“I’m just on my way to church. Blood-stained shirt and shoes … wouldn’t want to frighten the vicar …” Joe began.
“He’s seen worse! The Rev. Easterby was a front line padré in the last lot. Just help me out here—I’m assuming this fingerprint in blood on the neck of the body is yours.”
“I’ll supply my prints for the record, of course. Yes, the man was still alive when I got here. I rushed forward to offer assistance. Nothing I could do for him. I stood there by his side and said a prayer to Diana …”
“Crikey! Super Plod turns up to administer the last pagan rites? That must have sent him off rejoicing!”
Hunnyton looked up, puzzled, from his notebook and focussed on Joe’s face. “Good God, man!” And, more seriously, “What’s happened to you, Joe? You look bloody awful! Your face is bleeding.”
“The recently deceased threw a log at me yesterday. The wound opened up again when I was rolling around on the forest floor dodging bullets on my way back to the Hall an hour ago. Is this Suffolk or the Somme? Not sure.”
Hunnyton listened intently to Joe’s story, jotting down his estimate of the time of his arrival at the scene, the time Goodfellow had expired, and the time he’d been shot at in the woods without comment or question. “Well, kindly drip your blood type onto the paper provided. I’ve got a neat little sketch here and I’m not about to add any extraneous bodily fluid contributions from Scotland Yard.”
“That villain tried to kill me. We’re lucky it’s not my corpse you’re waving off in an ambulance.”
“Everybody’s lucky this is the corpse if I read his letter aright.” Hunnyton sniffed. “Not before time and I’ll raise a glass to the perpetrator. Those are my deathbed sentiments, if anyone wants to hear them. Now, I hope you don’t mind, I borrowed Timmy and his flash new bike to run a few errands for me. First he summoned PC Godestone from his allotment to act as guard dog, then he belted off to the vet’s with a phone message for Adelaide to transmit to the force back in Cambridge. We’re going to have to put that lady on the pay roll. Or me on the phone line.” He sighed. “And there goes my privacy. There’ll be a squad out within the hour. I haven’t alerted the Co-op funeral services yet—he’s going straight onto a slab at the morgue. I want a proper postmortem done by a doc I can trust in Cambridge. This is one case that’s not going to come back and bite me in the bum.”
“Not a suicide, then, Hunnyton?”
Joe received a scathing look. “I think you know that as well as I do. Could easily have been, though. I’ve come across these cases before. Bankrupt farmers usually. Their guns are old friends. If your arm is long enough, you can reach the trigger and fire it upwards into your head. Toe grip not unknown. Remote place like this—he’d have kept his gun at the ready under the bed in the country way. It’ll be interesting to see whose fingerprints are on the trigger.”
“I’m betting—Goodfellow’s.” Joe sighed.
“So am I. This is murder, Sandilands; we both know that. But it’s murder by a bloke who’s very sure of himself. Cool as you please. No emotion in evidence—no fight, nothing broken. Familiar with the victim’s habits. Knew he’d find him sleeping off a hangover. Knew he kept a loaded gun to hand. This was planning so careful, the bugger’s left not a trace of his presence. I tell you, Joe—I haven’t found so much as a hair so far. That’s worrying. They always leave something … Perhaps the forensics boys will see more than I’m seeing. Our careful friend would take the time to apply the dead man’s fìnger to the trigger when he’d wiped it clean, don’t you think? He might even have been wearing gloves and needn’t have bothered with the dead man’s finger. What he hadn’t counted on was that his target might be more alert than usual this morning. Planning an early get-away, Goodfellow might have drunk less than his usual eight pints at the Sorrel Horse.
“I was there at the Horse, Sandilands, last night. For the first part of the evening at any rate. In the public bar. Goodfellow was in the snug buying a round for his cronies. His last round as it turns out. I noted he sank two pints before I left. The barman will cast further light. We shall see. The murderer hadn’t counted on the instinctive recoil of a threatened body away from a blast, what’s more. Point blank range. The bullet was supposed to go straight up and take the top of the head off. But it went crosswise, through the throat and jaw. Removed his ear but left the skull intact, I’d say.”