Mr. Sandal was to come on Thursday night and stay over till after luncheon on Friday.

On Thursday morning Bee said that she was going into Westover to do some special shopping for Mr. Sandal’s meals, and what would Brat like to do with his day?

Brat said that he would like to come with her and see Westover again, and Bee looked pleased.

“We can stop on the way through the village,” she said, “and let Mrs. Gloom run her eye over you. It will be one less for you to meet after church on Sunday.”

So they stopped at the newsagent’s, and Brat was exhibited, and Mrs. Gloom sucked the last ounce of satisfaction out of the drama of his return, and they laughed together about her as they sped away to the sea.

“People who can’t sing are horribly frustrated,” Bee said, after a little.

Brat considered this non sequitur. “The highest mountain in Britain is Ben Nevis,” he said, proffering one in his turn.

Bee laughed at that and said: “No, I just meant that I should like to sing at the top of my voice, but I can only croak. Can you sing?”

“No. I croak too. We could croak together.”

“I doubt if it is legal to croak in a built-up area. One never knows nowadays. And anyhow, there is that.” She waved her hand at a large sign which read:

MOTORISTS. PLEASE REFRAIN FROM USING YOUR HORN.
THIS IS A HOSPITAL.

Brat glanced up at the building, set on the slope above the town, and remarked that it was uncommonly pretty for a hospital.

“Yes; much less terrifying than the normal place. It is a great pity that that was allowed to happen.” She jerked her chin at the row of cheap shops on the opposite side of the road; some of them not much better than shacks. Dingy cafés, a cobbler’s, a bicycle “depot,” a seller of wreaths and crosses, a rival seller of flowers, a greengrocer’s, and anonymous businesses with windows painted half-way up and odd bills tacked in the window.

They were running down the slope into the town, and this miscellaneous strip of roadside commerce was the last petering-out of the poorer suburbs. Beyond was Westover proper: clean and neat and shining in the reflected light from the sea.

As Bee turned into the car park she said: “You don’t want to tail round looking at ‘sea-food’ for Mr. Sandal’s consumption. Go away and amuse yourself, and we’ll meet for lunch at the Angel about a quarter to one.”

He was some distance away when she called him back. “I forgot to ask if you were short of money. I can lend you some if you ——”

“Oh, no, thanks; I still have some of what Cosset, Thring and what-you-may-call-’em advanced me.”

He went first to the harbour to see the place that he was supposed to have set out from eight years ago. It was filled with coastwise shipping and fishing boats, very gay in the dancing light. He leaned against the warm stones of the breakwater and contemplated it. It was here that Alec Loding had sat painting his “old scow” on the last day of Pat Ashby’s life. It was over those cliffs away to the right that Pat Ashby had fallen to his death.

He pushed himself off the breakwater and went to look for the office of the Westover Times. It took him some time to find it because, although every citizen of Westover read the local paper, very few of them had occasion to seek it out in its home. Its home was a stone’s-throw from the harbour, in a small old house in a small old street which still had its original cobbles. The entrance was so low that Brat instinctively ducked his head as he went in. Beyond, after the bright sunlight outside, there was blackness. But out of the blackness the unmistakable adolescent voice of an office boy said: “Yes?”

Brat said that he would like to see Mr. Macallan.

The voice said that Mr. Macallan was out.

“I suppose you couldn’t tell me where I could find him?”

“The fourth table on the left upstairs at the Blue Bird.”

“That’s explicit.”

“Can’t help it; that’s where he is. That’s where he always is, this time of day.”

The Blue Bird, it seemed, was a coffee-shop round the corner on the harbour front. And Mr. Macallan was indeed sitting at the fourth table on the left upstairs, which was the one by the far window. Mr. Macallan was sitting with a half-drunk cup of coffee in front of him, glowering down on the bright front. He greeted Brat amiably, however, as one old friend to another, and pulled out a chair for him.

“I’m afraid I haven’t been much good to you,” Brat said.

“The only way I’ll ever get myself on to the front page of the Clarion is in a trunk,” Mr. Macallan said.

“A trunk?”

“In sections. And I can’t help feeling that would be a wee bit drastic.” He spread out that morning’s Clarion so that the shrieking black print screamed up from the table. The trunk murder was still front-page news after three days, it having been discovered that the legs in the case belonged to two different persons; a complication which put the present case hors concurs in the trunk-murder class.

“What’s horrible about murder,” Mr. Macallan said reflectively, “is not that it happens, but that it happens to your Aunt Agnes, if you follow me. Hi! Miss! A cup of coffee for my friend here. Brother Johnny goes to the war and gets killed and it is all very sad, but no one is shocked — civilisation being what it is. But if someone bumps Aunt Agnes off on her way home one night that is a shock. That sort of thing just doesn’t happen to people you know.”

“It must be worse when someone you know bumps off someone’s Aunt Agnes.”

“Ay,” said Mr. Macallan, shooting an extra spoonful of sugar into his half-cold coffee and stirring it vigorously. “I’ve seen some of that. Families, you know. It’s always the same: they just can’t believe it. Their Johnny. That is the horror in murder. The domesticity of it.” He took out his cigarette case and offered it. “And how do you like being Clare’s white-headed boy? Are you glad to be back?”

“You can’t imagine how glad.”

“After that fine free life in Arizona or Texas or wherever it was? You mean you actually prefer this?” Mr. Macallan jerked his head at the Westover front filled with placid shoppers. And, as Brat nodded: “Mercy-be-here! I can hardly credit it.”

“Why? Don’t you like the place?”

Mr. Macallan looked down at the southern English walking about in their southern English sunshine, and metaphorically spat. “They’re so satisfied with themselves I can’t take my eyes off them,” he said.

“Satisfied with their lot, you mean? Why not?”

“Nothing in this world came out of satisfaction.”

“Except the human race,” said Brat.

Mr. Macallan grinned. “I’ll allow you that.” But he went on glowering down at the bright harbour scene. “I look at them and think: ‘These people kept Scotland fighting for four hundred years,’ and I can’t find the answer.”

“The answer, of course, is that they didn’t.”

“No? Let me tell you that my country ——”

“They’ve been much too busy for the last thousand years keeping the shores of England. But for them your Scotland would be part of Spain to-day.”

This was apparently a new idea to Mr. Macallan. He decided to let it ride.

“You weren’t looking for me, were you? When you came to the Blue Bird?”

“Yes. I went to the office first and they told me you would be here. There’s something I want and I thought that you might help me to it.”

“Not publicity, I take it,” Mr. Macallan said dryly.

“No, I want to read my obituary.”

“Man, who doesn’t! You’re a privileged person, Mr. Ashby, a very privileged person.”

“I suppose the Westover Times keeps back numbers.”

“Och, yes, back to June the 18th, 1827. Or is it June the 28th? I forget. So you want to look at the files. Well, there’s not very much, but you’ll find it very interesting of course. One’s own death must be a fascinating subject to read about.”

“You’ve read about it, then?”

“Och, yes. Before I went out to Latchetts on Tuesday, I naturally looked you up.”

So it was that, when they stumbled down the dark stairs to the cellar of the Westover Times offices, Mr. Macallan was able to put his hand on the required copy without delay and without raising the dust of a hundred and fifty years about their ears.

“I’ll leave you to it,” Mr. Macallan said, spreading the volume open under the naked light above the old-fashioned sloping desk. “Have a good time. If there is anything else I can do for you, just let me know. And drop in when you feel like it.”

He trotted up the stone stairs, and the scuffling sound of his shoes faded upwards into the world of men, and Brat was left alone with the past.

The Westover Times appeared twice a week: on Wednesdays and Saturdays. Patrick Ashby’s death had occurred on a Saturday, so that a single Wednesday issue carried both the announcement of his death and the report of the inquest. As well as the usual announcement inserted by the family in the list of deaths, there was a short news item on the middle page. The Westover Times had been owned and run by a Westover family since its founding, and it still kept the stateliness, the good manners, and the reticence of an early Edwardian doctor’s brougham plying between Harley Street and Knightsbridge. The paper announced the sad occurrence and offered its sympathy to the family in this great trial which had come to them so soon after the tragic deaths of Mr. and Mrs. Ashby in a flying accident. It offered no information beyond the fact that on Saturday afternoon or evening Patrick Ashby had met his death by falling over the cliffs to the west of the town. An account of the inquest would be found on page five.

On page five there was a whole column on the inquest. A column was not enough, of course, to do justice to the inquest in detail, but all the salient facts were there, and now and then a piece of evidence wa............