'I can imagine,' said Faro sourly.
Yarrow gave him a quick glance. 'I - see you don't approve, sir. No more than I do. I'm a town man myself but in the country these traditions are hard to break. Everyone comes along who is capable of shooting an arrow, even little bairns. The Elrigg family are born to it. Experts - Mr Hector and Mr Mark were trained from when they could first hold a bow.'
He paused and smiled proudly. 'Everyone is encouraged to take up the local sport and I'm now quite a good marksman myself, so is Dewar. But I prefer to stick to the archery field. We'll be having our annual contest - for the Golden Arrow - next week.'
'Really? With the castle in mourning?'
'Her Ladyship's decision. She said Sir Archie would have wanted everything to go on as normal. He would have wished to have the contest and not disappoint all the tenants.'
'That was very far seeing of her,' said Faro as he wondered at her motives.
'Come if you can. You'll be most welcome. The proceeds go to the Elriggs' favourite charities.'
'I doubt whether I'll be here then. With all these arrows flying about it might be a dangerous pastime for an observer.'
Yarrow frowned. 'The bull slaying was - for some. Not always fatal but like the ones used in the Spanish bullfights, they could turn very nasty. And that was when Sir Archie's grandfather decided most humanely that the beast should be finished off by rifle fire.'
'And that was what happened last week?'
'Yes. But some of them are not very good on the guns...'
He was silent, frowning before he continued: 'They thought they wounded one, but not the king bull. They were probably wrong and if His Lordship wasn't dead in the fall, and struggling to get to the road, the bull might have seen and set about him with his horns. It looked to me like that was the case -'
'What makes you think that?'
'He was gored in the back.' He shrugged away the unpleasant picture. 'And that was the end of him.'
Again he fell silent, his face bleak, his expression harsh with suffering. And Faro remembered that Yarrow had been seen many deaths and had almost lost his own life.
'Did you see anyone else in the area - who could have helped perhaps?'
Yarrow regarded him curiously. 'Not in the immediate vicinity,' he said heavily.
'But near enough?' said Faro eagerly.
He looked away. 'Hector Elrigg, Sir Archie's nephew. You - almost - met when you came to the station,' he added with a wry grimace. 'When I found Sir Archie, Hector was working at the hillfort.' He drew a deep breath. 'I shouted to him for help...'
'And ...' said Faro softly.
Yarrow gave him a glance of desperate appeal. 'Look, there is probably nothing in this at all. I just didn't care for his attitude. He was rather flippant about the whole thing. A downright refusal, sir, that's what I got from Hector Elrigg,' he added in shocked tones.
'From what you heard when you arrived earlier on, you'll realise he's a difficult sort of young devil, but I try to be fair—minded. And I'm certainly not suggesting that Hector seriously wished his uncle dead or would have tried to bring it about. Not at all.'
Wondering whether he should have revealed his true identity to Yarrow, Faro returned to the inn. In the empty bar he had a good look at the bull's magnificent de-horned head and decided that in life he must have been an ugly customer to face.
No doubt the Prince, despite his readiness to mow down everything in sight on a shoot, completely lost his nerve when he was unarmed - and left the gate open in his hasty retreat.
And Faro would have given much to know more about that quarrel between the Prince and his equerry, the reasons for which he had delicately omitted in his letter to the Queen. Had Poppy Elrigg been the reason, or had the Prince lost at cards?
Whatever the quarrel, it had been serious enough for him to cut short his visit to Elrigg. Was his anxiety to escape scandal or blackmail the only reason why he had been reported as 'abroad' and unable to attend the funeral of his equerry?
But Faro now had another strand leading into the labyrinth.
Yarrow's revelations regarding Sir Archie's nephew, who was also in the vicinity, had posed yet another question over the events of that day.
As he made notes of his interviews with the local police, Faro was left with an uneasy feeling of something he had missed. Something of vital importance. And what began as a personal command from Her Majesty, to prove for her anxious pride that her son, the future King of England, was not a coward, was already showing unmistakable signs of developing into a worse scandal.
Murder.
As he walked briskly in the direction of the castle to talk again to the devoted couple who had been his prime suspects, Lady Elrigg and her stepson Mark, Faro was already adding one other name. That of Hector Elrigg.
Even as he did so, he realised his behaviour was one of habit. But it was also quite out of order and he must not give in to temptation but merely regard it as an exercise in detection to fill in the few days before Vince's arrival, an investigation dictated by personal curiosity and the challenge set by a long-buried victim, no clues and some very vague suspects.
If murder was involved then he had no rights beyond turning over any evidence he found to Sergeant Yarrow, who would doubtless stir himself out of the torpor of Elrigg village and its feudal system and, remembering his old skills, do an
