The Moor - Laurie R. King [88]
The man who had brought Pethering here, however, had vanished into the scuffed leaf mould. The path was too well used for a single passerby to have left his mark, and he was not so obliging as to have deposited a thread from Pethering's coat or a tuft from his trousers legs on a passing branch, not that I could discover.
I finally gave it up and went back to the lake, where I found the doctor arrived, the body being loaded onto a stretcher, and the stony-faced, muddy coated police constable under the control of an inspector.
The inspector, whose name was Fyfe, did not know what to make of me; I could see him decide that it was best to defer judgement until all the votes were in. Noncommittally, he tugged his hat politely at Baring-Gould's introduction and merely said he'd be speaking to me later. As none of what I had found could influence the first flush of his investigation, I agreed, asking only that he please do his best to keep the curious off the western ramp.
"PC Bennett is taking care of that," he said mildly. I refrained from looking across at the hapless constable, reduced to guard duty.
I was also, quite simply, not up to the prolonged explanation and argument that I was sure would ensue when a rural inspector of police encountered a female amateur detective's analysis of a crime. All of a sudden I was deathly tired and enormously cold, and Baring-Gould, loyally standing by, looked even worse.
"Inspector, I'll go back to the house now and finish my breakfast," I heard my voice say. "The rector ought to be in out of the cold, as well." I did not listen to hear the inspector's yea or nay; I only waited until I saw Baring-Gould turning to his waiting sedan-chair and two strong men leaping forward to carry him back to the warmth.
I did not even make it across the meadow before the reaction hit me. In part it was sheer physical cold, but also, and I think chiefly, it was the psychic strain of dealing competently and in a professional manner in the face of a bloating corpse, and moreover one that I had known, however briefly, alive.
I was shuddering with cold when I got back to the house. An anxious housemaid stood at the door, ordered no doubt by Mrs Elliott to stay there but eager to know what was happening. Her questions died when she saw my face, and she helped me take off the borrowed coat. I was shivering so badly I could barely speak, but I succeeded in telling her that the coat was to be returned to Andrew Budd, and that I was going to bath.
I used the nail-brush on the skin of my right hand until the hand looked raw, and I drained the bath and ran it full and even hotter. My skin went pink, then red, but I still trembled inside, until the maid appeared (looking a bit pink herself—Mrs Elliott's stern hand had resumed control downstairs, a dim part of my mind diagnosed) with a tea tray and a cup already poured—very little tea in it, but a great deal of hot milk, sugar, and whisky. I drank the foul mixture with gratitude, and the fluttering subsided.
I began to relax, and then to think, and eventually I succumbed to a brief gust of shaky, half-hysterical laughter: Who would have thought I could make such a fuss over an irritating insect like Pethering?
SEVENTEEN
As the drift tin was exhausted, and the slag of the earlier miners was used up, it came to be necessary to run adits for tin, and work the veins.
—A Book of Dartmoor
Insect or not, the squashing of him left me distinctly queasy, on and off during the day. Baring-Gould withdrew to his room, leaving Inspector Fyfe little scope for questioning apart from me. When we had been over it all so many times even he was thoroughly sick of it, he left.
A few minutes later the housemaid Rosemary slipped in and placed a tray on the table beside the chair where I sat trying to summon the energy to rise.
"Mrs Elliott thought you could maybe use a coffee," she murmured, and slipped out again.
Bully for Mrs Elliott, I