“Don't be silly!” she said, pushing him away. “You know what I mean!” She cast another glance at the corpse, and said with some asperity: “I shall be glad when someone comes to relieve us! If there were anything one could do! But there isn't. In fact, I imagine that the less we do the better it will be. Standing about to keep watch over a dead man! It's all very well for you to laugh, but I wasn't brought up to this sort of thing.”
However, when Charles suggested that she might as well return to her home, she gave a scornful snort, and resumed her scrutiny of the flower-beds. Fortunately, they had not long to wait before relief came in the substantial form of Police Constable Hobkirk, a stout and middle-aged man who inhabited a cottage in the High Street, and devoted as much of his time as could be spared from his not very arduous police-duties to the cultivation of tomatoes, vegetable-marrows and flowers which almost invariably won the first prizes at all the local shows.
He came up the lane on his bicycle, very hot, for he had been pedalling as vigorously as was suitable for a man of his girth, and a little out of breath. Alighting ponderously from his machine, he propped it against the hedge, and, before entering the garden, removed his cap, and mopped his face and neck with a large handkerchief.
“Good lord! I forgot all about Hobkirk!” exclaimed Charles, conscience-stricken. “I expect I ought to have notified him, not Bellingham. He looks a bit disgruntled, doesn't he? Hallo, Hobkirk! I'm glad you've turned up. Bad business, this.”
“Evening, sir.”
“Evening, miss,” said Hobkirk, a note of formality in his voice. “Now, just how did this happen?”
“Good lord, I don't know!” replied Charles. “Miss Patterdale doesn't either. We weren't here. Miss Warrenby found the body, just as you see it, and came to Fox Cottage for help.”
“Oh!” said Hobkirk noncommittally. He produced a small notebook from his pocket, and the stub of a pencil. “At what time would that have been?” he asked.
Charles looked at Miss Patterdale. “Do you know? I'm hanged if I do!”
“Come, come, sir!” said Hobkirk.
“It's no use saying come, come, in that reproving way. No doubt, if Miss Warrenby had rushed in to tell you her uncle had been shot, you'd have taken note of the time: you're a policeman. The trouble is I'm not, and I didn't.”
“Ah!” said Hobkirk, pleased with this tribute to his superior ability. “That's where it comes in, doesn't it? It'll have to be established, you know, because it's very important circumstance.”
“Well, I daresay we can work it out,” said Miss Patterdale, pulling an old-fashioned gold watch out of her waistband, and consulting it. “It's ten past eight now—and I know that's right, because I set my watch by the wireless only this morning—and I should think we must have been here at least half an hour.”
“Twenty minutes at the outside,” interpolated Charles.
“It seems longer, but you may be right. When did Mavis reach us?”
“I haven't the ghost of an idea,” said Charles frankly. “I should make a rotten witness, shouldn't I? What a good job it is that I shan't be expected to know when the murder was committed!”
“I wouldn't say that, sir,” said Hobkirk darkly. “And when you found him, the deceased was sitting like he is now?”
“Hasn't moved an inch,” said Charles.
“Charles!” said Miss Patterdale. “This is not a moment for flippancy!”
“Sorry, Aunt Miriam! The worst is being roused in me.”
“Then overcome it!” said Miss Patterdale severely. “Neither Mr. Haswell nor I have touched the body, Hobkirk, if that, as I suppose, is what you want to know. Miss Warrenby may have touched, though I should doubt it.”
“I don't have to tell you, miss, that it is very highly improper for anyone to go touching anything on the scene of the crime.” The constable's slow-moving gaze travelled to a sheaf of type-written papers, clipped together at one corner, and lying on the grass beside the corpse's right foot. “Those papers, now: I take it they was there, laying on the ground?”
“Yes, and do you know what I think?” said Charles irrepressibly. “I believe the deceased must have been reading them—no, I mean perusing them, at the time he was shot.”
“That's is may be, sir,” replied Hobkirk, with dignity. “I don't say it wasn't so, but things aren't always what they seem, not by any means they aren't.”
“No, and life is not an empty dream, either. Are you supposed to be in charge of this investigation?”
Hobkirk, in his unofficial moments, rather liked young Mr. Haswell, whom he considered a well-set-up young gentleman, with friendly manners, and one, moreover, who could be relied upon to do great execution, with his inswingers, amongst the batsmen of neighbouring villagers; but he now detected in him a certain lack of respect, combined with a deplorable levity, and he answered with quelling coldness: “I'm here, sir, to take charge of things till relieved. Properly speaking, you had ought to have notified me of this occurrence, when I should, in accordance with the regulations, have reported same to my headquarters in Bellingham.”
“At the end of which exercise we should have been precisely where we are now,” said Charles. “Still, I'm sorry you aren't going to remain in charge! I say, Aunt Miriam, is it really past eight? I'd better go and give my Mama a ring: we dine at eight, and she always pictures me in the local hospital, with every bone in my body fractured, if I don't show up when I said I would.”
He strode off towards the house. Hobkirk watched him go, his countenance betraying some uncertainty of mind. In all the uneventful years of his service no case of murder had previously come his way, so that he had only a half-forgotten memory of text-book procedure to act upon. He felt vaguely that young Mr. Haswell should not be allowed to make use of the telephone belonging to the deceased. But as he had already made use of it, to summon the police, it was difficult to know on what grounds he could now be restrained. Constable Hobkirk held his peace therefore, and was secretly glad of the diversion afforded by the arrival at that moment of Dr. Warcop, in his aged but still reliable car.
Dr. Edmund Warcop, who resided in a comfortable Victorian house, inherited, like his practice, from his long-dead father, and situated on the outskirts of Bellingham, on the Trindale road, was sixty years of age and as unaccustomed as Constable Hobkirk to dealing with cases of murder. His professional methods, which were old-fashioned, might be the despair of younger and more progressive colleagues, but he enjoyed a very respectable practice, his simpler patients being as conservative as he was himself, and thinking it scarcely possible that they could be born or die without a Warcop to attend them; and the more sophisticated believing that they must be safe in the hands of a man who rode so well to hounds, and who had been established in the district for as long as most of them could remember. He held himself in high esteem, rarely called in a second opinion, and had never been known to admit himself to have been at fault. No one, observing his demeanour as he walked across the lawn towards the oak-tree, would have guessed that this was the first case of its kind which he had attended. A stranger would more readily have supposed that he was a police-surgeon of extensive experience. He nodded to Hobkirk, but favoured Miss Patterdale with a civil good-evening, and a handshake, for she was one of his patients. “I'm sorry you should have been brought into this,” he said. “Shocking business! I could scarcely believe it, when young Haswell told me what had happened. Almost under the eyes of Miss Warrenby, I understand.”
He then bent over the corpse, while Miss Patterdale walked away to inspect yet another flower-bed, and the constable respectfully watched him. He glanced up after a brief examination, and said: “Nothing for me to do here. Instantaneous, of course. Poor fellow!”
“Yes, sir. How long would you say he's been dead?”
“Impossible to say with any certainty. More than a quarter of an hour, and not more than an hour. We must bear in mind that the body has been all the time in hot sunshine.”