The Rain Gauge at Rook’s Hollow
The rain gauge stood at the far end of Edith Gort’s kitchen garden, beside the runner beans, where it had stood for eleven years. She checked it every morning at seven o’clock, noted the reading in a small blue notebook with squared paper, and emptied it with a tin ladle she kept hanging on the fence post. The ritual was as fixed as the tides.
On the morning of the fourteenth of October, Edith noticed two things. The first was that the gauge read zero, despite a steady drizzle having fallen throughout the night. The second was that the post it sat upon had been pressed back into the soil at a slightly different angle, leaning perhaps three degrees to the east, so that a faint crescent of paler earth showed on one side where the ground had been disturbed.
She stood in her waterproof and looked at it for a long time, the smell of wet soil and bruised marigold leaves rising around her. Then she went inside and put the kettle on.
—
Rook’s Hollow was the kind of village where everyone knew the colour of everyone else’s curtains. It had a post office, a pub, a Norman church with a listing weathervane, and, this autumn, a newcomer: Mr. Gerald Foss, who had taken the tenancy of Orchard Barn in September and spoken to almost nobody since.
People had tried. The WI had sent a welcome card. Reverend Aldcroft had knocked once and been answered by a shuffling silence before footsteps retreated down the hall. What Foss did with himself inside that barn conversion was a matter of considerable parish speculation.
Edith had no interest in speculation. She preferred evidence.
She had noticed Foss once, carrying a cardboard box from his car at half past six in the morning, his breath coming in short white puffs, his movements quick and purposeful in the way of a man who did not want to be seen being purposeful.
She had also noticed that the footpath running along the eastern edge of her garden, connecting the village lane to the fields behind Orchard Barn, showed signs of regular use in the early hours. Boot prints in the mud, pointing both ways. A consistent tread, deep in the heel.
—
“You think someone’s been through your garden at night?” said Dorothy Brace, who ran the post office and took coffee with Edith on Thursdays, sitting now with both hands wrapped around a mug that had a small chip on the rim.
“Through the path beside it,” Edith said. “Which is a public right of way, so that’s no crime. But they moved the rain gauge.”
Dorothy looked up. “Why would anyone move a rain gauge?”
“That is precisely the question.” Edith set down her mug. “It was moved back, you see. Replaced almost exactly. Almost.” She paused. “And it read zero after a night of rain.”
Dorothy was quiet for a moment. “So it had been tipped out.”
“Or stored somewhere dry and replaced before dawn. Either way, someone wanted it to appear undisturbed.” Edith smoothed the tablecloth with the flat of her hand. “Which means someone knew I kept records. Someone who didn’t want me to know the gauge had been moved. Someone who thought a zero reading on a rainy night would simply go unremarked.”
Dorothy set her mug down very slowly. “What would it matter? Someone cutting through your garden?”
“The path, Dorothy. Not the garden.” Edith stood and went to the window. “But the gauge is four feet from the path and behind the bean frame. You can’t knock it accidentally in the dark unless you’re walking well off the path.”
They both looked out at the garden, where the bean frame stood brown and spent in the October drizzle.
—
Edith visited Constable Hewett that afternoon, not because she expected him to act immediately, but because she believed in the proper order of things.
He listened, which she respected, and nodded at the right moments. He said he’d had a quiet word with Foss following a report from a farm on the other side of the fields: some missing diesel, a padlock cut, a week ago Thursday.
“We couldn’t place him at the scene,” Hewett said. “No footprints close enough to the tank. Dry spell that week.”
“Yes,” said Edith. “It was a dry week, wasn’t it.” She looked at him steadily. “Which makes the boot prints in my muddy path rather more interesting. The rain only came the night before last. So whoever made those prints used the path in the last forty-eight hours.”
Hewett got his notebook out.
Three days later, a search of a storage unit registered in Foss’s name turned up twelve jerrycans of agricultural diesel, two lengths of copper pipe, and a bolt cutter with red rubber grips.
—
On the morning of the eighteenth, Edith went out at seven o’clock, checked the rain gauge, and recorded eleven millimetres in her small blue notebook. The sky was pale and clearing from the west, and a robin was working through the leaf litter beside the bean frame with enormous self-importance.
She re-hung the ladle on the fence post and looked at the slight hollow in the soil where the gauge’s post had been replaced at an angle, now pressed back true and firm by her own hand on the morning she had noticed it.
Eleven millimetres. She clicked her pen closed and went inside to make toast.
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