“It’s all very well,” he said to Gordon, “the visibility’s good, and we shan’t be interrupted by rain; but we can’t get the atmosphere; the spiritual atmosphere, I mean, of yesterday’s fog and drizzle. We shall see where a man fell down the embankment, but we shan’t feel the impulse of that weeping depression which made him throw himself over, or made somebody else save him the trouble. We haven’t got the mise-en-scène of a tragedy.”
They climbed together, Gordon and he; a zigzag path up the side of the huge embankment, close to the clubhouse. When it reached the level of the line, it kept close to the trim hedge that marked the boundary of the railway’s property, and so lasted till the very beginning of the viaduct, where it dived under the first arch at a precarious angle and came up the other side. It was a matter of common knowledge to the good-humoured porters of Paston Oatvile that the shortest way from that station to the neighbouring station of Paston Whitchurch was along the railway line itself—the shortest, because it avoided the steep dip into the valley. Accordingly, it was the habit of residents, if pressed for time, to follow this path up to the viaduct, then to break over the sacred hedge and walk over the railway bridge till a similar path was available on the Paston Whitchurch side. This local habit Reeves and Gordon now naturally followed, for it gave them access to the very spot from which, twenty-four hours before, a human body had been hurled down on to the granite buttress and the osier-bed that lay beneath.
“You see what I mean,” said Reeves. “We can’t, of course, tell what pace the train was going; they vary so much in the fog. But if, for the sake of argument, you take the force with which I throw this stone as the impetus of the train, you see how the curve of the slope edges it out to the right—there—and it falls either exactly on the buttress or next door to it. That’s how I picture yesterday afternoon—the man takes a good jump—or gets a good shove, and falls just over the edge; there’s nothing for him to catch on to; and between his own motion and the slope of the embankment he gets pitched on to the buttress. I don’t know any place along this line where the drop comes so close. The coroner will call attention to that—it’s extraordinary the way coroners do draw attention to all the least important aspects of the case. I read a newspaper account once of a man who was killed by a motorcar just as he came out of church, and I’m blessed if the coroner didn’t draw attention to the dangerous habit of standing about outside churches.”
“I must say, the place seems made for something like this happening. Do you see how the line curves away from this side?”
“Why shouldn’t it?”
“What I mean is, it would be very hard for anybody to see Brotherhood fall out of the train unless he was travelling in the same coach: the other coaches would be out of view (unless a man were leaning right out of the window), simply owing to the curve—and of course a fog would make the job all the easier.”
“By Jove, that’s true. I must say, I stick to my murder theory, whatever the jury make of it. In fact, I hope they will bring in suicide, because then the police won’t be fussing round all over the place. It looks to me like a murder, and a carefully planned one.”
“I’d just like to try your stone-throwing trick once more. Look here, I’ll lean over the edge and watch it fall. Only we shall want a bigger stone, if you can find one.”
“All right. Only they’re all little ones between the sleepers. I’ll look along the bank a bit. I say, what the devil’s this?”
It was a sight that on most days would have given little surprise to the pair; a common enough sight, indeed, down in the valley, but up here a portent. Caught in a clump of grass, some twenty yards down the line in the Paston Oatvile direction, was a golf-ball.
“That beats everything,” declared Gordon. “I don’t believe Carmichael on his worst day could slice a ball a hundred feet up in the air and lodge it in that clump.”
Reeves was examining the trove intently. “I don’t like this a bit,” he said. “This is practically a new ball, not the sort of ball a man would throw away casually as he walked down the line. A Buffalo, I see—dash it all, there are at least a dozen of us use those. Who’ll tell us whether Brotherhood used them?”
“I say, steady on! You’ve got this murder business on the brain. How can you tell the ball hasn’t been there weeks and weeks?”
“Very simply, because it happens to have snapped the stalk of this flower—scabious, don’t they call ’em—which isn’t dead yet. The ball was right on top when I found it. I’m hanged if that ball fell there more than twenty-four hours ago.”
“I say, we ought to be getting back to Oatvile if we’re going to catch that train,” said Gordon. “It’s half-past four already, and we’ve got to take to the path before we come in sight of the signal-box. The signalman doesn’t really mind, but he has to pretend to.”
Gordon was one of those men who are always too early for trains. As a matter of fact they got into Paston Oatvile station before the 3:47 from London was signalled. The 4:50 from Paston Oatvile had to connect with it for the sake of passengers going on to Paston Whitchurch or Binver, and was still wandering up and down in a siding, flirting with a couple of milk-vans and apparently enjoying itself. The platform was nearly bare of passengers, a fact
