CHAPTER SIX1
“I don’t like it, Stone, and that’s a fact,” said John Wharton. Wharton was the manager for the contractors, Barrow & Teesdale, who were taking the pipe line over Bowland to connect the reservoirs they had built there with the water supply of the great industrial city of Leverstone. Wharton was a very able man; he had been in charge of similar projects, in conditions even more remote and inaccessible than Bowland, in the Highlands, in the Welsh mountains and the Northumbrian hills, and he had been heard to say that there was no problem connected with labour gangs in difficult terrain that he hadn’t had to face at one time or another.
Stone had come to his boss to report the van driver’s story, for Stone, also, was an experienced man, and he knew that crimes which occurred in
