Fixing the Nets

Ronan Varley came down off the ridge at six o'clock the next morning, in front of the deputy marshal, in daylight, with his hands empty and visible, and gave her his name, his licence number, and an account of his movements which was truthful and which she did not believe for one minute and could do nothing about, and then he took over the front room of Harrow Reach and turned it into an operations room, and for the next nine hours he did the thing I had travelled four hundred miles to watch him do.

He laid it all out on the long table, and then he did the thing I had not seen him do in ten days of this case, which was to stand up in the middle of the room and make an argument out loud to four people. On the left, the paper: the trust's file, the county records I had copied, the 1911 petition, the 1890s letters, the patent drawings of 1915 with C. Ashcombe in the corner. On the right, the objects: the cut-out warning, the boot's mate from the hostel, the brand-new chain from the Eureka hardware store, the prints photographed in the peat, the muddy hat. And on the near end of the table, where the light off the fire reached it, one sheet with three names written on it in his own hand, and he stood behind that sheet and did not sit down, and Ozer stood at the window with her arms folded and would not sit down either, and the rest of us understood that the room had been divided.

The first name was Emmett Scully, and Varley said it in an ordinary voice and then stood there, and it was Ozer who answered him from the window, and she answered him the way a marshal answers a theory she has already had and does not like. "That is a list, Mr. Varley. I can build that list around four men in this county and two of them were in church. Means and a motive do not put a chain in anybody's hand."

"No," said Varley. "They do not. This does." And he put one thing down on the table beside the name, and it was not paper. It was a length of the same galvanised chain that had come off the dead animal's collar, three links of it, cut and filed, handed over at the station as a courtesy by a man who did not know he was handing over anything, with a small brass tag still on the end: a stock number, the name of the store, and a date in July. "Twenty dogs behind a fence, and a standing order for the things you only buy if you are keeping a dangerous animal: chain, muzzles, kennel meat, veterinary compounds. I did not have to go looking for the man who buys that. There is one account on this coast that has bought it twice in a year, and it is not a farm."

Wren Ashcombe, who had not spoken since she came into the room, said: "He was in the kitchen with me that night."

Varley did not look at her. "I expect he was, ma'am, when he was not in the yard hearing a vehicle on the gravel."

The second name was Hollis Nord, and it was on that sheet only because the marshal had insisted on it. Concealment of a fugitive, certainly. Felony. But a man who feeds his wife's brother in a bog does not buy forty feet of galvanised chain and does not spend forty minutes cutting letters out of a magazine, because his whole life, his entire capital in this world, is the good opinion of the neighbour he works for.

The third name was Wren Ashcombe, and this was the one Varley spent the morning on. He had me write down everything she had said, both times, in order, and then he made me say it aloud, and then he made me say it again, and then he asked me four questions.

"Which is it," he said. "Is she the accomplice who has turned, or the hostage who is looking for a way out?"

"I asked myself that all night."

"You did not. You asked yourself whether she was telling you a truth or setting you up. Those are the same question only to a fool." He turned the page over. "Consider what she did. She came to the house, in person, in daylight, with a note inviting you both to dinner — written in her own hand in her brother's name, which is a forgery and is the sort of thing a person does when she wants a document of her own that says she was there. She said don't come. Then she said something she could not have said if she had not known exactly where the animal was going to be at ten o'clock. Then, when she was alone with you, she told you which way he would walk home."

"Which was the way the dog was waiting."

"Which was the way the dog was waiting," said Varley, "and which is why the man in the coat died instead of the man in this house, and which is also the only reason I am able to sit in this room and tell you what I am about to tell you, because it means that yesterday afternoon, in that kitchen, a woman who is in the middle of this up to her neck made a decision."

"To warn us?"

"To warn you. To warn the doctor and the engineer at the same table. Simon, I have been at this for thirty years and I am going to tell you something I would not tell a policeman. When a woman in a bad marriage and a worse conspiracy takes the risk of saying one sentence in a kitchen to a stranger, she is not telling him the truth. She is asking him for something. She wants to be found out. And two things follow from that, and the first is that she will not be the one who puts the animal on your young man, and the second is that the man who will is going to do it very soon, because the man who owns the animal has understood by now that the animal has killed the wrong person, which means he knows that his whole plan has been discovered to be a plan, which means that he has one move left and it is the last one."

"What is the last one?"

"He must produce a dead heir," said Ronan Varley, "and he must do it in the next forty-eight hours, before the county closes the land, before the newspapers arrive, before some woman at a field station can be got at a lawyer and handed immunity. So I am going to give him a live one and let him come for it, and we are going to be standing in the dark behind him when he does." He looked at me, and he was entirely serious. "I do not like it. Go and ask Mr. Vandermeer whether he will consent to be bait on his own land for one evening, and be honest with him about the risk, and if he says no, come back and we will think again. And Simon — before you go: telegraph Dr. Cray. I want her here tonight, with her bag, and I want her briefed on the gene, because there is a very real chance that within two days I am going to need a physician standing next to a frightened man on purpose."