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By Root 5466 0

rotting vegetation. Gardening implements hung from nails, some of them so rusty that they were now only skeletons of themselves: a spade with its broad face eaten away, a rake with its teeth flaked into threads as thin as needles, all thanks to some gardener who in happier times had been too idle or trusting to oil the metal. Not so long ago, perhaps only two or three years earlier, some lazy person had dumped a pile of grass under the work-bench, the mowing from one of the lawns. In the interim it had turned into a yellowish, putrid mass with a hard outer crust indented with the print of a boot.

Altogether the potting-shed had seemed to the Major too stark and comfortless a place to leave a young man’s body, even for so short a time. So with the help of Seán Murphy he had carried it into the house and placed it on a side table in the gun room. Here at least one could be fairly sure that the sight of it would not disturb the ladies. All the same, once it had been laid out on the table and Seán Murphy had retired, his friendly face still registering shock at this sudden contact with mortality, the Major found himself wondering whether it might not have been better to have left it where it was. The ragged clothes of a labourer, the muddy boots laced with string, the threadbare jacket and patched trousers—all this seemed out of keeping with the gracious oak panelling and the antlers on the walls, even when stretched horizontal with death on a side table. It was almost as startling, mused the Major, as finding a chimney-sweep lounging on the sofa in one’s drawing-room. Now that it was here in the gun room the body seemed to have been more at ease in the potting-shed.

He stood back, head on one side and finger to his mouth. Well, it would be absurd to have it carried back to the potting-shed now. He would have done better to leave it as it was, perhaps, but there was no point in worrying about that. His eye fell on another incongruity: above the body on a shelf there were a great many tarnished silver cups, for Edward had been a marksman in his day. Still was, apparently, in spite of his shaking hands. But the less one thought about that the better.

Shaking his head wearily he looked round for something to throw over the dead man. But there was nothing, so he left the room for a moment and returned with a clean tablecloth which he unfolded and threw over the body, taking another look as he did so at the young man’s white face and bright red hair, at the bluish eyelids which he had closed himself. The mouth was hanging open, however, and this gave the face an imbecile appearance. Turning, the Major’s eye at this moment encountered the resentful, open-mouthed pike in the glass case over the mantelpiece and he thought: “That won’t do at all. I must close the poor lad’s mouth before it gets too stiff.”

Touching the face gave him an unpleasant shock. The skin was still soft and pliable to his fingertips. It so obviously belonged to someone! He shuddered as he gently squeezed the chin until the lips closed.

But when he took his hand away the mouth fell open once more. He tried again and the same thing happened. The position of the head was wrong, that was the trouble. On the shelf below the silver cups he found a copy of Wisden’s Almanac for 1911 which he judged to have the right thickness. He blew the dust from it and slipped it under the boy’s head. This time the mouth stayed closed. Taking a deep breath, the Major went to sit down in one of the armchairs by the empty grate.

He sat for five minutes without moving a muscle. Then there was a knock on the door and Edward came in, somewhat apologetically.

“Ah, there you are, Brendan. I was wondering where you’d got to.”

He looked round the room and gave a slight start when his eye fell on the bulging tablecloth. But he made no comment as he came to sit down opposite the Major. Nor did the Major speak.

Presently Edward, with his head tilted back and mouth open in a way that strangely resembled the corpse’s attitude of a few minutes earlier, said: “My nose has been bleeding...