Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 148, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 900 & 901, September/October 2016

In the bottom of the valley a copse of silver birch swayed and shivered in the wind, their leaves glowing like underwater coins. Down valley, where the hillsides opened out and the teeth of the first northerlies stripped the trees to bone, the brook, hidden for much of the year, stretched out in a long unbroken line all the way down to The Riffle and Doxey’s pool, where it scratched at the earth like a dark and crooked finger. Above all this, a background for the scattering of crows he watched fighting to stay afloat in the sea of shifting air, the remains of graphite clouds shredded across an immense and quickly clearing sky. When the last of these had stretched and dissipated into nothingness he took the final few drags of his cigarette and, when he was sure there was nothing left worth smoking, flicked it expertly out of the window, the dim glow of it arcing through the air and over the barrier to end its life in a hiss on the damp grass below.