6:10 P.M.

Damn sorry, my dear fellow. Didn’t spot you down there. I thought that moron Rastus had shut Bonzo in without water.”

“General Clavering,” said Pibble, “I have reason to suspect that your brother has been killed and that you have some knowledge of how this happened.”

“I told Harvey it was bloody silly to get a real pro down,” said the General. He put his hand into an inner pocket and Pibble stiffened to jump for a gun, but what the General drew forth was a small torch which he shone into the bucket, bending down to peer at its contents.

“Didn’t think of that,” he said as he straightened up. “What are you going to do?”

“Have it analyzed for hair. And there’s something that looks like a braces clip. Meanwhile I’ll apply for a search warrant. There’s going to be a fuss, but you could save some of it by telling me what happened.”

The General shone his torch on the back wall, where a tall English beauty with the popeyes so admired by the eighteenth century was entwined with an ecstatically grinning hunchback.

“Extraordinary fellow, Josiah,” said the General. “That’s Lady Feverfew, you know. He put all the neighbors in, but kept it for his own amusement. Didn’t even let his brother down at the Abbey see it. Harvey wants us—I suppose I can say ‘me’ now—to open it to the visitors, but I don’t see how we can. Not honorably. Silly word. That old chap”—he shone his torch farther down the wall—“was the Rector in Josiah’s day, used to drink port with him after hunting, ancestor of Maureen Finnick’s, as a matter of fact. Isn’t the slightest evidence he was a pederast, and I don’t see why a lot of salivating Yanks should be allowed to think so now, eh?”

“General Clavering,” said Pibble, “will you please tell me how your brother died?”

“I am telling you, damn it,” said the General sharply. “If you won’t let me tell you my own way, you won’t get a squeak out of me. You must be feeling bloody pleased with yourself, but you aren’t home yet. Come here and listen. Going to take a long time, so we might as well be comfortable.”

He leaned his hands on the balustrade, like a tripper admiring the view from Weymouth Pier. Pibble walked forward and settled warily beside him: there was something wrong, another oubliette being prepared in that subtle old mind—perhaps he’d brought Singleton with him and left him lurking in the shadows, ready to tiptoe in when Pibble was all set up and pitch him down to the disposal unit below. The disposal unit was in theatrical form, ravening to and fro with the stilted walk of a destroyer captain pacing his five-foot bridge; the long tail lashed against either flank; the mad eyes never stopped looking up to where there now stood, just out of reach, a double helping of Man.

“Going to be a cracking night,” said the General. “Full moon, almost. We’ll be having a frost in a week or two—I must remember to warn Rastus. That one might be Mars—we’d never see Venus from down here. You interested in astronomy?”

“Interested but ignorant,” said Pibble, still tense for the Hush Puppy step on the flagstones behind him. The old man was keen to talk, to whatever end, and the sensible thing was to let him run on. They always tell you more than they mean to, the clever ones.

“Dick knew ’em all,” said the General. “Show him a fiddling little patch of sky through cloud and he’d tell you the names of the stars in it. He had that sort of mind, which was why we brought the Raid off. I’ll tell you something I haven’t told anybody—funny what you’re prepared to let them mumble over and then spit out again—writers, I mean. We decided early on that we’d always keep a bit back, so that the next chap could be offered a new crumb—you’d see if you read the books in order. The first ones had whole chapters about Dotty Prosser, most dangerous bloody bonehead I ever knew, wouldn’t have made the slightest difference if he’d been wiped out in the landing. We let them run on, though, because he was part of our investment. The Raid was our capital. Where was I?”

“Why you brought the Raid off,” said Pibble, unrelaxed.

“Course. Funny thing was what we chose to keep back, what seemed personal and private. Dick didn’t mind about this, but to me it seemed so particularly him, so right for his nature … Well … shan’t try to put it into words. Tried last night as a matter of fact, talking to Anty about him. She’s very cut up about this business, much more than you’d think to talk to her. Never mind. You ever looked at a chart of the St. Quentin estuary?”

“Not closely.”

“Well, I tell you it’s absolutely bloody terrifying, a complete bloody pot-mess of shoals and channels, all different at different tides. Dick sat up with those charts night after night, and when he’d finished you could name a tide and wind direction and he could draw the whole estuary, bang, every depth right to six inches. He took us in and got us out along ways which even the fishermen hadn’t thought of. War Office expected us to lose two-fifths of our boats before we’d even landed. Dick lost eight boats.”

“Two-fifths!” said Pibble. “That’s forty per cent! They didn’t do worse than that at Dieppe!”

“Ha!” said the General. “You’re going to learn a bit of history tonight, young man. You know why they mounted the Raid in the first place? They wanted to prove that it couldn’t be done. Winston was roaring for action because Uncle Joe kept getting at him, but the others were a lot of yellowbellies who expected the Yanks and the R.A.F. to win the war for them. Winnie bellowed and prodded till they realized they’d have to arrange something; then they thought they might as well take the chance to get rid of a lot of nits and nuisances—bods like Dotty Prosser and me. Christ, they must have rubbed their hands when they thought of that one!”

“Did you realize this at the time?” said Pibble.

“Not in so many words; pal of mine told me, long after the war, when he’d had a couple of ports too many at some bloody function. But we smelt something at the time, Dick and me. Obvious, really. Why put me in charge if they wanted the Raid to be a wow? Daresay you’ve heard how some of them used to go on about Monty—that was nothing to what they said about me. Trouble was I had a brother in the Navy, very close to him all my life, so I knew what an absolute dog’s dinner the Army was—even the clever chaps were saddled with a structure and a tradition so bloody inefficient that they were damned lucky if they got a quarter of their force into the right place at the right time. I used to say so, and I was too good at my job for them to sack me, so they must absolutely have pissed themselves silly with giggles when they thought of putting me in charge of the Raid. And it wasn’t only me. Prosser was just about typical of the sort of officer they landed me with.”

“And Mr. Singleton, and Dr. Kirtle?” said Pibble.

“Oh, for God’s sake, you couldn’t expect them to pick out individually tiresome M.O.s—Fred just got detailed. Same with other ranks; they were mostly just stray units who happened to be messing up some desk wallah’s paper work, and St. Quentin was a heaven-sent opportunity to tidy them away, a great big bloody W.P.B. But Harvey was in the same sort of mess as I was, only lower down the ladder; he’d made himself unpopular with his regiment, one of those toffee-nosed lots—the Halberdiers, as a matter of fact. He’d got just as riled at the damned stupid inefficiency of the Army as I had, though more in a profit-and-loss way, seeing he’s Harvey. Luckily there were quite a lot like him, to balance the Prossers, and between us we brought the thing off. Couldn’t have done it without Dick, though. He was in Western Approaches, but he wangled himself off, just to come with me. That mean anything to you?”

“I think so,” said Pibble.

“They were a bloody good crowd—they wouldn’t have changed jobs until they were dead, given the option. But Dick pulled strings, and there we were.”

“I see,” said Pibble, watching the lion pause in its pacing and stretch up the fretted stonework toward them, remeasuring its height against the unshrinkable distance. He heard a rustling in the gallery behind him and swung suddenly around, but though it was almost pitch dark now under the vaulted ceiling, he could see that no enemy stood there; it must have been a mouse, or even a leaf.

“Nervy?” said the General. “Not surprised—nasty great brute and he bloody nearly got you. To be fair, Dick was always a small-boat man at heart, lost in those damn great ships; all seemed to be run by pursers, he told me. So we sat down together and decided to trust no one. Had to do everyone’s homework for them: Army’s perfectly capable of sending two shiploads of boots somewhere, left boots all in one boat, right boots all in the other; then they can’t understand why the whole bloody lot’s useless when one of the ships gets sunk. Harvey was bloody good at sorting that sort of pot-mess out, and I had my pals. After all, Winnie had set his heart on the Raid, so we always had one bloody great string to pull when all our anti-tank guns were sent to lie rusting at Arbroath Station. Same with Intelligence—talk about wish fulfillment! Anything they want to be true is true. Journalists are the worst, archaeologists the best—I got journalists. So we just said, ‘Yes, yes, how bloody clever you are,’ and went off and asked elsewhere. I got more usable gen in the bar of the Travellers’ than I did out of the whole of my I Section.

“Huns knew we were coming, of course, but we insisted on a full rehearsal, week early, and Dick and I went in on the rehearsal. Nobody thought we could do it; tides quite wrong, they said. Dick knew better. Caught the Hun bending. Caught ’em bending at the Air Ministry, too, but I knew old Rufus McGoggin couldn’t afford to pull out without letting the Bomber Command boys have everything their own way in future. Always hated my guts, but he had to put on a show for me. Hello, your pal’s getting ideas above his station.”

He watched with mild interest as the lion, maddened beyond bearing by the noise of this garrulous meal above its head in the darkness, compressed itself back onto its haunches and sprang for the balustrade; its claws scrabbled at the brickwork a couple of feet below where they stood; then, still flailing, it fell thudding on hard earth. Pibble could hear the wind whoosh out of its lungs. It lay gasping for several seconds before it rose painfully to its feet and stalked off through the gloaming.

The General talked on; his short sentences, clipped of articles and pronouns like early Auden verse, were a fitting vehicle for the brutal story. Much of his argument was mathematical: how many men had it been worth sacrificing in the feint toward the double submarine pen on the chance of reaching the single pen? What were the odds that they’d get mauled to bits during the sudden switch from the Western Harbour to the Eastern? How long would the Resistance manage to delay the panzers coming up from the south? And, finally, how many deaths was it worth to last out how many days before the Admiral could get them off?

The lion came back, discouraged, and stared up into the cloister, its tail twitching slightly. The moon rose, full and regal, into a cloudless night. Pibble grew cold, listening to the old man with half his mind, glancing unconvincingly around from time to time (as Mr. Chanceley had glanced while he teased the lion cub’s ears) but never seeing an attacker; he knew he was being set up for something, being lulled into a sense of trust and friendship, but he couldn’t tell why. And, dammit, when would an ex-upper-lower-middle-class detective again get the chance to stand in the grounds of one of the greatest houses in England and listen to the bearer of one of his country’s proudest names telling the secret history of the greatest single feat of arms in the Second World War? You could set that in G.C.E. as an example of a rhetorical question.

“I’d lost a stone and a quarter,” said the General, “but they rang the City bells for us. And that was that.”

“You mean you never got another command?”

“Unemployable. You’ve got to remember St. Quentin was a defeat. Lost two-thirds of my men, four-fifths of my equipment, only destroyed one submarine pen. The Boche had the other two working again three weeks after we left. They had to sell it as a victory, but the professionals knew what it was worth. A few heads rolled when Winnie found out what had been going on, but he couldn’t do much, considering that it had all been his idea and then he’d been the first to get cold feet. You’ve heard about me smashing my wirelesses? Those signals were coming from him. Wouldn’t have done it if I’d known. But the others didn’t care how much of a bloody shambles it became—they were proving their point about raids.

“Dick sailored on for a bit, but his heart wasn’t in it. I went lecturing in the States—never liked the Yanks since then. There was a bit of a move to put me in command at Arnhem but Monty wasn’t too joyous about the idea.

“Nor was I. I’d had enough. You spend your life training for one thing, you give every second of your time to your profession, you sacrifice your wife and daughter to it, you’re there, coiled, ready—and they launch you off on a bloody abortion of an enterprise like St. Quentin. I gave up. I’d done my best for my country and my service; Herryngs and the Claverings were the limits of my horizon now. I told you earlier that Dick and I thought of the Raid as our capital; I just sat down to nurse it. Even on the boat coming back I was thinking along those lines—hadn’t got it worked out clearly, of course—but chose the bods for the decorations strictly according to what would look good in the papers. Had to fake the record a bit with Prosser, you know; we’d got at those gunners with a couple of rooftop Brens before he did his death-or-glory bit, but he was just right for a V.C., handsome, dashing, good family, dead. Couldn’t have a live V.C. stealing any of the limelight. Chap who should have got it was a Signals corporal called Martin. He was working his wireless in a house by the quay when the room caught fire just as the signals were coming through from Dick about taking us off. He stuck it out. Never seen a man so burnt. Wouldn’t have looked good in the papers, not at all. I did put him on the list for an M.M., but some civilian desk wallah decided I’d had my ration and crossed him off.”

The General stared at the rising moon. Only the gleam of reflection from his cornea showed that he wasn’t stone, or perhaps a wax model propped there until it should be needed for some puppetlike re-enactment of the heroic story. The lion lay down still watching them. Pibble shivered and listened to the silences behind him.

“It was a mistake,” said the General, the thin tongue licking between the thinner lips.

“The Admiral’s death?” slid Pibble.

“No. Yes. No,” said the General impatiently. “I mean that was a mistake, too, dammit, but the mistake I was talking about was shutting up shop. You remember what I said about being trained, being coiled and ready, and then going off at half cock? Your mind’s a machine, and it can’t take that sort of treatment. It goes sick, and the only cure is work. Work. Work. Slog away at the job you were bred for. But we packed it in, settled down to be heroes. Nothing to do but let the adulation roll in. Bad mistake.

“We were heroes, mark you. We’d done everything between us, saved everybody’s bacon, given Englishmen something to be proud of. I know, as well as I know that I’m talking to Superintendent James Pibble, that if Dick and I hadn’t been there it would have been an absolute bloody shambles. They might have lost a few less lives, but they wouldn’t have got anything done, and then they’d have surrendered. We didn’t win the bloody war, but if we hadn’t done what we did at St. Quentin we might have lost it: we bucked people up, strengthened Winnie’s hand a bit, lopped out a few useless bastards in high places, shook the Boche—he had nineteen men to my one there by the end, you know—we felt we’d done our stuff, but we trapped ourselves. Twenty-five years we’ve sat here, doing nothing to spoil our investment. We could have done anything, absolutely any bloody thing, Dick and I, but we stored ourselves away like apples in a loft, and lay on our shelves, waiting for the soft brown patches to appear. We got a bit mad, like your pal down there. Daresay you noticed it.”

“Do you think he’s mad?” said Pibble.

“Course I do. Hasn’t got rabies, but you’ve only got to look at his eyes. I’ll be honest with you: he reminds me of Dotty Prosser. Dotty was a killer—he’d have been in Broadmoor if there hadn’t been a war—very nasty type indeed. Your pal has just the same sort of look about his eyes. All lions are a bit loopy, you know: comes of being the strongest animal around, like Captains R.N. They go out on those shapeless great seas in their little tin ships, nobody of their own rank to talk to, so they go potty, start believing they’re the lost ten tribes, learn Tamil, think they’re going to retire and make money out of dairy farming, that sort of thing. Lions are the same—dangerous clowns. But your pal’s not dotty—he’s mad. Aren’t you, boy?”

The lion sensed that a communication was being made to it and raised its sullen head. It looked completely black by now in, the moonlight, but as it opened its jaws the thin rays caught its teeth so that they glistened for a moment, like remote stars. The roar came late, bored, ghastly.

“I see what you mean,” said Pibble.

“Come along here and I’ll show you something else.”

Pibble, poised for a trap, followed half behind the old man’s shoulder, almost on tiptoe, like a tennis player readied for a fast serve, peering into the thick but moving shadows for the inevitable ambush. The General had his torch out and was shining it along the obscene frieze, making the stone limbs quake in slow-motion simulations of the ecstasies of flesh.

“Here we are,” he said, and allowed the beam to pick out a particular character, hold it for a moment, and then move on to a handsome couple who were engaged in Nature’s trade in a fashion which, for once in all that extraordinary carving, did not seem corrupt or perverse. The sculptor had taken more trouble over them, rounding the splayed limbs with real affection, giving the pair, in his own crude terms, an innocence and beauty wholly different from the Swiftian frenzy of the rest of the work.

The torch moved up and to the side a little, and Pibble saw that this section had been separated from the rest of the riot; there was a lull, a clearing in the jungle of limbs, a blank space in which stood three shocks of corn. The beam moved back to the first figure and Pibble saw that it was fully clothed: an elderly, austere man with a high-buttoned frock coat, and a small wig above a thin face and a hooky nose, gazed down at the busy pair.

“That’s Josiah,” said the General. “That’s his mistress, girl called Mercy Plum. And that’s her lover, horse coper called Simon—nobody knows his other name. Josiah framed him and had him transported, and Mercy hanged herself in the old man’s bedroom. All this”—he waved his torch up and down the frieze—“is their monument. Rum sort of fellow, Josiah, don’t you think?”

“Yes,” said Pibble, realizing with a jerk that he’d let his defenses drop, fascinated by the abrupt Arcadian tone which the unknown sculptor had achieved. He looked over his shoulder and saw nothing but the arched darkness, then back to the sad, cruel face held in the beam of the torch.

“That’s what happened to us,” said the General, “in a manner of speaking. Haven’t got to that stage physically yet, thank God. We became remote, ‘outsiders’ is the fashionable jargon, I think. We just stared at the world as if it didn’t concern us. But we knew it did, same way that Mercy and Simon concerned him. We soured. We rotted. The brown patches came. I was worse than Dick, maybe, but not much. He could be a terror in private. I used to break out a bit in public, to show the world what I thought of it.”

“I read about the cuckoos,” said Pibble, “and the Epstein at Framplingfield.”

“Poor old George,” said the General. “Absolutely bloody awful artist. Typical of the sort of people they wished on me for the Raid. But I really did that to get at Blight. You know he cut down a row of limes my mother had planted, in Richmond, just in order to put up a filthy great block of offices?”

“Tell me about the duel,” said Pibble.

“Ha! Didn’t realize you’d sorted it out that far. Suppose we’d better get on to that. What’s your pal up to?”

Pibble moved well away from the old man, just in case of attack, and leaned over the balustrade to scan the moonlit floor. He couldn’t see the lion anywhere.

“Gone away to think,” said the General. “Better keep an eye open. Madmen might try anything, once they’ve thought about it a bit.”

“The duel,” said Pibble.

“Coming to that,” said the General. “You met our Judith?”

“Yes,” said Pibble.

“Funny face she’s got,” said the General. “Noticed how it slopes backward, all the way up, like an orangutan’s? Not so much, but quite marked once you’ve spotted it. Flat face, big mouth, little nose, everything tilted a bit backward. Ape woman—Eve must have been like that in Eden, Dick used to say.”

“You talked about her a lot?” asked Pibble.

“Nothing else, during the fortnight she was here. Not much else for two old men to talk about, really: not when they haven’t had a proper job for over twenty years, and they find themselves taking stairs in ones which they always used to take in twos. Rotting’s a slow process, and you think about it all the time. I tell you, I’ve found myself in bed with a woman, everything gone like a house on fire, she’s feeling all soft and mumbly, but what I’ve been thinking about is whether I’ll ever be able to do it again. Takes the edge off your pleasure, that sort of thing. Last few years Dick and I’ve been tending to egg each other on, if you see what I mean. Just talk, fantasy, but a sort of challenge at the same time—like when we were kids and used to dare each other to climb trees. And the same with horses, later.”

He paused, looking up at the minareted skyline. Pibble saw that the lion had come back and was sniffing one of the pillars farther along the arcade—the one he himself had climbed down and up by, most likely. He felt bewildered by all this self-revelation; there seemed to be too much of it for it to be just bait to lull him into unwariness. Probably it was no more than repressed shock, the old boy having played the Spartan over his brother’s death but now being betrayed by the second shock of being found out.

“Plenty of women in these parts, of course,” said the General, “happy to oblige a rich old hero. Then there are fancier campaigns which keep you occupied for a bit: Dick spent eight months maneuvering to cuckold old Blight after he’d cut down my mother’s trees—brought it off, too. Pretty girl, been a model, got that expensive leather look, very good, Dick said. But every now and then you come across a girl (and they get younger as you get older) who really cuts you up. You begin to think that having her is the most important thing in the whole bloody world—tell yourself that after her you’ll die happy. Funny thing, those are the ones you never make, more often than not. These last years Dick and I managed to steer clear of each other’s obsessions until Judith turned up.

“Anty chose her, and still can’t see what all the cheering’s about. But Dick and I developed a lot of needle over her. Started to get jealous of each other’s dirty minds, even. Didn’t stop us talking about her, of course, but there was no best-man-win nonsense about it. We’d sit up into the small hours jeering at each other and drinking too much. Couldn’t sail straight in and start seducing her the day she arrived, naturally. Got to give her the chance to feel like one of the family first. But the time was coming, and we both wanted to make a start before the other one. Trouble was we both thought we’d seen her first and the other one ought to do the decent thing and lay off. Two rich old heroes scratching on her door in the small hours and she’d have packed up and gone home to Mum.

“Four nights ago, one o’clock in the morning, we decided to have a duel. Both pretty tight by then. Deakin made the dueling pistols they use at the Abbey—made ’em to throw low and to the left, so that nobody gets bits of wadding in their eye and sues us. We’ve often loaded them up and pooped off at each other. Silly game, but made the old blood run quicker for a few minutes. No chance of hitting, provided you aimed straight.

“But this time I meant to hit him, and I knew he meant the same. Partly whiskey, partly jealousy. We both fell over a couple of times on the way down to the Abbey, and didn’t help each other up. I thought we weren’t going to be able to do it after all, it took such a time to load those damn pistols, black powder everywhere, both of us swearing like fishwives at the other one’s clumsiness. But we managed. Night like this, almost bright as day, heavy shadows.

“Dick said, ‘Feed me to Bonzo, Ralph.’ That’s Bonzo down there. He’d often said it before, much obsessed by death, so I knew he meant it. Can’t remember what I said. We stood back to back and paced apart, both counting aloud, turned round at ten, aimed. You’re allowed to fire as soon as you’ve turned, but there’s no point in it. Thing is to take a steady aim. I could see Dick’s pistol pointing high and to his right. Mine was, too. We fired just about together and I felt his ball going past my ear. Couldn’t hear it, because of the echoes. Then I saw I’d got him. He’d keeled over before in duels, just for the hell of it, but we weren’t in the mood this time.

“I walked across and saw I’d got his heart. Bloody fine shot. Serve you right, you randy old bastard, I thought. Then I went and fetched Rastus’s tractor and levered him onto the trailer and brought him up here and pitched him over. Took his shoes off, first—kicking­ myself now for not realizing Deakin would clean ’em and put ’em back. Spotted that, didn’t you? I was pretty sure Bonzo would drag him under cover, and he did. Told Harvey what had happened next morning, Harvey told Anty. We didn’t tell anyone else, but Deakin seems to have sorted it out. That’s why he hanged himself. Elsa knows now, and I’ve a sort of feeling some of the others­ have guessed something’s up. Rastus was acting up in the bone house, too. Did you say anything to him?”

“I asked him about the lion,” said Pibble. “He didn’t tell me anything. Now, this is an important point, Sir Ralph. Would you have done the same thing if you’d been sober?”

“Wouldn’t have tried to hit him if I’d been sober, if that’s what you mean. Least, I don’t think so. Difficult to tell: we were both considerably touched about that girl. Wouldn’t kill him again, of course, now that I know what it’s like living without him. But if you mean would I have fed him to Bonzo if I’d been sober—yes, I would. That’s what he wanted, and what the hell bloody business is it of anyone else’s?”

Pibble sighed, and the lion, who had come back to pace below the arch at their feet, answered with its enormous breathy roar.

“I’ll just go and get my bucket,” he said, “and then we can go to the house and ask one of the local policemen up to hear you make a formal statement.”

“He’s going to be disappointed,” said the General. “You don’t believe I’m going to spout that lot out in front of a witness, do you? Just because I felt the urge to get it off my chest to you? You’ve got a long furrow to plow yet, my boy.”

Pibble sighed again, but this time the lion did not answer.

“It won’t make a lot of difference, I’m afraid,” he said, and started to walk back down the arcading. He didn’t mind any more. What the General had told him about the Raid—particularly about the Signals corporal and Dotty Prosser—had dealt with the Clavering myth as a first frost deals with dahlias, turning all their green sappiness to blackened withering. He saw that the old boy was mad, probably always had been mad. No definition of sanity covered people who believed they could treat the world they lived in, the citizens they lived among, with such brutal, insolent … Why, the man was as mad and—

Something banged bonily into his rib cage behind his left elbow, hustling him half sprawling against the balustrade. His ankle was gripped and wrenched upward, twisting him further over, so that for a second he was almost on his back on top of the stonework, with no handhold to prevent his being pitched down below like a hay bale tossed from a barn loft; but as his left arm flailed outward above his head its knuckles banged against stonework—the next pillar. His right arm was already flailing, but he steered it in a panicky sweep in that direction and grabbed. Magically his fist was full of clean, unmoving stone. Suddenly he was in control of his body, which an instant before had been whirling mindlessly about like a tangle of snapped hawser. He let the attacker waste his attack on forcing his legs over the balustrade while he jerked himself upward with his right arm.

He was already in a sitting position when the next rush came. He leaned inward and pushed it away. His assailant was so light, so weak, so old.

“Worth trying,” panted the General. “Five years ago and I could have done it easy. Judith listened to a bit of your talk with your sawbones pal, you know. Told us about it at tea. Haven’t a clue what it meant.”

Pibble didn’t say anything. He stood down onto the flagstones and was about to move toward his bucket when he heard a new noise, a rattling scrape just outside the balustrade. He took a firm hold of the pillar and looked over, straight down into the lion’s mask. Either the animal had done its thinking or it had been stimulated to a fresh idea by the sound of the fracas above it, and now it was working its way up the ladder of fretted stone which Pibble had used. The oval holes were not quite large enough for the big pads, but as Pibble stared it forced its right paw into another rung and the mask followed in a jerking six-inch rush. Pibble thought for a wild second of trying to shove the creature back; he might have done it if he’d still had his shovel, but that lay hopelessly down at the bottom of the pit.

The General was leaning over the balustrade beside him.

“Told you he’d think it out,” he said coolly. “We’d better be off.”

For an old man he achieved a lively scamper. Pibble ran for his bucket but saw as he came back that the extra few yards might now be fatal. A hairy blackness was scrabbling at the top of the stone, the moonlight striking a faint gleam off its claws. He ran desperately and caught up with the General just around the corner. Inexplicably the old man had slowed to a walk.

“Quick!” panted Pibble as he rushed past him. “He’s almost there!”

And they’d been running the wrong way. The General, for all his apparent coolness, had led him in the direction which involved running almost three sides of the pit instead of one and a bit. He looked wildly over his shoulder across the diagonal of the courtyard and saw that the lion had vanished. It must be already under the arcading and leaping after them. He was balancing his run, awkward because of the wallowing bucket, for the final corner when a hand caught his back-flung shoe and wrenched him off balance. As he went down, he glimpsed amid the whirling shadows the General prancing past him. The old boy had led him around the long way on purpose, slowed on purpose to be overtaken.

Pibble let the twisting momentum of his fall roll him sideways into the blackness under the frieze. Against the arcaded sky he saw a jagged shadow whirl past him, heard the quick flutter of big pads taking the corner, then silence, then a brief barking cry which was not the cry of the lion, a thud, and then silence again.