I had put in a hard morning grease-banding the pear orchard against a bad invasion of winter moth and, while not deliberately avoiding Oswald’s Gable and all its complications, had not been sorry to put it out of my mind for a time. Angela had all my sympathy, but it was no place of mine to constitute myself her guardian. I had therefore heard nothing of any further developments, and I am afraid it had slipped my memory completely that I had promised old Blake to let him know about the grave. Harold’s first words, however, showed me that any message of mine to Blake would have been superfluous. ‘I say, you know, this is getting pretty serious, Douglas, don’t you think?’ ‘What is?’ ‘Why, what this brother of John’s is doing. Haven’t you heard? He got hold of Blake first thing this morning, before breakfast, and told him to lift the coffin and take it to the mortuary. Blake told him that he couldn’t do that now without an order from the Home Office (exhumation’s a pretty serious thing, you know), but Waterhouse said that the body hadn’t been buried yet, so the exhumation rules didn’t apply.
