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By Root 539 0

death. Mrs Sandbourne gave particulars of the coach tour, the expedition as arranged for that particular afternoon, and particulars of how the fatality had occurred. Miss Temple, she said, although not young, was a very brisk walker. The party were going along a well known footpath which led round the curve of a hill which slowly mounted to the old Moorland Church originally built in Elizabethan times, though repaired and added to later. On an adjoining crest was what was called the Bonaventure Memorial. It was a fairly steep ascent and people usually climbed it at different paces from each other. The younger ones very often ran or walked ahead and reached their destination much earlier than the others. The elderly ones took it slowly. She herself usually kept at the rear of the party so that she could, if necessary, suggest to people who were tired that they could, if they liked, go back. Miss Temple, she said, had been talking to a Mr and Mrs Butler. Miss Temple, though she was over sixty, had been slightly impatient at their slow pace and had outdistanced them, had turned a corner and gone on ahead rather rapidly, which she had done often before. She was inclined to get impatient if waiting for people to catch up for too long, and preferred to make her own pace. They had heard a cry ahead, and she and the others had run on, turned a curve of the pathway and had found Miss Temple lying on the ground. A large boulder detached from the hillside above where there were several others of the same kind, must, they had thought, have rolled down the hillside and struck Miss Temple as she was going along the path below. A most unfortunate and tragic accident.

‘You had no idea there was anything but an accident?’

‘No, indeed. I can hardly see how it could have been anything but an accident.’

‘You saw no one above you on the hillside?’

‘No. This is the main path round the hill but of course people do wander about over the top. I did not see anyone that particular afternoon.’

Then Joanna Crawford was called. After particulars of her name and age Dr Stokes asked,

‘You were not walking with the remainder of the party?’

‘No, we had left the path. We’d gone round the hill a little higher up the slope.’

‘You were walking with a companion?’

‘Yes. With Mr Emlyn Price.’

‘There was no one else actually walking with you?’

‘No. We were talking and we were looking at one or two of the flowers. They seemed of rather an uncommon kind. Emlyn’s interested in botany.’

‘Were you out of sight of the rest of the party?’

‘Not all the time. They were walking along the main path — some way below us, that is.’

‘Did you see Miss Temple?’

‘I think so. She was walking ahead of the others, and I think I saw her turn a corner of the path ahead of them after which we didn’t see her because the contour of the hill hid her.’

‘Did you see someone walking above you on the hillside?’

‘Yes. Up amongst a good many boulders. There’s a sort of great patch of boulders on the side of the hill.’

‘Yes,’ said Dr Stokes, ‘I know exactly the place you mean. Large granite boulders. People call them the Wethers, or the Grey Wethers sometimes.’

‘I suppose they might look like sheep from a distance but we weren’t so very far away from them.’

‘And you saw someone up there?’

‘Yes. Someone was more or less in the middle of the boulders, leaning over them.’

‘Pushing them, do you think?’

‘Yes. I thought so, and wondered why. He seemed to be pushing at one on the outside of the group near the edge. They were so big and so heavy I would have thought it was impossible to push them. But the one he or she was pushing seemed to be balanced like a rocking stone.’

‘You said first he, now you say he or she, Miss Crawford. Which do you think it was?’

‘Well, I thought — I suppose — I suppose I thought it was a man, but I wasn’t actually thinking at the time. It was — he or she was — wearing trousers and a pullover, a sort of man’s pullover with a polo neck.’

‘What colour was the pullover?’

‘Rather a bright red and black in checks. And there was longish hair at the back