The policeman gave him a sharp look.
“I couldn’t have said, sir,” he replied. “I’ve only been here three years, so of course I don’t know him. But these other two men, they do: Mr. Guy Markenmore, sir.”
Mr. Fransemmery started.
“What!” he exclaimed. “Sir Anthony’s elder son? You don’t mean it.”
“They say so, sir, and they know him well enough,” answered the policeman. “That man, Hobbs, the ploughman, found him. He ran down to the keeper’s cottage, and to me, and we came up at once. But before coming I telephoned to Selcaster, and the Chief Constable himself is coming along—they said he was starting out then, with the doctor. Come and look at him, sir.”
Mr. Fransemmery nerved himself to this sad task, and went nearer. The keeper and the labourer touched their caps; the policeman drew aside the cloak which the labourer had taken from his shoulders and laid over the dead man. And Mr. Fransemmery, wondering what all this meant, bent down.
Dead enough, he thought. And peaceful enough. A calm, bloodless face, neither smile nor frown on it—nothing but a little drawing together of the finely marked eyebrows, a slightly puzzled expression. Otherwise, so still. . . .
“It must have been murder, sir,” whispered the policeman, “and at close quarters. Look there!—the skin over his temples slightly burnt. And——”
“They’re coming,” said the keeper suddenly. “Two or three of them.”
Mr. Fransemmery straightened himself and looked across the downs. A dog-cart, driven at considerable speed, was coming along the grass-track from the direction of Selcaster, the tall spire of whose cathedral showed above the woods which lay between the downs and the old city. In the gleam of the rapidly rising sun he caught the glint of the silver and blue uniform of the county police, and as the keeper had said, the dog-cart, driven by a policeman, seemed filled with men. And presently it raced up the sward to the lip of the hollow, and the Chief Constable, a military-looking man of middle age, jumped out and followed by two other men, one the police-surgeon, the other obviously a plain-clothes officer, came hurrying down to the little group beneath the Scotch firs. He nodded to Mr. Fransemmery, whom everybody in the district knew, and turned sharply on the village constable.