Thief's Mark. Carla Neggers

finish, the ending to the sentence obvious. With the Rolls-Royce gone, it looked as if Oliver had taken off voluntarily and deliberately before the police had arrived. “The police have little to go on at the moment,” Martin added finally. “The house isn’t alarmed. There’s no video of the incident. Only Ruthie and Oliver seem to have been at the house when it happened.”

      With a burst of energy, Martin started tidying up the area in front of the dovecote, grabbing garden tools and setting them inside by the worktable. He left the door open and came out and grabbed the bags of soil. Emma decided it was best not to offer to help. Given his employer’s ways, Martin was accustomed to running the show at the farm, and probably in London, too. He would want to be useful in some small way and reassert a sense of control.

      “How long were you down here before Oliver arrived?” she asked.

      “Here at the potting shed? Forty minutes.” Martin spoke with certainty as he stood in front of the dovecote door. He tapped his watch. “I happened to look at the time. Oliver stayed perhaps ten minutes.”

      “And the gardener—Henrietta Balfour? Was she here when you arrived?”

      “No. I got here first. She’d been out back yesterday and wanted to show me the flowerpot she’d found. We carried it around front. I went out back again to dig loam from the hillside while she gathered her potting supplies. Then Oliver came down from the house.” Martin paused. “And Henrietta’s a garden designer, not a gardener. She’ll tell you herself.”

      “I see,” Emma said.

      Colin peered through a small window into the dovecote. “Did Oliver say whether he’d come straight from the house?”

      “No, he didn’t, not specifically, but where else would he have come from?”

      “Pasture, barn, another outbuilding, one of the cottages.”

      Martin held up a hand. “Point taken.” He grabbed the rest of the tools and set them inside. He shut the door behind him, but not tightly, and dusted off his hands. “That’s done, then.”

      “How long after Oliver left here did Ruthie Burns alert you?” Emma asked.

      “Five minutes or so. I didn’t check my watch but it wasn’t more than that. Henrietta might know.” He sounded stronger, and his color was better. “I assume she’s walking here. She didn’t have her car this morning and the police didn’t discourage her from walking home. They haven’t said they’re investigating the death as a homicide. It could be a terrible accident, couldn’t it?” He sighed. “I know. Not for you to say.”

      Colin returned to the bench, stretching out his thick legs. “The police will have a better idea of what happened once they have autopsy results. They’ll figure it out.”

      “We’ve had nasty accidents on the farm,” Martin said. “Years ago a worker lost a finger. I can’t see how an accident this bloody and catastrophic could happen so close to the house. The police didn’t find blood inside the house, at least that I’m aware of. It can’t be just one of those things for a man to incur a cut that causes him to bleed to death.”

      “Oliver could have found him outside after he’d been cut, when it was too late to put pressure on the wound to do any good,” Colin said. “A cut brachial artery can be repaired.”

      “Death isn’t inevitable?”

      “It is if you don’t stop the bleeding and get help fast. I’m not a doctor and I can’t say what happened this morning.”

      Martin perked up. “Oliver is trained in martial arts. He might have known what to do in such a situation but was simply too late. If the man attacked him, Oliver’s martial arts training would have kicked in. He’d have defended himself, but not...” Martin went pale. “Not in such a grisly fashion.”

      Emma plucked a dried lobelia leaf from a pot and tossed it into the grass. “Do you have any idea when and where the injury to this man occurred?”

      Martin shook his head, squinting as if he was envisioning the scene. “I didn’t see a weapon—a sharp instrument or anything like that—but the cut must have occurred close to where Henrietta and I found him. I would think it happened moments before Ruthie, before Oliver...” Martin jerked his chin up. “You don’t think I killed this man, do you?”

      “Take us through your morning, if you would,” Emma said gently. “From when you woke up until the police arrived.”

      “Please sit, Agent Sharpe,” he said. “You two make me nervous enough as it is.”

      Emma smiled and complied, sitting next to Colin on the bench. He crossed his ankles and gave a slight smile, in a deliberate effort, she suspected, to look less threatening. Martin needed to relax and focus on the details of his morning, not on his audience.