Free Colonel Butler's Wolf by Anthony Price Page B

the Rover, well-built, fresh-faced, stamping his boots on the gravel like a young carthorse impatient at having to stand still when the day’s work still lay ahead of him.
    “Not much to see there,” Butler said gruffly, brushing down his overcoat ineffectually.
    “Too much, sir. Half the village was there before me!”
    No apologies, that was a good sign. When Smith’s body had been spotted by schoolchildren taking their short cut along the far margin of the pond the Constable had been measuring up an early morning collision two or three miles away. Now he was making no bones about it, trusting Butler to know that a man couldn’t be everywhere, and was therefore seldom at the right spot.
    “They had him out and they tried to give him the kiss of life, sir. And they spotted his motor-cycle in the water—it’s not very deep anywhere and there was a big patch of oil on the surface—so they looked to see if there was anyone ridin’ pillion.”
    Butler looked at the stagnant pond with distaste. One public-spirited soul had stripped off and groped among the weeds, while another, even braver, had set his mouth to those cold lips, an act as admirable as it had been useless.
    With a shrug he turned his back on the pond and stared up and down the empty road. From this point on to the bend he had a clear view in both directions for two hundred yards or more. Ahead of him the road ran straight into the open countryside and to his left the first of the cottages of the village was tucked among the trees perhaps fifty yards beyond the further tip of the crescent-shaped stretch of water behind him.
    “Nobody heard anything?”
    “No, sir,” the Constable shook his head. “Old Mr Catchpole in the last house there—he’s half deaf anyway, so he has his television switched on full. He was watching Match of the Day until about 11 and then the midnight film until 12.55, so he wouldn’t have heard it.”
    “That was when it happened?”
    “Dr Fox said it might have been about then. If you want to have a word with him—“
    “All in good time, constable.” Everything pointed to the young fellow’s efficiency—he had taken the trouble to talk to the occupant of the nearest house on the off-chance of evidence, even in an open-and-shut road accident. So perhaps an off-chance lay in him too—“What do you think happened?”
    The constable looked at him doubtfully. Open-and-shut it might have seemed, but it wouldn’t seem like that to him now, with a mysterious Colonel Butler nosing about, armed with exalted Home Office credentials and authorisation from the Chief Constable himself. But an outsider nonetheless, and it would be dead against his training and inclination to hypothesise to such a person, colonel or not.
    Butler assumed the interested expression of a seeker after wisdom. Evidently the marrow would have to be coaxed from this bone.
    “Has there ever been an accident here before?”
    The constable relaxed slightly. “About ten years ago there was a bus went off the road. That was long before my time of course, but I’ve heard tell of it enough times. He was going too fast, the driver—that’s the reason for nine out of ten of the accidents I’ve seen, when you come down to it, sir—but it’s true the bend’s much sharper than it seems, more a corner than a bend, and the camber’s not good at all. So it seems like he just drifted into it gradually—went into the pond down there—“ he pointed towards the village.
    “And that was when the council put up the fence and the reflectors—you can’t rightly miss ‘em as you come into the bend—and the Ministry put up the warning signs too. So there’s been nothing gone amiss since then. I wouldn’t say it was dangerous at all.”
    That was the thing in a nutshell: the bend was at worst a minor hazard, but no killer. The moment a driver began to go into it at night those red reflectors would glare back warningly; even the ill-fated bus had almost managed