The abandoned sleepers buzzed and snorted contentedly in the sun. One was Mrs Crunkinghorn. As soon as she judged it safe to abandon her strategem, she sat up, made herself comfortable, and got on with her knitting.
The helpers were in the coach, enjoying cups of tea that they had brewed privately on a paraffin stove. With them was the driver. No one else was in sight, although an occasional distant squeal of surprise indicated where some at least of the hiders and seekers were entering belatedly into the spirit of the game. Of the two organizers, there was no sign.
Mrs Crunkinghorn’s knitting needles clattered on. She felt pleased with herself, with the sunshine she had been allowed at last to enjoy in peace, and with the bees that hummed in the clover flowers about her. Her thoughts strayed into other fields in other, far-off times when she was a girl at Moldham Marsh. Moldham...
Suddenly, the old woman perked up her head. Who, she asked herself, was that—scrawking like a guinea- hen? She sat straight and shaded her eyes with one hand while she peered across the meadow in the direction of the scream.
A figure emerged from a copse at the far corner of the meadow. It was that of a small, dumpy woman. She pelted like mad out of the trees, arms pumping, knees high. Mrs Crunkinghorn stared admiringly.
Seconds later, there broke from the same cover a taller, lankier runner—a man. His limbs flailed loosely and he seemed to have trouble in keeping his balance, but he was covering the ground at no less a rate than his quarry. In one hand he clutched a strip of what looked like dark cloth that fluttered behind him in the slipstream.
The woman raced across the grass for twenty or thirty yards, the man gaining noticeably He reached out, almost touched her; but then she veered and began to run at a tangent up the slope of the reservoir. By the time she reached the top, the distance between them had increased by a couple of yards.
Still no one else had appeared to witness the chase. Mrs Crunkinghorn felt a sense of privilege.
The figures now were silhouetted against the sky, and the watcher had a clear picture of the drama’s startlingly odd end.
The man had no sooner levelled into pursuit along the top of the embankment than his body seemed to turn on its own axis, quite independently of the legs. Considerably inconvenienced by this lack of co-ordination, the legs, though still pounding along, began first to knock against each other and then to swing out at increasingly wild angles.
It seemed to Mrs Crunkinghorn that the man was actually running sideways.
But soon he was not running at all. The legs having become hopelessly entangled with each other, he stumbled and cart-heeled on to his head, then toppled, quite slowly, over the farther edge of the embankment.
Mrs Crunkinghorn was too far off to hear the splash.
Chapter Six
Miss Pollock heard it, though. She stopped running and turned. What she saw made her scream, but not quite as loudly as she had screamed before. She remained where she was just long enough to get wind for another sprint, then she set off down the bank towards the coach, frantically waving one arm.
Three minutes later, a group of intrigued but helpless people stood on the brink of the reservoir, staring down at the submerged features of Alderman Steven Winge.
The body was only about a foot below the surface. It undulated very, very slowly, as if lazily flexing and relaxing in the cool luxury of effortless suspension. Mr Winge looked remote, certainly, but not dead. His eyes were wide open and he was smiling as usual. One hand still grasped its trophy of torn cloth, a black pennant drifting down to mingle with fronds of weed.
One of the helpers glanced surreptitiously at the rent in Miss Pollock’s dress.
The coach driver was the first to speak.
“I’ll get off to a phone. You’d better stay where you are.”
He went down the banking at a half run. At the bottom, he shouted over his shoulder:
“And don’t try and do anything—you’ll only fall in yourselves.”
The pensioners were beginning to straggle back in twos and threes, attracted by the sounds of crisis. The word spread that something dreadful had happened to Mr Winge. The old men and women toiled up the bank to see for themselves.
The body neither sank nor rose. It did not shift perceptibly in any direction at all. It seemed set for ever in dim, green jelly.
“What ’yer doin’ down there, Mr Winge?” quavered potty old Mrs Baxter.
Shocked, the others shushed her. Yet they, too, found it a little hard to think of a man dead who could continue to smile with such patent self-congratulation.
Soon after three o’clock, there sounded faintly through the trees the double candy-trumpet notes of an approaching fire tender. It emerged from the lane, scarlet, strident, splendid; drove at undiminished speed across the meadow, and rocked to a halt at the top of the banking.
Four firemen in unbuttoned tunics and shiny black thigh boots climbed out and unshipped ropes and straps and what looked like enormous fishing hooks. Carrying their gear, they pushed courteously but firmly past the watchers.
A police car drew up below, closely followed by an ambulance.
The firemen’s task did not take long. When the retrieved body had been laid to drain for a few minutes and then stretcher-borne to the ambulance, they neatly re-coiled their ropes, smoked a cigarette apiece, and drove back to town.
