With lips set so tight around his pipe that he came close to biting its stem in half, Trubshawe made his way, half-walking, half-running, towards the two matchingly sinister shadows.
Tobermory’s was the first of the bodies to be bathed in the harsh yellow beam of his torchlight. The dog was lying on his side and, if it hadn’t been for his foam-flecked mouth, his smashed-up rib-cage and the blood which polka-dotted the blankness of the snow, he could almost have been asleep. He wasn’t asleep, though, he was dead. Yet the breath of life had quit his body so recently, and with such haste, that his nostrils, if no longer quivering, were still moist.
No one dared to speculate on Trubshawe’s feelings as he contemplated his dead companion. At last, though, he turned his torch on the larger of the two shapeless masses. There was, of course, no suspense whatever as to its identity. It was, as everyone knew it could only be, the Colonel.
‘Oh, Jesus!’ said Don in a whisper.
‘This is truly vile!’ gasped Evadne Mount. ‘Ray Gentry was vermin – but Roger? Why would anyone want to murder Roger?’
The Chief-Inspector wasted no time venting either grief or fury. He bent over the body like a terrier poised at a rathole and laid his head sideways on the Colonel’s chest. Then, gazing up at the cluster of faces circled about his own, he cried out:
‘He’s alive! He’s still alive!’
At first sight the Colonel had seemed just as dead as Tobermory. But when a light was trained directly on to his face, both his eyelids began to twitch – independently of one another, a strange and rather horrible sight – and, every five seconds or so, a convulsively jerky little quaver would shake each of his shoulders in turn.
‘What’s happening to him?’
‘I think he may be in some sort of a coma, Farrar – possibly he’s had an internal haemorrhage – not impossible he’s even had a stroke. Rolfe will be able to make a proper diagnosis. But he’s definitely alive. Look here.’ The policeman directed his index finger at a bloodied rip in the Colonel’s overcoat. ‘The murderer was obviously aiming at the heart, but, see, the bullet went in much too high, through the shoulder and out again.’
Quickly taking in the surrounding waste-land, he muttered, ‘No point in looking for the bullet in this weather. Or for footprints. They’ll all have long since been buried under the snow.’
Once more he looked down at the unconscious man.
‘I’m no doctor,’ he said, ‘but in my time I’ve had to deal with a good number of men who’ve just been shot and I’m convinced he can be saved.’
‘But what are we going to do?’ asked Don. ‘Don’t they always say you should never move a wounded body?’
‘Yes, I daresay they do, but I’m less worried about the wound, which seems to be a relatively superficial one, than about a possible psychological reaction setting in. No, I certainly don’t recommend leaving the old boy here on the ground while one of us runs back to the house to fetch Rolfe. In this case, we don’t have a choice. We’ve got to carry him back ourselves.’
‘Yeah, you’re right, of course.’
Don at once peeled off his racoon coat and said to Trubshawe:
‘Here. We can use this to support him. You know, like on a stretcher?’
‘We-ell, but that’s a pretty flimsy jumper you have on. Aren’t you afraid you’ll freeze out here?’
‘Don’t worry about me, I’ll be okay.’
‘Good lad,’ said Trubshawe approvingly. ‘You’ve got what it takes.’
Then Evadne Mount spoke up.
‘And Tobermory?’
‘I know, I know … For the moment, though, the only thing that matters is to get the Colonel home. Don’t think I’ve forgotten old Tober. I haven’t and I never shall. But we’re going to have to abandon him for now. I’ll come out here later and – well, I’ll make sure he’s given a decent burial. Thank you, anyway, for asking.’
‘Why gun down a poor old blind animal?’ said Don. ‘It’s just crazy.’
Again Trubshawe gazed at the lifeless creature who had once been his most faithful and, at the end, his best friend, and for a few seconds his natural unflappability was tempered by a very real and visible emotion.
‘No, son, whatever it was, it wasn’t crazy,’ he quietly replied. ‘Tober may have been blind, but they do say a blind man’s surviving senses – specially his sense of smell – are sharpened by the loss of his sight and I imagine that’s just as true of a dog. P’raps truer. Tobermory was a witness, a dumb witness, so he had to be silenced. Dogs, even blind dogs, know right from wrong, and they remember, too, who did right and who did wrong. He would have snarled and growled at the murderer for ever afterwards.’
‘Inspector, I couldn’t be sorrier.’
‘Thanks, but this is no time for sentiment. Now, men,’ he said, gauging the strength of each one, ‘if we follow Don’s suggestion and use his coat as a stretcher, I think we can get the Colonel back home without worsening his condition. Farrar, help me roll him over – softly, softly does it – softly, I say. Don, you look as though you’re the strongest of the three of us, so why don’t you pick up your coat from the other end? That’s right – good, good – but take care you keep it from swinging too much. It’s not a hammock. Farrar, you and I will take him from this end.’
‘What about me?’ asked Evadne Mount. ‘What can I do?’
‘You? You’re going to be our guide. We’ll really need a guide, so keep your mind and your eyes focused on the way ahead. Here – take my torchlight as well as your own and direct them both at your feet. If you observe any hump, any bump, any ridge, any kind of concavity, anything at all we should look out for, make whatever detour you have to and we’ll follow suit. Understood?’
‘Understood.’
‘Now. Everyone knows what he’s got to do? Okay. One – two – three – all together!’
Then, with a wave of his hand, like the boss of a wagon train, he cried out:
‘Lead on, Evadne Mount!’
So it was that our dolorous little procession forged its slow and solemn path across the snow-mantled moors.
Chapter Thirteen
It seems that Mary ffolkes had chosen to ignore Dr Rolfe’s recommendation that she remain in a reclining position until the search party’s arrival home. Or else, more likely, knowing her, she had at the very last minute been alarmed by a cry from Selina – who at her mother’s request had stationed herself at the french window in order to catch the earliest possible glimpse of the Colonel’s return – and then leapt up to discover what had occasioned it. Whichever it was, the poor woman must have witnessed the funereal spectacle of her husband being borne across the moors on an improvised stretcher and, having assumed the worst, as loved ones inevitably do, simply fainted away. For, when the Colonel was finally transported into the drawing-room and his comatose body eased on to the sofa, Rolfe was already in the process of administering the smelling-salts.
Realising that nothing could more quickly and effectively snap her out of her fit than to be told that her husband’s condition wasn’t as terminal as she believed, Trubshawe all but elbowed Rolfe aside to give her the glad news.
‘Mrs ffolkes, can you hear me? I say, can you hear me, Mrs ffolkes?’
Half-raising her eyelids, baring eyes that were filmy with shock and grief, Mary ffolkes peered into his rough and ready features.
‘Roger? Is he …?’
‘No, Mrs ffolkes. He isn’t dead, if that’s what you were going to ask me. I won’t keep it from you. He’s in pretty bad shape. But he isn’t dead and he isn’t about to die.’