“Very well. Now I’d better be off. I’m wanted for a baby case. You’ll find me out at Forbes’s place if you want me. Lucky I hadn’t started. I don’t for a moment suppose anything will happen for hours, but it’s her first, and they’re naturally fidgety. If I don’t get there pronto, it’ll be B.B.A. , out of pure cussedness, and I shall never hear the last of it. Well, good night. Sorry I can’t give anybody a lift, but I’m going out in the opposite direction.”
He hastened out, and we heard his car chug away down the lane. The sergeant observed that it was a bad business all round, and suggested that he should take down notes of what Lathom and I could tell him. I found some logs in the outhouse and piled them on the fire till it roared up the chimney. More and more I began to feel that this was a scene from a book; it was like nothing in life at all. It was—hang it—it was almost cosy. I should have ended, I think, by almost enjoying it—the policeman’s voice cooing like the note of a fat wood-pigeon, the ruddy blaze on his round face, the thick thumb that turned the pages of his notebook, the pink tongue licking the stubby pencil, and Lathom, talking, answering, explaining so lucidly (he had got over his nervousness and was childishly eager to tell his story)—I could have enjoyed it, if it had not been for a fear in the back of my mind.
The sun …
You do not want a description of that stiff, cold sunrise. I was facing the window, and saw it—first a whiteness, then a hardening of the skyline—then a bluish reflection on the ceiling—then an uncertain gleam under the blanket of cloud. The weather was going to change.
I got up and wandered out across the fields. The stream, far off, was the only voice in the silence, and that was impersonal. It had no blood nor life behind its chatter.
I wandered to the edge of the slope, where the valley plunged down, gorse and heath and bracken all jumbled among the grey boulders, and