Then, of course, the police were at the door. He went to meet them, for apparently the servants had all been given the evening off, and it was that small banal fact of which he had read in so many murder stories that brought the squalid truth home to him. Dr Forester was still alive, and the local police thought it only right to send for the parson. . . That was all. It was extraordinary the devastation that could be worked in one evening in what had once seemed a kind of earthy paradise. A flight of bombers could not have eliminated peace more thoroughly than had three men.
The search was then begun. The house was ransacked. More police were sent for. Lights were switched on and off restlessly through the early morning hours in upstairs rooms. Mr Prentice said, "If we could find even a single print. . ." but there was nothing. At one point of the long night watch Rowe found himself back in the room where Digby had slept. He thought of Digby now as a stranger -- a rather gross, complacent, parasitic stranger whose happiness had lain in too great an ignorance. Happiness should always be qualified by a knowledge of misery. There on the bookshelf stood the Tolstoy with the pencil-marks rubbed out. Knowledge was the great thing. . . not abstract knowledge in which Dr Forester had been so rich, the theories which lead one enticingly on with their appearance of nobility, of transcendent virtue, but detailed passionate trivial human knowledge. He opened the Tolstoy again: "What seemed to me good and lofty -- love of fatherland, of one's own people -- became to me repulsive and pitiable. What seemed to me bad and shameful -- rejection of fatherland and cosmopolitanism -- now appeared to me on the contrary good and noble." Idealism had ended up with a bullet in the stomach at the foot of the stairs; the idealist had been caught out in treachery and murder. Rowe didn't believe they had had to blackmail him much. They had only to appeal to his virtues, his intellectual pride, his abstract love of humanity. One can't love humanity. One can only love people.
"Nothing," Mr Prentice said. He drooped disconsolately across the room on his stiff lean legs and drew the curtain a little aside. Only one star was visible now: the others had faded into the lightening sky. "So much time wasted," Mr Prentice said.
"Three dead and one in prison."
"They can find a dozen to take their place. I want the films: the top man." He said, "They've been using photographic chemicals in the basin in Poole's room. That's where they developed the film, probably. I don't suppose they'd print more than one at a time. They'd want to trust as few people as possible, and so long as they have the negative ..." He added sadly," Poole was a first-class photographer. He specialized in the life history of the bee. Wonderful studies. I've seen some of them. I want you to come over now to the island. I'm afraid we may find something unpleasant there for you to identify. . ."
They stood where Stone had stood; three little red lights ahead across the pond gave it in the three-quarter dark an illimitable air as of a harbour just before dawn with the riding lamps of steamers gathering for a convoy. Mr Prentice waded out and Rowe followed him; there was a thin skin of water over nine inches of mud. The red lights were lanterns -- the kind of lanterns which are strung at night where roads are broken. Three policemen were digging in the centre of the tiny island. There was hardly a foothold for two more men. "This was what Stone saw," Rowe said. "Men digging."
"Yes."
"What do you expect. . .?" He stopped; there was something strained in the attitude of the diggers. They put in their spades carefully as though they might break something fragile, and they seemed to turn up the earth with reluctance. The dark scene reminded him of something: something distant and sombre. Then he remembered a dark Victorian engraving in a book his mother had taken away from him: men in cloaks digging at night in a graveyard with the moonlight glinting on a spade.
Mr Prentice said, "There's somebody you've forgotten -- unaccounted for."
Now as each spade cut down he waited himself with apprehension: he was held by the fear of disgust.
"How do you know where to dig?"
"They left marks. They were amateurs at this. I suppose that was why they were scared of what Stone saw."
One spade made an ugly scrunching sound in the soft earth.
"Careful," Mr Prentice said. The man wielding it stopped and wiped sweat off his face, although the night was cold. Then he drew the tool slowly out of the earth and looked at the blade. "Start again on this side," Mr Prentice said. "Take it gently. Don't go deep." The other men stopped digging and watched, but you could tell they didn't want to watch.
The man digging said, "Here it is." He left the spade standing in the ground and began to move the earth with his fingers, gently as though he were planting seedlings. He said with relief, "Its only a box."
He took his spade again, and with one strong effort lifted the box out of its bed. It was the kind of wooden box which holds groceries, and the lid was loosely nailed down. He prised it open with the edge of the blade and another man brought a lamp nearer. Then one by one an odd sad assortment of objects was lifted out: they were like the relics a company commander sends home when one of his men has been killed. But there was this difference: there were no letters or photographs.
"Nothing they could burn," Mr Prentice said.
These were what an ordinary fire would reject: a fountain-pen clip, another clip which had probably held a pencil.
"It's not easy to burn things," Mr Prentice said, "in an all-electric house."
A pocket-watch. He nicked open the heavy back and read aloud: "F.G.J., from N.L.J. on our silver wedding, 3.8.15." Below was added: "To my dear son in memory of his father, 1919."
"A good regular time-piece," Mr Prentice said.
Two plaited metal arm-bands came next. Then the metal buckles off a pair of sock-suspenders. And then a whole collection of buttons -- like pearl buttons off a vest, large ugly brown buttons off a suit, brace buttons, pants buttons, trouser buttons -- one could never have believed that one man's single change of clothes required so much holding together. Waistcoat buttons. Shirt buttons. Cuff buttons. Then the metal parts of a pair of braces. So is a poor human creature joined respectably together like a dolclass="underline" take him apart and you are left with a grocery box full of assorted catches and buckles and buttons.
At the bottom there was a pair of heavy old-fashioned boots with big nails worn with so much pavement tramping, so much standing at street corners.
"I wonder," Mr Prentice said, "what they did with the rest of him."
"Who was he?"
"He was Jones."
Chapter 3
WRONG NUMBERS
"A very slippery, tremendous, quaking road it was."