‘Yes, yes. Well, I don’t doubt that you are right.’
The old man composed the seam of his mouth into the most insincere smile Inspector Bellows had ever seen.
‘And, really,’ he continued, ‘it is most fortunate that you require so little assistance from me, since, as you must know, I am retired. As indeed I have been since the tenth of August, 1914. At which time, you may take it from me, I was far less sunk in decrepitude than the withered carapace you now see before you.’ He tapped the shaft of his stick juridically against the doorstep. They were dismissed. ‘Good day.’
And then, with an echo of the love of theatrics that had so tried the patience and enlivened the language of the inspector’s grandfather, the old man tilted his face up to the sun, and closed his eyes.
The two policemen stood a moment, watching this shameless simulacrum of an afternoon nap. It crossed the inspector’s mind that perhaps the old man wished them to plead with him. He glanced at DC Quint. No doubt abject pleading with the mad old hermit was a step to which his late predecessor would never have been reduced. And yet how much there was to be learned from such a man if only one could—
The eyes snapped open, and now the smile hardened into something more sincere and cruel.
‘Still here?’ he said.
‘Sir – if I may—’
‘Very well.’ The old man chuckled dryly, entirely to himself. ‘I have considered the needs of my bees. And I believe that I can spare a few hours. Therefore I will assist you.’ He held up a long, admonishing finger. ‘To find the boy’s parrot.’ Laboriously, and with an air that rebuffed in advance any offers of assistance, the old man, relying heavily on his scarred black stick, hoisted himself onto his feet. ‘If we should encounter the actual murderer along the way, well, then it will be so much the better for you.’
IV
The old man settled himself onto one knee. The left one; the right knee was no good for anything anymore. It took him a damnably long time, and on the way down there was a horrible snapping sound. But he managed it and went about his work with dispatch. He pulled off his right glove and poked his naked finger into the bloody mud where Richard Woolsey Shane’s life had seeped away. Then he reached into the old conjuror’s pocket sewn into the lining of his cloak and took out his glass. It was brass and tortoise shell, and bore around its bezel an affectionate inscription from the sole great friend of his life.
With a series of huffings and grunts, labouring across twenty feet square of level ground as if they were the sheer icy face of Karakorum, the old man turned his beloved lens upon everything that occupied or surrounded the fatal spot, tucked between the lush green hedgerows of Hallows Lane, at which Shane’s half-headless body had been found, early that morning, by his landlord, Mr Panicker. Alas that the body had already been moved, and by clumsy men in heavy boots! All that remained was its faint imprint, a twisted cross in the dust. On the right tyre of the dead man’s motorcar – awfully flash for a traveller in milking machines – he noted the centripetal pattern and moderate degree of darkening in the feathery spray of blood on the tyre’s white wall. Though the police had made a search of the car, turning up an Ordnance Survey map of Sussex, a length of clear rubber milking hose, bits of valve and pipe, several glossy prospectuses for the Chedbourne & Jones Lactrola R-5, and a well-thumbed copy of Treadley’s Common Diseases of Milch Kine, 1926 edition, the old man went over the whole thing again. All the while, though he was unaware of it, he kept up a steady muttering, nodding his head from time to time, carrying on one half of a conversation, and showing a certain impatience with his invisible interlocutor. This procedure required nearly forty minutes, but when he emerged from the car, feeling quite as if he ought to lie down, he was holding a live .45 calibre cartridge for that highly unlikely Webley, and an unsmoked Murat cigarette, an Egyptian brand whose choice by the victim, were it his, seemed to indicate still greater unsuspected depths of experience or romance. Finally he dug around in the mulchy earth that lay beneath the hedgerows, finding in the process a piece of shattered cranium, stuck with bits of skin and hair, that the policemen, to their evident discomfiture, had missed.
He handled the grisly bit of evidence without hesitation or qualm. He had seen human beings in every state, phase and attitude of death: a Cheapside drab tumbled, throat cut, headfirst down a stairway of the Thames Embankment, blood pooling in her mouth and eye sockets; a stolen child, green as a kelpie, stuffed into a storm drain; the papery pale husk of a pensioner, killed with arsenic over the course of a dozen years; a skeleton looted by kites and dogs and countless insects, bleached and creaking in a wood, tattered garments fluttering like flags; a pocketful of teeth and bone chips in a shovelful of pale incriminating ash. There was nothing remarkable, nothing at all, about the crooked X that death had scrawled in the dust of Hallows Lane.
At last he put the glass away and stood up as straight as he could manage. He gave a last look around at the situation of the hedgerows, the MG under its tarpaulin of dust, the behaviour of the rooks, the direction taken by the coal smoke streaming from the chimney of the vicarage. Then he turned to the young inspector, studying him at some length without speaking.
‘Anything wrong?’ Sandy Bellows’s grandson said. So far the old man had refrained from asking the inspector whether his grandfather was living or dead. He knew all too well what the answer would be.
‘You have done a fine job,’ the old man said. ‘First rate.’
The inspector smiled, and his eyes travelled to the sullen Constable Quint, standing by the little green roadster. The constable pulled on one half of his moustache and glowered at the muddy purple puddle at his feet.
‘Shane was approached and struck, with considerable force, from behind; you have that much right. Tell me, Inspector, how you square that with your idea that the deceased came upon and surprised young Mr Panicker in the act of stealing the parrot?’
Bellows started to speak, then left off with a short, weary sigh, and shook his head. DC Quint tugged his moustache down now, in an attempt to conceal the smile that had formed on his lips.
‘The pattern and frequency of footprints indicates,’ the old man continued, ‘that at the moment the blow fell Mr Shane was moving in some haste, and carrying something in his left hand, something rather heavy, I should wager. Since your men found his valise and all of his personal effects by the garden door, as if waiting to be transferred to the boot of the car, and since the birdcage is nowhere to be found, I think it reasonable to infer that Shane was fleeing, when he was murdered, with the birdcage. Presumably the bird was in it, though I think a thorough search of neighbourhood trees ought to be made, and soon.’
The young inspector turned to DC Quint and nodded once. DC Quint let go of his moustache. He looked aghast.
‘You can’t mean, sir, with all due respect, that you want me to waste valuable time staring up into trees looking for a—’
‘Oh, you needn’t worry, Detective Constable,’ the old man said, with a wink. He did not care to divulge his hypothesis – naturally only one of several under consideration – that Bruno the African grey parrot might be clever enough to have engineered an escape from his captor. Men, policemen in particular, tended to discount the capacity of animals to enact, often with considerable panache, the foulest of crimes and the most daring stunts. ‘You can’t miss the tail.’
Constable Quint seemed unable for a moment to gain control of the musculature of his jaw. Then he turned and stomped off down the lane, toward the trellised doorway that led into the garden of the vicarage.
‘As for you.’ The old man turned to the inspector. ‘You must seek to inform yourself about our victim. I will want to see the body, of course. I suspect we may discover—’
A woman screamed, grandly at first, almost one would have said with a hint of melody. Then her cry disintegrated into a series of little gasping