She felt them all stiffen in instinctive resistance, not wanting their routine existence to be invaded by anything as bizarre as this.
‘There may be a simple explanation for this discrepancy,’ ventured Paviour hopefully. ‘If there was a fresh fall of earth there—the bank is quite high, and we’ve seen that there’s brickwork exposed there… Perhaps it wasn’t a deliberate attack at all, just a further slip that struck him and swept him across the path. After all, we didn’t go along to have a look at the place.’
‘
‘I was there, too,’ said Charlotte. ‘There’s something else. When you get a blow on the head and fall forward, whether it’s flying stones or a blackjack, you may fall heavily, but even so I don’t think you’d embed yourself as deeply in the mud as Mr Hambro was embedded.’
Chief Inspector Felse sat steadily watching her, and said nothing. It was Paviour who stirred again in uneasy protest. ‘My dear girl, are you sure you’re not recalling rather more than happened? After stresses like that, the imagination may very easily begin to add details.’
‘I’m recognising things I did see, and never had time to recognise then. But the other thing is a good deal more conclusive…’
George Felse asked quietly: ‘How were his arms?’
‘Yes, that’s it!’ she said. ‘How did you know? When you fall forward, fully conscious or not, you put out your hands to break your fall. His arms were down at his sides. Nobody falls like that. Even if you were out on your feet, and fell as a dead weight, your arms wouldn’t drop tidily by your sides. And that’s how his were.’
She was watching the chief inspector’s face as she said it, and she knew that he believed her, and accepted her as a good witness. Both the Paviours were stiffening in appalled disbelief, even young Lawrence had drawn a hissing breath of doubt. Probably Gus himself found it hard to swallow, and would have preferred not to accept it, the implications being too unpleasant to contemplate. But George Felse had come halfway to meet her.
‘But, good God,’ objected Stephen Paviour faintly, ‘do you realise what you’re suggesting?’
‘Not suggesting. Stating. I’m saying that someone, having knocked Mr Hambro cold, dragged him across the path to the water, and shoved him firmly into the soft mud with his face under water, to die.’
In the stunned silence George Felse got up, without speaking, and crossed the room to where Gus’s jacket hung on the back of a chair, turned towards the replenished fire, and steamed gently as it dried. He slid his hands into the sleeves, and lifted it to turn the back to the light, and for a few minutes stood studying it closely.
‘The back,’ said Charlotte, watching, ‘was dry as high as the shoulder-blades. Except that I probably made some damp patches, handling him after I got him out.’
‘Quite a difference from actually lying in the river.’ He spread the jacket between his hands, holding it out for them to see. ‘Look in the middle of the back, here, from just above the waist upwards. What do you see?’ He turned to look at Gus, with a faintly challenging smile.
‘A moist patch—sizeable. Two patches, rather, but practically joined in one.’ The warm, heathery colours of the tweed darkened there into a duller, peaty shade, two irregular, fading patches, with a vague dry line between. A thin rim of encrusted mud, drying off now, helped to outline the marks, but even so they were elusive enough until pointed out.
‘Well? What do you make of it? You tell me!’
‘It’s a footmark,’ said Gus, and licked lips suddenly dry and stiff with retrospective fear. ‘I know what to make of it, all right! It means some bastard not only laid me out cold, and stuck me face-down in the Comer, but even rammed me well down into the mud with a foot in the small of my back to make dead sure of me, before he lit out and left me there to drown.’
CHAPTER FIVE
« ^ »
They were too numbed by then, and too tired, to do much exclaiming, however their orderly minds rebelled at believing in mayhem and murder at Aurae Phiala. They stared in fascination at the imperfect outline which did indeed look more and more like the print of a shoe the longer they gazed. Lawrence said hesitantly, with almost exaggerated care to sound reasonable and calm: ‘But why? Why should anyone want to… to kill him?’ It took quite a lot of resolution to utter it at all. ‘Just a visitor here like anyone else. There couldn’t be any personal reason.’
‘I think,’ said Lesley sensibly, ‘I’ll make some coffee. We could all do with some.’ And she walked out of the room with something of the same wary insistence on normality. It was then still some twenty minutes short of midnight, though they seemed to have devoured the greater part of the night already in this improbable interview.
‘Someone,’ said Gus, ‘didn’t want me around, that’s certain. But wasn’t he still taking rather a chance, if it was all that important to him that I shouldn’t survive? I might have revived enough to struggle out, once he was gone.’
‘So you might,’ George agreed. ‘With a river handy, and you past resistance, why not do the obvious thing, and shove you far enough in to make sure the current took you? Even a swimmer with all his wits about him might well be in trouble down those reaches at this time of year. Out cold, you wouldn’t have a dog’s chance.’
‘You comfort me,’ said Gus grimly, ‘you really do. Go on, tell me, why didn’t he?’
‘Pretty obviously that’s what he intended. He simply didn’t have time.’
‘Because he heard me coming,’ said Charlotte.
‘I think so. He needed no more than one extra minute, or two, but he didn’t have it. He heard you, and he preferred to run for it. He dropped Mr Hambro where he was, in the edge of the water, and planted a foot between his shoulders to drive him in deeper before he made off.’
‘But without reason!’ protested Paviour. ‘Surely no one but a madman…’
‘The procedure would appear to be far from mad—quite coldly methodical. And since, as Mr Lawrence says, there could hardly be anything personal in the attack, we’re left with the probability that
