The Courtesy of Death Read Free Page A

the cabbage, neatly shredding them with a pocket knife—proof enough, I should have thought, that human teeth were never meant
for such a diet.
    I watched him—stared would be a better word—while he performed his conjuring trick of making a cabbage disappear. I could not make him out at all. He had luminous, grey eyes in a
thin face of yellowish tan: a complexion which may have been due as much to rabbit food as to sun. The hollow cheeks and remarkable eyes could look mild and intelligent, as now they did, or crazily
energetic under stress.
    ‘About your movements,’ I said. ‘I have finished my business here and I needn’t stay any longer. I’ll drive you wherever you want to go.’
    He hesitated over this, and repeated that it was his duty to protect me. He pointed out that he still had to lay a trail for the dog.
    ‘Damn the dog! There isn’t any dog,’ I exclaimed. ‘And unless it’s trained it can’t tell him anything for certain. All we have to bother about is somebody
sitting in comfort on the edge of the downs with a pair of field glasses. If you really believe that is possible, I’ll try to smuggle you into the car unobserved.’
    Since his coat was unwearable, I gave him a high-necked sweater of mine, and we pinned up the biggest of the rents in his trousers. I felt dubious whether he was in any real danger at all.
Still, the fact remained that his imagination had been sufficiently stirred to dive through the solidest hedge in the county of Somerset. Presumably Undine’s husband—as good a theory as
another—did not believe in affinities and cabbage.
    The odd thing was that the husband had not seemed in the least angry. Not out of breath. Perfect composure. Excellent manners. He could have been a soldier or a local squire. The compact body,
the clothes, the close-clipped dark moustache, the ease and intimacy of address were those of a man with his roots deep in the countryside.
    I paid my bill at The Green Man and drove off up the road, then turned into the cart track as if I meant to pick up my bag at the bungalow and save myself the trouble of walking across the
garden with it. I told Fosworthy to leave by the front door and work his way on hands and knees round the bungalow into the shelter of the little ornamental hedge. He could then reach the garden
gate, which I would leave open, and crawl through it under cover of the car without anyone seeing him except the Gorms. As they were busy cleaning up the bar and shortsighted anyway, the risk was
small.
    It worked. I reversed slowly with Fosworthy crawling alongside until trees covered us from any observer in the fields or on the downs. He got in and sat on the floor.
    We had travelled a mile or two towards Cheddar when he started fussing again about that improbable dog. I gave way to him and drove back until we came to a bend where there was a field gate,
just out of sight of the entrance to the cart track. This was likely to be the point where the other fellow had hit the road and he might well revisit it before investigating the now empty
bungalow. At any rate Fosworthy proposed to leave his scent there. I suggested derisively that he should do it on the gate post. He considered this in long silence, as if it might be an important
contribution to modern philosophy, but decided to have a roll on the grass verge instead. He then discovered that he had left his coat behind in the bungalow.
    I told him to stay where he was, and not for God’s sake to attract the attention of passing motorists by rolling on the ground as if he were having a fit. I drove back, recovered his coat,
rolled it up and chucked it into the boot of the car.
    When I was approaching the junction with the road, my other visitor of the night appeared on the edge of the cart track and waved me down. He asked if I would be good enough to give him a lift.
Wherever he had been, he could not have seen anything—except of course that I had forgotten some possession at