I came out of the baker’s, tore off a bite of bread and waited. Moffat was now leaning in his shop doorway whistling, and the tune wove its way steadily through the birdsong: ‘My Grandfather’s Clock’. The sun was raying down, everybody was waiting for everything and I ate my bread with half an ear cocked for the sound of gunshots from the Hall.
I heard instead a rattling of cartwheels, and looked up to see a load of hay creaking along the narrow hedge- tunnel with not an inch to spare on either side. The load was like a barn on the move, and yet only one horse did the dragging, and only one man led the horse.
At the same time, a rulley drawn by the lop-sided combination of a horse and a donkey was coming from the opposite direction — the way that led to the Hall — and I decided that the man driving this must be the carter, Will Hamer. He had two beasts to the farmer’s one, and yet he carried no load. He looked far wiser than a carter needed to be, with a white halo of hair and beard.
Will Hamer and the man leading the load of hay stopped and had a good laugh at how they’d come to be on the same bit of road at the same time. Presently the farmer sauntered on, his great haystack rolling behind. There was a placard on the side of the cart reading ‘Sidebottom: West Adenwold’. I would rule him out of account as well, provided I did not see him around again.
I walked across to Hamer before he could get going again. Standing next to the donkey, I held up my warrant card. He gazed down at me with a bright smile on his face, which by degrees became a frown.
I said, ‘Can you make it out, Mr Hamer?’
‘Bits,’ he said. ‘I can read bits. I can’t read all words, like.’
‘Well,’ I said, pocketing the card, ‘who can? Now I’m on police business, and I’d like a message sent. Could you do that?’
He nodded.
‘I can take you a message anywhere,’ he said. ‘East Adenwold, West Adenwold…’
‘The lines are down here,’ I said, ‘and I need a telegram sent. Can you carry a message to West Adenwold for me? West Adenwold is the nearest of the two, isn’t it?’
‘The nearest to where?’ asked the carter.
‘To here.’
He frowned again.
‘And there is a good-sized railway station there?’
No reply, but I pressed on: ‘And there is a telegraphic instrument in that station?’
‘Aye to both of those,’ Hamer said presently, and with a smile returned. The fellow was as slow as a wet week; there again, it suited me that he couldn’t read. I took out my indelible pencil, and began scrawling in my pocket book as follows: To Chief Inspector Weatherill, York Station Police Office. Come to Adenwold by first train. Matter of the gravest…
I broke off. The gravest what? The gravest gravity? I scratched out the sentence and wrote: ‘Life or death matter at hand.’
I passed it up to Hamer, saying, ‘What’s the cost?’
‘Well now,’ he said, ‘what d’you reckon?’
‘They ought to send it for nowt,’ I said, ‘since it is police business — and how about two bob on top for yourself?’
The carter had such a big grin on him when I passed up the money that I thought a bob might have been nearer the mark. Thanking me, he moved off, which was a matter of waking up the donkey and horse with a shout of ‘Come on, men!’
He went off a little way, and then stopped. He turned about and said, ‘Line might be down at West Adenwold ’n’ all.’
‘Let’s leave it that you are only to send the message if you can,’ I said.
‘Oh, all right,’ he replied, as if this was a very interesting new idea. ‘Only if I can.’
A thought struck me, and I said, ‘Mr Hamer, you wouldn’t have brought anybody into this village today, would you?’
‘Me?’ he said, and he looked at me for a while. ‘I should say not!’
And then he winked very slowly, which I wished he hadn’t done.
He re-started his beasts, and I took out my silver watch. It showed 9.45. Hamer ought to be at West Adenwold station by ten thirty, and the wire ought to reach York within five minutes of that. I guessed that the 12.27 arrival at Adenwold would leave Pilmoor at about midday, which meant that, if the Chief received the wire as soon as it arrived at York station (which was odds-on), he’d have an hour and half to get to Pilmoor. That would be simplicity itself. Being on the main line, Pilmoor was served by a good many fast trains from York, and it was only sixteen miles to the north. The only weak link in the chain was Hamer, who had now disappeared from sight in the hedge-tunnel.
I pocketed my watch and looked up.
Lydia was dawdling along the hedge-tunnel, moving slowly, which was out of the common for her. I called out to her and she quite ignored me. I wondered at this until I saw that the clerk from Norwood, the one who’d spilled the German documents, was coming along behind her. He walked briskly, and carried once again the Gladstone bag. I called again to Lydia, and once more she ignored me, but cut across the green making straight for the shut-up confectioner’s shop. The Norwood clerk had stopped and was looking about. I had a persuasion that it wouldn’t do to be seen by him, so I pulled down my cap, and turned a little aside as I watched him walk through the churchyard wicket. Lydia was watching the man from the shop doorway.
‘What’s the game?’ I asked, walking up to her.
‘I’m following him,’ she said, pointing to the clerk as he tramped across the graveyard in his cheap suit and high-crowned brown bowler.
‘But you were in front of him,’ I said.
‘I was following him from the front,’ said the wife.
The Norwood man had now cleared the graveyard and was leaving it by the opposite wicket.
‘He’s off to the parsonage,’ said the wife, as the man opened the gate of the big house behind the church, and walked up to the door.
‘Come on,’ said the wife. ‘I want to know what he’s about.’
So we too entered the graveyard, moving in the great, delaying heat between the compartments of the dead bounded by the thick dark hedges. As we walked, I told Lydia about how I’d sent for the Chief and how I expected him by the 12.27 train. I told her about how I’d met the earlier train in and collared the man in the field boots, and she in turn said that she’d had breakfast at the long table outside the inn, where entertainment had been provided by the sight of the bicyclist making a show of mending his puncture.
‘He was making such a palaver that I challenged him directly about it,’ she said.
‘Oh Christ,’ I said. ‘What did you say?’
‘I just said, “Surely this hole is of your own making. I saw you attack the tyre last night.”’
‘Pitch right in, I would… And what did he say to that?’
‘He said, “I had a fancy that it was punctured, but I thought I’d make quite sure.”’
‘He never did,’ I said.
‘That’s what he said.’
‘Did he seem put-out?’
‘Yes.’
‘I’ll bet. I’ll bet he was creaking in his shoes.’
‘I couldn’t imagine how anybody could behave more suspiciously,’ the wife ran on, ‘until about two minutes later when that man came down to breakfast, and started looking over his German papers while drinking coffee.’
And she pointed towards the vicarage, where we glimpsed through low graveyard trees the Norwood clerk, still waiting to be admitted. We’d come to a stop before one of the newer graves, which stood outside the green enclosures and lay exposed to the bright sun. ‘In Memoriam,’ I read, ‘Sir George Arthur Horton Lambert, Baronet. 1855–1909. Deus Fortitudo Mea.’ That meant something like ‘God give me strength’. No, couldn’t be. It was a very simple inscription anyhow, but then I supposed there were many things you couldn’t very well put on a murdered man’s gravestone. ‘Died peacefully’ was out for starters; so was ‘Loved by all’. There were no flowers on the grave
