The Moor mr-4

by Laurie R. King

  When the body was free from the rocks, I rolled him over, taking care not to add any scrapes or marks to those he might already possess, and taking care too not to let go of him lest he disappear into the depths. As I moved him, however, I noted that this did not actually seem an immediate likelihood, which was in itself interesting. Furthermore, his face when it came up to the surface was dark with livor mortis where the blood had slowly settled after death. Pethering had not died in the water, and he had not died in the last few hours.

  One side of the thin, pale hair was clotted with a brown bloodstain, and the heels of his sturdy walking boots were heavily scuffed and thick with mud. However, while I was hanging over the edge of the skiff and the body was floating alongside, I could not learn a great deal more. It would have to wait for a methodical examination on dry land, preferably by someone else.

  "Can you reach his hat?" I asked Budd, and as I waited for him to manoeuvre to where he could bring the sodden thing onboard, I studied my surroundings. The two steep, overgrown access ramps, on the west and the southeast walls; the stream that Baring-Gould had diverted to fill his father's quarry splashing in from the north, pushing this body down to the south wall along with the other debris; a sad little boathouse, once cheerful; autumnal trees drooping over the water and depositing their leaves; and a crowd now of at least twenty men, women, and children watching with interest this underdressed woman with a corpse on the other end of her arm.

  The ramp I had come down, in the south wall, had shown no drag marks; but then again, its top was very near the drive to the curate's house. The western ramp, on the other hand, though actually closer to the house, was more sheltered, and I thought it likely he had been placed in the lake from that ramp. One man could not have tipped him over the edge without a great deal more damage to the body than there seemed to be. Two adults might have swung Pethering and thrown him over, and if so, the launching site would have been precisely where Baring-Gould and the others were standing. I sighed. Little point to objecting, I supposed, but still: "Rector, could you have those people move around to the other side? There could be footprints right there."

  One of the women at his side leant over to repeat my message in his ear, and in seconds the assembly was tiptoeing away from the gathering place, lifting their skirts and eyeing the ground as if it were about to bite them. Baring-Gould resumed his chair and he, too, migrated around the rim, where he was joined by the pink-cheeked, helmeted forces of law and order in the person of the local police constable. The voice of legal authority came, inevitably:

  "Here, what are you doing down there?"

  I left Baring-Gould to explain and to assert his own, considerably more ancient form of authority over the upstart with his shiny buttons and his shallow roots in the last century. I huddled in the boat, holding on to Pethering's coat with my now-numb fingers (his collar would have been easier, but I recoiled from brushing his cold flesh any more than I had to) and watching the glowering, gesticulating constable, and I decided that there was no point in maintaining an exactness in the investigative process. I was satisfied that Pethering had not been placed where he was found, and as I could not let go of him until he was unable to sink or to float off, it was high time to hand him over to properly constituted authority. "Thank you, Mr Budd. Back to the ramp, I think. Try not to hit him with your oar."

  It was clumsy work, and after I tried, and failed, to keep Pethering out of the oar's way, Budd turned the boat and sculled it backwards with short, choppy strokes. At the ramp I let the constable drag the body up onto the shore, leaving it half in the water. Now that he had possession of the thing, he looked down at it in growing consternation, and did not notice at first when I got back into the boat. When the corner of his eye caught the movement of Budd pushing off, he protested loudly, more loudly than strictly necessary.

  I tried to reassure him. "I'm not going anywhere, constable. I'll be right back." To Budd I said, "Take me over to the other side, please. I'd like to have a look at it before half the parish tramps it down."

  The PC did not like this at all, and raised his voice to order us to return. I can't think he imagined we had anything to do with the death, but for a man more accustomed to drunken farmhands and petty break-ins than dead bodies, and faced with a pair in a boat who delivered a body and now proposed to row away, all he could do was to grasp hard onto the essentials—and we were as essential a thing as he could find. Seeing us making our way to the only other exit from this pit, he turned on his heels and churned up the hillside and around the rim. I saw him flitting behind the half-bare trees, and my heart sank at what those furious boots would do to any marks on the ramp.

  Davey Pearce was still at the top of his ramp, holding back his crowd of two very small children and studying all the activity with great interest. "Try to stop him from coming down the ramp," I called to him without much hope, and indeed, when the constable appeared at Pearce's side, he did not look open to reason. He pushed Pearce to one side and started down towards us.

  However, I had reckoned without Baring-Gould. His old voice rang out with the authority of six centuries of landholders, John Gold the Crusader ordering his troops into battle with the Saracen. "Pearce, hold him there."

  And Pearce, who was old enough to have the traditional ways built into his very bones, reached out through the thin veneer of governmental authority and laid a meaty hand on the constable, and he held him there. He sat on him, actually, with the beatific smile of licensed insurrection on his face.

  Before I could climb out of the boat, Budd tapped me on the arm and held out his wool coat. I looked at the heavy pullover he still wore, and took the coat.

  The sloping hillside before me must have been hellish for hauling up slabs of stone but it was no great obstacle for a strong person carrying the inert body of a small man across his shoulders, which is what the killer had done until he slipped on some wet leaves about halfway down. After that, he had dragged Pethering, which accounted for the marks I had seen on the backs of the antiquarian's waterlogged boots. At the edge of the water he had fumbled and splashed and no doubt got himself wet from the knees down, working to push the body out into the lake, before climbing back up to the rim (each step slipping slightly as his wet shoes hit the damp leaves) and making his way off.

  Before I went to investigate his destination, though, I returned to the place where he had fallen, studying it with great care from all angles until I could visualise the man's movements precisely.

  He had been carrying Pethering over both shoulders, I decided, left hand steadying his load, right hand out as a balance. When his right heel hit a patch of wet leaves and skidded out from under him, he thumped down on his backside, with Pethering landing on the ground in back of him. I could see clearly where the man's right foot had stretched out to leg's length, where his left heel had dug in, where his right hand plunged into the leaves in back of him, and where the seat of his trousers landed hard. The length of Pethering stretched out at cross angles, heels to the man's right hand, head to his left. The man got to his feet (no doubt brushing at his clothing in disgust) and went around to Pethering's shoulders to drag him off downhill the rest of the way to the water.

  It was all remarkably clear, one of the most elegant examples of spoor I had ever seen, and I was very pleased with myself until I stood up, brushing off my own hands, and saw my audience stretched around the rim of the lake. They had been standing, stone still and silent, as I examined the ground, so intent on a precise re-creation of what had gone on here that I had duplicated the man's very movements, dipping into a fall, flinging a leg out to mimic the sliding foot, standing and brushing and hoisting and pulling—all of my movements small and controlled, mere shorthand, as it were, but nonetheless vastly entertaining. Even the constable beneath Davy Pearce lay silently staring at me. My face began to burn, and I gruffly shouldered my way past the people at the top to examine the path that ran there.

  The man who had brought Pethering h
ere, however, had vanished into the scuffed leaf mould. The path was too well used for a single passerby to have left his mark, and he was not so obliging as to have deposited a thread from Pethering's coat or a tuft from his trousers legs on a passing branch, not that I could discover.

  I finally gave it up and went back to the lake, where I found the doctor arrived, the body being loaded onto a stretcher, and the stony-faced, muddy coated police constable under the control of an inspector.

  The inspector, whose name was Fyfe, did not know what to make of me; I could see him decide that it was best to defer judgement until all the votes were in. Noncommittally, he tugged his hat politely at Baring-Gould's introduction and merely said he'd be speaking to me later. As none of what I had found could influence the first flush of his investigation, I agreed, asking only that he please do his best to keep the curious off the western ramp.

  "PC Bennett is taking care of that," he said mildly. I refrained from looking across at the hapless constable, reduced to guard duty.

  I was also, quite simply, not up to the prolonged explanation and argument that I was sure would ensue when a rural inspector of police encountered a female amateur detective's analysis of a crime. All of a sudden I was deathly tired and enormously cold, and Baring-Gould, loyally standing by, looked even worse.

  "Inspector, I'll go back to the house now and finish my breakfast," I heard my voice say. "The rector ought to be in out of the cold, as well." I did not listen to hear the inspector's yea or nay; I only waited until I saw Baring-Gould turning to his waiting sedan-chair and two strong men leaping forward to carry him back to the warmth.

  I did not even make it across the meadow before the reaction hit me. In part it was sheer physical cold, but also, and I think chiefly, it was the psychic strain of dealing competently and in a professional manner in the face of a bloating corpse, and moreover one that I had known, however briefly, alive.

  I was shuddering with cold when I got back to the house. An anxious housemaid stood at the door, ordered no doubt by Mrs Elliott to stay there but eager to know what was happening. Her questions died when she saw my face, and she helped me take off the borrowed coat. I was shivering so badly I could barely speak, but I succeeded in telling her that the coat was to be returned to Andrew Budd, and that I was going to bath.

  I used the nail-brush on the skin of my right hand until the hand looked raw, and I drained the bath and ran it full and even hotter. My skin went pink, then red, but I still trembled inside, until the maid appeared (looking a bit pink herself—Mrs Elliott's stern hand had resumed control downstairs, a dim part of my mind diagnosed) with a tea tray and a cup already poured—very little tea in it, but a great deal of hot milk, sugar, and whisky. I drank the foul mixture with gratitude, and the fluttering subsided.

  I began to relax, and then to think, and eventually I succumbed to a brief gust of shaky, half-hysterical laughter: Who would have thought I could make such a fuss over an irritating insect like Pethering?

  SEVENTEEN

  As the drift tin was exhausted, and the slag of the earlier miners was used up, it came to be necessary to run adits for tin, and work the veins.

  —A Book of Dartmoor

  Insect or not, the squashing of him left me distinctly queasy, on and off during the day. Baring-Gould withdrew to his room, leaving Inspector Fyfe little scope for questioning apart from me. When we had been over it all so many times even he was thoroughly sick of it, he left.

  A few minutes later the housemaid Rosemary slipped in and placed a tray on the table beside the chair where I sat trying to summon the energy to rise.

  "Mrs Elliott thought you could maybe use a coffee," she murmured, and slipped out again.

  Bully for Mrs Elliott, I thought, to offer as refreshment a change from the endless cups of tea we had been swilling all day. A bracing cup of coffee to celebrate the (however temporary) repelling of constabulary boarders, and along with it, I was amused to find, a selection of three kinds of freshly baked biscuits that explained the odours that had wafted in from the door that connected the drawing room to the kitchen. If Mrs Elliott chose to work off her upset by indulging in an orgy of baking, it was fine with me.

  I wandered nervously in and out of rooms until I found myself in Baring-Gould's study, where I retrieved the manuscript copy of Further Reminiscences from the heap of papers where I had left it. Being handwritten, I thought, the going would be slow, but distracting enough to take my mind off the events of the day. And so it proved—when, that is, I could keep my attention on the pages at all. Time and again I caught myself staring blindly into space, and wrenched my thoughts back onto Baring-Gould's writing. His early parishes did not seem to have been successes, and his marriage was touched upon so lightly that it would have been easy to miss it entirely. The manuscript was, in fact, the least revealing autobiography I had ever read, being much more concerned with the minutiae of European travel and the triumphs of antiquarian explorations than his relationship with his wife or the birth of his children. Belgian art, the history of Lew, a trip to Freiburg, lengthy letters to his friend and travelling companion Gatrill, ghost stories, love philtres, and thirty pages on the collecting of folk songs were occasionally interesting, often tedious. The only thing that caught my attention was a brief mention of gold, but when I reread the passage I saw that he was talking about Bodmin Moor, some distance to the west, and I read on as he described being first lost in the fog and then sucked up to his shoulders into a bog.

  The long day dribbled to a close, punctuated only by a solitary dinner (I very nearly asked if I might join the others in the kitchen, but decided it would be too cruel) and an eventual adjournment upstairs—not to bed, which would have been futile, but to allow the servants to close up the house for the night.

  Three times during the day I had my coat on and stood at the door, ready to set off up the hill to the village post-office telephone, and three times I took off my coat and went back to my book before the fire. If this case were to be given over to Scotland Yard, a word in Mycroft's ear would cause a memorandum to travel sideways, across two or three desks, until it finally reached the desk of a man who could pick up the telephone and arrange for one of the more sympathetic Yard men to be sent.

  But what if that did happen, what if they even sent Holmes' old friend Lestrade himself? Would it make any difference if the official investigator was friendly or not? In fact, would it not actually be better if the Holmes partnership was disconnected from the police forces, allowing us to get on with our own investigation without undue interference? (Assuming, of course, that Holmes reappeared to take up his share of the burden. The man's penchant for disappearing at inconvenient moments was at times maddening.)

  In the end, I stayed with my book, deciding that the pull of the telephone was only the urge to be doing something (anything!) and meekly removed myself upstairs at an appropriate hour.

  By one o'clock in the morning, I had given up the attempt to read and sat watching my thoughts chase one another around by the low flicker of the fire. By two I had ceased feeding the coals and climbed under the bedclothes, but I did not even attempt to douse the light. I knew that the pathetic back of the dead man's head would be waiting for me in the dark, so I let my mind poke and prod at the restrictions that ignorance had laid, trying with a complete lack of success to put together a puzzle missing half its pieces.

  At three o'clock a stealthy sound from downstairs jerked me up into instant alarm: heart pounding, mouth open, I strained for a repetition. It came, and I instantly swung my feet off the bed and was reaching for a heavy object when my brain succeeded in asserting itself against the adrenaline. It was unlikely that a burglar or would-be murderer would have a key to the front door.

  Sure enough, in less than two minutes my bedroom door opened, quietly but surely, and Holmes came in, wearing the dark suit of London with an inexplicable quantity of mud and grass clinging to the ankles. He closed the door, turned, and stopped dead.

&nb
sp; "Good Lord, Russell, what have you been up to?"

  I had almost forgotten the state of my face, but whatever he saw behind the bruises and contusions had him by my side in a few rapid steps.

  "What?" he demanded. "What is it?"

  I did not give him his answer until some time later, but then, I did not need to. Holmes was always very satisfactory at determining, with a minimum of clues, what in a given situation was the required course of action.

  ***

  There are times when verbal communication, vital as it may be in a partnership, is insufficient; this was one of those times. I clung to him, and even slept for a while towards morning before finally, reluctantly, stirring.

  "Pethering is dead," I told him. He jerked and I felt him looking at my forehead. "No, there is no relationship to my injuries—I got those in a fall up on the moor." I gave him a brief sketch of my trip across Dartmoor and a slightly more detailed description of my impromptu visit to Baskerville Hall, then went on to the previous day's sequence of events, starting with theology at dawn and ending with meaningless words on a page at midnight. Once, I might have been too ashamed to tell him about my exaggerated response to the death of a scarcely known nuisance, but we had been through too much together for my overreaction to cause more than a pang of embarrassment in the telling. Or perhaps I was just too tired to care.

  "They will do an autopsy?" he asked.

  "Fyfe said they would do."

  "And he's preserved the marks on the ramp?"

  "They had a tarpaulin over it."

  "Better than nothing at all, I suppose. Plaster casts of the heel marks?"

  "I doubt it."

  "I shall have to insist."

  I laughed shortly. "I don't know how much influence you'll have down here. Certainly the name of Sherlock Holmes' wife is nothing to conjure with."

  "Ah, poor Russell, forced to ride along in her husband's turn-ups. It is a backward area, with no respect for women's brains. Never mind; we'll both have to resort to Gould's influence before we're through."