Where to begin? If this were a chemical experiment, the procedure would be obvious: I would start with those materials most closely to hand.
Mrs. Mullet! With any luck, she would still be puttering in the kitchen before plundering the pantry and carting off her daily booty to Alf. I ran to the top of the stairs and peered through the balustrades. Nobody in the hall.
I slid down the banister and dashed into the kitchen.
Dogger looked up from the table where, with clinical accuracy, he was excising the skin from a couple of cucumbers.
'She's gone,' he said, before I could ask. 'A good half hour ago.'
He's a devil, that Dogger! I don't know how he does it!
'Did she say anything before she left? Anything interesting, that is?'
With Dogger in the kitchen as an audience, Mrs. M would hardly have been able to resist blathering on about how she took Nialla in (poor waif!), tucked her into a cozy bed with a hot-water bottle and a glass of watered-down sherry, and so forth, with a full account of how she slept, what they had for breakfast, and what she left on her plate.
'No.' Dogger picked up a serrated bread knife and applied its edge to a loaf of new bread. 'Just that the joint is in the warming oven, apple pie and clotted cream in the pantry.'
Bugger!
Well, then, there was nothing for it but to make a fresh start in the morning. I'd set my alarm for sunrise, then strike out for Culverhouse Farm and Gibbet Wood beyond. It was unlikely that there would be any clues left after all these years, but Rupert and Nialla had camped at the bottom of Jubilee Field on Friday night. If my plan were properly executed, I could be there and back before anyone at Buckshaw even knew that I was gone.
Dogger tore off a perfect square of waxed paper, and wrapped the cucumber sandwiches with hospital bed corners.
'I thought I'd make these tonight,' he said, handing me the package. 'I knew you'd want to get away early in the morning.'
Curtains of wet mist hung in the fields. The morning air was damp and chill, and I breathed in deeply, trying to come fully awake, filling my nostrils and then my lungs with the rich aroma of dark soil and sodden grass.
As I bicycled into St. Tancred's churchyard, I saw that the Inspector's Vauxhall was gone, and so, I reasoned, was Rupert's body. Not that they would have left him crumpled on the puppet stage from Saturday evening until Monday morning, but I realized that the corpse would no longer be there inside the parish hall, its eyes bugging, its string of saliva congealed by now into a stalactite of spit....
If I thought it had been, I might have been tempted to barge in for another look.
Behind the church, I removed my shoes and socks and wheeled Gladys through the deeper water beside the submerged stepping-stones. Saturday night's rain had increased the flow of water, which roiled about her spokes and tires, washing clean the accumulated mud and clay from my ride into Bishop's Lacey. By the time I reached the other bank, Gladys's livery was as fresh as a lady's painted carriage.
I gave my feet a final rinse, sat down on a stile, and restored my footwear.
Here, along the river, visibility was even less than it had been on the road. Trees and hedges loomed like pale shadows as I cycled along the grassy verge in a gray, wooly fog that blotted all the sound and color from the world. Except for the muted grumble of the water, all was silence.
At the bottom of Jubilee Field, Rupert's van stood forlorn beneath the willows, its gaily painted sign, 'Porson's Puppets,' jarringly out of place with both the location and the circumstances. There wasn't a sign of life.
I laid Gladys carefully down in the grass and tiptoed alongside the van. Perhaps Nialla had crept back and was now asleep inside, and I wouldn't want to frighten her. But the lack of condensation on the windscreen told me what I had already begun to feel: that no one was breathing inside the cold Austin.
I peered in at the windows but saw nothing unusual. I went round to the back door and gave the handle a twist. It was locked.
I walked in ever-widening circles through the grass, looking for any trace of a fire, but there was none. The campsite was as I had left it on Saturday.
As I reached the bottom of the farm lane, I was stopped in my tracks by a rope hung across the road, from which a sign was suspended. I ducked underneath to read its message.
Inspector Hewitt and his detectives
Very well, then. Since there was nothing to see here anyway, I would move on to my next objective. Although I could not see it in the fog, I knew that Gibbet Wood lay not far ahead at the top of Gibbet Hill. It would be wet and soggy in among the trees, but I was willing to bet that the police had not been there before me.
I dragged Gladys under the barricade and pushed her slowly up the lane, which was far too steep to pedal. Halfway to the top, I shoved her behind a hawthorn hedge, and continued my climb, hemmed in on all sides with misty glimpses of blue flax.
Then suddenly the dark trees of the wood loomed out of the mist immediately in front of me. I had come upon it without realizing how close I was.
A weathered wooden sign was nailed to a tree, bearing the red words:
