“Going deaf as a post,” the woman who cleaned and cooked for the two men had told Walker. “Both of them.” But she herself had heard nothing.

As for the foreman who had discovered Anthony Pierce’s body the next morning, he had written that he’d found the outer door shut and hadn’t seen Pierce until he had come in and turned toward the stairs.

“Mr. Anthony had gone there to see to a broken gauge, because I found my tools had been moved when finally I went up the stairs to have a look at it again myself.”

Which indicated, Rutledge thought, that Pierce had been killed on his way out of the brewery rather than on his way in. No one had been lying in wait for him, but it was likely that someone had followed him there and, finding the door unlocked, stepped inside.

He went out after finishing the statements and walked first to the place on the Hastings Road where the van driver had come upon the body of William Jeffers.

There was nothing to be seen here, but Rutledge had no trouble finding the spot from the description given by the driver.

Standing there on the quiet stretch of road, Rutledge looked around. There was a farmhouse some hundred yards away, but Walker—very thorough in his thinking—had interviewed the family living there. Unfortunately their bedroom windows were on the far side of the farmhouse, and they had not seen or heard anything. Except for tending to a child with a fever who had cried at half past three in the morning, they had slept soundly.

There were shrubs along the side of the road that marched toward the farmhouse lane, and pastures on the far side. The Jeffers house was beyond these, tall, spare, and jutting from the fields like a sore tooth.

“A perfect place for an ambush,” Hamish remarked as Rutledge scanned the surrounding landscape.

Next he went to the Roper farm, walking down the lane past the house and to the barn where the murder had taken place. There was no one about, although clothes hung on the line, drying in the warm afternoon sun, and so Rutledge went inside the barn. There were bloodstains on the floor where Jimmy Roper had died, but any footprints that might have been there at the time of the murder had long since been lost as first the maid and then the elder Roper had walked round the body, and then the constable himself, followed by the doctor, not to mention whoever had led away the cow that had been in the now empty stall.

His next stop was the brewery, but before going there Rutledge paused at the hotel to ask where the nearest telephone was to be found.

He was told there was only one telephone in Eastfield, and that was in the office of Tyrell Pierce.

Making his way there again, Rutledge stopped briefly at the door that led into the two-story building where the great wooden kettles were housed, and opened it. The stairs were not ten feet from the door, leading upward into the richly scented heart of the building. Someone had conscientiously swabbed up Anthony Pierce’s blood, but the location was marked by the very clean spot on the floorboards where abrasives had been necessary to reach deep into the stained wood.