He moved a step or two, and for the second time his eye was caught by something glinting under the light. This time he had no need to prick his finger. The sun slanted across the hedge and dazzled upon broken glass – quite a lot of it. Nothing in the least mysterious about how it came there. Quite obviously the milk boy had been careless and let a bottle fall. The base had rolled under the hedge and was still sticky with milk.

Garth looked at the splinters on the ground, and thought about the splinter on the Rectory stair. He thought Miss Brown had picked it up on the hem of her black lace skirt and dropped it again as the lace dipped and brushed the carpet on her way upstairs.

Well, it wasn’t really his business – or wouldn’t have been if it were not for Aunt Sophy. As it was, it gave him a feeling of insecurity. He didn’t like the way in which the old dear had come by Miss Medora Brown. Coffee grounds and cards are not really a substitute for first-class references. He wondered to what extent Aunt Sophy had been carried away, and whether she had considered the question of references at all.

He walked slowly past the back door into Meadowcroft, and wondered whether Miss Brown had passed through it last night. When he reached the boundary wall of The Lilacs he turned back again. He was within a couple of yards of the open Rectory door, and had paused for another look at the litter of glass, when without any warning a voice went off in his ear.

‘Coo! That’s a smash!’ it said. ‘Not ’arf!’ Swinging round, he found himself looking down at a leggy boy of twelve, his grey flannel shorts half way up his thighs, and his sleeves half way up to the elbow. He might have been stretched, or the clothes might have shrunk. How much longer they would hold together was conjectural. ‘Hello!’ said Garth. ‘Who are you?’

‘Cyril Bond. I’m a ’vacuee. That’s my billet.’ He jerked an elbow in the direction of Meadowcroft, and added, ‘Got hens in there, we have. They don’t ’arf lay. I get a negg for my breakfast twice a week, I do.’

‘And you made this horrible mess?’

‘Naow!’ The shrill tone was scornful. ‘That’s a milk bottle, that is. I don’t tike the milk round. That’s Tommy Pincott’s doing, that is. He done it yesterdye. He’s fourteen and left school. He works for his uncle, and I reckon he’ll cop it from him.’ Garth stepped over the glass and went in through the Rectory door. The shrill voice followed him.

‘You’re stying in there? Your nyme’s Albany? Come last night, didn’t you?’

‘You seem to know all about it.’

‘Course I do!’

The boy’s face brightened. He had fair hair, grey eyes, a fresh colour, and a deceptive appearance of cleanliness. He jerked a thumb in the direction of the church.

‘There was a man shot in there a coupler days ago – right in the church. There’s going to be a ninquest todye and none of us boys won’t be let go to it. Coo – I’d like to go to a ninquest!’

‘Why?’

The boy scuffed with his feet among the broken bits of glass.

‘I dunno. Miss Marsden, our teacher, she said any boy that went on talking about this gentleman that was shot, she’d keep him in. That’s what comes of having wimmen brought in to teach you. My dad doesn’t hold with it. He says they’ll all be too big for their boots after the war. D’you reckon that’s right?’

‘I shouldn’t wonder,’ said Garth, laughing.

He prepared to shut the door, but the boy came edging over the threshold.

‘Do you reckon the gentleman shot himself?’ he said.

‘I don’t know.’

‘I reckon it’s a funny place to shoot yourself, don’t you – right in a church?’

Garth nodded.

Cyril kicked at a stone with the toe of a disintegrating shoe. His voice was shriller than ever. ‘Fancy going right into a dark church to shoot yourself, when you might do it comfortable at ’ome! It don’t seem likely – that’s wot I sye.’

‘Does anyone else say it?’

Cyril kicked again. The stone went into the ditch.

‘I dunno. What do you reckon about it, mister?’

‘It’s out of my reckoning,’ said Garth in rather an odd tone of voice. Then he said, ‘Cut along now!’ and shut the door.

HE STROLLED INTO the churchyard after breakfast, and found Bush digging the grave which would be wanted tomorrow for Michael Harsch. Frederick wore his usual air of conscientious gloom. He was a fine broad-shouldered man, and must have cut a personable figure in his footman days, but very few people had ever seen him smile. Some said it was just his gravedigger’s pride – ‘And say what you like, none of us wouldn’t fancy having jokes cracked over our coffins.’ Others said that if they had to live with Susannah Pincott and eat her cooking, maybe they wouldn’t smile either.

Garth said, ‘Hello, Bush!’ and got a ‘Morning, Mr Garth,’ after which the digging proceeded.

‘You’re all well, I hope?’

Bush lifted a heavy spadeful.

‘As well as anyone’s got the right to expect.’

‘I suppose this is for Mr Harsch?’ Garth indicated the grave.

This time he only got a nod.

‘Did you know him? I suppose you did. Was he the sort of chap to commit suicide? Seems an odd place to do it in, the church.’

Bush nodded again and threw out another spadeful. Then he said soberly, ‘I doubt there’s two kinds of chaps – anyone might do it if they was to be pushed hard enough.’

‘What makes you think that Mr Harsch was being pushed?’

Bush straightened up.

‘Begging your pardon, I never said no such thing. Anyone might get pushed so as they couldn’t keep a hold of themselves. I seen a car run away down Penny Hill when I was a boy – something gone wrong with the brakes, they said – come an almighty smash against a big ellum in the hedge. I reckon that’s just about what happens when a chap takes his own life – brakes don’t work and he gets out of control same as a car.’ He bent to his digging again. There was no more to be got from him.

The inquest was set for half-past eleven in the village hall. Garth walked down between Miss Sophy and Miss Brown, both wearing black. Miss Brown was silent, Miss Sophy tremulously conversational. She kept a hand on his arm, and clutched him hard as they entered.

Rows of wooden chairs, a narrow aisle up the middle, a platform at the far end, an all-pervading smell of varnish. Memories of village concerts, private theatricals, and jumble sales crowded in upon Garth. To the right of that platform he had sat at the upright piano presented by Miss Doncaster and played his first solo, The Merry Peasant, with leaden fingers and a growing conviction that he was going to be sick. Behind the very table which occupied the centre of the stage his grandfather’s impressive figure had towered as he presented prizes to the more virtuous of the village youth. Where the narrow lane between the chairs now stretched tables groaning with buns had been set for the Christmas Sunday School treat. There was something rather horrid about revisiting the scene for an inquest. One thing there was in common between those past occasions and this gloomy one, the hall was full. Only the two front rows remained unoccupied, but they were farther removed from the platform then they would have been at a concert, and on the right-hand side of the space thus left clear a dozen chairs placed sideways in two rows accommodated nine embarrassed-looking men and three women.

The coroner, who might have sat alone, had chosen to call a jury – half a dozen farmers; Mr Simmonds the butcher; the landlord of the Black Bull; the baker; Mrs Cripps of the general shop; Mrs Mottram, a pretty fair-haired woman with a rolling blue eye; and the elder of the two Miss Doncasters, Miss Lucy Ellen, very thin, upright and grey, with an air of considering that her gentility was being contaminated.

On the left a couple of reporters and a small, efficient elderly man whose face Garth found familiar without being able to place it, until it came to him that he had seen it bent over papers in Sir George’s office. Obviously Sir George was not leaving the reporting of the evidence to chance.