He nodded. 'There it was he met his death, in a stretch of rough but open terrain. Pieces of his broken hand torch lay between the rocks, and the blood that seeped down had been only lightly diluted by rain.'
'The storm blew through by midnight in Postbridge.'
'And slightly earlier to the north. He lay there for an hour or more, and after the rain had ended and begun to seep off the surface of the peat, his body was carried a mile or so down the river and hidden in an abandoned mine. His assailants then went back for the tent and his possessions, dragging and carrying them a lesser distance to the adit that I came across on my last tour of the area.'
'Ah. Too fastidious to share the watching place with a corpse,' I suggested.
'It would also indicate that they are not finished with the adit, whether they are proposing to use it for storing things or for watching from, or simply as a shelter out of the rain.'
'And yet you removed the rucksack.'
'It had been thrown far to the back in the collapsing portion of the shaft used for their rubbish tip, with the sleeping roll thrown on top. I thought it unlikely they would brave the unsavoury elements to retrieve it, so I simply rearranged the sleeping roll to look as it had before, and took the other possessions out from under it.'
I decided against closer enquiry concerning the type of rubbish in the tip; I also vowed to have my overcoat cleaned at the earliest opportunity.
'I found the adit first, and after I left there I continued downriver, where I found the signs of what I first took to be shelling from the range just north of there, as if the guns had overshot their mark. It had been roughly concealed, by spade work and a redistribution of leaves, and I imagine that in another month, with the last leaf-fall, it will be invisible.
'A short distance farther on, however, in a piece of broken ground that was once a tin works, I was interested to find the ground more freshly disturbed, with signs of digging still clear to be seen. On closer examination, I found pipes.'
'Pipes?' I said, as there flashed before me the bizarre image of a collection of meerschaums and briars planted stem-first into a hill.
'Empty steel piping, two inches in diameter and approximately two feet long. There were twenty of them altogether, arranged about four feet apart from one another, sunk into the ground and covered carefully with a cap to keep the inside clear of debris.'
'Not filled with pieces of gold and a charge of black powder?'
'Not yet.' His eyes gleamed briefly. 'I believe that the technique is to prepare the hole by drilling or shoveling down into soft ground and inserting a length of hollow pipe. One then takes a similar length of a smaller diameter of thin-walled, soft pipe which has had a good number of holes drilled or punched into it and then been loosely packed with the charge and the gold, probably an ounce or so mixed into a spadeful of river sand. The smaller of the pipes is then dropped—gently —into the larger, after which the outer pipe is withdrawn, and the wires on the detonators fastened onto a master wire running to the detonator plunger.'
'And, boom. Clean up the pipes and wires, and you have gold flakes in your streambed.'
'Farther down the river,' he continued, 'I found the mine where Pethering's body had lain. I left the rucksack beneath some rocks nearby, and walked down the footpath until I came to a farm.
'And do you know, the residents of the farm thought on the whole that perhaps they had heard a motorcar, just after dark, on Thursday night.'
For a long moment I could not think why he was looking at me so intently. I began to reconstruct Thursday in my mind, and when I did I felt as if someone had hit me very low in the stomach.
'Just after dark? Oh Holmes, no. You don't mean…You can't mean…'
'Approximately how long was Scheiman gone with the motorcar when you were at Baskerville Hall?'
'Perhaps three hours,' I answered reluctantly.
'Say fourteen miles from Baskerville Hall to the farm, a mile up and down to retrieve the body, fourteen miles back. Three hours sounds right.'
I put my hand over my mouth in revulsion. If Holmes was right, the car in which Ketteridge had driven me back to Lew House had also contained the two-day-old body of Randolph Pethering. Ketteridge must have known. He had to know.
'Did Ketteridge know?' I asked.
'So it would seem, unless you think Scheiman motored back home with his employer, and then immediately turned around and retraced his steps to bring the body here.'
'No. And I can't see Scheiman quite so cold-blooded, not to turn a hair at his innocent employer's getting behind the wheel with a corpse in the boot of the car.' I shuddered at the reminder that I had been in that car, had sat making inconsequential remarks about the beauty of the evening, while just behind me lay the folded-up remains of the man whose coat I would be hanging onto the following morning.
I pushed it away from me. 'Why not leave him in the mine? Why bring him here?'
'Look at the map, Russell. Even though the actual sightings cut across the diagonal from northeast to central west, I think we can safely say that their entire purpose has been to keep people away from the northwestern segment of the moor. When they have been forced to create points of interest, such as where Josiah Gorton was left and the hound sighted, or Pethering's body found, each of those points has been away from the northwestern quadrant. It would have been a risk to leave a body in a mine so near the area they wanted people to avoid—bodies have a way of getting themselves found, after all, particularly when they lie less than a mile from farms with their sharp-nosed dogs. And it would be arduous in the extreme to dig a large enough hole in the sodden peat to bury someone, and carrying him across the moor, to Watern Tor perhaps, would also involve the risk of discovery. Josiah Gorton they transported clear to the other side of the moor, but for some reason—grown cocky perhaps, or short of time, or merely the difference between disposing of a wandering tin seeker who had no family and a young and educated outsider whose death could be expected to attract a degree of attention—they decided to remove Pethering from the moor altogether. Your arrival that day at Baskerville Hall may have given them the idea, or they might have settled on it in any case.'
I thought about it for a long minute, dissatisfied, but there was no more to be done with the question at the moment. 'Have you been up on the moor all this time, then?'
'More or less. After interviewing the farmer I determined that there was, indeed, a place where a motorcar had pulled off the road two or three days before. Dunlops,' he said, before I could ask. 'Relatively new, such as Ketteridge's motor runs on.'
'Thank God for that. I was beginning to think he was as ghostly as Lady Howard.'
'Though it's not much use as proof in a court of law.'
'True.'
'I then went to visit the army garrison near Okehampton.'
'Good heavens.'
'I had to be sure that what appeared to be shelling was in fact not.'
'Of course.'
'Major-General Nicholas Wyke-Murchington gave me a cup of tea.'
'How nice.'
'Not terribly. It was nine o'clock this morning and I could have done with strong coffee and a full breakfast.'
'Where did you stop the night yesterday?'
'In the farmer's barn.'
I had half expected him to say, In the abandoned mine. At least the barn would have been dry and, with any luck, warm.
'So you had a nice tea with the major-general.'
'And, with Mycroft's cachet in hand, he showed me his tank.'
'A singular honour.'
'Any self-respecting spy would have died laughing at the sight of it, although I can well believe it would not have sunk into the mire of Passchendaele. It distinctly resembles a duck perched atop a half-inflated balloon, and it moves—trundles is perhaps the word—at the pace of an arthritic old woman.'
'A truly revolutionary design.'
'He also gave me another piece of information that I think you will not mock so freely.'
