The exhumation was carried out three nights later under the usual conditions of darkness and secrecy. The morbid ritual had been begun during the daylight hours, when about half the necessary quantity of earth had been removed. The rest of the soil and the coffin itself came up at between ten o’clock and midnight.

By the light of hurricane lamps the damp coffin was transported to the vicar’s tool-shed, emptied that day for the purpose. A couple of trestles supported a stout board – actually the sexton’s fowl-house door, the birds being lodged for the night in a derelict hen-house at the bottom of the doctor’s garden. This hen-house had been coopered up for the occasion by Abel Wootton, and the hens transported in a cart lent by Farmer Daventry. The cart had been driven by Ed Brown, and was covered with some old tennis nets provided by the doctor’s wife and daughter.

Apart from the gruesomeness inseparable from even the most scientific dealings with an exhumed body, there was but one dramatic incident.

The doctor who was there in the interests of the insurance company exclaimed with great assurance:

‘Oh, yes! This is the chap I vetted! But he shouldn’t have pegged out like that! How long was he out in the snow?’

Nobody could answer this question. The police, Mrs Bradley realized, were satisfied that the exhumation had been, in a sense, unnecessary, for, since there was now no question of fraud, and since it seemed unlikely that the autopsy would show any positive indication of foul play, from the Chief Constable’s point of view he had been right all the time.

He said as much to Mrs Bradley as they walked back towards his car.

‘Can I offer you a lift?’ he added.

‘No, thank you,’ she replied. ‘I am going to walk back.’

‘It’s after midnight, you know.’

‘Yes. I am unlikely to see the fairies, but who knows but what I may encounter the parson’s ghost?’ She spoke clearly, and heard a shuffling sound from the shadows.

She shone her torch on the gate of the nearest field, opened the gate, closed it carefully behind her, and struck out across the stiff grass.

It was a moonless night, fine and rather cold. There was no path to follow, but, ahead of her, and looming against the sky, she could just make out the trees of Groaning Spinney. By crossing the field steeply uphill on a north-west slant, she knew that she would come to the ghostly gate. She took her time. That there was somebody ahead of her, she knew.

When she topped the rise she involuntarily stood still, for there, hanging over the gate, was an eerie, dead-white face most curiously lighted as though by phosphorescence.