I told my clerk–there were only the two of us in the office–that I was going to do a round of visits, and that I shouldn’t come back. Then I drove twice round the shoot through all the lanes and roads that were near to it. There was no sign at all of anything wrong, no cars of police or strangers parked by the roadside or on the cart tracks.
I dropped in on old Blossom, the farmer from whom I rented the shooting. We had a mug of cider together–he was one of the few men left in the county who still made his own–and talked of local affairs. He evidently hadn’t been disturbed by police or anyone else. He mightn’t have told me, of course, if he had; but I knew him well enough to recognize his manner when he was being heavily discreet. You could always hear him turning on the caution, and forcing his geniality a bit.
As I drove out of Blossom’s gate and over the stream, I passed a man standing on the roadside near the bridge. He looked brisk and important, like a fussy foreman on a job he didn’t understand. In the ordinary way he would never have made me suspicious. Blossom’s farm, the tall elms and the clear chalk stream, made a pretty, if somewhat obvious picture that always attracted the holiday-making townsman. It was a bit late, however, for holidays, and it wasn’t a week end; and then the man was dressed as some minor, pestiferous government employee, yet had no vehicle in sight. I drove very slowly away, and watched him in the mirror. He was looking after my car; he wrote something, presumably its number, in a notebook.
I pulled up a little farther on, and climbed a slope to observe him. He seemed to be making a sort of census of traffic. The vet and the baker both stopped at the farm, and, as if glad of the opportunity, he asked them questions. His self-satisfaction was obvious, even from a distance.
I couldn’t believe this little man was a policeman, or that his questions were police routine. If anyone had approached the Dorset Constabulary with some story, necessarily vague, of a man shot on Blossom’s land, their very first move would be to interview Blossom and inspect the ground. They wouldn’t put a plain-clothes detective on the job before they knew whether there was a word of truth in the yarn.
Somebody else, however, seemed to have acted quickly. My thoughts returned to the imagined gang of game and poultry thieves. Perhaps they had some ingenious method of attracting things wild and edible by light or by some device that needed careful leveling. In any case this was a warning that some sort of investigation was going on. My simple plan had to be scrapped. I couldn’t risk leaving my car anywhere near the shoot, under possible observation, while I dug up the body and carried it back.
I drove on and lunched very late at a remote pub overlooking the Blackmoor Vale, where the landlord, who was a friend of mine, always had something solid to eat which food controllers had never heard of. On this occasion it was a badger ham, and very good it was. I was amazed at my appetite, and ashamed–but then I realized that my mind, all unknown to me, had been making deductions. Somebody was as yet unwilling to call in the police; and that could only mean that my shot was–well, not justified from any legal or moral point of view, but at least the sort of accident that did occur in the world to which the dead man had belonged. The instancy of his companion’s escape bore it out. Why run, unless he had a very guilty conscience or had been prepared to be shot at? Any normal citizen, however timid, would have protested then and there (though keeping, perhaps, carefully under cover) and would have gone to the police that very night.
So my conscience was easier, and my appetite made me realize it. I wasn’t quite in the position of a drunken driver who kills a man on the road and hides the body. I was more like the householder who shoots at a burglar and accidentally kills him. The law would take a serious view of such a crime, but the householder himself would not; and, if he could easily get rid of the body, he might be fool enough, as I was, to try.
I was strongly tempted to leave well enough alone; but then I should be at the mercy of the merest accident all through the winter–Blossom’s inquisitive sheepdogs, the rain or the rabbits themselves. No, the body couldn’t be left where it was. On the other hand it could no longer be removed by road. The only solution was to find a better hiding place on the shoot itself.
That wasn’t going to be easy. Hedges and coverts were thick with all the dying vegetation of summer, and I couldn’t dig in such stuff–apart from the physical difficulty of it–without leaving a patch of beaten ground which would be conspicuous to any determined searcher. Digging in the open and leveling off so that nothing suspicious remained was, at any rate at night, quite impossible. At last, in my after-lunch meditation, it occurred to me that I needn’t do either.
In the northeast corner of the shoot, at the top of the boundary hedge, was a tumble-down piece of dry stone walling which had once surrounded a barn or cottage, and now contained only a clump of beeches and a jungle of brambles. On the south side, just off Blossom’s land, was a field which had been freshly plowed and harrowed. I intended to pull down a short stretch of wall, dig a shallow hole and replace the stones when I had finished. The earth could be scattered on the new-turned earth of the field, and raked over with a branch. The nettles and bramble on the inner side of the wall would be undisturbed, and, if the job were neatly done, the two persons most concerned could rest in peace.
In the afternoon I drove back along the upper road and still saw nothing to disquiet me. I stopped for an instant to hide the spade in a ditch where I could pick it up later. When I reached Dorchester I put my car in the public car park and collected my bicycle at the little shop which had mended the puncture. I kept to the back streets, for I didn’t want to run into Cecily, who might be in town, or any of my friends.
After dusk I approached the shoot, very cautiously and without lights, along the upper road. I was prepared to give up the whole plan if I passed a single stranger, but I didn’t. For three miles, without either village or cottage, this narrow, well-metaled byroad switchbacked up and down across the high ground. There were several ways of scrambling across country from the road to Blossom’s land, but only one regular track–if you can call a couple of ruts in the grass a track.
I carefully reconnoitered the point where the track met the road. The man who ran away had taken this route the previous night. By bending close to the ground I could just make out the print of tires in the mud where his car had been parked. Then I rode on up the road, collected the spade, hid my bicycle and worked my way silently across the fields to the clump of beeches and the wall. There I was fairly close to the pit, but a good half mile from the corner of the hedge where the accident had happened.
It was a gusty night, with thin clouds whose lower edge occasionally touched the top of the downs and enveloped them in mist. The trees within the wall creaked and whispered, and the thorn and holly and elder of the great hedge rattled their branches and dying leaves. There was enough noise to cover any that I might make myself. Even so, before I started to remove the stones I sat still and watched and listened. The clouds were often tenuous enough to show the shape of a half-moon, and then I could see a hundred yards into the milky and uneasy world that surrounded me.
One by one I removed the flat stones of the wall, placing them on the bare earth of the field so that I would know in what order they went back. I hadn’t, of course, taken on the impossible task of replacing a neat wall in position. I wanted only to leave the tumble of stones, the wall-shaped object, looking much as it had before. While I worked I had my back towards the length of the boundary hedge, and I can’t say I liked it. With my back unguarded, with such a beastly task in front of me, and in not too deep a darkness, across which flitted the wisps and wraiths of cloud, I had to keep a tight hold on imagination.