The Moor - Laurie R. King [84]
"I say, Mrs—" he started to call. With that the door burst open and what looked like half the population of Lew Down spilled into the room, all of them gabbling at once.
Baring-Gould rose majestically to his feet and glared at them all. "Stop this at once," he thundered. Instant silence resulted. "Thomas, what is the meaning of this?"
The man automatically tugged off his cap, polite even in the extremity of his emotional upheaval. "A body, Rector," the man stammered. "There's a dead man in the lake."
SIXTEEN
The care for the tenants, the obligation of setting an example of justice, integrity, kindliness, religious observance, has been bred in him, and enforced by parental warning through three centuries at the least, on his infant mind. What is born in the bone comes out in the flesh.
—Early Reminiscences
It was fortunate that I was already dressed and wearing my shoes, because a pair of bedroom slippers would surely have been torn to shreds, or left behind, long before I reached the quarry lake. I was out of my chair before Baring-Gould could articulate a response to the man's statement, out of the front door without pausing to catch up a coat, across the drive, through the meadow, and on the edge of the watery chasm before anyone else had even emerged from the house on my trail.
I was not, however, before any others at the lake. Gathering a great breath, I cupped my hands and shouted at the full strength of my lungs, "Stop where you are! Don't touch him!"
Even over the constant splash of the waterfall my unladylike bellow bounced off the stone walls with sufficient force to startle the would-be rescuers. One of them slipped and fell backwards from the rowboat into the lake, which distracted the others long enough for me to race around the lake's rim and plunge down the closer of the one-time quarry's two access ramps, now a steep hillside heavily overgrown with fern and bramble, and slippery with fallen leaves. I caught my breath at the water's edge and waited for the boat to reach the shore.
Two other men had been picking their way around the precipitous south wall of the lake, and now stood eyeing me disapprovingly.
"Please," I called to them. "You must leave him there until the police have seen him. I know it doesn't seem respectful of the dead, but it's necessary, believe me. And try to walk back in the same place you went over."
I suppose that had it been summer, I might not have been so quick to think of the possibility of what the police blotters call foul play. On a long summer's night I could well imagine the lure this cool, slightly ominous spot might be for a group of young men on their way home from the pub. But in October, and with the awareness of wrongdoing on the moor, it was the first thing that came to mind, and I did not want heavy boots destroying any evidence we might unearth.
The five men gathered around me, one of them dripping wet, none of them showing much inclination to leave. I suggested mildly that the wet one might be better off dry, and thus rid myself of him and an escort, but the three remaining men, one of whom I had seen working around Lew House, planted themselves like trees and looked suspicious.
"Do you know who it is?" I asked them. They did not, only that it was a man, and he was not from around here, both of which facts I had already determined by a brief glance from the quarry rim. (That, and the sure knowledge that it was not Holmes. Not that for a moment I actually thought it was: My mad dash from the house was set off by professional concerns, not wifely imaginings. Truly.) The trousers on those reassuringly short legs had never belonged to a Devonshire working man. "Has anyone gone for the police