War Game (17 page)

“And too many people would have seen him—it’s surprising what people see.

Whereas if he came down the stream—“ Digby pointed.

Audley followed the line of the finger, past the fresh growth of the cropped section of bushes, to where the uncut bushes raged in their unrestricted summer tangle. The stream issued out of a green-shadowed tunnel, walled and roofed with leaves and branches. The open fields on either side were parched and dry, and open to prying eyes, the well-grazed summer grass of the meadow on one hand and the evenly-cropped wheat stubble on the other; but the Swine Brook itself ran in a secret place of its own making, nourishing the deep rooted things which shielded it from the sun.

He caught the old familiar stream-smell of cool, damp earth and rotting vegetation, and the smell carried him back to his own childhood. He had explored streams like this a lifetime ago, searching for the shy things that lived and grew and died in hiding along the water’s edge; the memory of soft wet moss under his fingers and smooth squidgy mud between his toes was there with the smell, long forgotten but never forgettable… . And the memory of the solitary little boy who had preferred such dark passages between the woodlands not only for the mysteries they concealed but also because of the invisibility they gave him.

Invisibility. No matter there were seven thousand pairs of eyes or seventy thousand on the ridge above, it would still have been easy for the killer to have stolen up on Jim Ratcliffe unnoticed.

“—somebody came down the stream, anyway. The mud was disturbed all the way to the farm bridge a quarter of a mile upstream, in the spinney there.” Digby pointed again. “Couldn’t make out the footprints, of course. Or anything else, except they were recent when we examined them. But someone came down and then went back again, and there’s a road just the other side of the trees there. So it would have been easy, coming and going.”

Easy?

“How did Ratcliffe die?”

For an instant the young sergeant frowned—no doubt Audley’s ignorance of the simplest basic facts of the crime was still confusing him. Then he straightened his expression into formal blankness again.

“One blow on the back of the neck, sir. What the newspapers call ‘a karate chop’ now, but what used to be called a rabbit-punch.” He paused. “Easy again—if you know how to do it.”

Easy?

This time Audley’s eye was caught by the wheat stubble.

Another memory there, but one much closer to the surface, for he could never pass a harvested field without half-recalling this one … a memory half-golden, because time edged all youthful memories with gold, but dark also because time never quite succeeded in erasing the blurred recollection of unhappiness.

Not a child any more, nor even a snotty schoolboy though still at school, but a gauche youth … still lonely and introverted—the concept of the mixed-up teenager hadn’t existed then because no one had yet coined the word “teenager”: it had not been his brains which had saved him in that cruel society, but his accidental prowess on the rugger field.

Tackle him low, Audley!

No, that was the wrong memory leading him up the wrong cul-de-sac—it was the school harvest camp he wanted, the endless boring stooking of the sheaves in the National Interest.

And one particular memory, obscene and humiliating—

It had been just such a corn field in the first year of the war. They had stopped stooking as the binder had come to the final cut in the centre of the field, fanning out in readiness for the rabbits trapped in the last of the standing wheat to make their break—and in the mad exhilarating chase he had driven one big buck right back into the cutting blades—

Kill it then, man!

One front paw gone, the other horribly mangled, the thing had suddenly come alive, the hind legs kicking with the strength of desperation.

Kill it, Audley—go on, man—kill it!

He had seen it done half a dozen times by the tractor driver, the grizzled man with the patch on his lung and the ten children. It had been a casual, matter-of-fact action: hold the hind legs and strike down with the edge of the stiffened hand.

Rabbit-punch.

Easy.

Four times he had tried, his own increasing desperation rising to match the rabbit’s, but failing to master it. Blood had spattered his trousers—why can’t you die, rabbit?

Then the tractor driver had snatched it from him—

Give us ‘un, then, for Lord’s sake.

One quick professional chop. Then, for final measure, the man had stretched the twitching thing, legs in one hand, neck in the other. He could still hear that stretching sound, the small creaking noise.

Well, ‘tis a good ‘un, any road. You’m let the other best ‘uns go.

From that dark memory to the banks of the Swine Brook, and now to the darkness beyond the study window, was a journey across years and hours time-travelled in a fraction of a second… . But he hadn’t returned empty handed.

There was the short answer to Weston’s off-the-record certainty and young Digby’s word for it.

Not easy.

Because it wasn’t so easy to kill a rabbit with one blow, and a man was bigger game and another game altogether. It wasn’t simply that they had eliminated all the costumed battlefield actors who’d been playing at killing—he could afford to take that for granted now, the hundreds of statements checked and cross-checked. This was a killing, and more than that, a neat and tidy killing, which was another thing and a very different thing. Because for all the popular claptrap, not one person in a thousand could guarantee to do that with one blow. That guarantee was the hallmark of the professional.

It had been Digby’s qualification that mattered—

Easy—if you know how to do it.

“I see. He came down the stream—that’s the hypothesis. And he hit Jim Ratcliffe once—that’s the forensic fact?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And Ratcliffe was crouching in his gap in the bushes beside the stream—here?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Behind the smoke he was most conveniently making… . And then?”

Digby pointed. “Ratcliffe was struck down
here
, sir. Then his body was rolled over the bank—“ he pointed again “—
there
.”

“Hypothesis?”

“Fact.” Digby took two steps. “And he was found in the water—there. Fact.”

Audley peered over the edge of the bank. The motion of the water was imperceptible, it was like a millpond. At this point, where the Swine Brook flowed out of its tunnel in a gentle curve, the stream had formed a shallow pool behind a miniature dam built with fallen branches and plugged with the accumulated detritus lodged in them by the winter floods. Over the years those same floods had carved the overhang at his feet, through which the feathery roots of the bushes trailed in a curtain towards the surface of the water. In its original state, with the tangle of thorn and bramble all around, this would have been a fine and private place to tuck a body, no doubt about that.

“Ratcliffe was lying right under the overhang, sir.” Digby seemed to have read his thoughts. “I didn’t actually see him until I was standing right on the edge, where you are now exactly.”

No need to elaborate on that. Rolled over and then tucked in out of sight. No one who had fallen, or been pushed or knocked, would ever have come to rest so tidily, virtually out of sight in the shallows. That had been the killer’s risk, but one taken coolly to minimise the greater risk of quick discovery and maximise the chance of a trouble-free getaway. And a small risk at that, because only Sergeant Digby’s trained eye would have spotted the dividing line between horrid accident and suspicious circumstance. And only Sergeant Digby, of all people, would then have fortified his suspicions with established police procedure—

Protect the scene of the crime.

Much more likely, even if the body had been discovered sooner rather than later, would have been these destructive moments of chaos which usually attended presumed accidents. People milling around in panic or ghoulish curiosity, moving the body, trampling the place flat and obliterating any shred of evidence or circumstance that there might be. With only a little luck here on Swine Brook Field— with a battle going on nearby and seven thousand spectators poised to stampede down the hillside—there wouldn’t have been any scene of the crime left by the time any sort of trained observer reached the spot. And then, with just a little more luck, there might not have been any crime, just an unfortunate but comprehensible accident of the sort discerning coppers like Weston had foreseen.

But a little luck had gone the other way for once, in the presence of Sergeant Henry Digby.

And doubly the other way… .

Audley frowned. “Why did you come here and look, Sergeant?”

“I beg your pardon, sir?”

Audley realised that he had been staring down into the still pool so long that the Sergeant had moved away from him. “I’m sorry… . You were on station down there—“ he pointed towards the clump of willow trees “—and then you came up here to look for Ratcliffe. Why did you do that?”

Digby stared at him for a moment. “But it wasn’t to look for Ratcliffe, sir. It was because of the dye—“

Such a curious thing, utterly unforeseeable, had made the best-laid scheme go agley. In less fatal circumstances a joke, and even now a piece of the blackest comedy.

The durability of Durex contraceptives.

It seemed likely, thought Audley, that James Ratcliffe had practical experience of their resistance, for he had taped no less than eight of them to his body, four at the front and four at the back, when the explosion of any one in each place would have been sufficiently effective to simulate death by cannonball.

Would have—and had been. For he had been carried out of the battle with most of them still intact, still loaded with air and red dye, and it had taken the spikes of the hawthorns and brambles against which he had fallen and over which he had been rolled to puncture the rest of them.

Dye on the ground, where he had fallen.

Dye on the edge of the bank, where he had been rolled.

And most of all dye in the Swine Brook itself, the tell-tale stain of which had eventually carried its message downstream to Sergeant Digby, who of all people happened to be the one best trained and disposed to read it.

“It was because of the dye—coming down from above where I was putting it in. So I knew somebody was playing silly buggers upstream from where I was.”

“Why should that matter?”

“If it was the same stuff I was putting into the water it didn’t matter, because that was non-toxic. But there are dyes and dyes. If there was some idiot adding a toxic chemical to the water there could be hell to pay downstream, where farm animals drank from it—it could have cost the society a fortune in damages. That’s why I went to find out double-quick.”

“I see. So you came to this gap first and found Ratcliffe in the water straight off?”

“Not straight off, sir. But I saw traces of the dye on the ground, where the contraceptives had burst. And the whole pool was red by then.”

Blood everywhere. And not a drop spilt. “That must have given you a nasty shock.”

“It gave me a shock when I looked over the edge of the bank and found Jim Ratcliffe, I can tell you, sir.”

Audley nodded. “In what you rightly took to be suspicious circumstances?”

The sergeant lifted his hands in an oddly uncharacteristic gesture of doubt. “Well, sir … it wasn’t quite as cut and dried as that. I had to make sure as far as I could that he was dead first. There’s—there’s a routine for this sort of situation.”

“Of course.” Audley watched the young man closely. “Yet your suspicions were aroused very quickly, were they not?”

Digby’s jaw tightened. “Yes, sir.”

“Because of the way the body was tucked in under the bank, and the blobs of dye on the ground where he had fallen —and so on?”

“Yes, sir.” A muscle in the young man’s cheek twitched nervously. “I believed there was a possibility of foul play.”

“And not … an accidental blow with the butt of a pike, say. During the rout?”

Digby steadied. “The body was in the stream before that.”

“But that would have been … only a matter of minutes. How can you be so sure?”

Without a word Digby bent down and plucked a handful of dry grass from the edge of the pool. Then he leant over and dropped the handful into the water under the overhang.

“Watch, sir,” he said simply.

Audley watched. For a few moments he thought the grass was stationary. Then, almost imperceptibly, it began to move upstream: here, in the still pool above the natural dam of winter debris there was a lazy backcurrent. Whatever entered it was carried in a slow circle, round and round, until it sank or was caught by the band of accumulated scum at the lip of the dam.

Digby followed his glance and pointed. “The stream doesn’t go over the top there, you can see—there isn’t much water coming down, with the drought we’ve had, and there wasn’t then either. It just seeps through underneath.”

Audley eyed the drifting grass, substituting for it in his imagination the thread of dye which would have unwound from Ratcliffe’s body in the sluggish movement of the water. And as it unwound it would have spread until the stain filled the pool … and only then would it begin to sink to find the chinks in the dam …

Not just sharp, but bloody sharp. Almost too bloody sharp to be true, was Sergeant Digby.

“How long did it take to reach you, then?”

“Not less than fifteen minutes.” There was no sign of doubt and nervousness now. “And fifteen minutes before I found the body the rout hadn’t started. Nobody broke ranks before the final attack, either —I know, because I was watching. And that was the way it was planned, too.”

“Planned?”

“That’s right. The first two attacks, the dead and wounded were carried back to the stream. But after that they lay where they fell—for effect …” Digby trailed off, momentarily embarrassed.

Audley studied him for a few seconds, then turned back towards the pool. “And you took one look, and smelt a rat— because of the time factor … that’s what it amounts to, does it?”