‘That’s right, sir. He’s the fourth since Thursday. It’s that poacher chap. Shouldn’t have thought he was a nutcase. Out for what he can get, I reckon.’
‘I’d better see him. Looks as though we’re not the only people who thought the verdict given at the inquest was more than a bit doubtful. All right, send him in.’
The individual who was shown in was utterly unlike any of the three earlier visitors to whom the sergeant had referred One of these had claimed to be clairvoyant; another was an escapee from a mental hospital who had been claimed by the authorities almost before he had concluded a confession that he was a murderer; the third had been a pseudo-clergyman eccentric but harmless, who said that he had witnessed the murder in what he called a vision. As none of his descriptions tallied even slightly with anything which the police knew, he had been dismissed, like the clairvoyant, with a promise that ‘we will look into it’.
The present claimant to knowledge was a wiry, ferret-faced man wearing, in spite of the fine summer weather, a long overcoat which, to the police inspector’s experienced eye housed a poacher’s pocket. He had seen Adams before. He said to the disreputable man, ‘Well, what’s
‘To come to the point, then, sir, I was wondering whether a bit of information might be worth a bob or two.’
‘Information about what?’
‘This bloke as was found in the river up about Abbots Crozier.’
Burfield did not betray the fact that he was interested. He said, ‘That’s all over and done with. We’ve held the inquest.’
‘You mean you knows who he was?’
‘No, we don’t know who he was. The inquest decided that the death was the result of an accident.’
‘And what if it wasn’t? What if somebody bashed him over the napper?’
‘You’re wasting my time. You own a dog, don’t you?’
‘Sort of.’
‘Licensed?’
‘Course she’s licensed. What do you take me for?’
‘You wouldn’t like it if I told you. What about those pheasants I heard about last autumn?’
‘I don’t never go trespassing after pheasants, sir. I only takes what I knows to be ferry naturee, such as rabbits and that.’
‘Fairy what?’
‘No, sir. Meaning as they don’t belong of nobody, so is a free-for-all. That’s all I ever takes, sir.’
‘If you’ve anything useful to say, say it and be off. If you think you know who the dead man was, you had better tell me. It’s a serious thing to withhold evidence.’
‘I can’t put a name to him, but I can tell you where he was dossing down the night before he was killed.’
The Axehead police had continued to make enquiries in their attempt to identify the dead man, but all efforts had proved to be in vain. Nobody appeared to have known him. The inspector jingled some silver in his pocket.
‘All right. Come across with it,’ he said. The story which emerged was circumstantial, but Burfield was inclined to think that it was true. Unfortunately it was of no immediate help in identifying the man found in the river.
According to the poacher, who lived in a shack on the moor about three miles from Crozier Lodge, on the morning in question he had gone at first light to look at some snares he had set and found that he had caught five rabbits. He had decided to offer them to the Rant sisters, as he often did, ‘them dogs of theirs being partial to a bit of rabbit’ — so he had taken them along to Crozier Lodge.
‘All five?’ asked Burfield.
‘Yes, sir, being that I’d been up to the hills a day or two before and had a nice hare hanging up ready for my own pot, hares on the mountain being anybody’s for the hunting, as the old song says.’
‘That lurcher of yours will land you in trouble one of these days.’
Adams ignored this warning and went on with his tale. Thinking that it was a little early to disturb the ladies — it being, he reckoned, not much past five in the morning — and being unwilling to carry five plump rabbits to his shack and then transport them later in the day to Crozier Lodge, he did as he had done before on similar occasions. He went to the back door of Crozier Lodge, which he had always found unlocked, opened it and deposited the rabbits on the kitchen table. When his occasions took him that way again, he proposed to call for his money and get the two thick slices of home-made bread and good beef dripping which were his perks when he made such visits. There was never any difficulty in getting paid for the rabbits, he explained, the ladies being as honest as the day and not the sort to try to do a good man down.
What he did not know at the time, although Morpeth told him later, was that, since the sisters had learned that they had a night prowler, they always locked and bolted both the back and front doors, so, for the first time, he could not get in.
He did not want to knock anybody up, so he thought of leaving the rabbits in the garage, where he assumed they would soon be found, but the garage also had been made secure. He then mounted the outside stair to the garage loft.
Matters, however, did not turn out as he had hoped. The door to the upper room was not locked, so he had opened it and was about to step over the threshold into the very dimly lighted chamber when he heard somebody moving about. He supposed it was a tramp and — ‘me being what you might call a bantam-weight, sir’ — he had decided to make a discreet withdrawal rather than risk annoying the vagrant by invading his sleeping quarters.
‘Oh, yes?’ said Burfield. ‘And, having read the papers, I suppose the minute you opened the door you detected a strong smell of aniseed.’
