The woman raced across the grass for twenty or thirty yards, the man gaining noticeably He reached out, almost touched her; but then she veered and began to run at a tangent up the slope of the reservoir. By the time she reached the top, the distance between them had increased by a couple of yards.
Still no one else had appeared to witness the chase. Mrs Crunkinghorn felt a sense of privilege.
The figures now were silhouetted against the sky, and the watcher had a clear picture of the drama’s startlingly odd end.
The man had no sooner levelled into pursuit along the top of the embankment than his body seemed to turn on its own axis, quite independently of the legs. Considerably inconvenienced by this lack of co-ordination, the legs, though still pounding along, began first to knock against each other and then to swing out at increasingly wild angles.
It seemed to Mrs Crunkinghorn that the man was actually running sideways.
But soon he was not running at all. The legs having become hopelessly entangled with each other, he stumbled and cart-heeled on to his head, then toppled, quite slowly, over the farther edge of the embankment.
Mrs Crunkinghorn was too far off to hear the splash.
Chapter Six
Miss Pollock heard it, though. She stopped running and turned. What she saw made her scream, but not quite as loudly as she had screamed before. She remained where she was just long enough to get wind for another sprint, then she set off down the bank towards the coach, frantically waving one arm.
Three minutes later, a group of intrigued but helpless people stood on the brink of the reservoir, staring down at the submerged features of Alderman Steven Winge.
The body was only about a foot below the surface. It undulated very, very slowly, as if lazily flexing and relaxing in the cool luxury of effortless suspension. Mr Winge looked remote, certainly, but not dead. His eyes were wide open and he was smiling as usual. One hand still grasped its trophy of torn cloth, a black pennant drifting down to mingle with fronds of weed.
One of the helpers glanced surreptitiously at the rent in Miss Pollock’s dress.
The coach driver was the first to speak.
“I’ll get off to a phone. You’d better stay where you are.”
He went down the banking at a half run. At the bottom, he shouted over his shoulder:
“And don’t try and do anything—you’ll only fall in yourselves.”
The pensioners were beginning to straggle back in twos and threes, attracted by the sounds of crisis. The word spread that something dreadful had happened to Mr Winge. The old men and women toiled up the bank to see for themselves.
The body neither sank nor rose. It did not shift perceptibly in any direction at all. It seemed set for ever in dim, green jelly.
“What ’yer doin’ down there, Mr Winge?” quavered potty old Mrs Baxter.
Shocked, the others shushed her. Yet they, too, found it a little hard to think of a man dead who could continue to smile with such patent self-congratulation.
Soon after three o’clock, there sounded faintly through the trees the double candy-trumpet notes of an approaching fire tender. It emerged from the lane, scarlet, strident, splendid; drove at undiminished speed across the meadow, and rocked to a halt at the top of the banking.
Four firemen in unbuttoned tunics and shiny black thigh boots climbed out and unshipped ropes and straps and what looked like enormous fishing hooks. Carrying their gear, they pushed courteously but firmly past the watchers.
A police car drew up below, closely followed by an ambulance.
The firemen’s task did not take long. When the retrieved body had been laid to drain for a few minutes and then stretcher-borne to the ambulance, they neatly re-coiled their ropes, smoked a cigarette apiece, and drove back to town.
One of the two policemen, in deference to those parts of Miss Pollock displayed through the tear in her dress, ushered her to the car.
The other officer went round asking questions. He received the eager undertaking of the sole witness—Mrs Crunkinghorn—to accompany him back to the police station and there describe what had happened.
At ten minutes to four, a procession set off on the return journey to Flaxborough.
It was led by the ambulance. Then came the coach carrying the Darbys and Joans and the helpers and the crate of light ale, unbroached and all but forgotten. In the police car behind, one officer had shifted to the back seat in the company of Miss Pollock so that Mrs Crunkinghorn might enjoy the high spot of her outing—a silent but triumphant homecoming beside the driver.
On reaching town, the three vehicles broke formation and went their separate ways, the ambulance to the mortuary at the General Hospital, the coach to its occupants’ club in Trent Street, and the car to police headquarters, where Inspector Purbright and the Coroner’s Officer, Sergeant William Malley, were waiting to see what they could make of the stories of its passengers.
In respect for her age, and on the assumption that she would be anxious to get home and rest after the day’s excitement, Mrs Crunkinghorn was interviewed first. Meanwhile, Policewoman Bellweather found a raincoat to cover the deficiencies of Miss Pollock’s clothing and a mug of tea to restore her spirits.
The inspector soon learned how mistaken had been his expectation of a frail, distressed and inarticulate octagenarian. Mrs Crunkinghorn’s description of what she had seen on the sky-line in Gosby Vale had all the colour and fervour of a racing commentary. Purbright was impressed, if a trifle dazed.
He asked her to repeat what she had said about the late alderman’s unorthodox manner of pursuit.
“Sideways,” she declared again. “Sideways wuz ’ow ’e wuz bowlin’ along. Until ’is legs’ got all raffled up. Then over ’e went, arse over tit! I never seen the like, never. Arse over tit, ’ewent! Pwosh!”
“It is very tempting,” Purbright said to Sergeant Malley when the old woman had departed after laboriously scrawling her name at the bottom of the statement typed by Malley, “to conclude from this that the Flaxborough Crab, so called, is no more.”
Malley stroked one of his chins and wheezed reflectively.
“Aye,” he said. “It certainly looks like it.”
“He’s been a singularly busy man, has our Steve. They tell me he was on fifteen committees.”
The sergeant inflated plump cheeks and shook his head in wonder.
“Sunday school superintendent. Old people’s welfare visitor. Magistrate..”
“Governor of the Grammar School,” Malley supplied.
“Lifeboat Fund president.”
“Chairman of that television clean-up thing...”
For a while, both men sat in awed contemplation of the late alderman’s multiplicity of office and honour.
“I wonder,” said Purbright at last, “what set the old bugger off on this lark all of a sudden. Surely not Miss Pollock?”
Malley shuddered. He sighed and went to the door.