He caught the old familiar stream-smell of cool, damp earth and rotting vegetation, and the smell carried him back to his own childhood. He had explored streams like this a lifetime ago, searching for the shy things that lived and grew and died in hiding along the water's edge; the memory of soft wet moss under his fingers and smooth squidgy mud between his toes was there with the smell, long forgotten but never forgettable. . . . And the memory of the solitary little boy who had preferred such dark passages between the woodlands not only for the mysteries they concealed but also because of the invisibility they gave him.
Invisibility. No matter there were seven thousand pairs of eyes or seventy thousand on the ridge above, it would still have been easy for the killer to have stolen up on Jim Ratcliffe unnoticed.
"—somebody came down the stream, anyway. The mud was disturbed all the way to the farm bridge a quarter of a mile dummy5
upstream, in the spinney there." Digby pointed again.
"Couldn't make out the footprints, of course. Or anything else, except they were recent when we examined them. But someone came down and then went back again, and there's a road just the other side of the trees there. So it would have been easy, coming and going."
Easy?
"How did Ratcliffe die?"
For an instant the young sergeant frowned—no doubt Audley's ignorance of the simplest basic facts of the crime was still confusing him. Then he straightened his expression into formal blankness again.
"One blow on the back of the neck, sir. What the newspapers call 'a karate chop' now, but what used to be called a rabbit-punch." He paused. "Easy again—if you know how to do it."
Easy?
This time Audley's eye was caught by the wheat stubble.
Another memory there, but one much closer to the surface, for he could never pass a harvested field without half-recalling this one ... a memory half-golden, because time edged all youthful memories with gold, but dark also because time never quite succeeded in erasing the blurred recollection of unhappiness.
Not a child any more, nor even a snotty schoolboy though still at school, but a gauche youth . . . still lonely and introverted—the concept of the mixed-up teenager hadn't dummy5
existed then because no one had yet coined the word
"teenager": it had not been his brains which had saved him in that cruel society, but his accidental prowess on the rugger field.
Tackle him low, Audley!
No, that was the wrong memory leading him up the wrong cul-de-sac—it was the school harvest camp he wanted, the endless boring stooking of the sheaves in the National Interest.
And one particular memory, obscene and humiliating—
It had been just such a corn field in the first year of the war.
They had stopped stooking as the binder had come to the final cut in the centre of the field, fanning out in readiness for the rabbits trapped in the last of the standing wheat to make their break—and in the mad exhilarating chase he had driven one big buck right back into the cutting blades—
Kill it then, man!
One front paw gone, the other horribly mangled, the thing had suddenly come alive, the hind legs kicking with the strength of desperation.
Kill it, Audley—go on, man—kill it!
He had seen it done half a dozen times by the tractor driver, the grizzled man with the patch on his lung and the ten children. It had been a casual, matter-of-fact action: hold the hind legs and strike down with the edge of the stiffened hand.
dummy5
Rabbit-punch.
Easy.
Four times he had tried, his own increasing desperation rising to match the rabbit's, but failing to master it. Blood had spattered his trousers—why can't you die, rabbit?
Then the tractor driver had snatched it from him—
Give us 'un, then, for Lord's sake.
One quick professional chop. Then, for final measure, the man had stretched the twitching thing, legs in one hand, neck in the other. He could still hear that stretching sound, the small creaking noise.
Well, 'tis a good 'un, any road. You'm let the other best 'uns go.
From that dark memory to the banks of the Swine Brook, and now to the darkness beyond the study window, was a journey across years and hours time-travelled in a fraction of a second. . . . But he hadn't returned empty handed.
There was the short answer to Weston's off-the-record certainty and young Digby's word for it.
Not easy.
Because it wasn't so easy to kill a rabbit with one blow, and a man was bigger game and another game altogether. It wasn't simply that they had eliminated all the costumed battlefield actors who'd been playing at killing—he could afford to take dummy5
that for granted now, the hundreds of statements checked and cross-checked. This was a killing, and more than that, a neat and tidy killing, which was another thing and a very different thing. Because for all the popular claptrap, not one person in a thousand could guarantee to do that with one blow. That guarantee was the hallmark of the professional.
It had been Digby's qualification that mattered—
Easy—if you know how to do it.
"I see. He came down the stream—that's the hypothesis. And he hit Jim Ratcliffe once—that's the forensic fact?"
"Yes, sir."
"And Ratcliffe was crouching in his gap in the bushes beside the stream—here?"
"Yes, sir."
"Behind the smoke he was most conveniently making. . . .
And then?"
Digby pointed. "Ratcliffe was struck down here, sir. Then his body was rolled over the bank—" he pointed again "— there."
"Hypothesis?"
"Fact." Digby took two steps. "And he was found in the water
—there. Fact."
Audley peered over the edge of the bank. The motion of the water was imperceptible, it was like a millpond. At this point, where the Swine Brook flowed out of its tunnel in a gentle dummy5
curve, the stream had formed a shallow pool behind a miniature dam built with fallen branches and plugged with the accumulated detritus lodged in them by the winter floods. Over the years those same floods had carved the overhang at his feet, through which the feathery roots of the bushes trailed in a curtain towards the surface of the water.
In its original state, with the tangle of thorn and bramble all around, this would have been a fine and private place to tuck a body, no doubt about that.
"Ratcliffe was lying right under the overhang, sir." Digby seemed to have read his thoughts. "I didn't actually see him until I was standing right on the edge, where you are now exactly."
No need to elaborate on that. Rolled over and then tucked in out of sight. No one who had fallen, or been pushed or knocked, would ever have come to rest so tidily, virtually out of sight in the shallows. That had been the killer's risk, but one taken coolly to minimise the greater risk of quick discovery and maximise the chance of a trouble-free getaway.
And a small risk at that, because only Sergeant Digby's trained eye would have spotted the dividing line between horrid accident and suspicious circumstance. And only Sergeant Digby, of all people, would then have fortified his suspicions with established police procedure—
Protect the scene of the crime.
Much more likely, even if the body had been discovered sooner rather than later, would have been these destructive dummy5
moments of chaos which usually attended presumed accidents. People milling around in panic or ghoulish curiosity, moving the body, trampling the place flat and obliterating any shred of evidence or circumstance that there might be. With only a little luck here on Swine Brook Field—