George and Ham discover McCarthy’s body and keep it secret. The discovery in the Old stone quarry links a hidden killing from seven years earlier to the silence and suspicions surrounding George’s death, making the quarry more than a place where a body was buried: it is where George and Ham first chose not to involve the police.

Discovery in the Quarry

While separated from the flock, Melmoth spends a cold November night huddled in a hawthorn hedge, then roams the wintry moorland alone. From a hill he searches the horizon for sheep, but sees none; later, at the pebbly mound in the Old stone quarry, he slips beneath a human leg bone and hides in the shadows as dogs pant and the butcher catches his breath. George arrives behind them. The light shifts back to the mound, revealing the pale leg against the night sky. At first the men’s attention is on Melmoth, but the bone changes the scene: what had been a chase becomes the discovery of a human body.

Identifying the Body and Withholding the Police

George puts on his work gloves and climbs the unstable pebbly slope. Pulling at the exposed leg, he loosens the stones until a large body emerges; Melmoth steps back to avoid the falling pebbles. The butcher recognizes the dead man as Weasel McCarthy. The discovery changes the encounter from a search for a missing sheep into a confrontation with a concealed human death, and George’s inspection confirms that McCarthy did not die naturally: he has minor wounds and bruises, sharp wounds consistent with a knife, and a blood-covered head bearing what appears to be the fatal injury. To Melmoth, watching from the shadows, the injuries seem entirely natural, an interpretation that exposes how little he can make of the humans’ alarm.

Ham proposes fetching the police, but George refuses to treat McCarthy’s death as an ordinary case. He says they would call the police if it were anyone else, then insists that something is wrong. His decision keeps the discovery out of official hands and draws Ham into the silence surrounding the body. The choice is not explained at the quarry; it becomes one of the event’s central unanswered questions, binding the two men to a secret whose significance will emerge only years later.

The Secret's Delayed Return

The discovery acquires a wider history when George makes a cryptic accusation about the people who had ignored McCarthy: he concludes that it was all of them, without explaining at the quarry whom he means or what they had done. The statement leaves collective responsibility suspended rather than resolved. Years later, Beth dates a change in the community to seven years earlier, when she returned from six months in Africa to find more superstition and less fear of the Lord. She says George was affected more than anyone and became increasingly reclusive. Her account places his withdrawal in the same period as the old killing, though it does not explain exactly what happened or establish a direct cause.

The public record Rebecca uncovers gives the concealed body a name and a date. In newspaper files from seven years earlier, she finds that Wesley McCarthy was reported murdered in the stone quarry; an anonymous caller notified the police, but there were no suspects or arrests, and the story quickly disappeared from the headlines. Beth recognizes the name as Weasel McCarthy, the man already known to the sheep through the discovery at the quarry. The gap between an anonymous report and a case without an arrest echoes the earlier decision not to take the discovery to the police, while the newspaper’s brief attention shows how quickly the killing vanished from public view.

The flock later turns that silence into a question about human memory and trust. Miss Maple recalls that God said no one had told him anything and found the omission suspicious: if people had acted as a flock, she reasons, they might have felt safe enough to tell him, as they had in McCarthy’s case. She also notes that God had not given them away then, despite disliking George. Mopple the Whale counters Cloud’s suggestion that the people may simply have forgotten, observing that humans still remembered McCarthy after seven winters. The sheep’s discussion makes the old crime not merely an unreported death but a continuing piece of shared knowledge, preserved even as its circumstances remain obscure.

The novel also returns to concealment through a separate object associated with Melmoth. George finds a narrow thread buried deep in the sheep’s fleece, cuts it with a knife, and retrieves a smooth, shining key. Melmoth remembers that George had tied it around his neck because he was the wildest of the flock; after taking it, George walks away without looking back. This later gesture does not explain McCarthy’s murder, but it repeats the event’s pattern of hidden things and withheld explanations, leaving the key’s significance distinct from the quarry secret.

A Later Visit and the Limits of What Is Told

Beth’s account of George’s visit on the Sunday before last gives the old silence a present-day echo without resolving the quarry’s unanswered questions. Late in the evening, George knocked at her door. She began speaking about the Gospel, as she had whenever they met, but this time he gently stopped her, saying that what he had come to discuss was important. Beth let him in; the moment resembled something she had once imagined, yet his purpose was different. Her recollection shows how long their conversations had followed the same pattern, and how a break in it could become charged with meaning. It does not, in the evidence available here, explain the murder of Weasel McCarthy or George’s earlier refusal to call the police. Instead, it leaves the old discovery within a larger history of postponed speech: the body was found, the question of who was responsible remained unresolved, and the people around George continued to approach the past through fragments and belated disclosures.