“Just what I wanted to know. One other query. What do you make of the young man with the suitcase, who came, if I remember correctly, by the 5.31 and left again later. By the 8.5, was it?”
Sergeant Oake polished his chin vigorously. “I’d like to know more about him, I’ll own,” he said. “Just because I can’t find out what he was up to hereabouts. But you always come on these loose ends when you’re on a case, as you’ll know, sir. And this fellow couldn’t have had no hand in Mr. Shearsby’s death, if that’s what you’re thinking. He couldn’t have got to the lane and back in time. He was by the station just before the 6.43 came in, and he was away by the 8.5.”
. “I suppose the porter couldn’t have been mistaken when he says he saw this chap on the bridge?”
“He says he’ll swear to it, sir. They mark down strangers in country places like this. I’ve checked it other ways, too, and nobody was near the bridge at that time.”
At The Bushel and Strike, which was not yet open, Mr. Tuke adhered to his role of the interested onlooker, and remained in the car while the two police officers went inside. They were out again within ten minutes, but stood conferring together a little longer before they rejoined him. Sergeant Webley then passed on their news.
The two men from the blue Morris had stayed in the bar for upwards of an hour that morning. Mr. Twitchell did not think he had seen either of them before. The bar filled up while they were there, and presently the talk came round to the death of Raymond Shearsby. The landlord, busy serving, could not say by whom the topic was introduced; but once it was launched the man in the check jacket had shown much interest in the tragedy, though appearing to hear of it for the first time. Before he and his companion left, they knew all the village knew about it. The companion took little part in the general conversation, concentrating on his beer, for which the other paid. The latter was a pleasant fellow, with an easy, gendemanly manner. When the pair drove away, they were seen to turn up the lane which led to Raymond Shearsby’s cottage.
Deferring consideration of this episode, Sergeant Webley glanced round at Sergeant Oake, who leant forward to broach the subject which, it seemed, the two had been discussing outside the inn. Much impressed by his colleague’s reasoning about the missing bicycle, and its prompt confirmation up to a point, the Hertfordshire officer was anxious to apply a further test at once. As he put it, if someone stole the bicycle from the cottage on that July evening with the aim of reaching the main road in time to catch the last bus to Cambridge, it would be discarded very near that road. In which event, having every reason by now to know the neighbourhood, Sergeant Oake thought the machine might still be lying where it had been left, even though three weeks had gone by. The instinct of the thief would be to hide it, and this he must do in some field, behind a hedge, for there were no other hiding places. The lane he took was little used, and the fields thereabouts were all pasture, and when cattle or horses were turned into them it was merely a matter of opening a gate, and the animals would amble in, and for that matter out, of their own volition. Countrymen, said Sergeant Oake, never walked a yard further than they could help, and cowmen and horsemen, who stood for hours in a heat-producing mixture of straw and mud, notoriously suffered torments from their feet. In short, the odds were that nobody had entered the fields in question for weeks past, let alone investigated the hedgerows, and these, there being no hedgers and ditchers, were greatly overgrown, so that a weighty object like a bicycle would sink in among the autumn foliage and be invisible at a casual glance.
Mr. Tuke met Sergeant Webley’s eye at this point, and reading in it his natural anxiety to follow whither this further spate of reasoning led, grinned encouragingly at him.
“Don’t let him steal your thunder,” he said. “And count me in. It’s your idea, and your car, and I’m on holiday and enjoying myself hugely. We’ll all look for the bicycle.”
Sergeant Webley smiled gratefully and got into gear, and soon they were driving up the lane towards Raymond Shearsbv’s cottage. They halted at the bridge over the Gat Ditch, which the officer from Bedford had not seen, and then went on past the lonely cottage and so along the winding, deserted lanes explored by Mr. Tuke in the reverse direction that morning. It seemed ancient history, so much had happened in the interim.
The sun came out again, to gild the general enthusiasm, and beneath scattered clouds and assorted aircraft the police car eventually pulled up a hundred yards short of the main road and bus route. At this corner, on the 28th of July, the clerical looking gentleman had boarded a bus at 8.10 p.m. It remained to be seen whether any evidence of how he got there was yet left in the hedgerows. These were indeed sprouting untidily and luxuriantly, and would have hidden all the bicycles in Hertfordshire. The fields immediately at hand were empty of livestock, and the car had not passed a single human being since it left Dry Stocking.
The two sergeants took one side of the lane, and Mr. Tuke the other. When they entered the fields, the high hedges concealed them. His hands in his pockets,
