Patchin retreated noiselessly, got back into his car, and returned to Hambleden Mill. He fished stolidly for three hours with a dour expression on his face, an expression that some North Korean soldiers had probably glimpsed before he killed them with his bayonet. Usually he returned small fish to the river, but on that afternoon he just ripped them off the hook and threw them on the bank.
Returning home again at about his usual time, Patchin found his wife in an excellent mood. Fornication seemed to be good for her health, as she appeared blooming. A delicious supper had been prepared for him, and Angela had popped over to the village stores to buy a bottle of the dry cider he favoured. She looked quite fetching with her flushed cheeks, her curly blonde hair freshly washed, and the two top buttons of a new pink blouse left undone, but Patchin could not respond at all; momentarily he found it difficult to keep up the pretence of not knowing about her affair and felt as though an expression of suspicion and cold contempt must appear on his face. When he went to wash he stared in the mirror and was surprised to find the usual phlegmatic expression reflected.
After supper Angela wanted to stroll around in the garden. It was something Patchin normally enjoyed, seeing the results of all his hard work, for in June the garden looked at its best, with the rose beds “a picture,” as Angela said, and usually it was very satisfactory to inspect the neat rows of vegetables. Instead he experienced a most unusual mood of emptiness and frustration: everything seemed hollow and meaningless.
While his wife bent down to smell a rose, Daniel Patchin stared up at the clear evening sky. He knew his enjoyment of life was temporarily lost and that it would not return until he was rid of the man who threatened his marriage. Angela came and stood by him, took his hand, and placed it on her firm, round breast, an action that would have been quite out of character a few months before; but her new sensuality did not move him at all, and when they went to bed, making love to her was like a ritual, quite spoilt by his memory of the protesting bedsprings.
Patchin decided to try to put his plan of murder into effect on the second Wednesday in July. Angela went for a walk again on the Monday of that week, so according to his understanding of the postman’s routine, it seemed probable that Ray Johnson would be working on the Wednesday afternoon. If so, he would then be driving down the narrow lane that skirted Calcot Wood to clear a remote, little-used postbox about 3 p.m.
On the Wednesday, Patchin felt quite calm and confident that everything would go as he devised. He set off from Pound Cottage promptly at 2 p.m. after an excellent lunch of roast loin of pork with the first new potatoes from the garden and a large helping of broad beans. His haversack had been got ready on the previous evening. It now contained some other things as well as fishing tackle: rubber gloves, matches, a ball of extremely tough cord, sticking plasters, and a foot-long piece of iron pipe.
Parking his van just off the lane by the wood in a cunningly chosen spot where it would not be seen, Patchin took his haversack and walked quickly through the wood to Ames’s cottage. He experienced pleasurable excitement in doing so and in inspecting the fire he had laid in the kitchen grate. It consisted of three fire lighters, paper spills and wood chippings, a few sticks, and numerous small pieces of coal. It had been constructed with the care that a chaffinch gives to making its nest, and he estimated that it would bum intensely for an hour or two. “Quite long enough to roast a joint,” he said in an expressionless voice as he got up from his crouching position in front of the grate.
After inspecting the trails of wood chippings soaked in paraffin which he had laid throughout the cottage like long fuses leading to explosive charges, he glanced round the wildly overgrown plot that had once been a garden. Rank grass a foot high contended with massive clumps of nettles, giant docks, and cow parsley. He did not think that it would be possible to trace footprints on such a terrain, but also he did not expect his enterprise to be risk-free. There were bound to be risks in a life governed by mere chance.
It was 2:45 p.m. when he walked back through the wood to the narrow, twisting lane. He wore the rubber gloves; his left hand was in his old fishing-jacket pocket and the other was plunged into the haversack that hung from his right shoulder. He positioned himself in the lane so that he would be on the driver’s side of the van when it approached him. The oppressive mood which had dogged him for so many weeks had lifted, and he whistled as he waited — a rather tuneless version of “As Time Goes By,” which he repeated over and over again.
At 3 p.m. precisely he heard a motor engine in the lane and got ready to wave the van down if it was driven by Johnson. For the first time that afternoon excitement seized him, with a thumping of his heart and a sudden tremor of fear such as he had always experienced before hand-to-hand fighting in Korea. He had once said to another soldier there, “Everyone’s afraid at times. Anyone who says he isn’t is either a liar or a fool.”
As the post office van came round the comer, Patchin waved it down, first tentatively then more vigorously as he spotted Johnson’s head of black curly hair. Johnson stopped the van, rolled its window farther down, and called out, “What’s up?”
Patchin walked slowly across to the van, limping very slightly and holding himself as though he were in pain. “Sorry, sorry,” he said. “Bit of trouble.” He came close to the van door and stood silent, with his eyes half-closed and swaying slightly as though he were going to faint.
With a puzzled expression in which there was just the faintest hint of suspicion, Johnson opened the van door and began to get out — his height made doing so a rather awkward business. Patchin took out the iron pipe and hit Johnson on the head, a measured blow by someone who had considerable experience in stunning animals. Johnson lurched forward and then fell in a heap, just like a poleaxed bullock. Patchin bundled him back into the van, got into the driving seat, and drove off down the lane, whistling the same tune again. After a hundred yards he turned off onto a track which led in the direction of the gamekeeper’s cottage. Before leaving the red van he pressed Johnson’s fingers on the steering wheel, then bundled the body up and carried it on his shoulder as easily as he managed a side of beef.
He also paused in the decaying doorway to impress Johnson’s fingerprints on two empty paraffin cans, then carried him through to the kitchen. The tall man was still inert, but as Patchin dropped his burden onto the cement floor, Johnson’s eyelids flickered. Patchin sat him up like a ventriloquist’s dummy and then knocked him out with a blow to the jaw that would have floored most boxers.
Patchin put sticky plasters over Johnson’s large mouth, then worked on the unconscious man with the skill he always showed in preparing joints. He put his legs neatly together and bound them tightly from above the knee to the ankles, using the same binding technique he used in repairing his fishing rod, pulling the cord so tight that the legs became immobile; he left a loop by the ankles. He repeated the process with the limp arms. Then came the part that gave him most satisfaction: lifting the two loops onto the hooks that had once supported a turnspit in front of the fire. Immediately after Johnson was suspended like an animal carcase ready to be roasted, Patchin lit the fire in the grate and left the cottage.