'But not this time?'
Digby continued to stare at him. 'Then —you haven't read dummy5
my report, sir?' He blinked. 'I mean—my statement in evidence?'
Audley shook his head.
'I see.' The young sergeant paused. 'Well ... it worked . . .
well enough—'
Well enough.
Audley stared out of his study window into the darkness, listening with one corner of his mind to the small dry rasp of the dead leaves on the terrace outside.
Suddenly his nerves tautened at the unnatural sound: there shouldn't be dead leaves moving like that in the gentle night breeze of summer. He half-rose from his chair before his brain relaxed the tension as instantly as it had arisen. The great elm across the lawn there was dying out of season, shedding its leaves for the last time like ten million other elms across the length of England which had been murdered by the invading Dutch elm fungus.
He subsided back into the chair, the knot in his stomach slowly untying itself. Whatever Matthew Fattorini might say, this wasn't the sort of job where the sound of dead leaves rustling in the darkness might not be what it seemed.
Well enough?
Such a beautiful, simple, professional killing, it had been. A pure, almost contemptuous best-laid scheme.
Colonel Flowerdew had died there according to plan on the dummy5
hillside above the Swine Brook, deluged in contraceptive blood to the admiring 'oohs' and 'aahs' of the crowd.
And Colonel Flowerdew had been carried away, back down the hillside, to where the wounded and dying lay.
And Colonel Flowerdew had then become James Ratcliffe, ready for his next special effect—
(ix) Royalist cannonade resumes. Roundhead wagons set ablaze.
Snugged down in his small gap in the bushes beside the stream he had set off the smoke canisters on schedule, one by one.
(x) Roundhead vanguard begins to retreat.
But now there came an unplanned addition to the Swine Brook Field Scenario—
Enter one murderer.
Identity unknown. Believed professional. Long gone now.
Route—in full view of seven thousand witnesses?
'He came down the stream, sir,' said Sergeant Digby. 'He couldn't risk coming upstream, because I was there, for one.
And nobody came past me until the rout started.'
(xiii) Collapse of Roundhead defence—
'And too many people would have seen him—it's surprising what people see.
Whereas if he came down the stream—' Digby pointed.
dummy5
Audley followed the line of the finger, past the fresh growth of the cropped section of bushes, to where the uncut bushes raged in their unrestricted summer tangle. The stream issued out of a green-shadowed tunnel, walled and roofed with leaves and branches. The open fields on either side were parched and dry, and open to prying eyes, the well-grazed summer grass of the meadow on one hand and the evenly-cropped wheat stubble on the other; but the Swine Brook itself ran in a secret place of its own making, nourishing the deep rooted things which shielded it from the sun.
He caught the old familiar stream-smell of cool, damp earth and rotting vegetation, and the smell carried him back to his own childhood. He had explored streams like this a lifetime ago, searching for the shy things that lived and grew and died in hiding along the water's edge; the memory of soft wet moss under his fingers and smooth squidgy mud between his toes was there with the smell, long forgotten but never forgettable. . . . And the memory of the solitary little boy who had preferred such dark passages between the woodlands not only for the mysteries they concealed but also because of the invisibility they gave him.
Invisibility. No matter there were seven thousand pairs of eyes or seventy thousand on the ridge above, it would still have been easy for the killer to have stolen up on Jim Ratcliffe unnoticed.
'—somebody came down the stream, anyway. The mud was disturbed all the way to the farm bridge a quarter of a mile dummy5
upstream, in the spinney there.' Digby pointed again.
'Couldn't make out the footprints, of course. Or anything else, except they were recent when we examined them. But someone came down and then went back again, and there's a road just the other side of the trees there. So it would have been easy, coming and going.'
Easy?
'How did Ratcliffe die?'
For an instant the young sergeant frowned—no doubt Audley's ignorance of the simplest basic facts of the crime was still confusing him. Then he straightened his expression into formal blankness again.
