A cry of mourning, intolerably loud, rose from beyond the willows and hung on the night air. A thrush whirred out of the thicket close to her face and the cry broke and wavered again. It was the howl of a dog.

She pushed through the thicket into an opening by the river and found the body of Colonel Cartarette with his spaniel Skip beside it, mourning him.

4. Bottom Meadow

CHAPTER 4

Bottom Meadow

Nurse Kettle was acquainted with death. She did not need Skip’s lament to tell her that the curled figure resting its head on a turf of river grass was dead. She knelt beside it and pushed her hand under the tweed jacket and silk shirt. ‘Cooling,’ she thought. A tweed hat with fisherman’s flies in the band lay over the face. Someone, she thought, might almost have dropped it there. She lifted it and remained quite still with it suspended in her hand. The Colonel’s temple had been broken as if his head had come under a waxworker’s hammer. The spaniel threw back his head and howled again.

‘Oh, do be quiet!’ Nurse Kettle ejaculated. She replaced the hat and stood up, knocking her head against a branch. The birds that spent the night in the willows stirred again and some of them flew out with a sharp whirring sound. The Chyne gurgled and plopped and somewhere up in Nunspardon woods an owl hooted. ‘He has been murdered,’ thought Nurse Kettle.

Through her mind hurtled all the axioms of police procedure as laid down in her chosen form of escape-literature. One must, she recollected, not touch the body, and she had touched it. One must send at once for the police but she had nobody to send. She thought there was also something about not leaving the body, yet to telephone or to fetch Mr Oliphant, the police-sergeant at Chyning, she would have to leave the body and while she was away the spaniel, she supposed, would sit beside it and howl. It was now quite darkish and the moon not yet up. She could see, however, not far from the Colonel’s hands the glint of a trout’s scales in the grass and of a knife blade nearby. His rod was laid out on the lip of the bank, less than a pace from where he lay. None of these things, of course, must be disturbed. Suddenly Nurse Kettle thought of Commander Syce whose Christian name she had discovered was Geoffrey and wished with all her heart that he was at hand to advise her. The discovery in herself of this impulse, astonished her and, in a sort of flurry, she swapped Geoffrey Syce for Mark Lacklander. ‘I’ll find the Doctor,’ she thought.

She patted Skip. He whimpered and scraped at her knees with his paws. ‘Don’t howl, doggy,’ she said in a trembling voice. ‘Good boy! Don’t howl.’ She took up her bag and turned away.