“Because there’s some blood…”
Gregory bent down and took a good look. Three, no four, coagulated brown spots had seeped so deeply into the snow that it was difficult to see them.
“Were you here when the ambulance took him away? Was he conscious?”
“Oh no, sir, definitely not!”
“Was he bleeding?”
“No sir, I mean, only a little, from the head… the ears, I think.”
“Gregory, will you please take pity on us,” said Sorensen, making no effort to hide a yawn. He flicked his lit cigarette into the snow.
“The regulations don’t say anything about pity,” Gregory snapped, looking around again. Wilson was angrily slamming his tripod into position; Thomas was cursing quietly to himself because the powdered plaster in his bag had spilled, and all his instruments were covered with it.
“Well, let’s get our jobs done, men,” Gregory went on, “prints, measurements, everything, and the more the better; when you finish here go down to the mortuary, but we’d better keep the rope up until later on. Doctor, there may still be something for you… wait a minute,” he said, turning to the constable. “Where’s your commanding officer?”
“In town, sir.”
“Well then. Let’s go see him.”
Gregory unbuttoned his coat; it was getting warm. The constable shifted uncertainly from one foot to the other.
“Do you want me to come along, sir?”
“All right.”
Sorensen followed them, fanning himself with his hat. The sun had come up in earnest now, and in its warmth the snow was quickly disappearing from the branches, which now appeared black and wet against the deep blue of the sky. As they walked, Gregory counted the number of paces from the wreck to the point where the cemetery lane joined the road: there were 160. The lane, and the cemetery at its end, lay in the shadows between two hills. It was cool here, and the snow was still wet and heavy; because of the hills nothing could be seen of the town except its smoke. The mortuary itself, a whitewashed little shed, was enclosed by thick underbrush in the rear; there were two small windows on the northern side, and a half-opened door in one wall. Carelessly slapped together with a few odd pieces of wood, the door had a simple latch but no lock. There were footprints all around the area, and just in front of the doorstep they saw a flat canvas-covered shape.
“Is that the body?”
“Yes, Lieutenant.”
“Has anyone touched it, or is that the way it was found?”
“Exactly the same, sir. No one touched it. The C.O. took a look at it when he got here with the doctor, but no one touched it.”
“What about the canvas?”
“The C.O. told us to cover it.”
“Tell me, could anyone have gotten to it while you were on the road?”
“No sir, impossible, the road is closed off.”
“On this side. But what about from Hackey?”
“We have a man on guard down there too, but you can’t see him from here because of the hill.”
“What about the fields?”
“It might be possible,” the policeman agreed, “but in that case he’d have to get across the water.”
“Water? What water?”
“There’s a stream on the other side of the road.”
Gregory still hadn’t gone near the canvas. Moving carefully to the side, he looked for Williams’s footprints. He found a few on the narrow, well-trodden pathway encircling the nearest gravestones; they continued around the long shed, then went back into the shrubbery. Some big footprints like the ones he had seen on the road were clearly impressed in the snow at the spot where the constable had abandoned his post, suggesting that he had lost his way in the dark.
Watch in hand, Gregory timed himself while making a complete circuit around the shed: four minutes. “At night, during the snow storm, it might have been twice as much,” he thought, “and maybe two minutes more, give or take, for the fog.” Venturing deeper into the thick shrubbery, Gregory found himself walking down a slope. Suddenly, the snow slid out from under him. Grabbing some hazelwood branches he managed to stop himself just before he fell into the stream. The area in which he regained his footing was the lowest point in the syncline in which the cemetery was situated. Even close up it was hard to see the stream because of the high snow drifts along its banks. Here and there he noted the water fretting steadily at the eroded roots of nearby shrubs; embedded in the soft loam at the bottom of the stream he could see stone fragments, some of them similiar in size and shape to paving blocks. Turning around, Gregory had a better view than before of the mortuary’s rear wall, but only of the windowless upper portion which loomed over the bushes a few yards away. He took a good look; then, pushing the resilient hazel branches out of his way, began to climb back.
“Where can I find the local stonemason?” he asked the constable. The officer understood immediately.
“He lives near the road, a little way past the bridge. The first house over there, it’s a kind of yellowish color. He only does stone work in the summertime; winters he takes on carpentry to make a little extra.”
“How does he get his stones over here? By the road?”
“He brings them in on the road when the water is low, but when it’s high enough, which only happens once in a while, he floats them over from the station by raft. He enjoys doing that kind of thing.”
“Once he gets them here, where does he work on them — over there near the stream?”
“Sometimes, but not always. He works in a lot of different places.”
“If you follow the stream from here, does it lead up to the station?”
“Yes, but you can’t really go that way because the whole area is tangled with underbrush right up to the edge of the water.”
Gregory walked over to the side wall of the mortuary. One of the windows was open — in fact, it was broken, and a jagged piece of the glass pane was half-buried in the snow just beneath it. He peeked inside, but it was so dark that he couldn’t see anything.
“Did anyone go inside?”
“Only the C.O., sir.”
“Not the doctor?”
“No, the doctor didn’t go in.”
“What’s his name?”
“Adams, sir. We didn’t know when the ambulance from London would get here. The one from Hackey got here first, and Dr. Adams came along with it. He happened to be on night duty when the call came in.”
“Is that so?” said Gregory, but he was only half-listening to the constable, his attention attracted by a small, light-colored bit of wood shaving stuck to the frame of the broken window and by the deep though not very clear impression of a bare foot in the snow next to the wall. He bent down to get a better look. The snow was all churned up, as if something very heavy had been dragged through it. Here and there he could make out some flat-bottomed oblong depressions; they looked as if they had been made by pressing a large-sized loaf of bread into the snow. Noticing something yellowish in one of them, Gregory bent over still more and picked up a few more curled shavings. Twisting his head around, he looked at the second window for a moment. It was closed and painted over with whitewash. Then, stepping backward a little, he knelt on one knee to brush some of the snow aside, stood up again, and with his eyes followed the course of the strange signs. He took a deep breath. Standing erect, with his hands in his pockets, he glanced at the white space between the bushes, the mortuary, and the first gravestone. The deep, misshapen prints began under the broken window, looped around in an arc to the door, then zigzagged right and left as if a drunk had been pushing a heavy bag. Sorensen stood off to the side, watching all this without much interest.
“Why isn’t there a padlock on the door?” Gregory asked the constable. “Was there one before?”
“There was, Lieutenant, but it broke. The gravedigger was supposed to take it to the blacksmith but he forgot, and when he finally remembered it was Sunday, and so on. You know how it is,” the constable
