The New Black Mask (No 5)

George Sims Family Butcher

George Sims’s suspense stories are marked by his ability to create an atmosphere in which unusual action is made convincing, as in the postcard-village setting of “Family Butcher.” The author of eleven books, Mr. Sims is a rare-book dealer in Berkshire, England.

Pasterne is arguably the prettiest village in the Hambleden Valley. Skirmett, Frieth, Fingest, and Ibstone all have their attractions as does Hambleden itself, and Turville is surmounted by a delightful windmill perched on a hilltop, a rarity indeed in the Chilterns, but Pasterne most conforms to a picture-postcard village. There is the large green, immaculately trimmed, known as Pasterne Pound, with carefully preserved oak stocks, and a dozen brick-and-flint cottages grouped round the green, just as if some Edwardian watercolourist had placed them there for a painting. The village pond is a fine example too, kept fresh by a spring, with white ducks and mallards and occasionally a nesting pair of swans. Postcards on sale in the village stores-cum-post office sell well in the summer months, particularly those featuring the pond and the rather eccentrically placed Norman church, which appears to have turned its back on Pasterne due to its being the sole relic of an even earlier settlement. But people in picture-postcard villages live lives much the same as the rest of us.

Another popular view of the village shows a northern aspect of the Pound with Daniel Patchin’s butcher shop centrally placed, together with his Pound Cottage and the copse which hides Lord Benningworth’s manor house. Patchin’s shop was originally an Elizabethan cottage; it has been a good deal refurbished over the centuries, but the exterior, apart from the small shop window, must appear much as it did originally with its massive black oak beams and the plaster walls that are freshly whitewashed each year. The name Daniel Patchin is in large white italic letters on the black facade, together with the trade description FAMILY BUTCHER in smaller capitals.

Patchin’s ancient establishment and the post office stores are the only village shops. Both are attractive and “quaint,” looking rather like the toy shops favoured by children of less-sophisticated epochs. And Patchin’s shop too is a model one, for he is fanatical about personal cleanliness and hygiene: he wears a fresh apron twice a day, and the washbasin at the rear of the shop is much used but kept spotless, as are the display area and the large bench where Patchin works, “looking more like a surgeon than a butcher,” as Lord Benningworth once described him to some friends. Patchin’s shop window always has a sparse display: a brace of pheasants, which he may well have shot himself, a hare, a local chicken or two, and one specimen of the prime meat he has for sale. Inside the shop there is a similarly small amount of meat on show: very likely just a side of Scotch beef hanging up with a Welsh shoulder of lamb. Under the impeccable refrigerated display counter there will be some of the famous Patchin sausages. Anything else that is required Daniel Patchin will have to fetch from the large cold room which takes up most of the rear portion of the shop.

The same shop when run by Daniel’s father Gabriel was well known throughout the Chilterns in the 1930s, as was Reuben Patchin’s before that. Daniel Patchin has an equally enviable reputation. Though the population of the village is not large enough to support such a thriving business, and Lord Benningworth who owns most of the village and the surrounding land is against more houses being built locally, callers come regularly from High Wycombe, Henley, and Marlow for their meat. The Patchin sausages are still made exactly as detailed in Reuben’s 1912 recipe, with generous amounts of pork, herbs, spices and freshly ground black pepper; they bear no resemblance at all to the products churned out in factories, and they attract customers from as far away as Slough and Oxford.

Daniel Patchin, a quiet, sometimes taciturn, man, is widely respected. He seems to live for his work and is busy throughout a long day for five-and-a-half days each week. Wednesday is early closing, and that afternoon he devotes either to fishing or shooting according to the season. When he returned from the Korean war, Daniel Patchin came to an amicable unwritten agreement with Lord Benningworth that on Sundays he would act as an unpaid forester for the estate, keeping Benningworth’s copses and woodland in good order, felling all diseased trees and clearing undergrowth, in return for which service he was allowed to keep all the timber he wanted. Every Sunday is devoted to this occupation, and Patchin has a woodyard at the back of his cottage where villagers can purchase logs and firewood.

The Patchin family has lived in Pasterne for centuries, but the Benningworth connection with the locality is even more ancient: Lord Benningworth can trace his ancestry back in this country to a Baron Will de Benningworth in 1220, and there are stone effigies of another Benningworth knight and his Lady installed in the church in 1290. The churchyard also houses many Patchin graves, but the earliest is dated 1695 with the epitaph:

Occasionally in an evening Daniel Patchin may stroll round the churchyard eyeing the graves, particularly those of his own family. He likes those epitaphs which hint of un-Christian attitudes, for he has a cynical, mordant sense of humour; he is not a churchgoer. During his army service in Korea he found out that human life there was as cheap as that of turkeys at Christmas, and he adopted a stoic’s attitude to life and death. Serving as an infantryman he was awarded the Military Medal for his bravery in hand-to-hand fighting and won the nickname “pig-sticker” from his comrades for his skill with the bayonet.

Daniel Patchin leads a very quiet life, devoted to work and country pursuits, including gardening in the evenings. Lord Benningworth will sometimes stroll to the edge of his copse with a friend to point out Patchin’s garden with its fine rose beds and lines of potatoes, peas, and beans as straight as guardsmen on parade. Patchin’s wife Angela is ten years younger than him and before the marriage was known as a pretty, jolly, and slightly flighty girl in Skirmett, where she was brought up in a large farming family. The Patchins have no children, as Angela proved to be barren, and over the ten years of marriage she has taken on the Patchin family’s traits of seriousness and quiet outward mildness. She is a natural blonde with very fair, clear skin who blushes easily: any compliment from Benningworth’s son and heir before he left to work in America would always make her change colour. She works behind the till in a cubiclelike office in the shop on Patchin’s busiest days, always on Friday and Saturday, and occasionally on Thursday. Patchin employs a boy who makes himself generally useful on Friday evenings and Saturday mornings; otherwise he does all the work himself. He is a stocky man with massive muscles, enormously strong. Behind the shop there is a large shed which was used for all the slaughtering for the business up till about twenty years ago, and that is where Patchin dispatches local poultry and scores of turkeys and geese at Christmas.

It was on a glorious late May afternoon that Daniel Patchin first became suspicious of his wife. It was a Monday, and at lunch she had said that she would go for a walk in the afternoon. Returning at five, she looked in at the shop to ask if he would like a cup of tea. He nodded and asked if she had enjoyed the walk. She hesitated, and he looked up from the mincing machine to see that she had blushed and was nervously fiddling with the buttons on her blouse as if to make sure they were all fastened. It would be difficult to imagine a more observant man than Daniel Patchin: his whole life both at work and during his time away from the shop had sharpened his perceptions. He had made a lifetime study of his customers and of nature; it was his sole inactive hobby. The slightest change in a pensioner’s expression, even the movement of an eye, was enough to tell Patchin that he was proffering a too-expensive piece of meat; the faintest ripple at the end of a roach “swim” caught his notice, as did the sound of a twig snapping. When she did not reply about the obvious pleasures of a country walk on a perfect May afternoon, Patchin covered his wife’s loss for words with a quick comment about an old woman who always called in for broth bones on a Monday.

When Angela left the shop, Patchin gave her back an intense look, noting that she had changed completely from the clothes she had worn at lunch. When she returned with the tray of tea, she had covered her pretty white blouse with an old brown cardigan. She was still nervous, restless, very slightly ill at ease. Patchin knew that she was a hopeless liar but did not ask any more questions. There was a fresh smell of lemon soap, and Patchin knew she had washed her face, probably plunging it repeatedly into cold water to get rid of the faint, pink flush. Again he covered her silence with talk of how he might go down to the river that evening. The season for coarse fishing did not start till mid-June, but it was something he occasionally did out of season, inspecting favourite angling haunts to see how they had been affected by the high level of the Thames in winter.

During the next few weeks he added to his short list of pastimes the one of observing his wife: nothing that she did escaped him, even the merest hint of exasperation or frustration was filed away silently in his head — but nothing unusual ever attracted a comment from him.

It would not have required special ability as an observer to note Angela Patchin’s revived interest in her clothes; even on Monday mornings when she did her weekly wash and on Wednesdays when she usually cleaned Pound Cottage from top to bottom she stopped wearing her old navy skirt and blossomed out in a new green one worn with a pretty apron or jeans. She went to the Marks and Spencer store in Reading ostensibly to buy a summer frock but returned with several packages.

One Monday afternoon when Angela had gone for another walk, Patchin closed the shop for a quarter of an hour and thoroughly inspected her chest of drawers. He took meticulous care in moving and replacing the various things; he found several new items of underwear, including a particularly skimpy pair of knickers and a brassiere designed to thrust size thirty-six breasts up and outwards as if proffering them to some lusty lad in a Restoration play. But which lusty lad? That was the question that teased Daniel Patching brain, taking his attention away from his work so that he tended for the first time in his life to become a little absentminded and not quite the usual model of efficiency. It was immediately noted by the villagers — “Seems more human somehow” was the general verdict, though expressed in different ways.

For a while Patchin speculated as to whether Lord Benningworth’s son had returned to Pasterne and was again flattering Angela. If so, it seemed a more serious matter than before, now apparently extending to her amply filled blouse. But an inquiry, casually phrased, to the Benningworth’s housekeeper informed Patchin that the heir to the estate was still working happily in New York and did not plan to return home before Christmas.

Patchin’s reaction to Angela's unusual behaviour varied considerably. At times he became quite fascinated by his secret observation in a detached way, as he had once studied an elusive old pike in a pool near Hambleden Mill: for weeks throughout one autumn he had tried various baits to entice the wily monster until he realised that the pike could be stirred into action only by a fish with fresh blood on it; so Patchin had served up a dace, liberally doused in blood, and the pike had succumbed. At other times Patchin experienced a feeling of cold fury that someone was stealing his wife from him; he was quite certain that it was happening. Once he woke with a horrid start in the middle of the night, convinced that the telephone had rung just once, and then lay awake consumed with feelings of jealousy and twisted lust; he did not fall asleep till just before the alarm bell rang at six.

Perhaps Angela’s changed attitude to sex was the most obvious giveaway. Before the Monday afternoon walks and the new clothes, she seemed to have regarded it as a rather boring routine matter to be managed as quickly as possible before turning away to sleep. Now she never turned away and was always ready for sex, keener than he could ever remember her being. Her kisses were open-mouthed and lingering, her embraces passionate and urgent; as he brooded on this he realised that “urgent” was the key word — that was it, she was urging him on to more effort so that he resembled, when her eyes were closed, her other, very passionate lover. Even after an orgasm she was unsatisfied, longing for something else. It would be impossible to describe the various feelings Patchin experienced as his wife became ever more knowing in bed, with wanton behaviour and explicit movements trying to get him to obtain the results she enjoyed elsewhere. One night she wanted him to make love in a new position, and as she determinedly pushed him into place he could see the grim joke of it so clearly that he nearly laughed. Nothing could make it more plain that Angela had a very virile, enthusiastic lover, much more skilled at the amatory arts than he would ever be, a lover who liked first to be inflamed by skimpy knickers and a “display” brassiere and then performed perfectly.

It was not until a Friday in the middle of June that Patchin was able to identify his enemy. He disturbed Angela while she was making a phone call when he entered Pound Cottage that lunch time a few minutes earlier than usual. As he opened the door, the telephone was slammed down, and Angela ran upstairs to cover her confusion. That afternoon Ray Johnson, the youngest postman in the area, called in at the shop ostensibly for a pound of sausages and some bacon. Johnson grinned over at Angela in the little office, calling out "Afternoon, Mrs. Patchin.” Angela did not reply but just nodded, flushing very slightly. Apart from that telltale flush there was something subtle about the way Johnson addressed her, with just an inflection of the “Mrs. Patchin,” as though the formal mode of address was something of a joke between the pair. Daniel Patchin took his time in the cold storage room to give them a chance for a few words. The moment he opened the door, Ray Johnson stopped talking and grinned foolishly as though he had forgotten what he was going to say.

Idiot, Patchin thought, you young idiot, but passed over the momentary awkwardness for Johnson by commenting on the sausages: “Cook’s specials this lot. Part of a batch I made up for the Manor. The old man likes just an extra pinch of pepper.”

Having once seen his wife with Johnson, there was no longer any doubt in Patchin’s mind, for it seemed to him as if there were some invisible but subtly tangible connection between them, an unspoken intimacy born of their long afternoons together, probably in Calcot Wood where there were some idyllic glades. As he did up the bacon and sausages and the embarrassed couple said nothing, Patchin could visualise them on a greensward in a patch of dappled sunlight, the flimsy knickers being removed together with the trick brassiere, and then Angela’s urgent movements as the mutual madness began. Patchin felt as though his obsessive thoughts might show on his usually phlegmatic face, so he cleared his throat loudly and shook his head, saying, “Sorry. Throat's a bit sore. Hope it’s not a summer cold.”

Ray Johnson gave Patchin an unusually serious, not altogether friendly look as he replied, “Yes. Let's hope not.” The look negated the banal response, and Patchin thought Liar; it would please you if I came down with pneumonia. For the first time it struck him that the feeling of jealousy might not all be on one side. Probably Johnson was also jealous of the nights when Patchin slept with Angela; possibly Johnson was coming to hate him as he had hated the unknown lover.

Later that afternoon, when Angela had gone back to the cottage to make some tea, Daniel Patchin stood at the open door of the shop staring at the pond where a pair of Canada geese had alighted and were being harried and made unwelcome by the aggressive, though small, coots which dashed in and out of the reeds, making proprietorial noises. And indeed Patchin did not miss anything that happened on the pond, noting how the mallards vanished and the white ducks kept out of the noisy quarrel like only faintly interested spectators. But Patchin’s mind was elsewhere, brooding on his predicament: it was the first time since the Korean war that Patchin felt he was faced with a problem he did not know how to handle. Ray Johnson was a tall, slight lad with curly black hair and a mouth that always seemed to be open, either grinning or laughing to show very white teeth. Johnson was easily the most popular of the local postmen; he was extremely cheerful, full of banter and old jokes. Patchin had always found that slightly irritating — but now the trifling feeling of irritation was replaced by the strong one of implacable enmity. Patchin had no intention of confronting Angela with his suspicions or of trying to surprise the lovers in the act, even though he thought it could be arranged one Monday afternoon in Calcot Wood. For all he knew, Angela might then decide to leave him — he did not know how heavily their reasonably prosperous and comfortable life together weighed against the hours of passion spent with Lothario Johnson. No, the only answer was to get rid of him as the coots would undoubtedly rid themselves of the intruding Canada geese.

After the break for tea, Patchin got down to work again. Friday evening was one of his busiest times, as dozens of joints had to be prepared for the weekend — he had some particularly choosy customers who liked to have their meat prepared in the finicky French manner, and he was quite willing to cater to their tastes. A great deal of beef had been ordered for that weekend, and his young assistant was not up to preparing it, being capable of carrying out only the humblest jobs. Patchin set the boy to mincing pork and then began butchering two sides of beef, attacking the carcase with relish.

Once supper was finished, he could hardly wait to get Angela to bed: knowing that she was the young man’s mistress had the strange, unexpected effect of doubling his lust for her. And she seemed equally ready for sex, falling back on the bed and raising her knees, smiling at him in a new way, a smile that contained a hint of amusement at his fumbling efforts to please her. This time it was his turn to be left feeling unsatisfied and empty even though he took her twice, as if possessing her half-a-dozen times would not be enough to assuage his restless yearning.

From mid-June, Daniel Patchin spent most of his Sundays in Calcot Wood; it was by far the largest area of woodland owned by Lord Benningworth. One Sunday he decided to devote to searching for clues as to the lovers’ meetingplace and did come on a bed of crushed ferns; it left him with a strange sensation and feeling slightly sick. From the improvised bed he made his way down to a deserted cottage in the remotest part of the wood, a spot that never seemed to be reached by the sun, as it stood in the shadow of Calcot Hill. It had been a gamekeeper’s cottage up to 1939, but the prewar Benningworth regime of having a gamekeeper had been dropped, and the remote, unattractive cottage was let, when Patchin was a youth, to a strange old man called Ted Ames, then left to rot. Lord Benningworth was a true conservative in that he was against change of any kind, even that of having a wreck of a building knocked down. The old widower Ames had eventually gone off his head and been taken away to a mental hospital in 1948, where he died. Since then the cottage had been stripped of its gutters and drainpipes; most of the roof was still sound, but rain had dripped in through a few missing tiles and some of the rafters were rotten, covered in mould; even on the wannest summer day the old cottage smelt of dank decay. There was fungus on the kitchen walls, and weeds were gradually invading the ground-floor rooms, sprouting up from the cracks in the brick floors.

Daniel Patchin stood absolutely still for a long while, staring at the ruined building which some villagers claimed was haunted by Ted Ames. Patchin did not believe in ghosts, spirits, heaven or hell: he believed that the universe was incomprehensible and absolutely indifferent to mankind. Suddenly he said aloud, “What a waste. Pity not to make some use of the old place.” The second sentence, spoken in a particularly mild voice, ended on a faintly questioning note, and for the first time he moved his head as though he were talking to someone and waiting for a comment on his suggestion. Then he gave the idea, engendered by his memory of a certain feature of the ancient fireplace in Ames’s kitchen, a mirthless smile and turned on his heel.

Throughout Calcot Wood there were piles of logs that Patchin built till he was ready to remove a truckload. There was also a hut where he kept a chain saw, tins of petrol, axes, and bags of wood chips and sawdust. He looked around to make sure that there was no one about and began to carry sacks of sawdust and chippings over to the cottage; he felt great satisfaction in commencing work on his plan.

On succeeding Sundays Daniel Patchin spent a good deal of time in transporting dry branches and brushwood; he also used his van to move cans of paraffin, half-empty tins of paint, plastic bags that had contained dripping, sacks of fat, soiled rags, and other rubbish. These he carefully planted throughout the cottage, gradually turning it into a massive potential bonfire.

While the preparations in Calcot Wood were proceeding satisfactorily, Patchin made a study of Ray Johnson’s working life. By casual questions to the village postmistress, who delighted in gossip, he wormed out the routine of Johnson and other postmen in the area. One of his discoveries was that Johnson often had either Monday or Wednesday afternoon off, and this was confirmed for him on the first Wednesday in July when Angela took a surprising interest in his fishing plans for that afternoon. Usually she was bored by angling, so he answered these questions with concealed, wry humour. Then, prompted by a whim, he took more time than usual in his preparations for the weekly expedition to the Thames. His fishing equipment was the simplest that could be devised — he despised the “London crowd” who invaded the river at weekends weighed down with paraphernalia. He had an all-purpose rod, a few hooks and floats, and one reel carried in an army haversack. As he pretended to fuss over these things and to take an unusually long time in making the flour paste for bait, he could see that Angela was very much on edge, nervous, and yet pleasurably excited at the same time. She had not mentioned going out, so he suspected that there might be a plan for Johnson to visit Pound Cottage while he was away. While the cat’s away the mice will play, he said over and over in his mind as he rolled the ball of dough between his strong, dry fingers.

When he at last set off in the van, he was again ironically amused that Angela came out to wave goodbye, as though to be certain of his departure. Patchin spent an hour on the riverbank but was not in the mood for fishing. The reeds were haunted by colourful dragonflies, and there was a brief darting visit from a kingfisher — sights that usually pleased him, but on this occasion he was hardly aware of anything about him, feeling rather like a ghost returned to haunt the scene of past pleasures.

Patchin drove back from the Thames with not much heart for what lay immediately ahead, but he now felt it was essential to make quite sure of the situation. In Pasterne he parked his van by the pond and appeared to stare down into its clear water for a while. Such behaviour on his part would not excite comment, for he had been known to catch sticklebacks and frogs there to use as bait when angling for pike.

After some minutes of staring with unseeing eyes, Patchin ambled back to his closed shop then walked through it into the garden that led up to Pound Cottage. He trod noiselessly over the lawn and entered the side door very quietly. Within a minute his suspicions were dramatically confirmed: through the board ceiling that separated the living room from the bedroom he heard the squeaking springs of his double bed, squeaking so loudly that it seemed as if the springs were protesting at the extraordinary behaviour of the adulterous couple. Then there began a peculiar rhythmic grunting noise, and his wife called out something incomprehensible in a strange voice.

Patchin retreated noiselessly, got back into his car, and returned to Hambleden Mill. He fished stolidly for three hours with a dour expression on his face, an expression that some North Korean soldiers had probably glimpsed before he killed them with his bayonet. Usually he returned small fish to the river, but on that afternoon he just ripped them off the hook and threw them on the bank.

Returning home again at about his usual time, Patchin found his wife in an excellent mood. Fornication seemed to be good for her health, as she appeared blooming. A delicious supper had been prepared for him, and Angela had popped over to the village stores to buy a bottle of the dry cider he favoured. She looked quite fetching with her flushed cheeks, her curly blonde hair freshly washed, and the two top buttons of a new pink blouse left undone, but Patchin could not respond at all; momentarily he found it difficult to keep up the pretence of not knowing about her affair and felt as though an expression of suspicion and cold contempt must appear on his face. When he went to wash he stared in the mirror and was surprised to find the usual phlegmatic expression reflected.

After supper Angela wanted to stroll around in the garden. It was something Patchin normally enjoyed, seeing the results of all his hard work, for in June the garden looked at its best, with the rose beds “a picture,” as Angela said, and usually it was very satisfactory to inspect the neat rows of vegetables. Instead he experienced a most unusual mood of emptiness and frustration: everything seemed hollow and meaningless.

While his wife bent down to smell a rose, Daniel Patchin stared up at the clear evening sky. He knew his enjoyment of life was temporarily lost and that it would not return until he was rid of the man who threatened his marriage. Angela came and stood by him, took his hand, and placed it on her firm, round breast, an action that would have been quite out of character a few months before; but her new sensuality did not move him at all, and when they went to bed, making love to her was like a ritual, quite spoilt by his memory of the protesting bedsprings.

Patchin decided to try to put his plan of murder into effect on the second Wednesday in July. Angela went for a walk again on the Monday of that week, so according to his understanding of the postman’s routine, it seemed probable that Ray Johnson would be working on the Wednesday afternoon. If so, he would then be driving down the narrow lane that skirted Calcot Wood to clear a remote, little-used postbox about 3 p.m.

On the Wednesday, Patchin felt quite calm and confident that everything would go as he devised. He set off from Pound Cottage promptly at 2 p.m. after an excellent lunch of roast loin of pork with the first new potatoes from the garden and a large helping of broad beans. His haversack had been got ready on the previous evening. It now contained some other things as well as fishing tackle: rubber gloves, matches, a ball of extremely tough cord, sticking plasters, and a foot-long piece of iron pipe.

Parking his van just off the lane by the wood in a cunningly chosen spot where it would not be seen, Patchin took his haversack and walked quickly through the wood to Ames’s cottage. He experienced pleasurable excitement in doing so and in inspecting the fire he had laid in the kitchen grate. It consisted of three fire lighters, paper spills and wood chippings, a few sticks, and numerous small pieces of coal. It had been constructed with the care that a chaffinch gives to making its nest, and he estimated that it would bum intensely for an hour or two. “Quite long enough to roast a joint,” he said in an expressionless voice as he got up from his crouching position in front of the grate.

After inspecting the trails of wood chippings soaked in paraffin which he had laid throughout the cottage like long fuses leading to explosive charges, he glanced round the wildly overgrown plot that had once been a garden. Rank grass a foot high contended with massive clumps of nettles, giant docks, and cow parsley. He did not think that it would be possible to trace footprints on such a terrain, but also he did not expect his enterprise to be risk-free. There were bound to be risks in a life governed by mere chance.

It was 2:45 p.m. when he walked back through the wood to the narrow, twisting lane. He wore the rubber gloves; his left hand was in his old fishing-jacket pocket and the other was plunged into the haversack that hung from his right shoulder. He positioned himself in the lane so that he would be on the driver’s side of the van when it approached him. The oppressive mood which had dogged him for so many weeks had lifted, and he whistled as he waited — a rather tuneless version of “As Time Goes By,” which he repeated over and over again.

At 3 p.m. precisely he heard a motor engine in the lane and got ready to wave the van down if it was driven by Johnson. For the first time that afternoon excitement seized him, with a thumping of his heart and a sudden tremor of fear such as he had always experienced before hand-to-hand fighting in Korea. He had once said to another soldier there, “Everyone’s afraid at times. Anyone who says he isn’t is either a liar or a fool.”

As the post office van came round the comer, Patchin waved it down, first tentatively then more vigorously as he spotted Johnson’s head of black curly hair. Johnson stopped the van, rolled its window farther down, and called out, “What’s up?”

Patchin walked slowly across to the van, limping very slightly and holding himself as though he were in pain. “Sorry, sorry,” he said. “Bit of trouble.” He came close to the van door and stood silent, with his eyes half-closed and swaying slightly as though he were going to faint.

With a puzzled expression in which there was just the faintest hint of suspicion, Johnson opened the van door and began to get out — his height made doing so a rather awkward business. Patchin took out the iron pipe and hit Johnson on the head, a measured blow by someone who had considerable experience in stunning animals. Johnson lurched forward and then fell in a heap, just like a poleaxed bullock. Patchin bundled him back into the van, got into the driving seat, and drove off down the lane, whistling the same tune again. After a hundred yards he turned off onto a track which led in the direction of the gamekeeper’s cottage. Before leaving the red van he pressed Johnson’s fingers on the steering wheel, then bundled the body up and carried it on his shoulder as easily as he managed a side of beef.

He also paused in the decaying doorway to impress Johnson’s fingerprints on two empty paraffin cans, then carried him through to the kitchen. The tall man was still inert, but as Patchin dropped his burden onto the cement floor, Johnson’s eyelids flickered. Patchin sat him up like a ventriloquist’s dummy and then knocked him out with a blow to the jaw that would have floored most boxers.

Patchin put sticky plasters over Johnson’s large mouth, then worked on the unconscious man with the skill he always showed in preparing joints. He put his legs neatly together and bound them tightly from above the knee to the ankles, using the same binding technique he used in repairing his fishing rod, pulling the cord so tight that the legs became immobile; he left a loop by the ankles. He repeated the process with the limp arms. Then came the part that gave him most satisfaction: lifting the two loops onto the hooks that had once supported a turnspit in front of the fire. Immediately after Johnson was suspended like an animal carcase ready to be roasted, Patchin lit the fire in the grate and left the cottage.

Before taking off his rubber gloves, Patchin picked up the empty paraffin cans and left them near the old garden gate, which was half hanging off its hinges, then strode off to the place where he had hidden his own van. The time was 3:30, and everything had gone exactly as he had hoped. There was always blind chance of course, for instance, the remote possibility that another pair of lovers might be trespassing in the woods and see him striding along so purposefully, but there was nothing he could do about it.

Driving to the Thames, Patchin mentally examined his plan again and formulated one or two more things to be done. As soon as he had parked the van near Hambleden Mill, he assembled his rod and line right down to putting on the bait, a thing he never did till he was actually on the riverbank, so that anyone seeing him might think he had already been fishing and was trying another spot. Then, carrying the assembled rod, he walked along a gravel path and over the complicated series of weirs which cross the Thames at Hambleden Mill. As he approached the lock, he watched to see whether the keeper there might be in sight and was relieved to be able to cross unseen.

Patchin threw his piece of iron pipe into the river before spending an hour angling. He fished like a young boy, close-in to the bank where there were more bites to be had but the fish were always small. He caught a tiny roach and three gudgeon but was quite satisfied with them, leaving the last gudgeon on the hook as he walked back to the lock. Good fortune was still with him, for the lockkeeper was now at work opening the gates for a motor cruiser. The keeper, who knew Patchin well, called out, “Any luck, Dan?”

“Not much. Just tiddlers,” Patchin called out, shaking his rod so that the suspended gudgeon twisted about at the end of the line. “Think I’ll use them to try for a pike in the pool by the mill. See you.”

"Yes, see you. Will you keep me a nice small chicken for the weekend?”

“Yes. Right.” Patchin walked off just fractionally quicker than he did normally. With excitement working in him at the prospect of revisiting Ames’s cottage, it was not easy to appear just as usual. For once he was grateful that he had a rather expressionless face.

His mind on other things, he mechanically dismantled the fishing rod and line as quickly as he could. “Yes, all going to plan,” he said aloud, though there was no one within a hundred yards of him.

Driving back to the lane once more he experienced a surprising feeling of letdown and anticlimax. It was true that it had all gone without a hitch as far as he could tell, but somehow it seemed a bit too easy. There would have been more satisfaction if he could have allowed the tall but puny Johnson a chance to fight, some ludicrous attempt at self-defence which he would have brushed away derisively, as easily as a tomcat deals with a rat.

Once in Calcot Wood again, Patchin’s nose twitched. There was a faint aroma like that of roast pork which had greeted him at lunchtime at Pound Cottage. It grew stronger at every step he took. Desultory grey fumes struggled up from the ancient chimney. The smell was very strong in the hall and unpleasantly so in the kitchen, which reeked of cooking odours and where a blackened, twisted carcase was still roasting and dripping fat into a dying fire.

Despite the smell, Patchin stayed there looking at the object, which bore no resemblance to the once garrulous postman. Patchin’s hatred of the man had quite disappeared now that there was no longer any need for it. He was not gloating over his victim but musing on the quintessential evanescence of man. How easily was man humbled, how soon was he changed into rotting meat! It had been just the same in Korea: one minute his friend Dusty Seddon had been telling a dirty joke, the next moment lying mute with most of his face blown off.

Pausing in the hall, Patchin set light to a pile of paraffin-soaked sawdust and then lit the trails of wood chips and retreated to the sagging front door, throwing the box of matches behind him.

The fire had taken a firm grip on the cottage before Patchin had even left the garden; he could hear it raging and roaring unseen until a sheet of flame sprang up at one of the diamond-leaded windows. For the second time that day, Patchin experienced a slight attack of nerves; momentarily his right hand shook, and for a few minutes he seemed to be walking on lifeless legs, having to make an extraordinary amount of effort just to propel himself along.

Seated in his van, Patchin took out a large handkerchief and wiped his forehead, which was sweating profusely, and allowed himself a few minutes’ rest before driving off in his customary careful manner. Was there something he had overlooked, perhaps a trifling slip which might lead the police to his door in a few days’ time? As he navigated a series of lanes and minor roads that would put him once again on the main road from Hambleden to Pasterne, his mind was exercised by the nagging suspicion that he might have made one vital mistake.

Calm gradually returned as he drove slowly along, and he began to think of the possible effect of the fire on the Benningworth estate. The large garden of rank grass and weeds should act as a barrier between the fire and Calcot Wood, but even if it did spread, Lord Benningworth owed him a favour for all the hard work he had put in there as amateur forester for twenty-five years. A sudden thought made Patchin smile. The Benningworth family motto, Esse quam videre, ‘To be rather than to seem to be,’ was well known in the locality; it was a pity that Ray Johnson had not known that Daniel Patchin also had a motto: “What I have I hold.”

When Patchin arrived in Pasterne he felt completely normal. His pleasant life had been momentarily threatened with an upheaval, but that was now all over. The village looked particularly lovely in the late afternoon sunlight. The white ducks were sedulously paddling to and fro as though they were paid to do so, and swifts were skimming over the clear pond’s mirrorlike surface, occasionally dipping down to it hunting midges. The postmistress’s black and white cat moved carefully over the neatly clipped grass as if it might be stalking a newt and sat down at the edge of the pond. “Pretty as a picture,” Patchin said.

Walking along to Pound Cottage, Daniel Patchin thought of what he should say when he saw Angela. It was essential to appear absolutely as normal so that when she heard of the perplexing tragedy in Calcot Wood nothing about his behaviour should prompt suspicion in her mind. Then he understood Angela’s difficulty in appearing quite normal or saying anything about that walk she had taken on the glorious May afternoon, because phrases that he went over in his mind seemed artificial and suspicious. “Nice afternoon, but I didn’t catch anything” — false. “I enjoyed it, but not good fishing weather” — unnatural.

But Patchin need not have worried, for as soon as he opened the side door he heard the squeak of protesting bedsprings and Angela calling out in a voice that sounded false and unnatural.