similar. They might even have been brothers, strange thought.
And all the while Mrs. Giblet was out on the marsh, searching for signs of upheaval, a bone in the mud to set her mind at rest about her missing child. It made people uneasy. Old John Crowthorne told me about it in the Hodge and Purlet one afternoon, then spat in the fire. Anyone who knows John Crowthorne will tell you what it means when he spits in the fire. The rain did not deter her, apparently; she was out there in the wettest weather beneath a huge black umbrella, squelching through the mire. Each evening she ate alone at the back of the saloon bar, but fortunately she did not appear while I was there. I slept very badly; I may have had more dreams; I never remembered them in the morning, however. The Fling flooded its banks near Pock and carried off a sheep.
There was nothing, as far as I can remember, to indicate that February 5 would be such a crucial day in these unfolding events. Perhaps the signs were there, the omens and portents, and I was blind to them. My empiricism was more or less intact then, and maybe that was what rendered me blind to warnings. I was drinking whisky in the barn at half-past two in the afternoon when Fledge came in and delivered a message: Mrs. Giblet had succeeded, she had found Sidney’s bones. The news alarmed me deeply—I was thinking of Cleo, of course, and what this terrible development would mean to her.
In retrospect it was, I suppose, not so much the finding of the bones that alarmed me as it was the state in which they came up. You see, I have dug up quite enough bones in my time to visualize clearly the scene out there on the marsh, though of course I have always dug up dry bones, and these were damp. But the patient labor of exposure and retrieval, with this I am deeply familiar. Mrs. Giblet apparently stumbled upon a piece of rib—this was more than a mile from where the bicycle had come up—a piece of rib that the earth was in the process of disgorging. By means of a small gardening trowel that she carried on her person she then uncovered the entire rib cage, and, close by, the skull. As I say, I am no stranger to such activity. But when I heard that the skeleton continued to come up piecemeal, bone by bone—and that there were
Butchered and gnawed. Limp and his men were soon on the marsh, and by dint of energetic excavation had the entire skeleton up by nightfall. The grisly remains were then rushed to the forensic laboratories for analysis, and speculation, in the hours that followed, was intense, not to say macabre. The lab report came the following morning, and did little to allay my fears: Sidney had indeed been butchered and gnawed—butchered by men and gnawed by pigs!
The vague unease I’d been feeling since the bones came up now took definite form, for I quickly understood the implications of this. That it was a piece of typical police bungling I was in no doubt, no doubt at all; but you see, the pig farm in Ceck’s Bottom
I was in the public bar of the Hodge and Purlet on the evening of the sixth, and there I met old John Crowthorne. That afternoon, he told me, just as he’d been crossing the farmyard with a bucket of swill in each hand, two police cars had come racing through the gate and squelched to a halt on the dung-puddled stones (it was rather a wet and overcast afternoon). Limp leaped out of the first car. “George Lecky?” he shouted.
“No,” said old John, who I’ve no doubt presented a most unwholesome aspect to the bustling little police inspector, for he sports a pair of huge brown whiskers and his face is deeply grooved down the vertical, and each groove seems to be full of earth. “No,” he said, as large policemen clambered out of the cars.
“You are?” said Limp.
“John Crowthorne. Afternoon, Hubert,” he said, addressing Cleggie, the Ceck policeman.
“Where is George Lecky?” demanded Limp; then, without waiting for an answer: “Right, we’re going to search the farm. We have a warrant”—and, turning to his men: “In you go!”
Standing in the public bar, listening to all this, I became very annoyed. This business of pigs gnawing Sidney’s bones—this, as I say, was a lot of rot. And that that officious little bastard Limp should go down to the pig farm
Old John’s eyes narrowed, and he glanced at me shrewdly. Odd, this, considering that old John’s eyes tend to dart constantly about the walls and ceilings of any room he’s in, some sort of nervous tic, I suppose. He turned briefly toward the fire, and spat a large gob of saliva into the flames; there was a brief hiss. Then he told me what happened next, and quite dramatic it was too. Just after they’d loaded a pile of blood-caked sacking into one of the police cars there came a sudden great roaring sound from over by the marsh, and through the murk could be seen a huge shining eye, moving at speed down the Ceck’s Bottom road in the direction of the farm. Limp and the constables apparently stood as if rooted to the stones as this one-eyed thing came lurching and backfiring into the farmyard—it was George, of course, at the wheel of the swill lorry. He came careering into the yard, swinging the lorry in a wide U-turn that forced them all up against the walls, and knowing the condition of that lorry, and the size of the yard, I can well imagine how he must have dragged at the wheel and stamped madly at the foot pedals to pull off such a maneuver. Then, said old John, he went reeling and roaring by, and then he was rattling out of the farmyard, still backfiring loudly, and away up the Ceck’s Bottom road toward the village. A faint smell of petrol and burning oil hung in the air; porcine grunting continued, basso profundo, in the background. “It were like he cast a spell on us, the way he come round the yard like that,” said old John, his voice lowered and his eyes bright. “The odd thing seem, Sir Hugo, that I seen his face as he come by me, and he were
The Ceck’s Bottom road is not ideally suited for high-speed car chases. It is rutted and potholed and strewn with boulders and dung and the occasional stray cow. They never did catch up to George; by the time they reached Ceck the quarry had long since been lost sight of. Into the Hodge and Purlet ran Limp—this I heard from Bill Cudlip, who was there at the time—then out again. “Back the way we came!” he shouted. “He must have gone into the marsh!” Hearty chortles, by the way, from Crowthorne and Cudlip at the ease with which George had shaken off his pursuers, and privately I, too, exulted. George had indeed gone into the marsh, they found his vehicle halfway down the cart track, and I can imagine the headlights of the police car picking out the filthy mudguards, the swill-crusted tailgate, the ranked dustbins on the bed of the familiar lorry. Beyond the channel of the headlights, however, the trees heaved up in a black and impenetrable wall. They would then have got out of the cars and stood listening to the marsh, which stretched for miles beyond the trees, a dark and treacherous tract of land that a man would be a fool to enter after dark, unless he knew it well. A deep silence lay upon the place. “Let him run,” murmured Limp. “I’ll have fifty men out here in the morning.”
But Limp’s fifty men failed to find George, though they searched the marsh quite thoroughly, and quite systematically, for several days. That night, though, the night of the sixth, I stood gazing into the fire and thought of my old friend George, at that very moment somewhere out on the Ceck Marsh, fleeing the law. Why? What had he done? What had he to be afraid of? A terrible suspicion begin to take shape in some dark corner of my mind— no, I would not heed it, I pushed it down—no, not that.
I am sitting
