‘Well, no doubt it all makes sense, but not to me,’ said Laura. ‘If he wanted to keep the thing, why didn’t he take it away with him?’
‘He was afraid to do so, I imagine, in case, by some freak of fate, it should be traced to his possession. It is so true that conscience doth make cowards of us all.’
‘He’s going to get a nasty jolt when he dives into that hole and finds the flint gone.’
‘He is going to get a nasty jolt, as you put it, long before that, I fancy,’ said Dame Beatrice. ‘Those who try to throw dust into other people’s eyes are likely to blind themselves if the wind happens to be blowing the wrong way. Well, to find out whether we have been told the truth about Sekhmet’s friendly way with strangers, I shall leave it to you to open negotiations with her. Make sure that no one from Crozier Lodge is with you when you make advances to the animal.’
Sekhmet fulfilled the predictions made about her. She received Laura with mindless enthusiasm, tore twice round what once had been the lawn at Crozier Lodge and then crouched adoringly at Laura’s feet while a lead borrowed from Bryony was attached to her collar. Dame Beatrice had waited beside the car which Laura had parked outside the gate. She patted the now quiescent dog and the three of them walked towards the little bridge over the river.
Laura had picked up two things from the car before they left it. One article was a carrier bag containing a pair of rope-soled canvas shoes, the other was a small, light, canvas-seated garden chair. The shoes were to be worn when she waded in the river, the chair was for Dame Beatrice to occupy while Laura was searching for the piece of flint, a business which she guessed might take some time.
‘Let Sekhmet loose,’ said Dame Beatrice, when they had crossed the bridge and were on the rough riverside path. ‘She knows the spot we want and will lead us to it.’
‘Bryony described it as being only a few yards below the confluence of the two streams,’ said Laura. ‘Wonder what Sekhmet was doing when the murderer hit the other fellow over the head?’
‘She may well have been tethered to a tree and released when the deed had been done, the victim’s trousers removed and the body dumped, alive or dead, in the river.’
‘After the piece of flint had been hidden in the bank where Bryony found it?’
‘Yes. She had then been released, given the pair of trousers and told to guard them, I think. We can test that when you give her your walking shoes to mind.’
‘Thanks very much! And supposing she won’t give them up when I want to change back into them? Still, anything in a good cause, I suppose.’
She released the dog, which disappeared immediately into the undergrowth. The two women walked on, Laura giving a whistle occasionally to which Sekhmet responded by making a brief, polite manifestation of herself before resuming her quest for rabbits.
‘I wish our errand weren’t quite so grim,’ said Laura. ‘It’s lovely along here and the last setting on earth for a cowardly murder.’
‘Yes, indeed,’ Dame Beatrice agreed. ‘There is a good deal to be said for the discovery of dead bodies in libraries rather than in beauty spots.’
They had risen very early and had set out for Abbots Crozier in time, they hoped, to reach Watersmeet before the holiday makers found it. Fortunately it was more of an afternoon than a morning walk for most people and they encountered nobody of human kind. They were accompanied, however, by a robin, but whether in friendship or because he wanted to see them off his territory they did not know.
‘I think it must be somewhere about here that Bryony meant,’ said Laura a little later. She unfolded the garden chair. ‘If you’d like to sit here while I go paddling — ’ she added. ‘I should like to identify that hole in the bank Bryony mentioned. It must be quite close at hand. Ought we to have brought her with us after all?’
‘I think not,’ said Dame Beatrice, testing the small chair for firmness and then seating herself. ‘Enjoy your search. I do not suppose the hole will tell us anything new, but time is of no object and this is a pleasant spot.’
Laura whistled up Sekhmet and this time the dog stayed with her. With the Labrador at her heels, she combed the bank. The hedge which crowned it was ragged and untended. Laura identified, in one part, the trailing wild rose with its white, wide-open flowers and, further along, there was the long-styled rose, stout-stemmed, erect and well foliaged, but of the dog rose, Laura’s favourite, there was no sign, since the soil was not suited to it. However, on her walk along the cliff path she had seen the burnet rose in flower in its chosen habitat near the sea.
It was Sekhmet who found the hole. Laura was wearing a short-sleeved shirt. She put her hand and then her arm into the hole while the dog, suspecting the presence of rabbits, nuzzled against her trouser-leg quivering with anticipation.
‘No droppings, so no rabbits, you idiot,’ said Laura, ‘in fact, no nothing.’ She continued to search the bank, but there was no comparable hole, so, accompanied by the disillusioned dog, she returned to Dame Beatrice and the sunshine, which flecked with light the turbulent little river.
She took off her walking shoes, substituted for them the pair of rope-soled sand shoes, rolled her trouser legs up to above her knees and waded in at a nearby spot where the edge of the stream shelved gently into the water.
This was extremely cold, but the rope-soled shoes gave her a reasonable chance of keeping her footing on the wet stones and boulders of the riverbed. Now and again she would pick up a pebble, inspect it and let it fall. Dame Beatrice watched placidly and Sekhmet watched anxiously from the bank. The water splashed joyously over the rocks, and the robin, which had accompanied the seeker all the time that she was exploring the bank, actually perched for a moment on the wooden arm of Dame Beatrice’s garden chair.
‘I remind myself of the chap who got so bored and frustrated looking for the touchstone which turned everything to gold that he realised that he must have found it earlier on and chucked it away without looking at it,’ said Laura, throwing down a pebble and coming out on to the bank.
‘You are walking against the flow of the stream, ’ said Dame Beatrice. ‘Why don’t you try higher up and walk down this way?’
‘Because I don’t much want to take a ducking. The stream is running fast so near the confluence and the stones are slippery. The rush of water against the backs of my legs could upset my equilibrium. Still, if you say so.’
