‘That and the lack of publicity. I don’t suppose his people even bothered to put an announcement in an English paper; they would just announce it in their own local affair, where people knew him.’
‘What did the P.M. say?’
‘Oh, the usual. Light meal about an hour before death, large quantity of whisky in stomach and a fair amount in the blood. Quite enough to make him tight.’
‘No suggestion that he was a soak?’
‘Oh, no. No degeneration of any kind. Head and shoulder injuries at some earlier period, but otherwise good healthy specimen. Not to say tough.’
‘So he had some earlier injury?’
‘Yes, but a long time ago. I mean, nothing to do with this. He had at some time had a fractured skull and a broken collar-bone. Would it be very bad-mannered or very indiscreet of me to ask why all this interest in a simple case?’
‘So help me, sergeant, if I knew I would tell you. I think I must be getting childish.’
‘It’s more likely that you’re just bored,’ Williams said sympathetically. ‘Me, I was brought up in the country and I was never a one for watching the grass grow. An over-rated place, the country. Everything’s too far away. Once that burn of yours starts flowing you’ll forget about Mr Martin. It’s pouring stair-rods here so you probably won’t have long to wait for rain now.’
It did not, in fact, rain that night in the Turlie valley, but something else happened. The cold bright stillness gave place to a light wind. The wind was soft and warm, the air hung damp and heavy between gusts, the earth was moist and slippery, and down from the high tops came the snow water, filling the river bed from bank to bank. And up the brown racing water came the fish, flashing silver in the light as they leaped over the broken ledges of rock and up the narrow sluicing current between the boulders. Pat took his precious invention from his fly case (where it had a special compartment of its own) and presented it to Grant with the formal benevolence of a headmaster handing over a certificate. ‘You’ll take care of it, won’t you?’ he said. ‘It took me a long time to make.’ The thing was, as his mother had said, a fearsome object. Grant thought that it was rather like something for a woman’s hat; but he was aware that he was being singled out among men as the sole recipient worthy of such an honour and he accepted it with due gratification. He put it safely away in his own case and hoped that Pat would not supervise his efforts to the extent of making him use it. But each time he chose a new fly in the days that followed, he caught sight of the fearsome object and was warmed by his small cousin’s approval of him.