Eighteen
Shaw came up in a battered¹ old Land Rover. I suppose it was the car heused for going to visit isolated² farms in bad weather. He barely looked ateither of us. He went straight and bent³ over Ellie. Then he came over to us.
“She’s been dead at least three or four hours,” he said. “How did it hap-pen?”
I told him how she’d gone off riding as usual after breakfast that morn-ing.
“Has she had any accidents up to this time when she’s been out riding?”
“No,” I said, “she was a good rider.”
“Yes, I know she’s a good rider. I’ve seen her once or twice. She’s riddensince she was a child, I understand. I wondered if she might have had anaccident lately and that that might have affected⁴ her nerve a bit. If thehorse had shied—”
“Why should the horse shy? It’s a quiet brute—”
“There’s nothing vicious about this particular horse,” said Major Phill-pot. “He’s well behaved, not nervy. Has she broken any bones?”
“I haven’t made a complete examination yet but she doesn’t seem phys-ically injured in any way. There may be some internal injury. Might beshock, I suppose.”
“But you can’t die of shock,” I said.
“People have died of shock before now. If she’d had a weak heart—”
“They said in America that she had a weak heart—some kind of weak-ness at least.”
“Hm. I couldn’t find much trace of it when I examined her. Still, wedidn’t have a cardiograph. Anyway no point in going into that now. Weshall know later. After the inquest.”
He looked at me consideringly, then he patted me on the shoulder.
“You go home and go to bed,” he said. “You’re the one who’s sufferingfrom shock.”
In the queer way people materialize out of nowhere in the country, wehad three or four people standing⁵ near us, by this time. One a hiker whohad come along from the main road seeing our little group, one a rosy-faced woman who I think was going to a farm over a short cut and an oldroadman. They were making

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