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II

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By eight o’clock the public tap was full and the private nearly so. Decima Moore and Will had looked in, but at the moment were closeted upstairs with Mr Legge who had apparently decided not to go to Illington. Miss Darragh came down in dry clothes with her curls rubbed up, and sat writing letters by the fire.

Two of Abel’s regular cronies had come in: Dick Oates, the Ottercombe policeman, and Arthur Gill, the grocer. A little later they were joined by Mr George Nark, an elderly bachelor-farmer whose political views chimed with those of the Left Movement, and who was therefore a favourite of Will Pomeroy’s. Mr Nark had been a great reader of the Liberal Literature of his youth, and had never got over the surprise and excitement that he had experienced thirty years ago on reading Winwood Reade, H G Wells, and the Evolution of Man. The information that he had derived from these and other serious works had, with the passage of time, become transmitted into simplified forms which though they would have astonished the authors, completely satisfied Mr Nark.

The rain still came down in torrents and Mr Nark reported the Coombe Tunnel was a running stream.

‘It’s a crying shame,’ he said, gathering the attention of the Private. ‘Bin going on for hundreds of years and no need for it. We can be flooded out three times a year and capitalistic government only laughs at us. Science would have druv a class-A highroad into the Coombe if somebody had axed it. But does a capitalistic government ax the advice of Science? Not it. It’s afraid to. And why? Because Science knows too much for it.’

‘Ah,’ said Mr Gill.

‘That’s capitalism for you,’ continued Mr Nark. ‘Blind-stupid and arrogant. Patching up where it should pitch-in and start afresh. What can you expect, my sonnies, from a parcel of wage-slaves and pampered aristocrats that don’t know the smell of a day’s work. So long as they’ve got their luxuries for themselves –’

He stopped and looked at Miss Darrah.

‘Axing your pardon, Miss,’ said Mr Nark. ‘In the heat of my discourse I got carried off my feet with the powerful rush of ideas and forgot your presence. This’ll be all gall and wormwood to you, doubtless.’

‘Not at all, Mr Nark,’ said Miss Darragh cheerfully. ‘I’m myself a poor woman, and I’ve moods when I’m consumed with jealousy for anybody who’s got a lot of money.’

This was not precisely the answer Mr Nark, who was a prosperous farmer, desired.

‘It’s the government,’ he said, ‘that does every man jack of us out of our scientific rights.’

‘As far as that goes,’ said PC Oates, ‘I reckon one government’s as scientific as the other. Look at sewage for instance.’

‘Why?’ demanded Mr Nark, ‘should we look at sewage? What’s sewage got to do with it? We’re all animals.’

‘Ah,’ said Mr Gill, ‘so we are, then.’

‘Do you know, Dick Oates,’ continued Mr Nark, ‘that you’ve got a rudimentary tail?’

‘And if I have, which I don’t admit –’

‘Ask Mr Cubitt, then. He’s an artist and no doubt has studied the skeleton of man in its present stage of evolution. The name escapes me for the moment, but we’ve all got it. Isn’t that correct, sir?’

‘Yes, yes,’ said Norman Cubitt hurriedly. ‘Quite right, Mr Nark.’

‘There you are,’ said Mr Nark. ‘Apes, every manjack of us, and our arms have only grown shorter through us knocking off the habit of hanging from limbs of trees.’

‘What about our tongues?’ asked Mr Oates.

‘Never mind about them,’ answered Mr Nark warmly, ‘do you know that an unborn child’s got gills like a fish?’

‘That doesn’t make a monkey of it, however.’

‘It goes to show, though.’

‘What?’

‘You want to educate yourself. In a proper government the State ’ud educate the police so’s they’d understand these deep matters for themselves. They know all about that in Russia. Scientific necessity that’s what it is.’

‘I don’t see how knowing I’ve got a bit of a tail and once had a pair of gills is going to get me any nearer to a sergeant’s stripe,’ reasoned Mr Oates. ‘What I’d like is a case. You know how it happens in these crime stories, chaps,’ he continued, looking round the company. ‘I read a good many of them, and it’s always the same thing. The keen young PC happens to be on the spot when there’s a homicide. His super has to call in the Yard and before you know where you are, the PC’s working with one of the Big four and getting praised for his witty deductions. All I can say is I wish it happened like that in the Illington and Ottercombe Riding. Well, I’d best go round the beat, I reckon Down the Steps and up again, is about all this drownded hole’ll see of me tonight. I’ll look in again, chaps.’

Mr Oates adjusted his helmet, fastened his mackintosh, looked to his lamp, and went out into the storm.

‘Ah, the poor fellow!’ murmured Miss Darragh comfortably from inside the ingle-nook settle.

‘In a properly conducted state –’ began Mr Nark.

His remark was drowned in a clap of thunder. The lights wavered and grew so dim that the filaments in the bulbs were reduced to luminous threads.

‘Drat they electrics,’ said old Abel. ‘That’s the storm playing bobs-a-dying with the wires somewhere. Us’ll be in darkness afore closing time, I dare say.’ And he raised his voice to a bellow.

‘Will! Oi, Will!’

Will’s voice answered from above. The lights brightened. After a minute or two, Decima and Will came downstairs and into the Private. Each carried an oil lamp.

‘Guessed what you were hollowing for,’ said Will, with a grin. ‘Here’s the lamps. We’ll put ’em on the two bars, Dessy, and matches handy. Bob Legge’s fetching the other, Dad. Ceiling in his room’s sprung a leak and the rain’s coming in pretty heavy. The man was sitting there, so lost in thought he might have drowned. I’ve fixed up a bucket to catch it, and told him to come down.’

Will stared for a second at Watchman, and added rather truculently: ‘We told Bob we missed his company in the Private, didn’t we, Dess?’

‘Yes,’ said Decima.

Watchman looked at her. She turned her back to him and said something to Will.

‘Let us by all means have Mr Legge among us,’ Watchman said. ‘I hope to beat him – all round the clock.’

And in a minute or two, Mr Legge came in with the third unlit lamp.

Death at the Bar

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