Wray gave him a rather startled glance. “We don’t want any more.”
“Then tell Inspector Vance to stop this silly tinkering with the accident idea. He’s dealing with murder, and it becomes a habit. And in this case the motive grows stronger with every death. The whole business has an empirical air, too. I should say it began as a try-out, suggested by Captain Dresser’s death. The ’prentice hand had a shot at Mile Boulanger, and bungled it. But it has steadily improved with practice. The two successful attempts were quite efficiently done. You’ll have your work cut out with either to send us up a case we’ll even look at.”
“I think the inspector can be safely left to handle the thing in his own way,” Wray said stiffly.
Mr. Tuke grinned even more diabolically. “By the way,” he said, “I’m spending the night at Cambridge. Having saved some petrol, I shall take the car. Anything I can do for you?”
“Nothing, thank you.”
“I thought of coming home by way of Stocking and Bedford.”
Wray gave him a foxy look. “Sticking your nose in again? I can’t stop you, unfortunately.”
“I am always interested in backgrounds. Well, bye-bye, Wray. I’ll see you when I come back.”
“Oh, don’t bother,” said Wray.
PART
THREE
:
UNDISTRIBUTED FACTORS
CHAPTER XIII
MR. TUKE’S engagement in Cambridge was to dine and sleep at the home on the Madingly road of a bachelor friend of his undergraduate days who was now a don. He drove there at his usual high speed by way of Baldock and Royston; but on departing after breakfast the next morning he turned the Delage down Grange Road, past Selwyn and Newnham, to the road to Wimpole. Crossing Ermine Street he began to explore the tortuous lanes about Wendy and Shingay. He remembered this country from his own Cambridge days, and he had been in the neighbourhood again just before the war, when he got himself mixed up with the murder of Norman Sleight. The landscape was flat and marshy; little streams flowed under little bridges, and in wet seasons were apt to ignore these and take short cuts over the roads. It was not wet now, but merely dull: a sort of sunlight filtered through a canopy of cloud of a shapeless and nondescript type. It was, in fact, a typical August day. Presently the ground began to rise gently, and as the black car passed from Cambridgeshire into Herts a line of low hills rose against the grey sky. Somewhere at the foot of these lay Stocking.
There were, correctly, a pair of Stockings—Dry Stocking and Stocking End, but the map showed the latter to consist of no more than a few cottages. The map also showed Stocking Corner, on the road Mr. Tuke was now following, and the Cat Ditch, which was an affluent of one of the streams he had already crossed and therefore of the Cam, or Rhee, as this mutable river is called in these parts. He did not turn at the Corner, but drove on a couple of miles to a lane which would take him to Stocking by a more roundabout route, past Raymond Shearsby’s cottage and over the bridge which featured in the story of the writer’s death. Almost all pasture land, this stretch of country was little populated. In the two miles he saw only two farms and a dilapidated bungalow. He met a green omnibus, on its way from Hitchin to Cambridge, and overtook one car. Then he came to the lane he was seeking, and, turning down it, seemed to leave the inhabited world altogether.
The lane, in its windings, headed south and then east. Two miles and more along it stood a lonely little cottage of lath and plaster and thatch, which Harvey knew had been Raymond Shearsby’s. It was unoccupied, and when he walked up the neglected garden and peered through the windows he found it as empty as a drum. The scenery around, to his prejudiced eye, was infinitely depressing. No other building was in sight; everywhere stretched pasture, peopled only by cattle switching their tails at the flies. Clumps of old trees lifted their heavy foliage to the cloudy sky. Raymond Shearsby’s stories were not those of a morbid or anti-social mind, and he must have taken refuge in this backward corner of Hertfordshire because he escaped from France with little in his pocket and the cottage was cheap. And he had never been able to get away. As Wray had put it, he had lived from story to story.
The lane wound on between high ragged hedges towards the village. A few hundred yards beyond the cottage, in the middle of a bend, it humped itself over a small bridge; and Mr. Tuke pulled up again and got out. But there was little to speak of what had happened on that July evening three weeks ago. At the western end of the bridge there was a gap at one side of the lane between the brick parapet and the hedge, which, like its fellow, rose from a grass verge. Beyond the gap was a steep fall of several feet to the Cat Ditch below, a fall too steep for cattle or horses. Anyone with poor sight, blundering on a dark night into the hedge or the parapet, might easily plunge headlong into the stream. This was a bigger volume of water than its local name had led Mr. Tuke to expect. It was much more than a ditch: it was a little river, some ten feet across. It seemed to be several feet deep, and no doubt carried a good deal more water at the end of that wet July. The turbid current flowed steadily northward, and as it whispered past the slimy brickwork it was seen to be swifter and more powerful than it appeared between the wider banks. At its deepest, however, a kick or
