“Isn’t a red sky in the morning supposed to be some kind of warning?” Lucie remarked as they rounded the corner of Shields Tower to a dramatic sunrise. She linked her arm into her husband’s and frowned. It felt strangely odd, as if she had been somehow disloyal. She shook off the feeling and added, “If it is, then that is the great-grandfather of all warnings.
“So, Atticus, have you finally determined the identity of our murderer and, by and by, did you win your chess game?”
Atticus shook his head. “The game was a stalemate,” he said, “which is good. It means that my mind is perfectly objective. As for the murderer’s identity, I find myself again in something of a stalemate, and that is not so good. I have a reasonable suspicion but I would put it no higher than that.
“Lucie, you discovered three sets of fingertip prints on the sword we can call Excalibur. At least two more people are in great danger for their lives so it is vital that we identify the owners of those prints as quickly as we can. I do hope that James, the footman, has returned from Hayden Bridge. He served in the British Army with the Northumberland Fusiliers and I need to find out a little more about bugle calls.”
The whitewashed walls of Uther’s cottage seemed to glow crimson as they reflected the dying embers of the early morning sky. But just as before, they knew instantly that it remained eerily deserted.
Atticus knocked gently on the peeling paint of the door above the great, red emblem of the dragon.
“Uther,” he called. “Uther Pendragon, it is only us; Atticus and Lucie Fox.”
There was no sound. Lucie touched his arm and pointed to a small parcel lying on the hard, trodden ground by the side of the door. It was wrapped in brown paper that had been shredded and torn. Atticus stooped and picked it up.
“Bread and cheese,” he noted, pulling aside the wrapping. “Although the birds or the rats have been at it. We must have overlooked it last night.”
He knocked again, more briskly this time and then lifted the latch and pushed open the door.
Atticus and Lucie stepped inside the threshold. If anything, the short time since their previous visit had served to palpably increase the sense of desolation and abandonment within.
“This will do excellently well, Atticus,” Lucie said, picking up Uther’s glass tumbler with its dusting of orange sediment. “There is quite a full set of prints here.”
Atticus laid the ragged food parcel onto the table then moved aside a pile of mould-spattered sketches to allow space for his wife to work. Lucie took her ostrich-feather brush from the enamelled tube in which it was kept and twisted the cork lid from a jar of dusting powder. As she settled to begin her work, Atticus took the opportunity to examine Uther Pendragon’s cottage again in more detail.
“Lucie, it still bothers me that Sir Hugh continues to allow Uther to stay here in this cottage,” he said as he gazed around the squalor.
“He has the debt of honour,” she replied without looking up from her tumbler. “And I suppose that underneath all of his bluster, he must believe a man innocent in law until he is proven guilty,” Atticus grunted. “Possibly. It still seems very strange though. The man is convinced he is a five-time murderer yet he keeps him here, a stone’s throw from his own son and daughter and the rest of his household. In fact, he lets his son and daughter visit him, and he even required his housekeeper to deliver a food parcel to him twice each week.”
He nodded to the ragged remains of the parcel on the table.
“It seems so wrong. Surely Britton should be taken into the lunatic asylum at Morpeth or wherever it was.”
“It was Morpeth or Gosforth. But don’t forget he made a promise to his father, Atticus. Sir Hugh may be many things, but word and honour are everything to him.”
“I suppose you’re right,” Atticus conceded.
Lucie held up a small glass plate onto which she had stuck a number of strips of dark blue paper. There were three other identical glass plates already laid neatly side-by-side on the table.
“Here you are, Atticus,” she said grimly, “Michael Britton’s prints do match with one of the sets we took from the sword hilt. It is the set of fingerprints which show the extensive scarring.”
She shrugged.
Atticus considered for a moment, gazing at the incriminating prints through the thin glass.
“That will certainly be enough for the detective superintendent, and probably for a judge of assizes too given the force of the other evidence.”
Lucie shrugged again. “The evidence is damning, but as you said yourself, it’s not entirely conclusive given that we have two other sets of prints from the sword too. It may still be that he is innocent. We need to find the owners of those other two sets and quickly. Northumberland is a large county. Where do you propose we begin?”
“Well,” Atticus replied, “Northumberland is a vast county but all of this appears to be centred on Shields Tower and the home farm, so I suggest we begin there. But before we do, I’m going to take a look at Britton’s draw pump outside. This orange water still intrigues me greatly and I wish to look at a sample.”
There was no rear entrance to Michael Britton’s cottage so Atticus followed an obviously well-trodden path around the outside of the walls to the windowless rear. For a man obsessed by the moors and crags of Sewingshields, Atticus mused, the pump temporarily forgotten, there could be no better place to live. In front of him the ground rose steadily up, punctuated here and there by long, shallow crags and by the bright yellow mounds of scattered gorse thickets to finally break open on the rocks of the high Whin Sill. The panorama was as beautiful as it was dramatic.
Atticus’s attention returned to Britton’s cottage. There were rocks here too. In fact, the cottage had been built in the lee of one of the wide, low outcrops of rock that were repeated up the hillside beyond. The draw pump was nestled right against this outcrop. It was encased in a tall, wooden housing with an iron handle on one side and a lead spout on the other gaping over a mossy, stone trough.
Atticus lifted and then heaved down on the handle. The pump primed immediately and gently spilled its load of water from the spout. He scooped the tumbler under the flow and held it up to the light. There was a faint but unmistakeable orange hue to the water. Stepping up astride the slippery sides of the trough, he shuffled off the wooden lid of the pump housing and peered down inside.
It was still early and the low angle of the sun could illuminate only the top few inches of the bare, ochre-stained wood. Beyond that, only the wet lead of the pump mechanism glistened back at him from the shadows. But it was enough. Atticus grunted in grim satisfaction before setting the lid back into place.