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alder a few yards off the track. A white flake was showing up against the dark, gnarled bark.
    Hansom glared at it as though it were a personal insult. ‘And what’s that supposed to be – the answer to a detective’s prayer?’
    But Dutt had already grasped the significance of the white flake and was making his way carefully through the rough grass. Gently waited patiently, Hansom impatiently, while the sergeant performed his operation. Eventually there was a little cluck of triumph from Dutt and he returned to drop something small in his superior’s hand. Gently examined it expressionlessly.
    ‘Spot any blood, Dutt?’
    ‘Yessir.’
    ‘Much or little?’
    ‘Not much, sir.’
    ‘Head, I expect. They’d have noticed it lower down.’
    ‘What I was thinking, sir … about the angle, too.’
    ‘Would it be too much,’ enquired Hansom with biting sarcasm, ‘would it be too much to ask what all this is about?’
    Gently extended his hand gravely and revealed the shapeless chunk of metal Dutt had dug from the tree.
    ‘It’s about the way Lammas was killed … you can let your pathologist off duty. He was shot through the head with a bullet from a .22 gun.’

CHAPTER FOUR
    I T WAS A pleasant run from the village to ‘Willow Street’, lately the home of James William Lammas. After traversing the beech avenue, the road ran along the edge of the upland just where it fell into the shallow river valley and one caught glimpses of the winding stream low down amongst billowy trees and later of the broad.
    ‘All this and the best coarse-fishing too …’ murmured Gently at the wheel of the Wolseley. At breakfast that morning he had watched Thatcher fairly scooping bream out of the mouth of the Dyke.
    ‘You know, it’s rum, sir,’ began Dutt beside him, and stopped.
    ‘What’s rum, Dutt?’
    ‘Well sir, it stuck in me loaf what you said about the woman.’
    ‘What was that?’
    ‘About her not having to go off with the shover.’
    ‘It’s a point that needs elucidating.’
    ‘I mean, sir, it’s pretty obvious that this geezer and her were planning to fade together … it don’t seem naturalfor her to get the shover to do him in. What’s she going to get out of it what she didn’t have in the first place?’
    ‘Only the chauffeur … he might be quite a guy.’
    ‘No sir.’ Dutt shook his head. ‘If she’d been took with the shover there wasn’t nothink in their way … he wasn’t married. And she wouldn’t be carrying on with Lammas.’
    ‘Unless it was a deep, dark plot.’
    ‘No sir. It don’t seem right.’
    ‘What’s the theory, then, Dutt?’
    ‘Well, sir … I’d say the shover did for both of them and hooked it on his own. It’s the only way what makes sense, the way I looks at it. He knows about the money – it’s got to be on the boat – he goes there ready to do for them and make it look like an accident. When he gets there he finds there’s only Lammas, but if he shoots him first-off down by the car he isn’t going to know that till it’s too late.’
    ‘And then, Dutt?’
    ‘And then he goes through wiv it, sir – what else can he do? But somehow he runs across the woman again – maybe Lammas was aiming to pick her up somewhere close – she’s seen the fire – she sees the shover coming away from it – so he has to do for her, to keep her mouth shut. And then he dusn’t go back and shove her in the yacht, so he gets rid of the corpse somewhere else.’
    ‘Which is why he flitted, eh, Dutt? The second corpse wasn’t looking like an accident.’
    ‘That’s right, sir. Otherwise he’d be sitting tight and knowing nothink.’
    Gently grinned feebly at his subordinate. ‘It’s a nice little theory … all it needs to set it up is a bunch of facts and a fresh corpse.’
    ‘Well, sir … it isn’t to say they won’t turn up.’
    ‘No, Dutt – but until they do we’d better be good policemen and keep a wide-open mind.’
    ‘Yessir. Of course,