Death on the Drumble

Emmett Scully invited Cole Vandermeer to dinner at the field station on the Friday night, and Cole accepted, and I have thought since that this is the one decision of that week that I would have made differently, and I have also thought that it changed nothing except the body.

The invitation came up the drive at three in the afternoon in the hand of Wren Ashcombe, written on a card, which was itself an interesting choice: the note said that Mr. Scully would be glad to discuss the survey permit with Mr. Vandermeer over dinner at seven, and that he apologised for the short notice, and that the doctor would of course be welcome, and it was signed with her brother's name, which was the only signature that would not be the first thing he asked about when he came in, and delivered by her, in person, on foot, and she stood in the hall at Harrow Reach for perhaps a minute while Hollis Nord read it and then looked straight at me and said two words that I did not understand and could not report to anybody for four days.

"Don't come," she said, and then she said, quite clearly and rather more loudly, "Mr. Scully will send the truck at six-thirty," and she was gone down the drive.

Cole heard her. He was standing on the stairs with a towel round his neck, having come in from the orchard.

"She said something," he said.

"She said she would send the truck at six-thirty."

"She said something before that."

"She said a thing I am not going to repeat to you," I said, "because I do not understand it, and because you are going to eat this man's dinner and I am going with you, and I want to watch his face across a table, and I cannot do it if you are going to sit there deciding whether a woman is a friend of yours."

We went. The dinner was excellent and horrible. Scully had done it properly: a chowder made with his own clams and a joint of lamb and a bottle of good wine, and a table with four places laid, and a fire, and the whole evening conducted in the manner of a man who intends to be a neighbour for the next thirty years. He talked about the drainage with real expertise and no intention whatever of helping. He produced, when Cole pressed him about the trust, a set of photographs of the western block of the Drumble taken from the ridge in 1974, and laid them on the table, and they were beautiful and irrelevant. And twice during the meal he left the room and was gone five minutes, and the second time I heard, from the yard at the back, the sound of a vehicle on gravel.

Twice he asked Cole about Chicago — the neighbourhood, the train, whether a man could still keep a car in that city — and when Cole said that he had sold the car before he came, Scully put his glass down and said, "That's a mistake. A man in this county without a car is a man who has decided to stay in one place," and looked at him and smiled, and I watched Cole smile back, and Wren Ashcombe, who had said almost nothing all evening, got up and began to clear the plates while he was still speaking. On the road afterwards, going down, Cole said to me: "He wanted to see whether I would flinch when he said the word stay."

And all the while Wren Ashcombe sat at the fourth place and ate almost nothing and watched her brother's hands, which is the thing I remembered afterward: not her face, her attention.

At half past nine Scully proposed that Cole stay and look at the breeding programme by lamplight, which is a real thing and not a pretext, because the animals can only be assessed when they are working and they work at night; and he was persuasive about it, and Cole is an engineer, and a working dog at night in a fenced field is an engineer's kind of animal, and so the two of them went out to the pens with a lamp and I was left in the house with Wren Ashcombe for twenty minutes.

She said nothing of any consequence. She made coffee and stood at the window with her back to me and I asked her, because I had to ask something, whether the owl would fly, and she answered me about the owl at length and in a voice entirely without expression, and then, when I moved to put my cup down, out of the corner of my mouth, without turning round, in a voice pitched so low that I have never told anybody except Varley and the deputy marshal how I could possibly have heard it:

"The path. He always takes the lower path."

They came in at half past ten, and Cole, who had spent an hour with the animals and been openly delighted by them, said he would walk home across the shoulder; and I said no, and Scully said, mildly, that the boy was right to want the walk, and that the fog was coming down, and that he would drive us both, and he did drive us, and we came into the yard of Harrow Reach at five minutes to eleven, and the deputy marshal's cruiser was standing in the yard with its lights on and the deputy marshal was standing in the middle of the flags with her hands on the back of her neck, looking at the ground.

She had come up to tell Cole Vandermeer that the fingerprints on the hostel light switch matched nothing in any database, and that the rental van found abandoned on the shore road two miles south had been stolen in Sacramento in August and had been wiped, and to ask him one more time whether he had any enemy in the world; and while she was waiting for him in the yard she had heard something in the direction of the Drumble and had gone fifty yards down the path with her torch, and had found, at the point where the lower path comes round the corner of the orchard wall and turns east toward the bog, a hat.

Then she had gone another thirty yards, and had found the man who had been wearing it.

For eleven minutes on the path that night I believed that I had failed at the one thing I had been asked to do, and I have since had a doctor's interest, a professional's interest, in what those eleven minutes did to Cole Vandermeer's heart, and he has told me that he intends to be cremated with certain things and does not wish me to write them down, and I will respect that, and I will only say two things, one of which he has given me leave to write. He stood it better than I did. And he has told me the one detail he kept, which is not the thing itself: that in the middle of it the animal's feet stopped, and that for a moment the two of them stood still in the fog together and neither of them moved, and that he understood in that moment that he had been right for ten days, and that being right was the worst thing that had ever happened to him.

The man was lying on his face at the edge of the path with one arm up over his head, in a long dark coat of the heavy canvas kind that was fashionable on that coast in the 1970s, with a leather collar and a game pocket at the back. He was a big man from behind. He was wearing, on the visible foot, a brown leather work boot, resoled, size eleven. There was a great deal of blood on the path, more than I had seen outside a hospital in a good many years, and the prints of a gigantic dog were in the mud all around him in a ring.

Cole Vandermeer stood over the body of the man in his own coat for a long time, and then he knelt down and turned the head with both hands, very gently, and looked at a face that was not his own, and said, quietly, "It's the man from the harbour road," which was true, and which none of us had known.

His name was Denny Roux. He had been out in the blackberry at the corner of the fallen field nine hours earlier, and he had eaten a can of beans and half a loaf out of a canvas bag, and by that evening he had been wearing another man's coat, which is the whole of this business in a single object: a coat that had come out of the cloakroom at Harrow Reach in a canvas bag, because the fugitive's own coat had rotted off him in ten months of weather and his brother-in-law had gone to the house he served and got him a good one without asking anybody.

"It was the dead man's own coat, doctor," said the deputy marshal, who had gone white and was holding her own torch as though it were a weapon. "That's what I don't like. That animal came at him in the dark and it took the coat for the man, because a coat is what a dog has to go by in fog, and that coat was the one it had been trained on. It didn't want the man. It wanted the man in that coat, and it went for the throat anyway, because that is what it has been trained to do, and it went at a place a quarter of a mile from the house at ten o'clock at night, which is exactly when somebody knew Mr. Vandermeer would be coming up the lower path."

I thought, and I said nothing, that the animal had come at a place and a time that were correct and that the man in the coat was the wrong man; and then I thought of the walk we had not taken because Emmett Scully had driven us home, and of the truck I had heard on the gravel at the back of the field station, and of a small dark woman standing at a window with her back to me saying the path, he always takes the lower path, and I have never in my life been so certain of a thing that I could not prove.