with a battle going on nearby and seven thousand spectators poised to stampede down the hillside—there wouldn't have been any scene of the crime left by the time any sort of trained observer reached the spot. And then, with just a little more luck, there might not have been any crime, just an unfortunate but comprehensible accident of the sort discerning coppers like Weston had foreseen.
But a little luck had gone the other way for once, in the presence of Sergeant Henry Digby.
And doubly the other way. . . .
Audley frowned. "Why did you come here and look, Sergeant?"
"I beg your pardon, sir?"
Audley realised that he had been staring down into the still pool so long that the Sergeant had moved away from him.
"I'm sorry. . . . You were on station down there—" he pointed towards the clump of willow trees "—and then you came up here to look for Ratcliffe. Why did you do that?"
Digby stared at him for a moment. "But it wasn't to look for Ratcliffe, sir. It was because of the dye—"
dummy5
Such a curious thing, utterly unforeseeable, had made the best-laid scheme go agley. In less fatal circumstances a joke, and even now a piece of the blackest comedy.
The durability of Durex contraceptives.
It seemed likely, thought Audley, that James Ratcliffe had practical experience of their resistance, for he had taped no less than eight of them to his body, four at the front and four at the back, when the explosion of any one in each place would have been sufficiently effective to simulate death by cannonball.
Would have—and had been. For he had been carried out of the battle with most of them still intact, still loaded with air and red dye, and it had taken the spikes of the hawthorns and brambles against which he had fallen and over which he had been rolled to puncture the rest of them.
Dye on the ground, where he had fallen.
Dye on the edge of the bank, where he had been rolled.
And most of all dye in the Swine Brook itself, the tell-tale stain of which had eventually carried its message downstream to Sergeant Digby, who of all people happened to be the one best trained and disposed to read it.
"It was because of the dye—coming down from above where I was putting it in. So I knew somebody was playing silly buggers upstream from where I was."
"Why should that matter?"
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"If it was the same stuff I was putting into the water it didn't matter, because that was non-toxic. But there are dyes and dyes. If there was some idiot adding a toxic chemical to the water there could be hell to pay downstream, where farm animals drank from it—it could have cost the society a fortune in damages. That's why I went to find out double-quick."
"I see. So you came to this gap first and found Ratcliffe in the water straight off?"
"Not straight off, sir. But I saw traces of the dye on the ground, where the contraceptives had burst. And the whole pool was red by then."
Blood everywhere. And not a drop spilt. "That must have given you a nasty shock."
"It gave me a shock when I looked over the edge of the bank and found Jim Ratcliffe, I can tell you, sir."
Audley nodded. "In what you rightly took to be suspicious circumstances?"
The sergeant lifted his hands in an oddly uncharacteristic gesture of doubt. "Well, sir ... it wasn't quite as cut and dried as that. I had to make sure as far as I could that he was dead first. There's—there's a routine for this sort of situation."
"Of course." Audley watched the young man closely. "Yet your suspicions were aroused very quickly, were they not?"
Digby's jaw tightened. "Yes, sir."
"Because of the way the body was tucked in under the bank, dummy5
and the blobs of dye on the ground where he had fallen —and so on?"
"Yes, sir." A muscle in the young man's cheek twitched nervously. "I believed there was a possibility of foul play."
"And not ... an accidental blow with the butt of a pike, say.
During the rout?"
Digby steadied. "The body was in the stream before that."
"But that would have been . . . only a matter of minutes. How can you be so sure?"
Without a word Digby bent down and plucked a handful of dry grass from the edge of the pool. Then he leant over and dropped the handful into the water under the overhang.
"Watch, sir," he said simply.
Audley watched. For a few moments he thought the grass was stationary. Then, almost imperceptibly, it began to move upstream: here, in the still pool above the natural dam of winter debris there was a lazy backcurrent. Whatever entered it was carried in a slow circle, round and round, until it sank or was caught by the band of accumulated scum at the lip of the dam.
Digby followed his glance and pointed. "The stream doesn't go over the top there, you can see—there isn't much water coming down, with the drought we've had, and there wasn't then either. It just seeps through underneath."
Audley eyed the drifting grass, substituting for it in his imagination the thread of dye which would have unwound dummy5
from Ratcliffe's body in the sluggish movement of the water.
And as it unwound it would have spread until the stain filled the pool . . . and only then would it begin to sink to find the chinks in the dam . . .
Not just sharp, but bloody sharp. Almost too bloody sharp to be true, was Sergeant Digby.
"How long did it take to reach you, then?"
"Not less than fifteen minutes." There was no sign of doubt and nervousness now. "And fifteen minutes before I found the body the rout hadn't started. Nobody broke ranks before the final attack, either —I know, because I was watching. And that was the way it was planned, too."
"Planned?"
"That's right. The first two attacks, the dead and wounded were carried back to the stream. But after that they lay where they fell—for effect . . ." Digby trailed off, momentarily embarrassed.
Audley studied him for a few seconds, then turned back towards the pool. "And you took one look, and smelt a rat—
because of the time factor . . . that's what it amounts to, does it?"
The muscle twitched again. "You could say that, sir—yes."
"I am saying that, Sergeant. If it had been after the rout you might have put it down to accident, but before the rout you weren't so sure—is that it?"
"I couldn't see how it had happened when it did happen, yes dummy5
sir."
"Good." Audley lifted his gaze back to the sergeant. "Well then, Sergeant, I'd be obliged if you'd tell me how the devil you knew there was a time factor at all?"
"Sir?" Digby frowned at him.
Audley hardened his expression. "How did you know so much about the behaviour of the stream?"
Digby relaxed abruptly. "Oh—that."
"That, yes."
"Because we don't leave anything to chance, sir." Digby smiled at him innocently. "When we stage a battle we do it properly. ... So I gave the dye a trial run a week before, to find the best place for it, and I tried this pool first because the gap here was more sheltered than the one downstream.
But it took too long—and it spread the dye too much." He pointed downstream. "What we needed was for the water to be good and red where Black Thomas was due to drink it, and still pink when it reached the road bridge where the crowd could see it. So in the end we decided on the big willow as the best place."
"We?"
"The Special Effects Section . . . sir," amended the sergeant politely.
Good boy, thought Audley. If you have to kick the top brass, always kick them politely.
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"I see. And everyone knew about this, I take it?"
"It's in the battle scenario, sir— Appendix F." Digby nodded.
"Everyone has to know exactly what's happening, otherwise things are bound to go wrong. We've learnt that by bitter experience. So you see—"
Audley smiled into the stillness of his study, remembering the sergeant's meticulous account of the battle of Swine Brook Field with admiration.