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the handler.
    Ooowooo! Oooowooo! came the sound, horribly loud.
    “Again! Toss it again!”
    Again the man tossed the lasso; again he missed.
    And suddenly, without even a gurgle, there was silence. The sound of the dog’s last smothered cry echoed across the moorlands and died away. The muck closed up and its surface smoothed. A faint tremor shook the bog, and then it went still.
    The handler, who had risen to his feet, now sank to his knees. “My dog! Oh, great Christ!”
    Balfour fixed him with a stare and spoke quietly but with great force. “I’m very sorry. But we have to continue.”
    “You can’t just leave him!”
    Balfour turned to the gamekeeper. “Mr. Grant, lead on to the Coombe Hut. And you, sir, bring that other bloodhound. We still need him.”
    Without further ado they continued on, the dog handler, dripping with mud, his feet squelching, leading the remaining bloodhound, who was shaking and trembling, useless for work. Grant was once again walking like a demon on stubby legs, swinging his stick, stopping only occasionally to viciously stab the end of it at the ground with grunts of dissatisfaction.
    To Esterhazy’s surprise, they weren’t lost after all. The land began to rise and, against the faint light, he made out the ruins of the corral and hut.
    “Which way?” said Grant to him.
    “We passed through and went down the other side.”
    They climbed the hill and passed the ruins.
    “Here, I think, is where we split up,” said Esterhazy, indicating the place where he had departed from Pendergast’s trail in the effort to flank him.
    After examining the ground, the gamekeeper grunted, nodded.
    “Lead on,” said Balfour.
    Esterhazy took the lead, with Grant right behind, holding a powerful electric torch. The yellow beam cut through the mist, illuminating the rushes and cattails along the edge of the marsh.
    “Here,” Esterhazy said, halting. “That’s… that’s where he went down.” He pointed to the broad, still pool at the verge of the marsh. His voice broke, he covered his face, and a sob escaped. “It was like a nightmare. God forgive me!”
    “Everyone stay back,” said Balfour, motioning the team with his hand. “We’re going to set up lights. You, Dr. Esterhazy, are going to show us exactly what happened. The forensic team will examine the ground, and then we’ll drag the pool.”
    “Drag the pool?” Esterhazy asked.
    Balfour glared at him. “That’s right. To recover the body.”

C HAPTER 7

    E STERHAZY WAITED BEHIND THE YELLOW TAPE laid on the ground as the forensic team, bent over like crones, finished combing the area for evidence under a battery of harsh lights that cast a ghastly illumination over the stark landscape.
    He had followed the evidence gathering with growing satisfaction. All was in order. They had found the one brass casing he’d deliberately left behind, and despite the heavy rains they managed to find some faint tracks of the stag, as well as to map some of the crushed marks in the heather made by himself and Pendergast. In addition, they had managed to confirm where the stag had burst through the reeds. Everything was consistent with the story he’d told.
    “All right, men,” Balfour called. “Pack away your kits and let’s drag the pool.”
    Esterhazy felt a shiver of both anticipation and revulsion. Gruesome as it was, it would be a relief to see his adversary’s corpse dragged up from the muck; it would provide that final act of closure, an epilogue to a titanic struggle.
    On a piece of graph paper, Balfour had sketched out the dimensions of the pool—a small area twelve feet by eighteen—and drawn a scheme of how it would be dragged. In the glare of the lights, the team clipped a claw-like grapnel to a rope, the long steel tines gleaming evilly, and then fixed a lead weight to the eye. Two men stood back, holding the coil of rope, while a third balanced himself on the pool’s edge. With Balfour consulting his drawing and murmuring