Free Fen Country by Edmund Crispin Page A

mean,” he added. “You’ll see.”
    “Nice of you,” said MacCutcheon. “Nice of you DI’s to try and keep my tottering intellect alive with little games. Well, I’ll buy it. Smoke if you care to.” And he settled down to read, while Humbleby, leaning back in his chair and lighting a cheroot, reconsidered the salient features of his visit to Harringford the previous day…
     
    He had arrived there by train, with Detective Sergeant Pinder in tow, shortly before midday; and they had gone at once to the police station. Inspector Bentinck, who received them, proved to be a bony, discontented-looking man of fifty or thereabouts.
    “Between ourselves,” he said, as he led them to his office, “our County CID are a fairly feeble lot at the moment, so I’m glad the CC had the sense to call you people in straightaway. And of course, having a ruddy lord involved… You knew that, did you?”
    “It’s about the only thing I do know,” said Humbleby.
    “I’ve got his gun here.” They had reached the office, and Bentinck was unlocking a cupboard, from which presently he produced a .360 sporting rifle. Two slats of wood were tied to either side of the breech, and there was a loop of string for carrying the weapon.
    “Not been tested for prints yet,” said Humbleby intelligently; and Bentinck shook his head.
    “Not been touched since I confiscated it yesterday morning. But in any case I shouldn’t think you’ll get any prints off it except his—Lord Ellingham’s, I mean. He’d cleaned it, you see, by the time I caught up with him.”
    “Well, well, we can try,” said Humbleby. “Pinder’s brought all his paraphenalia with him. See what you can get, please,” he added to the sergeant. “And meanwhile”—to Bentinck—”let’s have the whole story from the beginning.”
    So Pinder went away to insufflate and photograph the rifle, and Bentinck talked. “Ellingham’s one of what they call the backwoods peers,” he said. “He’s got a big estate about five miles from here, but I shouldn’t think there’s much left in the family coffers, because he lives in the lodge, not in the manor-house—that’s shut up. He’s about fifty, not married, lives alone.
    “Well now, like everyone else, Ellingham’s had his servant problems, and just recently—for the last year or so, that is—the only person he’s been able to get to look after him has been this girl.”
    “Enid Bragg.”
    Bentinck assented. “Enid Bragg. And a fortnight ago even she packed it in—since when Ellingham’s had to look after himself.”
    “What sort of girl was she?”
    “Not bad looking in a trashy sort of way,” said Bentinck. “I don’t know that there’s much else good to say about her… Anyway, point is, this Enid lives—lived—in a cottage with her parents not far from the Ellingham estate. And it was yesterday morning, while she was waiting for the 8:50 bus so as to come into town and do a bit of shopping, that someone picked her off with a rifle, presumably from behind the hedge opposite the bus-stop.
    “Well, of course, when the bus came along, there she was with a hole in her head, and it wasn’t long before me and the sergeant got out there and took over. We went through all the usual motions, but the only worthwhile thing we got out of it was the bullet.”
    Bentinck opened a drawer in his desk and produced a small jeweler’s box in which a squashed rifle bullet lay on a bed of cotton wool. “It’d gone clean through her and buried in an ash tree behind the bus-stop.”
    “No cartridge-case?”
    “Not that we’ve been able to find. So I said to myself, well, better look up Ellingham first, because I knew he’d got a gun, and after all, the girl had been working for him until just recently, and what should I find but that—”
    Here Bentinck broke off at the return of Pinder, who announced that he had dusted and photographed the two or three blurred prints on the rifle, and that it was now at