’s been some sort of coldness between Cartarette and that ass George Lacklander. However! And after all that, here’s the bridge.”
As they crossed it, they could hear the sound of rain beating on the surface of the stream. On the far side their feet sank into mud. They turned left on the rough path. Alleyn’s shoes filled with water and water poured off the brim of his hat.
“Hell of a thing to happen, this bloody rain,” said the Chief Constable. “Ruin the terrain.”
A wet branch of willow slapped Alleyn’s face. On the hill to their right they could see the lighted windows of three houses. As they walked on, however, distant groups of trees intervened and the windows were shut off.
“Can the people up there see into the actual area?” Alleyn asked.
Sergeant Oliphant said, “No, sir. Their own trees as well as this belt of willows screen it. They can see the stretch on the far side above the bridge, and a wee way below it.”
“That’s Mr. Danberry-Phinn’s preserve, isn’t it?” asked the Chief Constable. “Above the bridge?”
“Mr. Danberry-Phinn?” Alleyn said, sharply.
“Mr. Octavius Danberry-Phinn, to give you the complete works. The ‘Danberry’ isn’t insisted upon. He’s the local eccentric I told you about. He lives in the top house up there. We don’t have a village idiot in Swevenings; we have a bloody-minded old gentleman. It’s more classy,” said Sir James, acidly.
“Danberry-Phinn,” Alleyn repeated. “Isn’t there some connection there with the Lacklanders?”
Sir James said shortly, “Both Swevenings men, of course.” His voice faded uncertainly as he floundered into a patch of reeds. Somewhere close at hand a dog howled dismally and a deep voice apostrophized it, “Ah, stow it, will you.” A light bobbed up ahead of them.
“Here we are,” Sir James said. “That you, Gripper?”
“Yes, sir,” said the deep voice. The mackintosh cape of uniformed constable shone in the torchlight.
“Dog still at it seemingly,” said the sergeant.
“That’s right, Mr. Oliphant. I’ve got him tethered here.” A torch flashed on Skip, tied by a handkerchief to a willow branch.
“Hullo, old fellow,” Alleyn said.
They all waited for him to go through the thicket. The constable shoved back a dripping willow branch for him.