“Right. I’ll go along there this evening. He’s still at Garthmere, isn’t he?”
“Aye, but he’s not farming now, he’s getting on, seventy-five he’d be. He’s got a cottage below his old steading and a few acres where he grazes some beasts to keep him happy.”
“And there’s another job,” said Macdonald. “One of us will have to go up and see the manager at the pipe-line works. There’s quite a chance that deceased was one of the gangers who found his own way over here, or came over here to lend Sam a hand, if Mr. Brough’s notion was anywhere near right. If they planned to get any of the furniture out of High Garth, it’d have taken two men to shift it. It’s all heavy stuff.”
“True enough,” said Bord. “Now would you like to tackle that end, the gangers up on Bowland?”
“No use trying it by myself, because I’ve never seen Sam Borwick,” replied Macdonald. “We want a photograph of him, or lacking that a description by somebody who knows Sam well: Mr. Staple might be willing to come. Now about deceased: there’s one way we might get him identified—if he’s ever been ‘inside.’ ”
“Fingerprints?” said Bord, and his voice sounded sceptical. “What are the chances? I never saw a corpse so far gone.”
“True, but it happens that the skin of the finger tips has remarkable endurance—it’s tough and it retains its characteristic markings even after identification by the usual methods is impossible. The experts who do the P.M. will provide us with fingerprints, sufficient to identify him if his dabs are in records.”
“Well, I might not have thought of that one,” said Bord.
A few minutes later they parted, Bord on his way to see Mrs. Borwick, Macdonald on his way to see Mr. Staple.
3
While Macdonald and Bord were debating their case, a lorry was grinding up the steep hill from Kirkham to the pipe-line encampment on Bowland Fell. The lorry belonged to the contractors who were laying the pipe line and it carried supplies for the works canteen. The supplies came from Preston and the route followed by the lorry driver on the final stages of his journey was the road through the Lune Valley via Crossghyll and Kirkham and then up the steep hill road on to the heights of Bowland, the only possible approach to the encampment for a wheeled vehicle. Tractors could climb the rough fell tracks which approached the encampment more directly, but the supply lorries always kept to the metalled road. Turner, the driver, followed the same roads every week and had made many acquaintances en route. When he saw the mortuary van turn on to the valley road, it was only natural that he stopped to inquire where it had come from, and only natural that he was told a long and involved story by the roadman who was his informant, a story about a police search up at the uninhabited farmstead, the finding of a body, and about an accident to or an attack on Mr. Brough, who had just been taken to hospital, “mortal bad.”
When Turner reached the huts where the pipe-line gangers slept and ate, four men came forward as usual to do the unloading and to carry the crates into the storeroom at the back of the canteen: in addition to the four who did the unloading and carrying, there was the canteen manager, Mr. Stone, to check the goods and sign for them. Once again Turner told his news, and made the most of it. A corpse found at High Garth, after a search which had been carried out by the county police and the London C.I.D., a search directed by a local farmer, who had himself been attacked and taken away in an ambulance. The four men who did the unloading, Green, Hall, Walton, and Brook, were reliable fellows, who had worked for the contractors for a period of years. Stone, the canteen manager, knew by experience that it was essential to have trustworthy men on this job. It was all too easy for goods to disappear—a carton of cigarettes, a crate of tinned food—so Stone saw to it that he always had the same men on this particular job and that none of the other gangers hung around while the goods were being moved. He liked to get the job done quickly and the goods put away in the canteen strong room. As he sometimes said to the manager, “They’re not a bad lot of chaps, taking them all round: very much the same set of toughs you found in any infantry regiment And was there any thieving in the army if canteen goods weren’t properly supervised? Ask any old soldier.”
Today, it was difficult to get through the job with the usual dispatch. The men wanted to hear details of the driver’s story. Where was the body found? How had the farmer been attacked?
“High Garth?” asked Bill Walton. “That’s the godforsaken old shack perched up on the moor away over there, isn’t it?”
“There’s two farms, fairly close together, neither of them lived in, and I don’t wonder at it,” put in Percy Hall. “Miles from anywhere. I walked over there last autumn, when the heather was out. With Fuller I went, he said there was a short cut down to a village where there was a pub. Short cut, blimey: miles we walked and never saw no village, just them two farmhouses, empty both of them.”
“There’s two farmhouses all right, High Garth and Fellcock,” said Turner, “but only one is uninhabited, that’s High Garth, where the body was found. Fellcock’s lived in and the land’s cultivated. You can see that right across the river, green fields and decent buildings.”
“That’s right,” put in Brook. “Who was it went over there, not long ago? Tom Martin, said there was a decent young couple living there, gave him tea and treated him kind, asked him inside.”
“Look here, chaps, get a
