The Moor - Laurie R. King [117]
"And do you know, the residents of the farm thought on the whole that perhaps they had heard a motorcar, just after dark, on Thursday night."
For a long moment I could not think why he was looking at me so intently. I began to reconstruct Thursday in my mind, and when I did I felt as if someone had hit me very low in the stomach.
"Just after dark? Oh Holmes, no. You don't mean…You can't mean…"
"Approximately how long was Scheiman gone with the motorcar when you were at Baskerville Hall?"
"Perhaps three hours," I answered reluctantly.
"Say fourteen miles from Baskerville Hall to the farm, a mile up and down to retrieve the body, fourteen miles back. Three hours sounds right."
I put my hand over my mouth in revulsion. If Holmes was right, the car in which Ketteridge had driven me back to Lew House had also contained the two-day-old body of Randolph Pethering. Ketteridge must have known. He had to know.
"Did Ketteridge know?" I asked.
"So it would seem, unless you think Scheiman motored back home with his employer, and then immediately turned around and retraced his steps to bring the body here."
"No. And I can't see Scheiman quite so cold-blooded, not to turn a hair at his innocent employer's getting behind the wheel with a corpse in the boot of the car." I shuddered at the reminder that I had been in that car, had sat making inconsequential remarks about the beauty of the evening, while just behind me lay the folded-up remains of the man whose coat I would be hanging onto the following morning.
I pushed it away from me. "Why not leave him in the mine? Why bring him here?"
"Look at the map, Russell. Even though the actual sightings cut across the diagonal from northeast to central west, I think we can safely say that their entire purpose has been to keep people away from the northwestern segment of the moor. When they have been forced to create points of interest, such as where Josiah Gorton was left and the hound sighted, or Pethering's body found, each of those points has been away from the northwestern quadrant. It would have been a risk to leave a body in a mine so near the area they wanted people to avoid—bodies have a way of getting themselves found, after all, particularly when they lie less than a mile from farms with their sharp-nosed dogs. And it would be arduous in the extreme to dig a large enough hole in the sodden peat to bury someone, and carrying him across the moor, to Watern Tor perhaps, would also involve the risk of discovery. Josiah Gorton they transported clear to the other side of the moor, but for some reason—grown cocky perhaps, or short of time, or merely the difference between disposing of a wandering tin seeker who had no family and a young and educated outsider whose death could be expected to attract a degree of attention—they decided to remove Pethering from the moor altogether. Your arrival that day at Baskerville Hall may have given them the idea, or they might have settled on it in any case."
I thought about it for a long minute, dissatisfied, but there was no more to be done with the question at the moment. "Have you been up on the moor all this time, then?"
"More or less. After interviewing the farmer I determined that there was, indeed, a place where a motorcar had pulled off the road two or three days before. Dunlops," he said, before I could ask. "Relatively new, such as Ketteridge's motor runs on."
"Thank God for that. I was beginning to think he was as ghostly as Lady Howard."
"Though it's not much use as proof in a court of law."
"True."
"I then went to visit the army garrison near Okehampton."
"Good heavens."
"I had to be sure that what appeared to be shelling was in fact not."
"Of course."
"Major-General Nicholas Wyke-Murchington gave me a cup of tea."
"How nice."
"Not terribly. It was nine o'clock this morning and I could have done with strong coffee and a full breakfast."
"Where did you stop the night yesterday?"