'One blow on the back of the neck, sir. What the newspapers call 'a karate chop' now, but what used to be called a rabbit-punch.' He paused. 'Easy again—if you know how to do it.'
Easy?
This time Audley's eye was caught by the wheat stubble.
Another memory there, but one much closer to the surface, for he could never pass a harvested field without half-recalling this one ... a memory half-golden, because time edged all youthful memories with gold, but dark also because time never quite succeeded in erasing the blurred recollection of unhappiness.
Not a child any more, nor even a snotty schoolboy though still at school, but a gauche youth . . . still lonely and introverted—the concept of the mixed-up teenager hadn't dummy5
existed then because no one had yet coined the word
'teenager': it had not been his brains which had saved him in that cruel society, but his accidental prowess on the rugger field.
Tackle him low, Audley!
No, that was the wrong memory leading him up the wrong cul-de-sac—it was the school harvest camp he wanted, the endless boring stooking of the sheaves in the National Interest.
And one particular memory, obscene and humiliating—
It had been just such a corn field in the first year of the war.
They had stopped stooking as the binder had come to the final cut in the centre of the field, fanning out in readiness for the rabbits trapped in the last of the standing wheat to make their break—and in the mad exhilarating chase he had driven one big buck right back into the cutting blades—
Kill it then, man!
One front paw gone, the other horribly mangled, the thing had suddenly come alive, the hind legs kicking with the strength of desperation.
Kill it, Audley—go on, man—kill it!
He had seen it done half a dozen times by the tractor driver, the grizzled man with the patch on his lung and the ten children. It had been a casual, matter-of-fact action: hold the hind legs and strike down with the edge of the stiffened hand.
dummy5
Rabbit-punch.
Easy.
Four times he had tried, his own increasing desperation rising to match the rabbit's, but failing to master it. Blood had spattered his trousers—why can't you die, rabbit?
Then the tractor driver had snatched it from him—
Give us 'un, then, for Lord's sake.
One quick professional chop. Then, for final measure, the man had stretched the twitching thing, legs in one hand, neck in the other. He could still hear that stretching sound, the small creaking noise.
Well, 'tis a good 'un, any road. You'm let the other best 'uns go.
From that dark memory to the banks of the Swine Brook, and now to the darkness beyond the study window, was a journey across years and hours time-travelled in a fraction of a second. . . . But he hadn't returned empty handed.
There was the short answer to Weston's off-the-record certainty and young Digby's word for it.
Not easy.
Because it wasn't so easy to kill a rabbit with one blow, and a man was bigger game and another game altogether. It wasn't simply that they had eliminated all the costumed battlefield actors who'd been playing at killing—he could afford to take dummy5
that for granted now, the hundreds of statements checked and cross-checked. This was a killing, and more than that, a neat and tidy killing, which was another thing and a very different thing. Because for all the popular claptrap, not one person in a thousand could guarantee to do that with one blow. That guarantee was the hallmark of the professional.
It had been Digby's qualification that mattered—
Easy—if you know how to do it.
'I see. He came down the stream—that's the hypothesis. And he hit Jim Ratcliffe once—that's the forensic fact?'
'Yes, sir.'
'And Ratcliffe was crouching in his gap in the bushes beside the stream—here?'
'Yes, sir.'
'Behind the smoke he was most conveniently making. . . .
And then?'
Digby pointed. 'Ratcliffe was struck down
'Hypothesis?'
'Fact.' Digby took two steps. 'And he was found in the water
