reached here for the time being, but I want to have a look round. Can you ask Bobby if that’s OK?’
‘I’m sure that’ll be fine,’ Sir Charles agreed. ‘Is there anything more I can do for you? I wish I could get down but it won’t be possible, I’m afraid.’
‘No, I can see that.’ And he could. If Sir Charles wanted to carry on pretending to be nothing more than a government official he could hardly take a visible part in investigating a murder. ‘I think that’s all at the moment. I’ll keep in touch.’
‘Good man. And I’ll speak to Bobby.’
Anthony rang off, drew a deep breath, picked up the receiver and had a rather less elliptical conversation with the local police sergeant or, as Sir Charles would have said, Bobby. The sergeant was clearly puzzled by his request that he should get in touch with his chief constable before coming out to the Moultons’ but he agreed all the same.
Anthony put the phone down and did a rapid calculation. At a guess Sir Charles would even now be talking to the chief constable, who, please God, would be both present and cooperative. That should give him some time to see Veronica O’Bryan’s body alone.
It felt odd going up that woodland track again, consciously retracing Veronica O’Bryan’s last journey. The weather had been fine recently and the track, churned into ruts by heavy cartwheels, was dry and useless for footprints. He knew from Mrs Moulton that the woods were used for timber. There were some muddy patches to the side, incised with the crescents of horses’ hooves, but no footprints. That was much as he’d expected. There was no very good reason why Veronica O’Bryan or her murderer should have sought out the few muddy puddles which remained.
It seemed to be a much shorter walk than he remembered. A little more than five minutes from the Moultons brought him to the rotting tree trunk.
He dispatched the gardener back home and crouched down beside the body. The bullet had passed more or less through the centre of the forehead at a slight upwards angle. There was an exit wound on the upper parietal bone – or, thought Anthony, translating it into the layman’s language that Sir Charles would want – the top of the back of her head. That was an entirely natural way to shoot someone who was coming straight towards you and he couldn’t read anything significant into the upwards direction of the shot. As he knew, all guns tend to jerk upwards. It took quite a bit of training to hold a pistol steady.
When he’d first found the body all he’d really taken in was that Veronica O’Bryan had been shot and that two days lying face downwards in a damp wood hadn’t improved matters.
Now, without Tara, he was able to consider that badly discoloured face more closely. There was a bruise on her cheek and a scratch on her neck, but no other sign of a struggle. Where had she actually been shot?
They’d found her hat in a clump of harebells by the track. He went to investigate. Once again, there were no footprints and the grass had had plenty of time to recover, but on the track itself the dried mud was stained with blood. So this was where Veronica O’Bryan had died. He raised his eyes. A few yards away stood an ash tree, its trunk chipped with a new splinter. That’s where the bullet had gone. Now he knew where Veronica O’Bryan had been shot, it was easy to see the telltale marks of broken twigs, disturbed pebbles and crushed plants which marked out where she had been dragged to the trunk.
He stepped back from the trunk to get a full picture of the slope leading to the track and caught his sleeve on a mass of brambles. He shook himself free, leaving a snag of tweed on the thorns and there, slightly lower, were caught some blue-grey tweed threads. The murderer’s? Maybe. He put a couple of threads carefully in his pocketbook, leaving the rest for the police.
He glanced at his watch. He didn’t have long before the police turned up, but he wanted to see if he could glean anything more from the woods. The track pretty soon petered out into a clearing which, from the ruts on the ground, looked as if it was used for turning the foresters’ carts. Beyond the clearing, the path was little used, but the grass,