Adders on the Heath by Gladys Mitchell Read Free Book Online Page B

busy.'
    The inviting path on the other side of the gate was broad and clearly marked, and bore the imprint, here and there, where the ground was soft, of car tyres and caterpillar wheels. Denis produced a magnifying glass and studied the imprints with exaggerated thoroughness.
    'No hoof-prints,' he observed. They walked on again, past the grey, smooth trunks of a couple of felled beeches on the right-hand side of the path, and a magnificent Scots pine, prone across the bracken, on the left. The path mounted gradually. Suddenly Denis, who was in the lead, stopped short. 'I'm going back,' he said. A gaggle of geese, eight in all, had formed a line across the path, which led straight into a farmyard. 'Geese horrify me. I'd rather face a pride of lions.'
    'There's a dog, too,' said Richardson, in practical tones. 'Besides, about geese I really do agree. I told you I'd never been this way, and now you see that my instinct was sound.'
    They retraced their steps and again followed the path beside the water. It narrowed and grew lumpy and then muddy. Then it turned almost at right-angles on to a miry track with led across the gravelled road and on to the open heath. Richardson pointed out the big house from which he had tried to telephone.
    'You don't think there's anything suspicious in the circumstance that the owner of the house happened to be away on the very day you discovered a dead man in your tent?' Denis suggested.
    'Oh, I hardly imagine so. Just a coincidence, I would say. And I certainly don't attach any importance to the fact that the maid wouldn't let me use the telephone. For all she knew, it might have been an impudent attempt on my part to get into the house with burglarious intentions. Besides, women-servants always think somebody is determined to murder them in their beds, although why in their beds I can't think. One would suppose the last thing to do on their part would be to stay in bed if a homicidal maniac was loose about the place. Personally, I should want to be up and about, preferably with my shoes on.'
    'Yes, it's odd how helpless one feels with bare feet if there's any rough stuff going-Judo excepted, of course. Where do we go from here?'
    'We follow the main track as far as those gorse bushes and then branch off on to a kind of secondary track which pretty well follows the flow of the river.'
    Pursuing this course, they soon came upon the former site of Richardson's camp. It was marked by two young oak trees, about fifteen yards apart, which formed a landmark against the surrounding gorse and some low-growing thorn trees. More gorse and bracken screened the little clearing from the main track, but Richardson, who had chosen the spot because, besides being easily identifiable, it was secluded, now looked upon it with a different eye. He indicated the gorse and said,
    'Somebody could have lain up hidden and watched my movements. I'd never have known he was there.'
    Denis did not answer. He searched all the tiny paths which ran among the gorse. Richardson strolled over in the opposite direction, that in which the river, shallow at this point, ran with a quietly insistent murmur over the stones. Denis soon joined him. When they were together again, Richardson remarked,
    'You know, it occurs to me that it would have been frightfully easy to have brought the body across the river from the other side. Come and see.'
    He led the way to where a loop in the stream had laid bare two spits of gravel. They were not opposite one another, but lay in a long slant with perhaps twelve yards of very shallow water between them. Denis looked long and thoughtfully at this possible ford.
    'I don't know about that,' he said. 'Could be, I suppose. Let's see how the road runs.'
    They made their way along the secondary track until it joined the main one. Then, following this until it met the gravelled road, they turned to the left and crossed the bridge.
    'This will be it,' said Richardson. They stepped on to rough grass and found