‘Sharp instrument?’ said Fox.

‘Yes,’ Alleyn said. ‘Yes, a great puncture, certainly. But could a sharp instrument do all that, Brer Fox? No use speculating till we know what it was.’ His torchlight moved away from the face and found a silver glint on a patch of grass near Colonel Cartarette’s hands and almost on the brink of the stream. ‘And this is the Old ’Un?’ he murmured.

The Chief Constable and Sergeant Oliphant both broke into excited sounds of confirmation. The light moved to the hands, lying close together. One of them was clenched about a wisp of green.

‘Cut grass,’ Alleyn said. ‘He was going to wrap his trout in it. There’s his knife, and there’s the creel beside him.’

‘What we reckoned, sir,’ said the sergeant in agreement.

‘Woundy great fish, isn’t it?’ said the Chief Constable, and there was an involuntary note of envy in his voice.

Alleyn said: ‘What was the surface like before it rained?’

‘Well, sir,’ the sergeant volunteered, ‘as you see, it’s partly gravel. There was nothing to see in the willows where the ground was dry as a chip. There was what we reckoned were the deceased’s footprints on the bank where it was soft and where he’d been fishing and one or two on the earthy bits near where he fell, but I couldn’t make out anything else and we didn’t try for fear of messing up what little there was.’

‘Quite right. Will it rain again before morning?’

The three local men moved back into the meadow and looked up at the sky.

‘All over, I reckon, sir,’ said the sergeant.

‘Set fine,’ said the deep-voiced constable.

‘Clearing,’ said Sir James Punston.

‘Cover everything up again, Sergeant, and set a watch till morning. Have we any tips of any sort about times? Anybody known to have come this way?’

‘Nurse Kettle, sir, who found him. Young Dr Lacklander came back with her to look at him and he says he came through the valley and over the bridge earlier in the evening. We haven’t spoken to anyone else, sir.’

‘How deep,’ Alleyn asked, ‘is the stream just here?’

‘About five foot,’ said Sergeant Oliphant.

‘Really? And he lies on his right side roughly parallel with the stream and facing it. Not more than two feet from the brink. Head pointing downstream, feet towards the bridge. The fish lies right on the brink by the strand of grass he was cutting to wrap it in. And the wound’s in the left temple. I take it he was squatting on his heels within two feet of the brink and just about to bed his catch down in the grass. Now, if, as the heelmarks near his feet seem to indicate, he keeled straight over into the position the body still holds, one or two things must have happened, wouldn’t you say, Brer Fox?’

‘Either,’ Fox said stolidly, ‘he was coshed by a left-handed person standing behind him or by a right-handed person standing in front of him and at least three feet away.’