Gibbous House 59

I was quite unable to contain a snort of laughter and would have made great mock of this portentous statement, had not the dining room doors swung wide open at that point. Mrs Gonderthwaite, having recovered her temper, said in a voice devoid of modulation;

'Mr Moffat, there is someone without.'

This utterance seemed a little deficient in the matter of information, but the woman was already gliding to the entrance hall and the house door. Had I not seen her naked, I could have believed the woman less than corporeal.

Before the door, cap in hand, was a grubby specimen of the local population. His trousers were better called rags and, though his feet were shod, his boots were an uncommon mismatch in colour, design and, it appeared, fit. He was possessed of a prodigious beard, but no moustaches and his pate was as bald as his lip. The single tooth in his head endowed each sibilant with a comical whistle, while his Northumbrian accent rendered intelligibility a hopeless dream. The bold Miss Pardoner had followed me to the door – although my factotum, strangely, had not. My ward informed me that the man, an itinerant labourer currently employed on the estate, had discovered a body in the pond. She may well have understood the man, but I should not have been surprised to learn that she had observed events the previous evening from some vantage point in the house.

'Tell the oaf to show us the place.'

Miss Pardoner's smirk was again in evidence as I strode out the door and turned right, in the opposite direction to that in which the pond lay.

'Find out the fellow's name, Miss Pardoner.'

'It's Cullis, Mr Moffat. Or that is the name in the account book, and he has made his mark against it this last month.'

We made an odd trio as we walked along the fore wall of the east wing. Cullis was as bent and wiry as an old man, but he was most likely only a few years older than I. Miss Pardoner seemed as youthful and vibrant as a butterfly between a gorse and a briar bush. I hoped she would live longer than any lepidoptera might. We rounded the wing and paused on the terrace:

'Where might this pond be?' I said, looking to the wrong side of the hill.

'Over there to the left, Mr Moffat. Can you not hear the frogs and fowl?'

Of course, I could - and I could also see that there was grave danger of overplaying any hand whilst in the company of my ward.

Over by the pond, I pretended no shock or disgust at the sight of the broken body. The shepherd's head was bent at a most unlikely angle and thus I deduced that, as I had thought, whether by the blow from the rock or by the fall, the man had been dead before reaching the water.

'Who is it?' I asked.

Miss Pardoner had not time to supply the answer before Cullis:

'Wor Lad.'

Which seemed a strange name of eastern European origin to me, until Miss Pardoner explained that it meant the corpse was that of Cullis' younger sibling.