‘Be off, Will, as though you’d gone for help. If you see anybody don’t speak to him unless you can trust him absolutely. Come back, if you can, with the Woottons. They’re staunch enough and can keep their tongues still. By the way, where’s Worry?’

‘That’s what I’d like to know,’ Will replied. ‘Not like him to go off on his own this long. Sent him out for his walk, same as I always do, but he hasn’t come back. I was looking for him when I saw Ed first.’

He strode away. Mrs Bradley sat down on her waterproof and waited. Will was gone almost an hour. He came back with the two gardeners and with George, Mrs Bradley’s chauffeur, who had been giving the brothers a hand with a motor mowing machine which had gone wrong. The three men had a hurdle with them, a bit of local colour which Mrs Bradley welcomed.

Solemnly the grinning Ed was raised from the trench and laid on the hurdle. Mrs Bradley spread her waterproof over him and the four men bore his light weight off towards Will North’s cottage.

Mrs Bradley had seen where the bullet had snicked up the earth on the edge of the barrow. She picked up Ed’s fork and excavated carefully, sprinkling earth by handfuls into the trench as though she might be covering up bloodstains. There was little hope, she felt, of finding the pellet. It would have gone too deeply into the soil.

She was still engaged in her deception when the three men who had gone off to lunch returned.

‘Hullo! Ed Brown gone home?’ asked Emming. Mrs Bradley pointed to the trench which was now almost half-full of soil.

‘You’ll have to leave your digging for today, I’m afraid,’ she said gravely. ‘The police, you know. Ed Brown was shot at, just after half-past twelve.’

The comma indicated in her voice prevented the statement from being a lie, but this fine shade of meaning was lost upon her hearers.

‘Ed Brown?’

‘Shot?’

‘Who did it? – Some damned carelessness somewhere!’

Mrs Bradley replied to the last speaker, who happened to be Obury.

‘There is no proof of who did it. As to carelessness, it seems to me that criminal negligence is the mildest description to apply to the occurrence.’

‘Negligence? – Well, yes. There seems no reason to be shooting over this hill. I suppose some idiot saw a rabbit and took a pot shot. Sort of person who ought not to be allowed to handle a gun.’

‘I thought I saw Will North,’ said Emming.