Adders on the Heath

'I didn't catch the doctor's name,' he added.

The pro. repeated it.

'Does the police doctoring round here as well. Seems there's been a corpse up on Medley Heath. Some chap in a little tent. I don't know the rights and wrongs, but all over the place that's spoke of,' he added.

'Oh, really? What did he die of?'

'Poison, so they reckon.'

'Who do? The police?'

'Them, among others. Doctor Mack you played with just now, got a fine big carryin' voice!'

Richardson wondered whether, had he known that his opponent 'did the police doctoring,' he would have asked him any questions concerning his findings. He decided that to have done so would have been to risk a snub. As it happened, however, on his way out he met the doctor again just as the latter was getting into his car. The doctor said, immediately, seeing Richardson on foot,

'Oh, can I give you a lift? Which way do you go?'

Richardson named his hotel.

'Splendid. I can drop you on the village side of the level crossing, if that will help.'

Richardson said gratefully that it would. The car started up and turned left on to a secondary road lined with fairly pretentious houses. Richardson, deciding that it was now or never, risked the snub which he confidently expected.

'I say,' he said, 'the pro. was telling me about the dead man on the heath, you know.'

'Yes?' The doctor kept his eyes on the road ahead, but Richardson detected a slight frown between his thin sandy brows.

'Well, you see, I'm the person who got stuck with the body,' he said, 'so I'm rather interested.'

'How do you mean-stuck with the body?' The frown disappeared.

'I've been camping on my own up on Medley Heath since Thursday. I'd pushed over to the hotel for dinner and hung around a bit afterwards, having coffee and a brandy, and, when I got back to my tent, there was this dead man.'

'Oh?' The monosyllable invited further confidences.

'So, of course, I called the police and now I think they believe the chap was murdered. I spent the night at the Superintendent's house. He was very decent, but I don't think I'm out of his clutches. I'm just wondering how the man was killed. I don't want the police to connect me with the job!'

'I can tell you how he was killed. It will be in the papers tomorrow, anyway, so there need be no secret about it. Still, perhaps, you'd better keep it to yourself until it's public property. He was choked to death with a fir cone.'

'Choked...?'

'With the fruit of the Douglas Fir, to be exact. I recovered an elliptical cone nearly three inches long. Didn't you notice how suffused the face was?-typical case of asphyxia.'

'No, I didn't notice. I tried to revive him by that pinch the nose and breathe into the mouth method, but I think I knew he was gone before I started.' (This referred to Colnbrook, he reflected, and realised that he should not have said it.)

'The mouth was very badly bruised, too,' said the doctor, pursuing his own train of thought. 'The bruising, of course, is one reason for believing that he was murdered.'

'Well, of course! I mean, surely you couldn't choke yourself accidentally on a fir cone, could you?'

'Hardly, perhaps, but I suppose you could commit suicide that way.'

'Surely not! It would be a beastly way to die!'

'You'd be surprised at how some of them manage it. There was a fellow, some years ago, who slopped petrol all over himself and set himself alight. You wouldn't think that was possible, but he did it.'

The car passed a school and the village hall, and drew up just before it reached the village street. Richardson, expressing gratitude, got out and waited on a lumpy bit of pavement until the car turned a bend in the road. Then he strode away past the shops in the village street, over the foot-bridge which crossed the water-splash and made his way back to the hotel.

The doctor (funny swine) had been pulling his leg. Neither of the deaths had been caused by a fir cone. Colnbrook's most certainly had not. If anything of the sort had choked him (only it hadn't) it would have been a surfeit of almonds. There had been faint but unmistakable odour of almonds while Richardson was trying to give him that breath-of-life treatment first recorded in the annals of the prophet Elisha.

Almonds!

It could have been suicide, of course, yet, recollecting his sight of the two men on the heath and then on the common, their running togs, their field-glasses and their absorption in the job in hand (whatever it was), it seemed highly unlikely that anything so dramatic as a double suicide could have been in their minds. In addition to this, Colnbrook had been the last person on earth, Richardson felt, to have contemplated such a drastic course. He had given the impression of being far too pleased with A. B. Colnbrook to think of doing away with him.

There was one feasible explanation, of course. One of the men could have murdered the other and then, afraid to face the possible consequences of such an act, have killed himself. There was yet another possibility. When last he had seen them, they had been heading for the heath again. The only dwelling-house they would pass, so far as Richardson knew, was the biggish place from which he had tried to telephone. Could they have been lured in there and murdered?

He visualised the curl-papered maid who had answered the door to him, and this brought to mind her reference to Cook and Shirl. Cooks, he supposed, could and did perform fearful and wonderful deeds, upon occasion-there was that frightful pie-maker of Dusseldorf-or was it Hanover?-but was anybody called Shirl capable of murder?-let alone the goggling, curl-papered specimen who had answered the door. Besides, he did not believe that three women would have struggled from that house to the tent with the hulking body of Colnbrook and then taken it away and hidden it and substituted the second body for it. Theoretically this might be possible, but for all practical purposes he felt certain that it was not. Only a man would have organised a job such as that.

* * *

He was too late for tea at the hotel, but Barney, who met him as he entered, said, with a conspiratorial nod,

Try the kitchen, sir. Mabel's "on" this afternoon.'

Richardson crossed the uneven, large, ancient tiles of the kitchen, beyond which lay the modern annexe in which the cooking and serving were done, and turned off to the right, past the foot of a servants' staircase, also part of the original house, which had been built, very narrow and steep, in the thickness of the wall. It led up to the second floor and the porter's bedroom.

In the room past the bottom of this staircase, Mabel was busy washing up. She desisted as Richardson came in and hooked a chair up to a large, scrubbed, wooden table. As was her invariable habit, she grinned widely but did not speak. She made fresh tea, put out bread and butter, jam and a sponge sandwich, and, jerking her head, indicated that he might set to.

'We've had Carrie's boy friend, the policeman, here this afternoon. Tell us about the murder,' she said, when Tom had drunk his third cup of tea. Richardson, in a low tone, gave her a carefully edited account of what had happened. At the end, she stood with her arms akimbo, studied his fresh complexion and boyish, candid face and shook her head.

'He's wrong. The police are all wrong. It can't be you. Ain't got the nerve,' she said. 'No more nor me. Takes nerve, it do, to bring off a nice clean murder. No, Mr Richardson, it wouldn't be your sort of lark, no more nor it wouldn't be mine, whatever Carrie's boy friend may say.'

Richardson felt that the Delphic Oracle had spoken. He did not even resent the slur cast upon his courage. What Mabel believed today he hoped and trusted that the police would believe tomorrow. He thanked her for the tea, went into the small drawing-room which served to house the visitors' library and, most days, an irascible ex-Naval officer, and, surveying the volumes on the bookshelves, took down E. F. Benson's masterpiece, The Luck of the Vails, trusting that the flute-playing villainies of Mr Francis Vail would blot out, for a space, his own anxieties and problems.