—there. Fact.'
Audley peered over the edge of the bank. The motion of the water was imperceptible, it was like a millpond. At this point, where the Swine Brook flowed out of its tunnel in a gentle dummy5
curve, the stream had formed a shallow pool behind a miniature dam built with fallen branches and plugged with the accumulated detritus lodged in them by the winter floods. Over the years those same floods had carved the overhang at his feet, through which the feathery roots of the bushes trailed in a curtain towards the surface of the water.
In its original state, with the tangle of thorn and bramble all around, this would have been a fine and private place to tuck a body, no doubt about that.
'Ratcliffe was lying right under the overhang, sir.' Digby seemed to have read his thoughts. 'I didn't actually see him until I was standing right on the edge, where you are now exactly.'
No need to elaborate on that. Rolled over and then tucked in out of sight. No one who had fallen, or been pushed or knocked, would ever have come to rest so tidily, virtually out of sight in the shallows. That had been the killer's risk, but one taken coolly to minimise the greater risk of quick discovery and maximise the chance of a trouble-free getaway.
And a small risk at that, because only Sergeant Digby's trained eye would have spotted the dividing line between horrid accident and suspicious circumstance. And only Sergeant Digby, of all people, would then have fortified his suspicions with established police procedure—
Protect the scene of the crime.
Much more likely, even if the body had been discovered sooner rather than later, would have been these destructive dummy5
moments of chaos which usually attended presumed accidents. People milling around in panic or ghoulish curiosity, moving the body, trampling the place flat and obliterating any shred of evidence or circumstance that there might be. With only a little luck here on Swine Brook Field—
with a battle going on nearby and seven thousand spectators poised to stampede down the hillside—there wouldn't have been any scene of the crime left by the time any sort of trained observer reached the spot. And then, with just a little more luck, there might not have been any crime, just an unfortunate but comprehensible accident of the sort discerning coppers like Weston had foreseen.
But a little luck had gone the other way for once, in the presence of Sergeant Henry Digby.
And doubly the other way. . . .
Audley frowned. 'Why did you come here and look, Sergeant?'
'I beg your pardon, sir?'
Audley realised that he had been staring down into the still pool so long that the Sergeant had moved away from him.
'I'm sorry. . . . You were on station down there—' he pointed towards the clump of willow trees '—and then you came up here to look for Ratcliffe. Why did you do that?'
Digby stared at him for a moment. 'But it wasn't to look for Ratcliffe, sir. It was because of the dye —'
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Such a curious thing, utterly unforeseeable, had made the best-laid scheme go agley. In less fatal circumstances a joke, and even now a piece of the blackest comedy.
The durability of Durex contraceptives.
It seemed likely, thought Audley, that James Ratcliffe had practical experience of their resistance, for he had taped no less than eight of them to his body, four at the front and four at the back, when the explosion of any one in each place would have been sufficiently effective to simulate death by cannonball.
Would have—and had been. For he had been carried out of the battle with most of them still intact, still loaded with air and red dye, and it had taken the spikes of the hawthorns and brambles against which he had fallen and over which he had been rolled to puncture the rest of them.
Dye on the ground, where he had fallen.
Dye on the edge of the bank, where he had been rolled.
And most of all dye in the Swine Brook itself, the tell-tale stain of which had eventually carried its message downstream to Sergeant Digby, who of all people happened to be the one best trained and disposed to read it.
'It was because of the dye—coming down from above where I was putting it in. So I knew somebody was playing silly buggers upstream from where I was.'
'Why should that matter?'
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'If it was the same stuff I was putting into the water it didn't matter, because that was non-toxic. But there are dyes and dyes. If there was some idiot adding a toxic chemical to the water there could be hell to pay downstream, where farm animals drank from it—it could have cost the society a fortune in damages. That's why I went to find out double-quick.'
'I see. So you came to this gap first and found Ratcliffe in the water straight off?'
'Not straight off, sir. But I saw traces of the dye on the ground, where the contraceptives had burst. And the whole pool was red by then.'
Blood everywhere. And not a drop spilt. 'That must have given you a nasty shock.'
'It gave me a shock when I looked over the edge of the bank and found Jim Ratcliffe, I can tell you, sir.'
Audley nodded. 'In what you rightly took to be suspicious circumstances?'
The sergeant lifted his hands in an oddly uncharacteristic gesture of doubt. 'Well, sir ... it wasn't quite as cut
