Small David had done a good job with the stove, and it came to me presently that J was properly warm for the first time in days. I thought of little Harry, and I hoped that he was warm. I thought of how he would stand in the road at Thorpe-on-Ouse for minutes on end, and then suddenly go skipping off, as if he'd at last got hold of the answer to some very troublesome question. He was eccentric, like his mother.
Well, they would go on in their own way. It was better that I should die in the course of an important investigation than lose my job through my own foolishness and leave them with a loafer at the head of the family. I turned over on the narrow bed many times, back and forth until finally I knew that sleep would come. I was certain on that point, and I believe I spoke out loud the words, 'I have lost all my doubts', but there must have been the complication of a dream somewhere, for I now heard those words repeated directly into my ear by another.
'I have lost all my doubts.'
I felt the firm press of a hand on my shoulder and opened my eyes to see Bowman leaning over me.
He was changed.
'We're going to make off,' he whispered; and for the first time since I'd known him, he smiled. If he'd had any hair to speak of, it would have been tousled; his glasses were askew on his nose, but I could see by the one remaining lamp that there was more purpose about him than ever there had been before. He wore his topcoat; he held his sporting cap tightly bundled in his hand.
'Collect up your boots,' he whispered as I rolled upright. 'I know where Small David stows the key.'
The other men were still rolling and groaning in the darkness, like a restless sea. I picked up my boots, and followed Bowman into the scullery, where the air was just as cold as if we'd been outside. As I stepped into my boots, I could just make out that Bowman was kneeling at the grate. He came up with the key in his hand.
'Still warm,' he whispered. 'He keeps it in the ash pan.'
He walked over towards the heavy front door, and there came a great cymbal crash as he did so. All the breath stopped on my lips, as I looked towards the other door, the one leading into the sitting room, which we had left ajar behind us. It did not move.
'Kicked the damned ash pan,' said Bowman, who now placed the key in the front door.
He was straining at it.
'Won't turn,' he said, a little too loudly.
I looked again towards the living-room door.
'Can't get the trick of it,' he was saying.
I went towards him, stepping carefully, for I didn't know where the ash pan had been kicked to. I motioned him aside, leant hard on the door and turned the key.
Nothing doing.
I pulled it towards me by the handle - again nothing.
'Take the key out and try again,' said Bowman.
I did so, and the key went in further this time - it had not been properly lodged by Bowman. But as I turned the key, the wrong door was moving. With every degree of twist that I gave it, the sit- ting-room door was moving inwards. The key gave a click as I continued to look over my shoulder, at the door behind. A figure stood there: Richie, the son. A blanket was around him like a cape, and he might have been sleepwalking, or he might have been thinking hard. Above the blanket, his face shone white in a new light. The key had done its work as I looked at him. Before me, the door was open, and the Highlands seemed to rise like a drop scene at the theatre: the valley falling away before me; white clouds moving across the tops in succession, like a train, and all lit by a magical grey light. The snow had stopped, for all its work was now done.
We were through the door, and crashing through the drenching, snowy heather in an instant. I looked back at the house. Richie Marriott had not emerged from it, and nor had anybody else.
We moved with long, comical strides, stepping out, and then down and nearly over-toppling at every stride. We could not afford to take the track by which we'd come up in the cart - that was too slow and twisty. 'Had to get out, and had to take you along,' Bowman was panting behind me. 'I couldn't dodge it, having brought you up here.'
He'd shown himself a man at last, and it gave him new life.
I looked back at the house - still no sign of life.
'I'm obliged to you,' I said.
We crashed on, but the ground did not play fair. The snow and heather sometimes hid black, brackeny water; we might at any moment be stepping on to heather that hid a twenty-foot rocky gulf, and there were many streams running down towards the one that had made the valley. Over the next five minutes of headlong descent Bowman fell over twice behind me. After the second fall, he said, 'Glasses gone.'
I turned around, and saw that his small eyes seemed to have sunk further into his head, as if in retreat from the job of looking out at the world unaided.
I felt around in the heather near his feet.
'Give it up,' he said.
'Try to step in my tracks,' I said, and we carried on.
'How's your boots?' I asked after a while.
'Pretty well sodden,' he said, and it struck me that he had said it happily.
'Good old moon,' he said, after a couple more falls.
'The boy saw us,' I said.
'He might not let on,' Bowman panted out behind me.
'He's great pals with Small David, though,' I said.
'Small David's taken a fancy to him,' said Bowman. 'I don't know how far it works the other way. The boy's the one I feel sorry for in all this - apart from myself, of course,' he added, laughing.
'What does he work as?'
'Solicitor - only been at it a couple of years.'
'Up in Middlesbrough?'
'That's it.'
'I think I have the matter straight now,' I said, as we battered on through the drenching heather. 'The rudiments of it, anyway.'
'Well, Marriott's given you most of the tale. He has some kink in the brain that makes him always talk of it.'
But it seemed to me that Bowman's own kink was straightened out.
He was fairly skipping down the hill, in between falls. And he was not juiced, either.
'Marriott crowned Falconer,' said Bowman. 'And of course the whole Club knew it directly. It happened in the saloon, and half of them saw it. The body was put off the train at a spot near Marske, which is a little way north of Saltburn - it was just pitched into the snow at trackside, but they were lucky over the weather because the stuff was coming down fast, and Falconer would have been covered over in minutes. It bought them time,' Bowman continued, righting himself after another tumble. 'Well, you can imagine the discussion that went on in that carriage as it neared Middlesbrough - the heat of it. I think it would have been like a courtroom on wheels, with Marriott making out that it had been an accident, that he didn't deserve to swing for it or do thirty years, or whatever the turn-up might be if the police were called in . ..'
Something was moving along the hillside towards us; like a great brown cloud, only it came with a fast and dangerous rustling noise. It stopped twenty feet off, and the picture composed.
'Deer,' I said.
We both stopped and watched the herd for a second. Their eyes shone like new shilling pieces.
'Rum,' I said. 'They're looking at us as if there's something wrong with us.'