“Long barrows,” said Macdonald; “your ancestors and mine, maybe. A good spot to be buried.”
Reeves stood and stared; some moorland ponies stared back and then bolted in a wild stampede of flying hooves and manes and tails. To the far west, Lundy Island hung like a cloud on the horizon; Bideford Bay was one great curve of reflected light from Hartland to Morte. To the north the head of the Lynn Valley showed a sinuous green among the dark green of heather. Turning about, Reeves looked beyond and below the moor to a chequer of farmland and woodland, the rich earth of south Devon spread out to the river Exe and the distant hills behind Exmouth. Having stared his fill, he sat down beside Macdonald, who was gazing out to Hartland and remembering the coombes that cleft that rocky coast—Welcombe, Marsland Mouth, Coombe Valley, and Moorwinstow.
“Well, thanks for this,” said Reeves as he gazed at the first white pinprick of starlight. “I shan’t forget it in a hurry.”
They sat in silence and listened to the call of the moorland birds and watched kestrels hovering until the light faded and the northern sky paled, misted to faint amethyst and then to lilac-grey. Reeves lav on his back and watched the stars strengthen, while his mind inevitably went back to the problem they had come to solve. It wasn’t that he didn’t value this high solitude of air and sky and distant sea, but an active mind cannot easily ignore a present problem. Sensuously he was aware of near bird call and far constellation, of fragrance and the chill of evening air, of the reflection of headland lights flashing out from hidden lighthouses: intelligently he was aware of a conundrum in which human motives made a crisscross of pattern, moving inevitably to the cold rush of the millrace.
They stayed there for a long time, each busy with his own thoughts, the smoke of Reeves’s cigarettes mingling with the mellower smoke of Macdonald’s pipe, while rustles in heather and bracken told of unseen small beasts busy on nocturnal occasions, and the last bird call died away in sleepy cuck-cuckings, save for the mournful hoot of owls. When Macdonald got up and stretched himself, Reeves could see his tall straight figure like a void against a sky which was still vaguely pale, though myriad pin points and scintillas of golden starlight quivered from horizon to horizon. Reeves got up and stretched, too, and found his coat was misted with dew.
“You can see it’s round when you’re at sea, but you don’t often see it’s round when you’re on land,” he said.
Macdonald considered the cryptic phrase and turned slowly the full three hundred and sixty degrees. They were so high above the rest of the moorland that they had their own uninterrupted circle of horizon. “There’s something satisfying about a full circle,” he said. “It seems to settle the infinity argument. This is where we go back, in time as well as in space. I’m going to drop you about half a mile from the mill. I shall go on up to the top and walk down through the park. We will each follow our own devices and discuss results when we get home. There’s a moon for you—like a dinted green cheese.”
They went back to the car, turned the headlights on, and bumped down the steep descent, lighting up an occasional white owl, and once a hawk flew in the beam of the head lamps, every pinion displayed in its great wingspread. Back into the tunnel of the lane they drove, and on till the first thatch gleamed in the moonlight at the bottom of the village street. Here Reeves got out and Macdonald drove on up the hill to the little plateau between inn and Manor and church. Every south-facing wall was white in the moonlight, white as milk; every thatch gleamed with the faintest tinge of gold on its well-combed surface, and beneath the eaves the shadows were purple-black.
CHAPTER XI
Macdonald walked across the village green to the entrance gates which closed the drive of Gramarye. They were tall wooden gates and they were bolted on the inside. Having noted their solidity, Macdonald put his hands on the top of the gates, pulled himself up, and got over the top without any difficulty at all. The drive was dark, shaded by ilex trees, and the Chief Inspector walked silently along the tunnel of gloom until he could see the garden front of die old stone house. It looked very beautiful and serene in the moonbeams, its mullions and flat Tudor archways showing clear in the witching light. Every window was closed, despite the warmth of the midsummer night, and the narrow leaded casements had a dark, secret look. The sunk lawn was smooth and white now, but anybody leaving the house could get immediately into the shadow of clipped shrubs and hedges. The conditions tonight, Macdonald pondered, were the same as on the night when Monica Emily Torrington had walked down to the mill, and when Dr. Ferens had driven up the village street to the Dower House.
Leaving the drive by the gate he and Reeves had used that afternoon, Macdonald moved on into the park. He paused after he had descended a hundred yards of the steep declivity. To his right, the scarp rose sharply to the line of the village street, the houses hidden by the trees on the slopes. To his left, the ground fell away steeply to river level, so steeply that it was probable that if anybody took a false step and slipped from the path he would roll helplessly down the long bank, faster and faster, till he reached the bottom. Despite the fact that he was not many yards
