9:00 P.M.

Mr. Waugh, swathed to the great white gills in borrowed mufflers, waited in the shadow of the Private Wing. Pibble plodded away from him across the moon-blanched lawn, lowered himself clumsily into the ha-ha, and began the tedious walk along sleepers which were spaced exactly wrong for any comfortable stride. Three shots, Miss Scoplow had said. Couldn’t hear it because of the echoes, the General had said. Two old soaks, drunk enough to fall twice on their way down, drunk enough to make a hash of loading the pistols, but not too drunk For A to hit B and feel B’s ball fanning past his cheek. Good shooting for drunks—and Pibble had heard no echoes in the morning, just the two shots of the Americans burning powder. Nothing in it, probably; sounds are always different at night; best wait and see what Waugh heard.

Well, then, what about the worst actress in Who’s Who in the Theatre (worst supporting actors, Sergeant Maxwell and loyal Dr. Kirtle)? A rum trio to pick, except in the hope of betrayal. What about the double shooting of the lion? And what about that gray blob, gray and spreading, like a cell under a microscope, off key, wrong? What the hell had it been? How big? Pibble could see it on his inner retina, as large as a baby’s head and pulsing slightly, changing color now—ah, Crippen, it hadn’t been like that. No use trying to force it up: that never works, the summoning of apparitions from the Endor inside the skull. They come when it suits them.

Anyway suppose, if only for the sake of the Macbeth fantasy, that Harvey Singleton had hidden behind the General and shot the Admiral. That would account for both the death and the General’s feeling a bullet pass, but what other machinery would be needed? He’d been a brilliant shot, Dr. Kirtle had said. He went to bed late, he’d said himself, and had very good hearing, so he might have listened to the quarrel. Could he have relied on the General tipping the body over for Bonzo? Probably—the Admiral had often asked to go that way—or he could have appeared as if wakened by the shots and suggested it. That would be one old hero out of the way, and a fair chance of having the other one locked up for murder.

But why? They don’t believe ordinary common folk have motives, Miss Finnick had said. Policemen do, though. Why would business-efficiency Singleton knock off a couple of dotty old heroes? The old boys still think they’re as rich as Croesus, she’d said. The General had talked about Harvey’s sideshows. They wouldn’t let him show the dirty frieze. He gave up a very promising job with a merchant bank to put the Claverings back on their feet, and here he was, after all those striving years, running sideshows. Forty-nine, say—last possible age to decide between blazing success and gray mediocrity. And all that fizzing action bottled up inside him. Not surprising if the cork popped.

The cork popped, then. Four days of intrigue, and somebody had argued somebody else into sending for a chap from London. Never mind who now, but it was an oddity. No, we’re over­running; Deakin had died in those four days. Could he have killed him, or was it just a lucky chance to set the General careering down his crazy slalom of deception, so sure to fail taking a curve too fast, relying on the lost reflexes of youth? Then all he’d had to do was nudge the plot nearer to discovery. Then Scoplow had told them about the telephone call, and he’d hung around at the top of the Tiger Pit while the General waited for him to come and ambush this intrusive Londoner—what would he have said if the hero had emerged triumphant, like Rikki-Tikki-Tavi out of the king cobras’ hole, covered with dirt, licking his whiskers? Perhaps the General would have been so cock-a-hoop at managing it alone that any excuse would have done.

But they’d both waited for each other, the General and his son-in-law, and Singleton had waited longer. Pibble had seen it happen again—or heard it, rather—when Singleton, motionless in the blackness of the stair well, had outwaited the lion. What had he felt like during that first waiting, when the General might have babbled anything to the detective? Or perhaps he’d spent the whole history lesson leaning on the parapet above them, listening with his very good hearing. Then the fracas, then the last fearsome bark of the hero as the huge claws caught him. Then down the path to the cottage while Pibble was fastening the door; the victor, Pibble or General, would be sure to go there. He’d known the door was shut, too.

Action next, killing the lion. Twice. Yes, of course. If the Admiral had really been killed by a pistol ball, it might still be in the lion’s two-fathom of guts, and the police might slice the beast up to look for it, and they’d find a modern bullet. Hide it; spray the long body with modern bullets, same size and caliber; a rimless .45 wasn’t it?

Ah, hell, the whole thing was pure supposition; Pibble decided he believed some of it some of the time, like the Nicene Creed.

But Singleton had “forgotten” to explain how to prime the pistols.

He had been walking toward a belt of trees and was almost into their black shadows when he saw amid their upper branches two spike-topped helmets with flat brims, such as Sidney’s men might have worn at Zutphen. No, two towers with helmet-shaped roofs on the far side of the trees, enormous—why couldn’t you see them from the house? He shone his torch at them and found that they were on the near side of the trees, a small pastiche of the Tower of London, into which the railway gate was set.

The key turned easily. Beyond the gates Pibble could see the glint of moonlight striking off the rails where they curved out from under the trees. There were mossy steps in the low embankment to his left, and then the path plunged steeply down. This must be another section of the ravine by which the bone-meal chapel stood. The path twisted between shrouding yews; logs were set across it to form crude steps at the steepest places. He came around a hairpin corner, shone his torch in front of him, and felt his heart bounce with panic as the beam fell on a very old man, on his knees, rapt, in front of a rough-hewn crucifix. The panic lasted only half a second before he realized that the figure, however priestly its attitude, was lay. Nicely done, though, with real sackcloth on the plaster limbs, and the cell behind clean with a bed of fresh bracken in the corner. There was even a charming hollow in the rock where a spring oozed out between small ferns to fill a natural basin—or perhaps an unnatural one, scooped here at the whim of some long-dead Clavering to provide drink for a living, breathing, wage-earning hermit. Odd world they’d lived in, those great Whig gentry—odd uses which they’d thought it proper to put their fellow men to. Still did. A jink in his train of thought made Pibble wonder who the next heir was, after Mrs. Singleton, and whether he’d inherited the same arrogance.

Another mini-folly stood untenanted beside the path a few yards farther down; then the slope eased and the path widened to a mossy walk, and there was the Bowling Green. It wasn’t at all as he’d imagined it, not a lawn below formal terraces, fringed with heraldic topiary. This was a deep romantic chasm, with the Abbey roofs invisible and only the claustrophobic crags, shaggy with trees, surrounding the level turf. The space was a little larger than a tennis court, and when Pibble crossed it to look at the stream, which licked quietly along below the further cliff, he found that the crevice opened to his right so that he could now see what looked like the pitch of an outbuilding roof, and beyond it a star-obliterating line of blackness, the far crest of the valley.

The icehouse was Gothick, flint-built, crenelated. Pibble opened the door and laid his torch on a shelf. The pistols were in a polished mahogany box lined with blue satin; they were larger than he’d expected, but nice to hold. Once you knew about it, it was easy to spot how crookedly the barrels were set, though Deakin had taken full advantage of the asymmetry of the flintlock on one side and sweated a tapering sleeve of steel down the other, covering its surface with fine chasing.

Loading should have been straightforward enough but Pibble was trapped by his instinctive distrust of all contrivances, however primitive, and couldn’t believe that the measuring device at the neck of the flask would work; so he unclamped his pistol from the vise and tipped the barrel out onto the shelf. A nasty little pile of black granules mocked him—it had worked. But how do you extract a ball and wad from a pistol which has no powder in it to shove them out? There must be a method; it must have happened often enough in genuine flintlock days; but it’s not the sort of question a chance-come detective cares to ask at a great house after bungling an attempt to incriminate his host.

He tried again, resolutely trusting all the antique gadgets, bonking the ramrod down onto the ball with manful precision. Nothing rattled when he turned the weapon horizontal, but he couldn’t bring himself to point it downward for fear of seeing the whole tiresome cargo cascade out on the floor. He shoved the steel forward and poured some of his spillage into the pan. Snapping the lid shut, he inspected the whole contrivance with wonder: the little flint was held in a miniature vise at the end of an arm on a spring; you pulled it back with your thumb to cock it, and then when you pulled the trigger it shot forward, bashing into the vertical steel to produce its minute meteor shower; the impact also shoved the steel forward, opening the lid of the pan because they were all one piece, thus letting the meteors sprinkle down into the saltspoonful of gunpowder, which then flared—flared enough to send a gout of flame down the pin-sized hole in the barrel, igniting the main charge.

He stared at the gadget, humming, struck by the rum collection of ingenuities which man will assemble to achieve his peculiar ends. There is a town in remote Guatemala called El Progreso, whose sole industry is the cultivation of a single crop; a mountain railway has been built over fantastic canyons in order that this crop may be exported to another part of Guatemala; the crop is the staple diet of the cochineal beetle, which is in turn harvested and pulped so that its juices may be re-exported to enhance the color of European blancmanges without affecting their taste. Never was a town better named: it is by fitting together processes such as these that man heaved himself up from simian innocence to the point where he could assemble iron and carbon into a steel tube, add a flint, a mixture of niter and saltpeter and charcoal, and a lump of lead, and use the resulting contrivance to kill his brother.

Pibble stalked out into the moonlight, pointed the results of Progress at the further cliff, and pulled the trigger.

There was a fractional instant after the click, in which he could begin to think he had loaded wrongly, begin to loosen his grip on the butt. Then the thing went off with a noise louder and lower than a modern pistol, a true bark, not a yap. The butt bucked in his hand, up and to the left. The echoes lasted for several seconds, distinct but fading booms. Pibble counted five of them volleying between the two cliffs. Then he put the gun back in the icehouse, picked up his torch, locked up, and began to climb the path past the plaster hermit, brooding as he went.

What was the best thing to do if he was wrong about Singleton—pragmatically best? They couldn’t have been all that drunk if they’d managed the complex process of loading (though the General had said it took a bit of time, and they’d had a lot of practice) and then shot accurately enough to produce one hit and one near miss. But need anyone know about the duel? Wouldn’t all England be happier if the evidence was faked so that they both appeared to have been killed by the lion? There could be a grand state funeral of the unconsumed portions, and the world could enjoy its big, soft weep. Say the lion had caught the Admiral, and the General was trying to rescue his brother and got nobbled, too? A good death—both original and heroic. Deakin would have to be fitted in somewhere: say he’d usually helped the Admiral feed Bonzo and his death induced the Admiral to try and do it alone. Rastus could be shipped home; five years in jug would keep him quiet. Everyone else would play. Yes. Better than two soured old soaks squabbling over a woman two generations younger than themselves.

He went through the gate and locked it.

Except that that would leave Singleton in honorable command of Herryngs, ready to shift the last of the Claverings out of the Private Wing, ready to expose the non-pederastic Rector to the view of salivating Yanks, ready to extinguish the last spark of genuine life in the House amid the neon glare of a dollar-earning fun fair. Well, good luck to him, provided he hadn’t murdered one old hero and possibly one whiskery coxswain for the sake of transforming his nonprofit concern into a tourist blue-chip.

And how could you prove that, one way or t’other? Check with Mr. Waugh on how many shots/echoes he’d heard; take him to witness a statement from Miss Scoplow about how many she’d heard; have Bonzo sliced up and the bullets counted and inspected; search the Tiger Pit for the odd slug out; search the undergrowth round the Bowling Green for a place of ambush where Singleton had waited. That bullet, it would have to look roughly the same as one from the tommy gun (he wouldn’t have had time to get across to the stall and fetch that). A .45, then, and …

He missed the next sleeper, stumbled sideways, banged his shin on the railway line and sprawled onto the bank of the cutting. As he climbed angrily back to his feet, his brain did one of those extraordinary linkages which the mind can sometimes achieve if you don’t force it—the gray blob which had been fretting him swam into his mind’s eye, fluttered for a second, and diminished with a rush of perspective to a dirty mark about a quarter of an inch across marring the white smoothness of the label under Dotty Prosser’s Colt—a long-barreled .45.

And the grenade beside it had been dusty.

Mr. Waugh was fast asleep on the dank lawn in the shadow of the Private Wing. His breath came loudly, but in the nasty gulps of the dead drunk. Fine witness to the number of bangs audible he’d be. Pibble shone his torch around and spotted a small tumbler which he picked up with his handkerchief and smelled. Neat whiskey. So some friendly spirit had brought out a warming toddy to comfort the poor old actor on his chilly vigil—someone who knew that in his shocked and dismal loneliness he would risk a sip and then a swig and then keel ponderously over.

Pibble hid the tumbler in a tuft of long grass in the corner of the wall, where no mower could reach. The evidence would be barely useful, but he was angry and he wanted to know who’d actually carried the liquor.

He couldn’t think of a method of getting Mr. Waugh indoors, off the rheumatism-breeding turf, without asking Singleton for help. Ah, well, five minutes wouldn’t make all that difference. First things first, and with a bit of luck the lit windows of the Kitchen Wing meant that the briefing was still in progress and everyone out of his way. The door to the colonnade was unlocked; dim bulbs shone amid the vines; but the Main Block was dark, and Pibble picked his way by torchlight across the Zoffany Room and into the enormous hall. The wetness of his shoes deadened their clacking on the resounding wood; at a real flat-foot’s pace he crept soundlessly into the Chinese Room, rapt in a charade of stealth, and tiptoed across the carpet toward the case of weapons.

The label had been changed since the morning; and the dusty grenade had been cleaned and polished.

Now he was certain, though there was no way of proving it unless they found the bullet. The main thing was to make sure of the gun; he knelt to look at the lock of the case, a flimsy brass affair, and then stood his torch to shine downward through the glass. As he was levering the seldom-used screwdriver device out of his penknife, his throat was seized from behind. Madly he tried to use the leg-hooking technique he had been taught for dealing with an assailant from the rear, but his instructor had not dealt with the case of a man who was kneeling when the assault came. Expert thumbs, cold as stone, probed direct for the jugular. He wrenched at the hands as uselessly as a baby trying to open a stiff doorknob; then even the faint light from the torch vanished into roaring blackness. Harvey Singleton had outwaited his enemy again.

Light, when it came back, was a pale rhythmic flash accompanied by the clank of heavy metal and a rumbling sound. His neck was a woeful belt of pain, but when he tried to raise a hand to touch it he could not achieve even a half inch of play for the limb—he was encased in something stiff but soft.

He filled his lungs to yell and felt the same constriction on his chest. The yell came out as a poor affair, a mild croak—the strangling had unmanned his vocal cords. It hurt even to try to twist his head, but by straining his eyes to their leftward limit he managed to glimpse the moon before a black shape eclipsed it in time to the clank, then the moon again, eclipse and clink again, moon … The rumble must be wheels; even through the padding he could sense their uneven joggle. Then the moon edged slowly into full view as the vehicle took a curve, and he could see that it had been a head and shoulders pumping up and down which had caused the interruption of its light. Then the clank made sense, too. He was lying on his back on a hand-operated rail trolley; Harvey Singleton was pumping the long arm that propelled it along the rails.

“You’ll never get away, with this,” Pibble croaked.

Singleton pumped on, silent, as remote from Pibble’s pains and terrors as a liner must seem from dying men in a lifeboat who can just see its plume of smoke smudging the horizon. A straitjacket, a very luxurious one, encased his limbs, he realized—just the kind of handy gadget that was sure to be stored in one of the Herryngs attics: you never knew when one of your guests might not go killing-crazy halfway through a wet weekend; or perhaps it had been made to measure for some past Clavering in whom the family madness surfaced too violently for social comfort. Why hadn’t Singleton simply tied him up? Answer, because the marks of the rope would show on his wrists and ankles. But the mark on his throat? Answer, it didn’t bear thinking about; there was one obvious way of hiding a stigma like that.

“Did you kill Deakin?” he croaked.

Singleton stopped the trolley and opened the gates to Old England. He had to push the trolley for several yards before it had enough momentum to be driven again by the pumping handle. He stopped once more in another hundred yards and bent down to lift Pibble’s rigid form across his shoulder, but in a moment of carelessness allowed their two heads to come close enough together for Pibble, despite the pang of twisting his neck, to snatch at the passing ear with his teeth, and get a good hold. With stolid patience—much the same as Pibble had earlier shown when removing the bramble from his own ear—Singleton laid him back on the trolley, their heads as close as if they had been lovers spooning under the big moon. Pibble ground his teeth, rejoicing in the taste of blood. Singleton’s fingers felt for his damaged neck; they seemed to know their way about, and suddenly one of them pressed deep in under the ear to find its chosen nerve. Pibble’s whole skull sang with agony. He opened his jaws.

Singleton straightened up and then bent out of sight again. There was a slow tearing noise and he rose with a strip of cloth in his hand which he used to bind around his head, with a wad over the bleeding ear. So there would be no trail of blood after all. He picked Pibble up as unemotionally as he had the time before, jerked his shoulder twice to settle his burden comfortably, and walked off along a flagged path. Pibble’s head faced downward and with a shiver of unburied superstition he saw that Singleton was a monster, one whose monstrosity came by night and vanished again with sunrise: his legs ended in a pair of ballooning mushrooms, white, soft, obscene … No, he’d padded them with cloth to achieve an area of contact with the ground as broad as an elephant’s foot—he’d leave no footprints at all. That’s where he’d torn the strip of cloth from to bandage his ear. The path led down, breaking into steps every few yards. Each pace, each descent, shot its lance of agony through Pibble’s neck, for his head was supported only by the bruised spine and mangled tissues. Singleton must have known, but cared as little for his victim’s pain as he had for the chewing of his own ear, which must have hurt like hell. Pibble could still taste the blood of his enemy in his mouth, and wondered whether the pathologist would have the genius to spot it and diagnose an alien blood group. And what would Singleton do about his ear? Tooth marks are very distinctive. Cut it off? Very likely.

They stopped at another door; Singleton lifted the latch and bore him into a wider turfed area, a courtyard among buildings. Seven steps more and he laid him on a platform and rolled him over onto his back. Directly behind Pibble’s head, a big beam reached toward the stars; at its top, supported by a small timber across the angle, the L-piece stood out sideways. From this dangled, just as in the silly little toy Miss Finnick had assembled, the summoning noose of the gallows.

Pibble felt his shoes being taken off. This seemed so extraordinary that inquisitiveness overcame the apathy of his fear and he contrived to move his head slowly to a position from which he could just see Singleton low down in the corner of his right eye. The man was leaning against the pillar of a moonlit cloister, removing the pads from his feet, and cramming Pibble’s shoes on—they were at least three sizes too small. Then, carrying the pads, he walked with short steps straight toward the gallows, out of Pibble’s line of vision. After a few seconds he appeared again, not carrying the pads but unwinding a ball of string whose other end was attached to a part of the gallows Pibble couldn’t see; he led the string around a pillar and came back to the gallows, still unwinding it; this time be came straight up the steps of the platform and tied his end of the ball to the beam above Pibble’s head. He moved out of sight and there was a longish pause before Pibble felt his shoes being laced back on again—any chance that a colleague would spot that it was a non-regulation knot, supposing it was? But Singleton was a devil for that sort of detail.

Next, after another short pause, a strange sensation at his fingertips which made him shrivel with terror at the thought that he was being prepared for some agonizing torture. It wasn’t until Singleton had done four fingers that he realized that he was having his fingernails cleaned with the paint of a nail file in case any telltale fragment of skin was still there after the brief fight in the Chinese Room.

So this was to be suicide. The single set of footsteps following the path of the string and then leading straight back to the scaffold would show up under normal police investigation. Presumably the string was fastened to a lever which controlled the trap, and had to be led around the pillar because the lever worked in that direction. Singleton would stand him up, put the noose around his neck, stand beside him on the scaffold, and pull the string; when the long lump of meat and bone had stopped swinging, he would untie the straitjacket and leave the body dangling, the string draped into the trap hole and the triple course of footsteps to show the world how poor Jimmy Pibble, unhinged by the shock of his dealings with the General (they might even work things to show that he had been responsible for the hero’s death), had melodramatically taken his own life.

Could it come off? Not if they brought the whole apparatus of forensic science to scrutinize his death. They’d find the place where the straitjacket had rested on the scaffold, the strained seams of his shoes, the depth of footprint made by a heavier man, even the faint and mysterious indentations where Singleton’s huge pads had plodded across the lawn bearing the weight of two men. All that should be detectable, given the will, but it was a lot of work and bother for an open-and-shut case.

So it all depended on whether they thought Pibble was the type to crack and kill himself. Jimmy Pibble, a bit sensitive—highly strung, you might say—never had the basic drive to make a topflight officer, clever but quirky, wouldn’t put it past him …

Suddenly, with a passion which detached him from the pain and fear of the horrid machine above him, he longed to know that they would put it past him.

“I am not that sort of person,” he gasped, in his ghostly whisper. Singleton hesitated in his manicuring and then moved on, silent, to another nail.

Mrs. Pibble, she’d know, surely. She thought him weak, unambitious, wasteful of his cleverness (which she absurdly overestimated), selfishly neglectful of her, but sane. She’d know he was sane. Too sane to kill himself, even as the last neglect of her. Poor Mary Pibble, she’d had a small, sour life, and she’d find it smaller and sourer tomorrow. And she wouldn’t know what to do about the insurance, though he’d told her fifty times—but Tim Rackham would look after that.

But would Tim listen when she said that her husband would never have committed suicide? Four-fifths of wives say that anyway, felo-de-se being a distinct reflection on the inadequacy of a spouse to make the dead man’s life worth living. What would Tim believe, whom he’d played chess with over beer and bangers and cheese almost every day in the last eight years on which their work had allowed them to lunch near their offices? Tim, who thought that any man’s life was purposeless if he didn’t find four noisy kids rioting about him the moment he got home?

And the Ass. Com.?

As Singleton levered him to his feet, taking care that his hard heels should not scrape along and mark the platform, Pibble found himself praying not to any God but to the Assistant Commissioner of Police, begging that official not to believe that Detective Superintendent James Willoughby Pibble was capable of the crime of self-slaughter.

Singleton, silent on padded feet, lifted him over to the noose; propped him up, and settled the rope around his neck.

“Stand up or you’ll strangle,” said Harvey Singleton, in a detached voice. They were the only words he’d spoken.

He moved off the trap and untied the string. Pibble tried to gather the nerve to throw himself sideways and, at the cost of strangling, leave better pathological evidence of what had happened to his throat before the rope got there. The wrench of the full drop must obliterate all that—there’d been that case of the sergeant in Germany—so … But he couldn’t do it. The muscles of his ankles, the only muscles which the straitjacket allowed him to move, clung despite his mind’s bidding to their last three seconds of life.

Singleton jerked the string.

It snagged on the pillar.

He jerked again, but still the return length hung in its low catenary curve. Without even a cluck of the tongue at the tiresomeness of inanimate things, he retied his end to the beam and padded across the lawn to remove the obstruction. This time Pibble was in control of his ankle muscles, but a faint, absurd hope bade him stand upright.

Singleton reached the moonlit edge of the cloister and pulled the string to one side; it still held. He moved it up and down under slight tension, but achieved nothing. He couldn’t afford to do much waggling, Pibble thought, without producing a suspicious abrasion of the string and fragments of thread caught in the wrong places on the pillar. Singleton seemed to think so, too, for he walked around to the next opening to loosen the string from inside.

Immediately he stepped into the shadow, there was a single sharp thud and he was tossed sprawling out across the grass. A squat gorilla-like figure pounced out of the cloisters onto his body; rolled it over on its front, straddled it, and with a rapid weaving motion lashed the arms together behind the back, then tied the ankles together, then ran another length of what Pibble knew must be camera strap between these two lashings and pulled it taut so that Singleton’s body was bent back into a bow. Singleton didn’t stir; the blow must have been well-aimed and vigorous.

Pibble felt the noose caress the side of his neck and realized with another bout of shock that he was swaying, giddy with fatigue and pain and relief, and with no possible leverage of limbs to regain his balance. He forced his ankles to move him gingerly back to attention and tried to call to his rescuer to hurry, but no sound came. However, the squat figure straightened from its task and trotted up the steps of the platform.

“It is Mr. Pibble,” said Mr. Chanceley. “I reckoned it was you, but I found it difficult to verify in this light. Let me have that cord off of your neck. What’s this you’re wearing?”

“A straitjacket,” gasped Pibble. “I’m extremely grateful to you, Mr. Chanceley.”

“Think nothing of it,” said Mr. Chanceley. “I will be asking a favor of you in the immediate future—I’ll tell you when I’ve untrussed you. You know, first I figured your act was a leg-pull but when I’d studied the setup awhile I guessed you wasn’t play-acting, neither of you. So I knotted his piece of cord around a nail and waited for him. I reckoned I could shout or discommode him if he tried to pull that lever direct.”

“He’s a very dangerous man,” said Pibble.

“And I was All American tackle, Idaho, afore I shifted down to Texas. You have a sore neck, Mr. Pibble.”

“Yes,” whispered Pibble. “He laid me out by throttling me and then he brought me down here to fake a suicide. The rope would have hidden the earlier bruises.”

“I heard you say you were down here on a job,” said Mr. Chanceley, with a shade of query in his flat voice.

“I’m a policeman, and I was investigating a suicide which turned out to be a murder, I think. That’s Mr. Harvey Singleton.”

“Yeah,” said Mr. Chanceley. “I spoke with him already.” The voice held a hint of social reproach; as though Pibble had committed a gaffe. He remembered the square, purple-clad figure arguing with Singleton under the fountain while the crowd milled into the coaches; remembered, too, how absurd he had seemed then.

“I hit him with my camera,” said Mr. Chanceley, as if pointing out the poetic justice of the implement. “It is shock-proof, naturally. I reckon he’ll live. Now, Mr. Pibble, you may consider you’re a mite in my debt, but you can set the record straight before we take him to the cells. I missed the picture of my life to fetch you out of that mess, but we can set it up again, and better, too. I have this experimental film, ultra-fast, nothing like it on sale anywhere in the world, and, like the slogan says, ‘It Takes Movies by Moonlight.’ Now, Mr. Pibble, you and your pal were posed, ab-so-lutely posed, for the greatest moonlight shot in history, but I couldn’t take it, first because I left my silent camera at my hotel, and second because I had to get you out of the fix you were in.”

“I’ll gladly put my head into the noose again for you, Mr. Chanceley,” said Pibble, “but I’m afraid we’ll have to do without the executioner.”

“Nuts,” said Mr. Chanceley. “I have a timing device for my camera. I’ll strip off and be the hangman—I have more the figure for it than your Mr. Singleton, too.”

He had already, while waiting in ambush, divested himself of his festooning gadgetry. Now he threw his blazer on the lawn, whisked his necktie off, and began to pull his shirt over his head, talking as he did so.

“We’ll move fast. If I know photography—and I do, Mr. Pibble—that beautiful big moon will fade behind a cloud if we give her one moment’s grace. Now, see here: I’ll aim my camera to take in the steps and a little bit of lawn this side, as well as the scaffold. You take off your coat and necktie, Mr. Pibble, but leave your shirt open at the neck. You don’t say it has a detachable collar? Holy Mother of Jesus, this is my lucky night. Take the collar off and you’ll look real antique. That white shirt is fine, and your face is nigh as white as your shirt—you’re sure this ain’t asking too much of you, Mr. Pibble? Then I’ll lead you up the steps with your hands strapped behind you; you’ll turn and kneel and say a prayer; I’ll jerk you up and put the noose around your neck and make like I’m going to pull the lever. Then you can step off the trap and we’ll have it open. I found a crate in there”—he jerked his thumb toward the cloisters—“and we’ll put it under the trap for you to stand on. Then you can go down slow, bending at the knees, while I pull the lever again slow. I can splice the pieces I need to make it seem quick when I run the film. We’ll have twelve minutes and thirty seconds before the film runs out, so we should do it easy.”

“Fine,” said Pibble, reflecting that Mr. Chanceley and Mr. Singleton made a very near match for rapid and detailed planning. The Texan fetched a small crate from the cloisters and hid it behind the scaffold. Pibble watched him wonderingly: half naked, with the build and musculature of a real Jack Ketch, his trouser ends tucked into his socks to simulate tights, he looked like a natural force which nothing short of annihilation would deter from its ends. How easy it would have seemed to another man to wash his hands of the humane aspects of the scene, perhaps to take a still or two of Singleton pulling the lever and Pibble undergoing the drop when the lens click would be drowned by other noises. How many dedicated photographers get the chance to snap a real murder by hanging? The temptation must have been like a flood tide. Juicy blackmail afterward, too. No question of not being allowed to photograph the Abbey by moonlight, either, and then to milk the publicity for all it was worth.

Mr. Chanceley fiddled and fussed over his tripod. Pibble put his coat back on while he waited; he felt as cold as he had while brooding over Deakin’s body—suddenly he remembered Mr. Waugh lying stertorous in the dank shadow under the Private Wing, rheumatism seeping every second into those alcoholic joints. As Mr. Chanceley straightened from his adjustments, Harvey Singleton groaned. Pibble bent to look at the thongs; they seemed firm enough for anything.

“Let him bide,” said Mr. Chanceley. “You ready now, Mr. Pibble?”

Pibble took off his coat, let his wrists be bound behind his back, and followed Mr. Chanceley up to the scaffold. The camera whirred in the dimness. He hung his head disconsolately so that he could see where the knotty muscles bulged on the square slab of his rescuer’s back. He knelt at the top of the steps and praised the Assistant Commissioner for his manifold mercies. He was hauled to his feet, stood on the trap, and again felt the harsh caress of the noose. For a crazy moment he was certain that Mr. Chanceley would be carried away by the histrionic art and would pull the lever—hard to make a motive like that stand up in court.

Then there was the juggling with the crate; slowly he did a full knee bend; when the rope was taut, he allowed his head to sag to one side while he tilted his chin upward and forward. It hurt like hell, but he owed Mr. Chanceley that much.

Harvey Singleton, when they came back to him, was threshing on the lawn like a landed salmon.

“Just let me dress,” said Mr. Chanceley, “and we’ll put him into that straitjacket.”

Pibble went and fetched the thing, wondering whether it could be made to fit so different-shaped a man, but found that it was most ingeniously designed to suit any size of customer: there were webbing straps at the back which served the dual purpose of adjusting the scope of its embrace and tightening its grip until the victim could not even wriggle. There was a label inside the collar—it said “Army and Navy Stores.”

“I’d best lay him out again,” said Mr. Chanceley. “We’ll have one hell of a wrestle getting him into that thing otherwise.”

He swung his camera in a sharp arc, producing the same thud as Pibble had heard before. The long body jerked and lay still.

“Holy Mother of Jesus,” said Mr. Chanceley as he undid the thongs. “You seen anything like that before, Mr. Pibble?” Pibble knelt and looked. The leather had cut into Singleton’s wrists so that they were welling with blood and the hands were as puffy as kidneys. Pibble tore up strips of the footpads and bandaged the wounds. Then, while Mr. Chanceley was untying the ankles, he went through Singleton’s pockets, finding a big ring of keys, a small automatic pistol, a wallet, and a roll of tape from a tape recorder. He pocketed these and helped roll the unconscious man into the straitjacket and adjust the straps as tight as they dared. He was still terrified of Singleton; the threshing had been a final desperate effort to get a hand to the pistol, and even with his arms strapped behind his back he might have managed to use it—he was that sort of man.

“Where now?” said Mr. Chanceley.

Pibble took the map Singleton had given him out of his pocket and peered at it by the light of the moon.

“I don’t fancy going back to the House,” he said. “I don’t know how much Mrs. Singleton is involved in all this, and the place is full of guns; they might try anything. But there’s a car up in the staff car park—it looks about five hundred yards—if one of us can drive it. It’s an E-Type Jaguar.”

“Boy, oh boy!” said Mr. Chanceley. “Is this my lucky night! If you’ll carry my equipment, Mr. Pibble, I’ll carry the prisoner.”

“Are you sure you can manage?” said Pibble. “I don’t think he’d get out if we left him here.”

“I’ll be happier if I know he’s with us,” said Mr. Chanceley. He hoicked Singleton up by the shoulders, tilting him onto his feet like a man tipping a log end over end, bent, and caught him neatly at the point of balance on his broad shoulder.

“My cameras are under the archway there,” he said. “Bring what you can carry, and maybe I’ll have time to come back for the rest. I’ll start off—you reckon it’s this track, Mr. Pibble?” He trudged into the dark with his lethal burden. Pibble picked up the bloody straps and carried them into the cloister, where he found an untidy ziggurat of leather, glass, and chrome. It took him several minutes to thread the straps into the right buckles and to load himself up. Not a dressy man, he was still concerned lest the providential Mr. Chanceley should feel he was carrying the gear in an inappropriate manner.

He found him propping his burden up at a point where the path forked.

“You made it,” said Mr. Chanceley. “Where now?”

“Left,” said Pibble, glad that he’d taken an extra half minute to learn the route off. Mr. Chanceley slung Singleton up onto his shoulder without a grunt.

“Be careful how you handle him,” said Pibble. “I managed to bite his ear when he was lifting me.”

“He tries that on me,” said Mr. Chanceley, “and I have his eye out. I was a Minuteman, back home, before they went soft, and I learned unarmed combat.”

The load of photographic equipment suddenly seemed heavier as Pibble came to terms with the knowledge that his rescuer was not merely a semi-literate American figure of fun, but a supporter of the extreme right wing to boot. But an honest man, he thought. An honest man. An honest man. The load became no lighter, but at least he could carry it.

The gate was locked and none of the keys fitted. Mr. Chanceley slid his load to the ground and propped it against a tree with a casualness that suggested he would have put it down head first if it had happened to lie that way.

“I saw you took his pistol,” he said. “We can maybe shoot the lock out.”

“I don’t think it’s worth it,” said Pibble. “If I take those three screws out, we can take the handle off and pull the whole lock sideways.”

In the event, it was Mr. Chanceley who had to turn the screws with the gadget on Pibble’s penknife. Pibble was feeling weaker every stride, and when they reached the car park he was ready to buckle under the weight of a new problem.

“We’ll never fit him into a two-seater,” he said.

“We’ll lower the top and lay him longways,” said Mr. Chanceley. “You’ll have to find somewhere to squat, and you’d best look for a scarf for your sore throat, Mr. Pibble—it’ll be a mite cold.”

“Let’s hope there’s a map in the car,” said Pibble. “I’m a stranger in these parts.”

“Me, too,” said Mr. Chanceley.

There was a map. The key was in the car. The top came down without trouble. Singleton fitted neatly in on the passenger seat with his feet in the long cavern under the dash and his head protruding over the folded top. Pibble, remembering how his own head had jogged on the journey down to the Abbey, insisted on using the two rugs in the car to wedge him into position, tying them to the straitjacket with one of Mr. Chanceley’s straps. He found a Shetland scarf for his own throat; Mr. Chanceley tried on the General’s deerstalker and rejected it; they settled themselves, Pibble perched on the top with his knees wedged behind the driving seat; the engine boomed its creamy note; three seconds later they were away, actually outside the purlieus of Herryngs House.