Free What Dread Hand? by Christianna Brand

anything, just stood there, staring at me with a sort of sick, white heaviness. I couldn’t exactly say anything either; it was worse than, talking it over, I’d thought it ever would be. I sort of—looked a question at him; and he gave me a weary kind of nod and glanced away towards the river. It was easier to talk about my angle, so I said, at last: ‘Well, I saw the Vicar.’
    ‘But did he see you?’ he said. We’d agreed on the Reverend, because he always walked across the church of a Thursday evening; you’d be sure of passing him, if you went at a certain time.
    ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘He saw me. I gave a sort of grunt for “good evening” and he said “Going poaching?” and gave me a bit of a grin. You’d better remember that.’ He nodded again but he said nothing more; and more to ease the silence than anything else, I said: ‘Is the car all right? Not marked?’
    ‘What does it matter if it is?’ he said. ‘It’s marked all over, no one could say what’s old or what’s new: you know that, from bashing the boy.’ As for bits of her clothing and—blood and all that, he’d had the idea of spreading a bit of plastic over the front of the car before he—well, did it. He produced the plastic folded in a bit of brown paper, and we wrapped the whole lot round a stone and sank it, then and there, in the river. There was blood on the plastic all right. It gave me the shudders.
    But next thing he said, I really had something to shudder at. He said: ‘Anyway, your number’s up, mate. She’s shopped you.’
    ‘Shopped me?’ I said. I stood and stared at him.
    ‘Shopped you,’ he said. ‘She’d already sent off an anonymous note to the police. About the hit-and-run.’
    ‘How do you know?’ I said. I couldn’t believe it.
    ‘She told me so,’ he said. ‘It was on her conscience.’
    Her conscience. Lydia’s conscience! I started to laugh, a bit hysterical, I suppose, with the strain of it. He put his hand on my wrist and gave me a little shake. ‘Steady lad,’ he said. ‘Don’t lose your head. I’m looking after you.’ It wasn’t like him to be so demonstrative, but there you are—it’s like the poem says, when times are bad, there isn’t no friend like a brother. ‘It’s just a matter of slanting the alibi,’ he said.
    Well, we’d worked that out, too; like I said. There’d always be a risk that they wouldn’t accept a brother’s alibi, that we two was together. The other time, about the accident, they’d had no special reason to suspect me, they’d accepted that all right; but this might at any moment turn into a murder enquiry. And a murder enquiry into us, now they knew about the hit-and-run. But as he said—we had the alternative.
    I hadn’t counted on its being Inspector Cockrill. When I realised it was him—come all the way over from Heronsford—I knew they meant business. And to be honest, it struck a bit chill to the heart of me. A little man he is, for a policeman, and near retiring age, he must be—he looks like a grandfather; but his eyes are as bright as a bird’s and they seem to look right into you. He came into the old woman’s best parlour and he had us brought in there, and he looked us up and down. ‘Well, well,’ he said, ‘the famous Birdswell twins! You certainly are identicals, aren’t you?’ And he gave us a look of a sort of fiendish glee, or so it seemed to me, and said: ‘And devoted, I hear? An almost mystic bond, I hear? David and Jonathan, Damon and Pythias and all the rest of it? In fact,’ he said, ‘you might properly be called—blood brothers?’
    We stood in front of him, silent. He said at last: ‘Well, which is which?—and no nonsense.’
    We told him: and no nonsense.
    ‘So you’re the one that killed the child?’ he said to me. ‘And drove on, regardless.’
    ‘I never was near the child,’ I said. ‘I was in the woods, on Monday evening—poaching.’
    ‘Yours is the name stated in the anonymous