‘She produced what she seems to think is double proof: first, that, as we knew a long time ago, there is no flint in this part of the country; second, that this is a worked flint.’
‘Flint could be brought in for road repairs, sir, and this piece brought in along with the rest of the chippings.’
‘All right, show me the part of a local road where such repairs have been made. Even if you can, it couldn’t be anywhere near Watersmeet. There’s only a woodland path beside the river which leads to where the man died.’
‘You will be showing the bit of flint to Sir Ranulph, of course, sir?’
‘Of course. Don’t ask damn silly questions. Still, as you have asked one, I’ll give you a damn silly answer. When Sir Ranulph has done with it, I shall show it to the murderer.’
‘But we don’t know — ’
‘Who the murderer is? No, we don’t, but Dame Beatrice swears she does and, such is her reputation, I am forced to do as she says when she names the murderer. Well, come on down to the Axe and Sapling and I’ll buy you a drink.’
‘They don’t take axes to saplings,’ said Callum, ‘but it’s a new pub and the landlord is a Londoner, so what can you expect?’
‘His country lore may be all askew, but there’s nothing wrong with his beer,’ said Harrow.
The exhumations took their grisly course, beginning at five in the morning. The rain soaked down, the ground around the graves was a mass of trampled mud, and the only comfort to be got out of the affair was that the weather kept away even the most morbid-minded sightseer.
The two graves were a long way apart. Dr Rant’s head-stone had an honoured place along the central path through the cemetery; the chemist’s one-time errand-boy had been buried on the outskirts and his grave was unmarked except on the custodian’s map.
The little knot of men whose business it was to be on the scene waited in the rain, hats pulled down and dripping from the brim, coat collars turned up; but the heavy work had all been done on the previous evening when the cemetery had been closed to the public, so the time of waiting in the wet was not over-long and the coffins were soon on their way.
Sir Ranulph and the county pathologist were both present at what the former called ‘the lifting’, so were Harrow, Callum and a reporter (uninvited and outside the cemetery railings) from the Axehead local newspaper. There were also two grave-diggers, there to put the finishing touches to their work of the previous day and also to join with the custodian in verifying the information on the metal labels of the coffins. At the gates of the cemetery two uniformed constables had been stationed to ensure that no unauthorised persons attempted to storm the fortress of the dead, and in the street an ambulance waited to receive the newly resurrected doctor and the erstwhile chemist’s assistant.
‘Nothing now but to wait for the findings, whether negative or positive,’ said Harrow to Callum as they sheltered in a shop doorway before making their separate ways home for breakfast. ‘It will take some time, I reckon, before we get a report.’
‘At any rate, our investigations, since we knew the identity of the Watersmeet body, have given us some satisfaction, sir. We’ve traced the man’s movements to a certain extent. We know he emigrated and we know he soon got into trouble and came back here pretty well broke. That’s when he turned to blackmail, I’ll bet.’
‘I’m not as well satisfied as you seem to be,’ said Harrow. ‘We didn’t discover who the chap was. It took Dame Beatrice to work that one out.’
‘We beavered away at the Australian end, sir.’
‘Only with a lot of boost from our own top brass, and we could have done nothing unless Dame Beatrice had got a name put on the man. Thank goodness he didn’t festoon himself with a set of aliases like the valley chap.’
‘Well, when he emigrated he had done nothing wrong, sir, so far as we can prove.’
‘That’s true, but he seems to have made up for it since. Dame Beatrice thinks the chemist left him to make up the prescriptions when he could no longer be sure of reading the doctor’s writing himself, and it’s likely enough. Her theory is that our chap mixed the ingredients cheerfully enough at first, but then something about the prescriptions made him suspicious, so he must have kept them as evidence in case anything should rear itself up later.’
‘He wanted to cover himself and the chemist, you mean, sir?’
‘Dame Beatrice is certain that’s all there was in it to begin with, but that when he came back to England he saw the prescriptions as a means of blackmail.’
‘But Dr Rant was dead by then. He wrote his own prescriptions. You can’t blackmail a dead man.’
‘The dead man left two daughters and left them pretty comfortably off, remember.’
‘Is that what Dame Beatrice thinks? — that the women were being blackmailed?’
‘It’s what I think. That older one, Miss Bryony Rant, is bright enough to have picked up doctor’s shorthand from her father and I’ve no doubt she had access to the official pad on which the prescriptions were written out before the leaf was torn out and given to the chemist.’
‘So, as she was in charge of the Crozier Lodge car, she took her father’s prescriptions into Castercombe to get them made up, you mean, but the prescription the doctor had written out for himself was not the prescription handed in to the chemist? I thought, though, that we were told Dr Mortlake took over from Miss Rant in delivering the prescriptions.’
Strange and bizarre things are done in the name of science. Some are cruel, some repulsive. The clipping of Dr Rant’s nails and hair came, to the lay mind, under the latter heading, but to Sir Ranulph it was all in the day’s work. That done, the corpse was decently re-interred. The Watersmeet man was already back in his grave, for the fitting of the coup de poing to the hole in his skull had proved to be no more than a formality.
The shrouding tarpaulins in the cemetery had not gone unremarked although, with the break in the weather, they had been seen by few. The news, however, found its way around in the way news seems to do and it reached Dr Mortlake through the agency of the local tobacconist.
‘Doings at the cemetery, so I heard,’ she said. ‘Don’t do to believe everything you hear, though, does it? There’s some as knows how to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear, whatever our grandmothers used to say.’
‘A funeral, Mrs Wake? I didn’t know anybody in the town had been buried. Who was it?’
‘Not buried. Un-buried, if you take my meaning, doctor, and there was two of them, at that. All done secret, with screens around and policemen on the gate and everything.’
‘Good gracious me! Who were they!’
‘Oh, well, you know what people are! They’ll say anything if it’s a bit spicy. I was told it might be Dr Rant for one. It was along the main path and just about where he laid, but, if that was so, I reckon you’d have knowed about it, you being a doctor, too.’
‘Where was the other screen put up? You mentioned two graves, I think.’
‘That’s right, or so I heard. The other tarpaulins was over on the Beestone road end, but nobody don’t seem to know whose grave it was.’
The reports came through in due course and could not be kept out of the local paper. From there they reached the big dailies and there followed a sensational article in a Sunday paper headed: How many other graves ought to be investigated? Analysis of Dr Rant’s hair and fingernails had revealed nothing, so there was still no conclusive proof that his death had been anything but accidental. However, the subject of poison had been raised and provoked much speculation. Perhaps the doctor’s worsening condition could be attributed to a slow, systematic poisoning which, combined with the quantities of alcohol he had consumed, eventually proved fatal?