Macdonald walked on; the path was straight now and offered no cover: anyone walking either up or down could be seen clearly and would have no means of concealment. He stood still for a while and listened; the only sound came faintly from far below, the perpetual plash of water over the weir. Macdonald had gym shoes on, for he found they were quieter than any other form of footwear and gave better foothold on a slope. He picked up a small stone and tossed it. As he expected, he got an echo from the scarp to his right. Every sound was amplified on this path. “She had acute hearing,” he pondered to himself. (The conscientious Peel had noted this down.) “Even the rustle of a cotton frock would sound loud here. Surely no one would have risked following her down this path. She would have heard them, and once she had turned, she would have seen them.”
He walked on, thinking hard. “She must have gone to meet somebody. If she had only been walking for the pleasure of a walk in the moonlight, or to induce some sort of semi-hysterical trance, she wouldn’t have gone on through that last gate to the workaday jumble of Mill House and sawmill and generating station. And if you wanted to meet someone, surely you wouldn’t choose to meet them on this path. It’s not wide enough for two people to walk abreast without fear of slipping; it’s steep and toilsome, and not particularly safe. If she went to meet somebody, she’d have chosen level ground at the top or level ground at the bottom.”
He walked on, slowly and silently, down to the five-barred gate which shut off the park from the level space by the river. There were trees overhanging the path here, and a big elder tree, covered with flowers, looked fairylike in the moonlight. Macdonald wanted to know what Reeves was up to. He would be down there somewhere, near the bridge, watching and listening, as Macdonald himself had been watching and listening. Reeves would be quite capable of doing a practical experiment to discover what happened to a person who tripped up on the bridge, and Macdonald thought it not improbable that one or other of them would end up in the millstream, the betting being that he (Macdonald) would have to swim for it. The fact that Reeves was there, unseen and unheard, but certainly watchful, acted as a sort of stimulant, and Macdonald began to test his memory about the approach to the bridge, recollecting what there was in the way of cover where an assailant might hide. There was an open space of level ground on either side of the bridge, and while he stood visualising this, Macdonald suddenly thought: “Being Reeves, he’ll probably get under the bridge somehow. It’s a wooden bridge and there must be beams of some sort to act as stays: it’s too wide a span to have no supports. If somebody grabbed your ankle or got a crook round your leg while you were on the bridge, the result might make hay of all our arguments about what happens when you go at the knees. Well, here’s his chance for a demonstration.”
He had just put out his hand to loosen the chain on the gate when he caught a sound on the farther side of the stream. It was a slight clatter, as though a stick had fallen on cobbles. Macdonald drew back into the shadows: he could see right across the bridge and on to the moonlit space beyond it. The path which ran between the Mill House and the farm was in black shadow, and it was from here that the sound had come, as though someone coming towards the bridge from the village street had knocked a stick down. Macdonald’s first thought was: “That wasn’t Reeves.” Reeves had the eyes of a cat, and a cat’s neatness in avoiding obstacles. A moment later a man moved out of the shadows between the houses and into the moonlight. He walked quietly on to the bridge and Macdonald saw who it was—Sanderson, the bailiff. He was dressed in singlet and shorts and he was very obvious in the moonlight. Behind, in the shadows, was another man, unidentifiable in the gloom. Whatever Macdonald anticipated, the next event took him entirely by surprise. Sanderson measured his length on the bridge, if not with a resounding crash, with a thud which was not far removed from a bang. Then his big form rolled over and fell in the water with a smack and a splash which made a great deal more noise than Macdonald would have believed possible. Immediately there was an outburst of barking from the dog in Venner’s house, and the calves in the nearby byre bawled their protest at being wakened from sleep.
2
Macdonald said afterwards that something in his subconscious mind told him the whole thing was a put-up job. When Sanderson fell, his limbs did not seem to lose control as do the limbs of a man rendered suddenly senseless. It was a good fall, and in addition to the thud on the echoing planks, the timber of the bridge creaked and groaned in reverberation. The lively uproar following the noisy flop into the water was reinforced by the sound of a window being flung violently
