There seemed nothing much which needed to be done in tidying the room except to dust it. Morpeth did this thoroughly, shaking the duster out at the open doorway every now and then. She opened the drawers, but they were empty, as she expected. It occurred to her that she ought to inspect the interior of the wardrobe in case the intruder had used it as a convenience. Dreading that such might be the case, she hesitated for a bit and then nerved herself to make the inspection.
The wardrobe was empty. The bag which the doctor had carried with him on his afternoon calls on his patients, the ancient raincoat and the hat which Morpeth knew had been left in the wardrobe had gone. Morpeth, although fearing it was useless, searched the room again. Then she left the loft and went back to the house. On Bryony’s return from shopping, they unpacked the baskets, put away the food and the other household necessities, and made coffee. When they had settled down, Morpeth broke the news of the disappearance of the hat, bag and raincoat.
‘Father’s bag gone, and that old raincoat and hat?’ said Bryony. ‘Must have been taken by the tramp Adams talked about. I suppose the man thought he could sell them, especially the leather bag. Is anything else missing?’
‘Not so far as I know. Perhaps you would go and have a look round. You see, if the bag is missing, father’s scalpels and perhaps other dangerous things have gone. The bag was fitted up just as he left it.’
‘After lunch, then. There’s no hurry. Have you done the vegetables? Susan will enjoy the cutlets I’ve brought in. What’s she doing this morning?’
‘She is still out. She must be taking Anubis and Amon for a longer walk than usual.’
Susan came back with startling and disturbing news.
‘Police all over the moor,’ she said. ‘A hiker has found a body in that rocky valley which runs out to Castercombe.’
‘Not another dead body?’ exclaimed Bryony.
‘Yes, I’m afraid so. I met the shepherd whose flock graze the pastures below Cowlass Hill and he says the man’s throat was cut.’
‘How horrible! Worse than the other death! At least that one was brought in as accident. This one must have been murder or suicide,’ said Bryony.
‘Yes, I suppose so. What’s for lunch?’
‘You feel like having lunch after hearing a thing like that?’ asked Morpeth.
‘I didn’t see the body and I’m hungry.’
‘Did the police stop you?’
‘No. I was right over near the Witch’s Cauldron rock and they were mostly on the road. I thought they might be looking for somebody who had escaped from Castercombe gaol. Then, when I got to Cowlass Hill and met the shepherd, he told me what had happened. He got the low-down from his son, who happens to be a policeman. It seems to be a suicide so I suppose it was all right for the policeman to blab.’
‘Did you see the police on your way back?’
‘No. I kept well in the shelter of the rocks and then I took the cliff path, which is quite hidden from the road. Anyway, I think they were too busy to notice me.’
‘You were determined to dodge them, I suppose,’ said Bryony. ‘Well, I don’t blame you.’
‘I should think not indeed!’ said Susan, her sun-and-wind-roughed face flushing angrily. ‘If you had been given the going-over they gave me when they were in my cottage and found that silly hat and the piece of trouser-band, you would have dodged them, too. It was my rotten luck to find that dead man at Watersmeet and I don’t want any more to do with dead bodies for a long time to come, thank you!’
The news was all over the village by the early evening. The three women had supper at seven and Susan, presumably on her way home, called at the Crozier Arms for a beer and then, to the surprise of the sisters, she came back to Crozier Lodge with as much of the matter as she had been able to gather at the pub.
‘Didn’t like to ask any questions,’ she said, ‘me not being exactly what you might call popular in the village, but the barmaid was getting a pretty lurid account from a man who had a cousin in the telephone exchange in Axehead, so I gathered an earful, but whether it was fact or romance I wouldn’t care to guess. Apparently the police plan to telephone the hotels to find out whether any guest is missing, as nobody in the village seems to know anything.’
‘Well, it doesn’t sound like a convict, does it? Where was the body found?’ asked Bryony.
‘I told you, near enough. I don’t know the exact spot.’
‘Perhaps the poor man had a sudden fit of depression. That valley can be very lonely at times and it’s a nasty spooky place, anyway,’ said Morpeth. ‘Some people think it’s haunted.’
‘Talking of lonely and spooky,’ said Susan, ‘would you mind if I kipped here for the night? That’s what I came back to ask.’
‘It’s not like you to be nervous,’ said Bryony, ‘but stay by all means, if you want to. I wonder how soon the police will know who the dead man was?’
‘Goodness knows. I suppose they’ll put out photographs, as they did of the man I found. This village will be getting itself a bad name if any more people die on holiday here.’
Nobody came forward to identify the dead man, so the police did as Susan had predicted. A day or two after Susan had returned to Crozier Lodge to make her report, Morpeth recognised a picture in the local paper. The sisters had gone into Axehead to take Nephthys to the vet for a check-up, as the hound had begun to scratch an ear and seemed slightly off her food. Morpeth had to pass a newsagent’s after she had left Bryony sitting in the car in the carpark, so she went into the shop to buy a couple of women’s magazines which the sisters favoured and which they passed on to Susan when they had finished with them.
A small pile of the papers was lying on the counter, so that Morpeth could not help seeing them. Feeling a sense of shock, since the caption above the picture on the front page was eye-catching and in large print, she picked up a paper, bought it and the magazines, and went on to the veterinary surgery with a sense of foreboding and deep unease, for she had no doubt whatever that the newspaper picture was that of Goodfellow. It was not the photograph of a dead man. It was that of an artist’s impression of what Goodfellow would have looked like before his throat was severed, but Morpeth had no difficulty in recognising the face.
In the vet’s waiting-room she realised this with a sick feeling of horror mixed with resentment at the tricks Fate seemed to be playing. The half-dozen other pet-owners, having looked up, but without curiosity, when she entered, returned to their magazines or to stroking their cats, and paid her no further attention. Her excitement made her impatient of delay. She felt that she could not return quickly enough to the carpark to show Bryony the newspaper.
Half an hour’s waiting-time before Nephthys could receive attention caused her to calm down and reflect upon what her next move should be. Obviously it was her duty to report to the police that she knew something important about the dead man and, for what it was worth, could give his name. In her naive, almost childish way, she thought the police would be sufficiently grateful for the information to give up pestering Susan and themselves about the body found in the river. Instead, therefore, of taking the hound straight back to the car park, she called at the Axehead police station. An enlarged copy of the newspaper picture was conspicuously displayed at the side of the front door. Morpeth looked at it, hitched the hound’s lead to the railings and said, ‘Good girl, stay!’
‘You’d better see the Chief, miss,’ said the desk sergeant resignedly, when she had stated the purpose of her visit. ‘Yours is the sixth story, up to date. They range from telling us the man was an oil baron to suggesting he was the victim of a secret society, so I hope your account will seem a bit more sensible. You say you knew the man?’