“Yes,” said George, “that sounds right. The first shot missed him and buried itself in the door, the second, fired at shorter ranger still, took its time and got him. He couldn’t get away, not from there. There wasn’t any way out—it only looked as if there was.”
“Thanks very much for that instalment, George. Tell me the whole thrilling story some time over a bottle.”
“Certainly,” said George, “if you’re paying.”
“On my derisory fee?”
Dr. Goodwin rang off with his usual aplomb; and George returned, not elated but encouraged, to his cellar. Sergeant Moon had scrupulously refrained from touching the lining behind the pockets in the case.
“You could have gone ahead,” said George, raising the clammy blue lid again. And in answer to Moon’s look of inquiry: “He was shot. Seemingly with the same type of cartridge by the same gun and at the same time. He was the reason for the hole in the door, for the floor being taken up and refusing to lie down properly again, for the knocker being put on to cover the hole, and for the door being moved in the hope of avoiding any investigation into why it dragged. A very, very important man. I really wonder why! What made him so important?”
“And how long does Goodwin reckon he’s been here?” asked Sergeant Moon, watching George’s probing finger slide into the gap where the adhesive had perished, and ease its way along the back of the pocket.
“Anything from three to eight or nine years, on present estimate. Which could put him right back into old Robert’s time, of course…”
Gummily the lining parted from the frame, and now there was not mistaking what the victim had secreted there. Behind the twin pockets were aligned two damp and odorous wads of paper, engraved in steely blue. Not a fortune, but still quite a respectable little nest-egg in five-pound notes. And behind them a thin, dark-blue book with a coat of arm in gilt, and two little oval windows, the upper of which presented them with a still perfectly legible name in a printed hand:
“Mr. T.J. CLAYBOURNE.”
“Well, well!” said Sergeant Moon reverently. “Somebody who put him here got rid of every direct identification they knew about, but they didn’t know about this. Pretty cagey, wasn’t he? He had his passport with him, and he had his savings, and it looks as it he was heading for somewhere healthier, only not fast enough.” He peered curiously at the cover. “L. Issued at Liverpool. Pity passports don’t actually carry the owner’s address anywhere, but we can soon get it from Liverpool. Better than a dental chart, any day.”
George was carefully parting the bluish pages, spotted with mildew and limper than originally, but still capable of being turned cleanly, and still retaining their text. “Profession! Sales representative. Covers a multitude of sins and virtues both. Place and date of birth: Kirkheal Moor, Lancashire, September 15th, 1931. Height: 5 feet 1/2 inches. Description— what do we want with a description, there he is!”
And there he was, in the two by one-and-a-half inch photograph opposite, a small-featured, oval, slightly ferrety face topped with wavy dark hair worn short and parted on the left. Rather startled eyes stared wildly, as usual in passport pictures, but their colour seemed also to be dark, and their setting well-shaped and spacious. George turned the page. “Yes, here we are—the Liverpool stamp. He was alive in February 1965, at any rate. That’s when this was issued.”
“If we can prove it belongs to our corpse,” Brice pointed out diffidently. “Maybe we do need that dental chart, after all.”
“Wait a minute, there’s something else here inside the back—a newspaper cutting.” George slid it out and unfolded it, and Sergeant Moon and Brice leaned close to look over his shoulders. It had been cut from the middle of a page, apparently, for it bore no upper margin, but as soon as Brice set eyes on the clear black type and lay-out he said what they were all thinking: “That’s the Midland Evening Echo, I’d know that style anywhere.”
Spread out carefully before them, limp but intact, was a two-column heading:
“Obituary: MIDSHIRE LANDOWNER AND
SPORTSMAN KILLED IN
HUNTING FIELD.”
Someone had found more than a thousand words to say about the deceased, more renowned in his death than in the last twenty years or so of his life, or at least renowned in a different and more printable way. It had not, after all, been possible to celebrate his principal local activities without running the risk of a libel action, but his death had been just as colourful and entailed no such dangers.
The very clear photograph, printed web offset in one column, was unmistakably of Robert Macsen-Martel the older, lean, racy and handsome in hunting pink, on top of the ageing horse which had finally broken his neck and its own at an impossible fence on the shoulder of Callow, in February 1965. Only in this picture horse and man shone glossier and younger than on the day of their death. The widow must have given the editor a photograph at least ten years old.
Hugh arrived with a rush and an outcry just as they all three had their heads together over his father’s obituary. They heard voices clashing in the hall above, Hugh’s loud and agitated, demanding to know what the hell was going on here, where the intruders were and what they thought they were doing there, anyhow, Robert’s low but sharp, ordering him with considerable asperity to keep his voice down, which rather surprisingly he suddenly did. George pocketed the passport and the cutting instantly, and Sergeant Moon flicked the folded coat out of sight under the trestle table, and dropped the lid of the suitcase.
“That’s young Hugh home, breathing fire by the sound of it.”
“I’d better have a word with him, too, I suppose. Though from all accounts he managed to break away some time ago—small blame to him.”
“Hasn’t slept in this house oftener than about five or six times a year, for years now,” Sergeant Moon confirmed, “and then only to please the old lady. But blood’s thicker than water, seemingly, when it comes to the point.”
George ran up the stone steps, and collided with Hugh at the top. A vivid, distressed face, still slightly travel-stained from the drive home, glared into his. The young man’s impetuous rush carried them irresistibly a tread or two backwards down the stairs again, and George gave way obligingly and let himself be persuaded. Hugh saw below him the open dark cavern of the cellar doorway, the lights concentrated in one corner, where two men sifted soil patiently into a bucket, and the rectangle of empty blackness cutting between. A look of total shock, blank almost as unconsciousness, dropped like a mask over his face, and melted into scared and agitated humanity again only with painful slowness. He pressed a few steps lower, against the steadying barrier of George’s arm, and looked round at the trestle table and its load, the suitcase closed now, the clothes covered with a piece of sheeting. The heavy, chill odour of disturbed earth hung upon the air and stirred sluggishly at every movement. Hugh’s nostrils dilated and quivered like those of a high-mettled horse.
“It’s true, then,” he said. His tone as unexpectedly flat and practical, as though he had shed his excitement, at any rate for the moment with his uncertainty. “They told me you’d issued a statement—is that right?—that you’d found a body somewhere in the house, Rob said you were down here. I couldn’t believe it—I still can’t. I don’t see how it’s possible. It has to be some grisly mistake—or else it’s a plant…”
“By the police, you mean?” George asked mildly.
“No, I didn’t mean that—but damn it, even if I did, please remember that’s no more incredible to you than your version is to me.” Hugh’s eyes flared again; one of them he had rubbed with fingers lightly soiled by grease, and unwittingly awarded himself a black eye which gave him a curiously youthful and disarming appearance. “I wish to hell I’d been here.”