Well, no doubt I exaggerated. Perhaps some proofs could have been discovered by examination of the ground that my story was true. Perhaps I should never have been in the dock on a charge of murder. But most certainly I was guilty of manslaughter.
Now, if I am to explain properly the panic I was in, and what I did, I must tell a little about myself. My name is Roger Taine. I am thirty-four, with a family and no capital. I have a good job as Dorset agent for a big quarry combine, producing cement, roofing tiles, special bricks, stone for building and gravel for roads, and all sorts of by-products that interest an up-to-date architect or county surveyor. What with commission and salary, I’ve no complaints, but my family, of course, has no security beyond my own earning power.
So, as I stood over the corpse and watched the dark shadow–in a dusk already too deep to distinguish color-spreading over his clothes from beneath the head of that gigantic thumbtack, I passed from the police interrogation to what the judge would say. Shooting a harmless poacher as if I were some callous county magnate a hundred and fifty years ago. At the best criminally negligent. At the worst a savage sadist from whom society must be protected. Make an example of him. Five years.
I couldn’t expect to get less, and I deserved it. But when you have a family it’s not so much the sentence which counts as the result of it–the complete, irrevocable breaking of the continuity between past and future. I’m not one of your go-getters. A small post as a clerk with some charitable firm would be all I could hope for, and there, for the rest of my life, I should remain.
After hearing the judge’s remarks, I had no doubt at all that there weren’t going to be any judge’s remarks if I could help it. There was no one about. The dead man’s companion had cleared out without ever seeing me or even knowing where the shot came from. I caught a glimpse of him bolting over the skyline towards a lonely road which ran across the downs some five hundred yards from Blossom’s boundary, and then I saw the lights of a car gather speed and go tearing northwards.
I determined to get rid of the body where it wouldn’t be found. It was, I admit, the act of a bad citizen, and, to my present way of thinking, a great deal worse than taking a careful shot–for I was careful–at that broad and unexpectedly vulnerable target from a perfectly safe range.
The disposal of bodies, as anyone knows who reads the Sunday papers, is not easy: sooner or later they turn up. I could not hope to find a permanent solution then and there. He was too heavy to carry far, and I had no spade. The most I could do was to hide him, so that the man who ran away would assume, if he returned, that his companion had recovered and left. There was hardly any blood on the ground. No doubt police would have detected it, but it wasn’t visible to a casual eye.
I strapped my game bag over the wound and got him on my back. I was about to set off when it occurred to me that the traps were still in position. Was I to leave them or remove them? Either act might be evidence against me if there were ever any inquiry. I put him down, and hunted about in the last of the light. There were no traps at all. I found a spirit level, a foot rule and three more of those murderous broad-headed spikes.
The sweat poured down my ribs. Had I shot at some harmless Post Office surveyor? But that didn’t make sense. The wildest conjectures went through my head. Commando training? Broadcasting engineers? Some kind of official experiment? I had hoped, with an irresponsible, cowardly optimism that I suspect is shared by every criminal, that there would only be the most perfunctory search for my supposed poacher, or none at all; his accomplice hadn’t looked a man to get himself into the slightest trouble that could be avoided. But now it was absolutely certain that it would be some employer’s duty to make the most exhaustive inquiries.
It is curious how every animal, even a quarry agent, is a creature of habit. In the midst of this blinding mess, which should have excluded all other worries, I found time to be upset at the thought of returning home too late. My wife knew that I was up at the shoot, for I had telephoned from Dorchester after leaving my office. She would be anxious when I didn’t return at nightfall, and the children would catch her mood and refuse to go to sleep. I hated the thought of inventing some long and complicated lie. I never do lie to her. There’s no reason for it.
That made me impatient, and over-anxious for a quick and temporary solution. I should have bicycled home, got out my car and taken the body a hundred miles away from my shoot. The following night when, for all I knew, the place might be teeming with policemen, it would be impossible. The bicycle I must explain. Partly to save petrol, but more to keep fit, I always bicycled to and from the office on days when I knew I wasn’t going to need the car. And so that evening the bicycle was all I had.
I carried my burden half a mile along the top of the down, and dropped it, together with all its tools, into a rabbit warren. This was a hollow which must once have been a dew pond or a flint pit. The steep sides were honeycombed with rabbit holes, so large and so close together that once when I climbed down to pick up a shot rabbit the earth gave way and I sank over the knees. It was an unsavory spot, with the carcasses of half a dozen sheep at the bottom, which had died of disease and been thrown there to rot.
I stamped on the tunnels and galleries until the soil caved in. Then I laid the corpse in this irregular trench and lightly covered it. In the pockets and on the clothes there was nothing to prove identity–or at any rate nothing that I could see by the light of matches. I was careful to leave no smooth slope of new earth, and reckoned that there would be nothing suspicious to a casual eye. The only risk I ran was from a dog, which could track me across the down if he were put onto my scent in time.
I picked up my gun and returned to my bicycle, which was leaning against a haystack just off the upper road. On the way home I stopped at the edge of a fast stream and let the water run over my game bag and my coat to dissolve the blood. I wished to heaven that I had had more experience of police methods than odd bits and pieces gathered from newspaper reports and detective stories. War experience –well, there was that, and I suppose in a way it was useful. At any rate I had carried a dead man before though I didn’t know he was dead till we arrived. War, too, had convinced me that a remarkable deal of crime is never discovered at all.
It was nine o’clock when I got home, and, as I expected, Cecily was very worried. She had visions of a shooting accident; they were not unreasonable, and, if you think of it, they were correct. My lateness was inexplicable. If I had stopped at a pub or to see a friend on my way home, I should have telephoned. She knew, too, that I wouldn’t willingly disappoint our two boys, who had been promised a long story before bedtime.
I told her that I had stayed very late looking for a dead bird, and that on the way back a tire had been punctured (which was true, for I had driven a pin into it just before reaching home), so I had had to walk. She gave me a silent, doubtful look once or twice in the evening, which meant that she knew there was trouble on my mind, and that she too proud to ask for it. I pretended to be sulky just because I hadn’t shot anything.
The next day I awoke–if it can be called waking after such a night–with an atrocious, evil conscience. To prepare the way for my absence, I told Cecily that I intended to do a round of customers and prospects, and that, as I was going to be in the north of the county, I should call on my opposite number in Salisbury and stay the night. This was a perfectly normal routine; nevertheless she asked me diffidently to call her from Salisbury just to say that I was all right. I tied my bicycle to the roof of the car–on the grounds that I couldn’t be bothered to mend the puncture myself–and surreptitiously threw a spade into the back.