I now advanced more cautiously, endeavoring to locate the search party by the sound of the pump, and when I had done this I made a little detour so that I might approach from the opposite direction to that from which the constable had appeared.
Still guided by the noise of the pump, I at length came out into a small opening among the trees and halted to survey the scene. The center of the opening was occupied by a small pond, not more than a dozen yards across, by the side of which stood a builder’s handcart. The little two-wheeled vehicle had evidently been used to convey the appliances which were deposited on the ground near it, and which consisted of a large tub—now filled with water—a shovel, a rake, a sieve, and a portable pump, the latter being fitted with a long delivery hose. There were three men besides the constable, one of whom was working the handle of the pump, while another was glancing at a paper that the constable had just delivered to him. He looked up sharply as I appeared, and viewed me with unconcealed disfavor.
“Hallo, sir!” said he. “You can’t come here.”
Now, seeing that I was actually here, this was clearly a mistake, and I ventured to point out the fallacy.
“Well, I can’t allow you to stay here. Our business is of a private nature.”
“I know exactly what your business is, Inspector Badger.”
“Oh, do you?” said he, surveying me with a foxy smile. “And I expect I know what yours is, too. But we can’t have any of you newspaper gentry spying on us just at present, so you just be off.”
I thought it best to undeceive him at once, and accordingly, having explained who I was, I showed him the coroner’s permit, which he read with manifest annoyance.
“This is all very well, sir,” said he as he handed me back the paper, “but it doesn’t authorize you to come spying on the proceedings of the police. Any remains that we discover will be deposited in the mortuary, where you can inspect them to your heart’s content; but you can’t stay here and watch us.”
I had no defined object in keeping a watch on the inspector’s proceedings; but the sergeant’s indiscreet hint had aroused my curiosity, which was further excited by Mr. Badger’s evident desire to get rid of me. Moreover, while we had been talking, the pump had stopped (the muddy floor of the pond being now pretty fully exposed), and the inspector’s assistant was handling the shovel impatiently.
“Now I put it to you, Inspector,” said I, persuasively, “is it politic of you to allow it to be said that you refused an authorized representative of the family facilities for verifying any statements that you may make hereafter?”
“What do you mean?” he asked.
“I mean that if you should happen to find some bone which could be identified as part of the body of Mr. Bellingham, that fact would be of more importance to his family than to anyone else. You know that there is a very valuable estate and a rather difficult will.”
“I didn’t know it, and I don’t see the bearing of it now” (neither did I for that matter); “but if you make such a point of being present at the search, I can’t very well refuse. Only you mustn’t get in our way, that’s all.”
On hearing this conclusion, his assistant, who looked like a plainclothes officer, took up his shovel and stepped into the mud that formed the bottom of the pond, stooping as he went and peering among the masses of weed that had been left stranded by the withdrawal of the water. The inspector watched him anxiously, cautioning him from time to time to “look out where he was treading”; the laborer left the pump and craned forward from the margin of the mud, and the constable and I looked on from our respective points of vantage. For some time the search was fruitless. Once the searcher stooped and picked up what turned out to be a fragment of decayed wood; then the remains of a long-deceased jay were discovered, examined, and rejected. Suddenly the man bent down by the side of a small pool that had been left in one of the deeper hollows, stared intently into the mud, and stood up.
“There’s something here that looks like a bone, sir,” he sang out.
“Don’t grub about then,” said the inspector. “Drive your shovel right into the mud where you saw it and bring it to the sieve.”
The man followed out these instructions, and as he came shoreward with a great pile of the slimy mud on his shovel we all converged on the sieve, which the inspector took up and held over the tub, directing the constable and laborer to “lend a hand,” meaning thereby that they were to crowd round the tub and exclude me as completely as possible. This, in fact, they did very effectively with his assistance, for, when the shovelful of mud had been deposited on the sieve, the four men leaned over it and so nearly hid it from view that it was only by craning over, first on one side and then on the other, that I was able to catch an occasional glimpse of it and to observe it gradually melting away as the sieve,
