‘Or that the same person murdered both of them,’ said Harrow. ‘In fact, on the face of it, it seems very unlikely that the same person did. The bank here has been very helpful and there is no indication at all that Rant had obtained any money by blackmail. Yet Dame Beatrice seems certain that blackmail is at the bottom of this business and that the murderer, whoever he is, killed because he was being blackmailed. Even supposing that somebody poisoned Dr Rant a bit quicker than he was already poisoning himself, we’ve found nothing to connect his death with that of the other two.’
‘Money must come into it somewhere, though, sir.’
‘One thing Dame Beatrice has done for us is to produce this flint object.’
‘Do you think it will fit the hole in that fellow’s head, sir?’
‘That’s for Sir Ranulph to say, but it wouldn’t surprise me. We’ve been doubtful about the verdict at that inquest from the beginning, but, given the evidence, such as it was, I suppose the coroner had no option but to direct his jury to find as they did. Neither you nor I, I take it, would have taken off his trousers and thrown them to a dog to pacify it, but it takes all sorts. Anyway, we’re both convinced that nothing of the sort happened. We’ve both seen the dog and Pollyanna could take its correspondence course. It’s almost indecently friendly and couldn’t scare a child of two.’
‘Some people are terrified even if the most affectionate dog jumps up at them, sir. I don’t know which of the phobias you would call it.’
‘I can understand a child or a nervous woman being alarmed, but not a grown man and certainly not to the extent that has been suggested. The myth about the trousers was unbelievable from the first and, very soon, so was the theory that the fellow had slipped on the stones in the riverbed, knocked himself out and was drowned before he could save himself. No. Dame Beatrice may be dead right about one thing. If a stone killed the chap, this could easily be the one.’ He picked up the neolithic dagger and looked it over critically. ‘It fits the hand all right, although I think it would fit Dame Beatrice’s small hand better than it does mine.’
‘She seemed a bit vague as to where she found it, sir, I thought.’
‘Oh, I don’t think so. She said that Mrs Gavin went paddling and noticed that the thing looked different from the other pebbles. She admitted that they had been looking for it.’
‘After all this time, sir? Oh, well, perhaps it wasn’t the first time she and Mrs Gavin had been to Watersmeet to look for it. There’s no proof it was the murder weapon, though.’
‘She produced what she seems to think is double proof: first, that, as we knew a long time ago, there is no flint in this part of the country; second, that this is a worked flint.’
‘Flint could be brought in for road repairs, sir, and this piece brought in along with the rest of the chippings.’
‘All right, show me the part of a local road where such repairs have been made. Even if you can, it couldn’t be anywhere near Watersmeet. There’s only a woodland path beside the river which leads to where the man died.’
‘You will be showing the bit of flint to Sir Ranulph, of course, sir?’
‘Of course. Don’t ask damn silly questions. Still, as you
‘But we don’t know — ’
‘Who the murderer is? No, we don’t, but Dame Beatrice swears she does and, such is her reputation, I am forced to do as she says when she names the murderer. Well, come on down to the Axe and Sapling and I’ll buy you a drink.’
‘They don’t take axes to saplings,’ said Callum, ‘but it’s a new pub and the landlord is a Londoner, so what can you expect?’
‘His country lore may be all askew, but there’s nothing wrong with his beer,’ said Harrow.
The exhumations took their grisly course, beginning at five in the morning. The rain soaked down, the ground around the graves was a mass of trampled mud, and the only comfort to be got out of the affair was that the weather kept away even the most morbid-minded sightseer.
The two graves were a long way apart. Dr Rant’s head-stone had an honoured place along the central path through the cemetery; the chemist’s one-time errand-boy had been buried on the outskirts and his grave was unmarked except on the custodian’s map.
The little knot of men whose business it was to be on the scene waited in the rain, hats pulled down and dripping from the brim, coat collars turned up; but the heavy work had all been done on the previous evening when the cemetery had been closed to the public, so the time of waiting in the wet was not over-long and the coffins were soon on their way.
Sir Ranulph and the county pathologist were both present at what the former called ‘the lifting’, so were Harrow, Callum and a reporter (uninvited and outside the cemetery railings) from the Axehead local newspaper. There were also two grave-diggers, there to put the finishing touches to their work of the previous day and also to join with the custodian in verifying the information on the metal labels of the coffins. At the gates of the cemetery two uniformed constables had been stationed to ensure that no unauthorised persons attempted to storm the fortress of the dead, and in the street an ambulance waited to receive the newly resurrected doctor and the erstwhile chemist’s assistant.
‘Nothing now but to wait for the findings, whether negative or positive,’ said Harrow to Callum as they sheltered in a shop doorway before making their separate ways home for breakfast. ‘It will take some time, I reckon, before we get a report.’
‘At any rate, our investigations, since we knew the identity of the Watersmeet body, have given us some satisfaction, sir. We’ve traced the man’s movements to a certain extent. We know he emigrated and we know he soon got into trouble and came back here pretty well broke. That’s when he turned to blackmail, I’ll bet.’
‘I’m not as well satisfied as you seem to be,’ said Harrow. ‘We didn’t discover who the chap was. It took Dame Beatrice to work that one out.’
‘We beavered away at the Australian end, sir.’
‘Only with a lot of boost from our own top brass, and we could have done nothing unless Dame Beatrice had
