“Well, I suppose you can still find a bit of sport?”
Mr. Melton looked shocked, but surrendered when he saw that I was not.
“I can,” he admitted. “But I only tells you that, mind, to give you confidence. And I don’t hold with them dirty gangs from London what clears out all the pheasants in one night. I’m a reasonable man. One for the pot and one for my expenses.”
I rang the bell for Ferrin again. I have always respected the sporting singlehanded poacher and employed him if he were employable at all. Jim Melton was a useful ally.
“Heard of Fred Gorble?” he asked, when more drinks were on the table.
“No.”
“Fred ain’t too careful what he buys, see? Lives in a caravan on a bit of woodland of his own, with some old farm buildings and no proper road to ‘em. I puts some honest business his way from time to time, which makes a nice change for him.
“Tuesday night I was up there to tell ‘im about a load of old iron what he might have a use for when I sees a ‘orse in the stable what I wasn’t meant to see. Tidy ‘orse, that, I says. Not mine, says he. Whose is it, I asks, for I knows an old girl out Blixworth way what’s looking for a quiet ‘orse up to her weight. You forget about that ‘orse, Jim, he says — you ain’t seen it.
“Well, I thinks, that ‘orse is a ‘unter if ever I see one, but what’s he up to with a ‘unter in the flat season? If it had been winter, I’d have known he was keeping it till the dye wore off. So I thinks, what’s in this for me? Just as you would yourself. And when I says good-by to Fred, I don’t go far but slips round the back of the wood, like. I watches him looking for me, ‘alf-‘earted, but he soon gives up his suspicions.
“Now, this is what I sees, and I wouldn’t think nothing of it if Ferrin hadn’t said you was a friend of his and that you weren’t trustin’ the rozzers to tell you all they knows any more than you want to tell them all you knows.
“Bloke comes along about ‘alf past nine and goes into Fred’s from the back. Changes into boots and breeches and bowler ‘at and then goes off on the ‘orse. Funny time for hackin’, I thinks. And that’s all I knows.”
“When you saw him go into Gorble’s from the back,” I asked, “could he have been coming from the Long Down?”
“Not your end of it, he couldn’t. But the other end he could.”
“How was he dressed before he changed?”
“Couldn’t see in the dusk. But a big bloke, he was, with a cap on his head.”
“Any form of luggage? A knapsack on his back?” I asked, for I couldn’t understand how he had managed to change out of riding kit and into the brown tweed suit at Fred Gorble’s.
“Rolled cape on his saddle when I saw him,” Jim Melton suggested.
That was good enough. All he needed to carry in the roll were shoes, a cap, a pair of trousers to match his jacket, and a collar and tie to take the place of his cravat.
This invaluable agent now insisted on paying for the next round of drinks. Stiff whiskies seemed to have no effect on him whatever. Myself, I was awash with beer; but Ian’s brewery did not seem to be all Ferrin claimed for it. When we had finished, Jim Melton nodded to me, vanished through the kitchen door of the pub, round the back of the yard into the road and along the road to the public bar. It was very evidently his habit to let no one know his business or whereabouts.
As soon as Ian came home I told him the story. He went straight to the telephone to ask whether a rider had passed either of the patrol cars the night before.
“That damned Melton!” he exclaimed while he waited for the reply. “I’ve spent all of a week trying to get hold of him to tell him to keep his eyes open. Bloody little crook! Doesn’t he strike you as the perfect type of double agent?”
He didn’t. Jim had no sense of self-importance. All he wanted from life was to be allowed to scrabble around among the roots of it and avoid notice.
“What did he do in the war?” I asked.
“Caught rats for the Ministry of Agriculture — after fooling the psychiatrists into believing he had fits every time he heard a bang.”
“And the village didn’t give him away?”
“Not they! The joke kept ‘em happy for five years!”
I could see that Jim Melton would be forever beyond Ian’s understanding. He had the quality of an old-fashioned Central European peasant. Any and all rascality was forgivable so long as it made established authority look an ass. The Meltons are the only relic of the feudal system left in England.
The call from the chief constable came through. Yes, one of the patrol cars had passed a well-dressed man on a horse and paid no attention.
“Did they stop?” I asked.
No, they had not stopped — just seen him in the headlights as they cruised by.
The dark gentleman had played his formidable knowledge of customs and country for all it was worth. Hunting with the famous packs of the Whaddon Chase and the Grafton was the winter sport of the district, and horse-breeding a flourishing local industry. Men in cars and on foot might be worth watching, but a well-dressed man on a horse would be assumed to have no interest in vulgar crime. He would not even arouse the curiosity of a town-bred traffic cop, whereas a local farmer would at least wonder where the devil he was hacking to or from at that time of night.
He must have discovered Fred Gorble’s establishment in his first reconnaissance of the district — for it would be an inconceivable coincidence that they already knew each other. Then he coolly rode in, weighed him up, told him a good story and arranged to stable his horse at a price which would keep Gorble’s mouth shut. The choice of a horse for transport between his base and the approaches to the Long Down was a stroke of genius. Should an unfortunate incident at the Warren be discovered before he was clear of the district, he could either canter casually past the police or, at the worst, make a highwayman’s escape across country.
“Well, now straight to the police!” said Ian briskly. “They can get on his tail and establish his identity. Where did he hire his horse? Where was he staying?”
“He hired his horse under a false name,” I answered, perhaps impatiently. “And wherever he was staying, he’s not there now. He may even be having lunch in your club today — without his prominent black eyebrows.”
“All right, Charles, all right! But how did he travel? Taxi drivers, ticket collectors, car registration numbers — that’s all daily bread and butter to the police.”
“Yes. They will trace him up to a point. But they won’t get near his identity.”
“He isn’t a superman!”
I agreed that he was not. He was just trained — and so was I —to recognize, anticipate and avoid police. I never, in old days, took a taxi anywhere near my starting point. I always gave the driver a reasonable mass destination which was close to but not my real one. I never repeated the same route. There would be no trouble in tracing the man to Euston Station, and a complete blank when he left it.
“But you can’t do nothing!” Ian exclaimed — and then, feeling that despairing cries were not strong enough, added, “You must not do nothing!”
I begged him to look at the position from my opponent’s point of view —who could not know that I had discovered the drugged dog nor that I suspected him. So the trap did not quite make sense as a trap.
“Was it one at all?” I went on. “Well, I had a friend with me whom he never saw arrive. And he had some other strongish reason — I don’t know what — to smell a rat. So for his own safety he must assume I expected him. And therefore it is dead certain he has cleared right out of the district for the moment and covered his tracks.