"She's from one of the cottages, isn't she?" said Thorpe, peering down. "You know, Harry, I think I know who she is."
Ford, who to tell the truth, hadn't been all mat keen on having a really close look on his own, was emboldened by the presence of the young man and bent down towards the cold white face. "Why, it's Mrs. Jenkins."
"That's right," said Thorpe.
"Boundary Cottage," responded the postman automatically. (The odd letter, no circulars, very few bills.)
Thorpe looked round. "Hit and run," he said bitterly. "Not even a ruddy skid mark."
"It's a nasty corner," offered Ford.
Thorpe was still looking at the road. "You can see where he hit the verge a bit afterwards and straightened up again."
Ford didn't know much about cars. 'Too fast?"
"Too careless."
"You'd have thought anyone would have seen her," agreed Ford.
"Walking on the wrong side, though."
"Depends whether she was coming or going,"said Ford, who was the slower thinker of the two.
"I should have said she was walking home myself," pronounced Thorpe carefully. "Last night."
"Last night?" Ford looked shocked.
"If that mark on the grass is his front tyre after he hit her when she was walking along the left hand side of the road towards her home."
"But last night," insisted Ford. "You mean she's been here all night?"
Thorpe scratched an intelligent forehead. "I don't know, Harry, but she isn't likely to have been walking home this morning in the dark, is she?"
Harry Ford shook his head. "A very quiet lady, I'd have said."
"And," continued Thorpe, pursuing his theory, "if she'd been going anywhere very early she'd have been walking the other way. No, I'd say myself she was going home last night."
"Off the last bus, perhaps," suggested the postman.
"Perhaps."
"Her daughter's not at home then," said Ford firmly. "Otherwise she'd have been out looking for her."
"No, she's away still. Back at the end of term." He looked down at the still figure in the road and said, "Sooner now."
"I rang the ambulance," said Ford, for want of something to say.
Thorpe moved with sudden resolution. "Well, then, I'll go and ring the police. Don't you let them move her until they come."
"Right."
Thorpe paused, one foot on the tractor. "Poor Henrietta. No father and now no mother either."
Police Constable Hepple came over from Down Martin on his motorcycle and measured the road and drew chalk lines round the body and finally allowed the ambulance men to take it away. He, too, knew Mrs. Jenkins by sight.
"Widow, isn't she, Harry?" he said to the postman.
"That's right. Just the one girl."
He got out his notebook. "Does she know about this?"
"She's away," volunteered young Thorpe. "At college."
"Do you know her exact address?"
But young Thorpe went a bit pink and said rather distantly that he did not So P.C. Hepple made another note and then measured the tyre mark on the grass verge.
"I'd say a 590 X14 myself," offered Thorpe, who was keen on cars. "That's a big tyre on a big car." Now that the body had gone he could talk about that more freely too. 'Those were big car injuries she had."
P. C. Hepple, who had reached much the same conclusions himself, nodded.
"Tisn't what you'd call a busy road," went on Thorpe.
"Busy!" snorted Harry Ford. "I shouldn't think it gets more than a dozen cars a day."
"Even the milk lorries all go the other way," said Thorpe, "because it's a better road."
"Did you have any visitors at the farm last night?" Hepple asked Thorpe.
"Not a soul."
"Perhaps it was someone who'd taken the wrong turning at the Post Office." That was the postman.
"Wrong turning or not," said Hepple severely, "there was no call to be knocking Mrs. Jenkins down."
"And," said Thorpe pertinently, "having knocked her down to have driven on."
It seemed to Henrietta Jenkins that she would never again be quite the same person as she had been before she stepped into the cold, bare police mortuary.
A sad message, telephoned through a series of offices, had snatched her from the Greatorex Library where she had been working. A succession of kind hands had steered her into the hastily summoned taxi and put her onto the Berebury train. She had been barely aware of them. She vaguely remembered getting out at Berebury more from force of habit than anything else. A police car had met her—she remembered that—and brought her to the police station.
Voices had indicated that there was no need for her to identify the body just now. Perhaps there were some other relatives?
No, Henrietta had told them. There was no one else. She was an only child and her father had been killed in the war.
Perhaps, then, there was someone close in Inking who would…
Henrietta had shaken her head.
Tomorrow then?
She had shaken her head again. Now.
Something like this was only possible if you didn't think about it. She heard herself say—very politely—"Now or never."
She had followed a policeman down a long corridor. She didn't think she had ever seen a policeman without a helmet on—absurd the tricks one's mind played at a time like this.
He drew back a white sheet. Briefly. And looked not at the still face lying there but at Henrietta's own live one.
She nodded speechlessly.
He laid the sheet back gently and led the way back to the world of the living. Henrietta was shivering now but not from cold. The policeman—she noticed for the first time that he was a sergeant—brought her a cup of tea. It was steaming hot and almost burnt her mouth but Henrietta drank it thirstily, gladly giving the hot liquid all her attention.
Even the sensation of pain, though, could not drive away the memory of the mortuary.
"It's the smell that upsets people," said the police sergeant kindly. "All that antiseptic."
"It is a bit dank," admitted Henrietta shakily. The detached, educated half of her mind noted how primitive it was of her to be so grateful for human company; but nothing would have taken her back into that other room again. Only if the body had been that of a stranger could she have borne that.
The sergeant busied himself about some papers on his desk while she drank. Presently she said,
"Sergeant, what happened?"
"The Larking postman found her lying in the road, miss. She'd been run over by a car on that last bad bend as you leave Larking village."
"I know the place. Why?"
"Why was she knocked down? That we don't rightly know, miss. You see, the car didn't stop."
Henrietta stifled a rising wave of nausea.
"We'll pick him up, sooner or later, you'll see," said the sergeant. "Someone will have seen his number."
Henrietta said dully, "The number doesn't really matter to my mother or me now."
"No, miss." It seemed for a moment as if he was going to explain that it mattered to the police but instead he said care"Constable Hepple found her handbag—afterwards— and there was a letter from you inside it."
"I always wrote on Sundays."
"Yes, miss. People do that are away. Sunday's the day for that sort of thing…"
"I wish I'd had time to say something before…"
The sergeant offered what comfort he could. "There's not a lot really needs saying, miss, not when it comes to the point. Families have said everything long ago, or else it's something that doesn't need saying." He paused. "What about tonight, miss?"
"I shall be all right."
"Wt'll run you home to Larking, of course, but…"
"It's something I've got to get used to, isn't it?" she said. "Being alone from now on."
CHAPTER TWO
