Mowbray, under pressure from the Chief Constable, had furnished two young policemen to assist in clearing the ditch. The pickaxe, as the suspected murder weapon, had been impounded, but in any case it was not required for the task in hand. That, as Bonamy observed, involved a mere job of shovelling, so two extra shovels and a spade had been purchased in Holdy Bay. Supervised by Dame Beatrice, the constables began work and Bonamy, Tom and Laura (who had insisted upon joining in) were also toiling away as soon as the coast was clear.
Dame Beatrice directed operations. The policemen, in shirtsleeves and with their official headgear discarded, were told to clear one end of the defensive ditch. Laura worked with the spade to remove debris from around Saltergate’s fortifications and the two young men were bidden to begin clearing the other end of the defensive ditch and work towards the two policemen.
The operation was barely half-an-hour old when a delivery van stopped beside the grass verge below the gatehouse and put out a couple of wheelbarrows which Dame Beatrice had ordered. With the aid of these the work went forward expeditiously until Dame Beatrice called a halt for refreshments.
The very dry soil was light and easy to shift and soon after the break the two policemen, who, like Tom and Bonamy, had taken turns with the shovels and the wheelbarrows, announced that they were ‘getting down to the hard ground, ma’am, at the bottom of the old ditch’.
At this, Dame Beatrice ordered that the wheelbarrows should be abandoned and all four workers were to finish the clearance by dumping the loose earth and spending no more time taking it to shore up Tynant’s outer circle. Laura came over and joined in, but, rather to Dame Beatrice’s relief, it was not she, but the two policemen, who discovered Stour’s body.
This happened about twenty minutes after they had announced that they had cleared their end of the ditch. Dame Beatrice had inspected it and had shaken her head. They had made a wonderfully clean job and the grass and weeds which had been growing on the sides of the ditch before the vandalism had taken place were obviously undisturbed. She pointed this out and added that for the rest of the time a sharp lookout must be kept and a report made if there was any indication that what had been the bottom of the ditch showed any signs of having been dug over.
The policemen had advanced only about a yard into Bonamy’s half when one of them gave a shout. Dame Beatrice looked down into the ditch and said, ‘Go carefully, please, with the pickaxe. I think this is it.’ She then called upon Laura to surrender her spade and sent her off to the village to telephone the police station at Holdy Bay. This served the double purpose of getting Mowbray to the castle as soon as possible and of getting Laura herself out of the way when the body was found. By the time Mowbray, Detective-Sergeant Harrow and the police surgeon, accompanied by a photographer and a fingerprint man arrived, the body, left exactly as it had been found, was lying exposed in the bottom of the ditch, a look of surprised expostulation on its grime-streaked face and with a horrid, suffused, black and purple bruise all down one side of the head.
There was no need for the doctor to give this as the cause of death. ‘Swung round when he heard something behind him, and walked slap into a heavy spade, I think,’ he said cheerfully. ‘Didn’t even have time to be frightened. Dead quite a day or two. Can’t tell you any more until we get him along for a post mortem.’
‘I bet he heard Stickle being struck and killed,’ said Mowbray, when the body had been photographed and removed. ‘Swung round to see what was happening and got the devil of a slosh. Chap who did it must have been a powerful fellow. The bones of the head are like jelly under that badly discoloured skin. Whoever did it meant to kill him all right. You can take him away. There’s nothing more I can do here.’
‘It was Stour,’ said Tom.
‘Lets him out,’ said Mowbray. ‘He could have pickaxed Stickle, but he couldn’t have done that to his own head. What made you think of a body in the ditch, ma’am?’
‘I thought there must have been a reason for dumping all that soil in it, since the rest of the dig was so untidy. It seemed to me that the soil in the ditch could have been put there to hide something. Where the murderer made his mistake was in not realising that the digging up of the weeds and grass in the bottom of the ditch, which he had to do in order to bury the body, must necessarily arouse suspicion in the mind of anybody who had seen the ditch in its original state.’
‘I reckon he’s far enough away by now, ma’am. Most likely been keeping an eye on the operations and knows the second body has been found. The murders must have taken place within seconds of one another, I should think. I wonder whether Stickle and Stour were working with their murderers – were employed by them, I mean.’
‘It is possible. Undoubtedly, before the site was vandalised, careful digging had been done at night.’
‘Well, I hardly suspect either Tynant or Saltergate of killing their workmen with a pickaxe and a spade, and yet somebody knew of those woods and saw the possibilities of the sidecar, and that brings us back to Saltergate and Tynant again. Both of them had been up to the manor to argue the rights and wrongs about priorities at the castle ruins, which means they would have driven past the woods on their way up to the house, and Tynant knew that Stickle and Stour came to work on a motorbike and sidecar.’
‘What do you propose to do now?’
‘Continue our house-to-house enquiries. I can’t arrest Saltergate or Tynant, or both, on the very little we’ve got at present. You thought from the beginning that there was a purpose beyond that of sheer destruction behind the vandalism, didn’t you?’
17
Ways and Means
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I’ve been looking at the map,’ said Laura, ‘and I’d like to take a walk tonight.’
‘Not alone, I trust, in these uncertain times.’
Laura looked at her curiously.
‘It isn’t like you to play the old hen with one chick,’ she said. ‘What’s the big idea?’
‘Only that three violent deaths have occurred very recently in this vicinity and that you and I are known to be interested in them.’
‘Oh, I see. You think somebody may be keeping an eye on us?’
