Murder Jigsaw

by E.

  The company chuckled at Emmett’s embarrassment. “He’s probably been in with an empty creel, and gone off to avoid the banter. Anyhow, I’m not interested, and the gong has gone.”

  “I expect he’ll be in for dinner,” said the major. “He’s a pretty good trencherman, isn’t he, Franky?”

  Franky grimaced. “He is,” he agreed.

  But dinner came and went, and still the colonel made no appearance. Franky sought the lounge’s advice on his missing guest.

  “May have run into a good evening rise and wants to show what he can do.”

  “More likely gone after another kind of fish.” The sneer came from Bill Braddock.

  “Oh,” from several voices. “Who is she, Braddock?”

  “Didn’t know he went in for that kind of fish. Spill her name.”

  Braddock shook his head. “I’m saying nothing,” he said. “But what I hope is that he’s fallen in the Tamar and drowned his damned self.”

  “Well, I think I’ll run down to the river and have a look round,” said Franky. “He may have fallen down and hurt himself, and there’s nobody down there he could call to for help.”

  He returned an hour later without the colonel. “No sign of him down there,” he said. “I walked down to the flats at the bottom of our water.”

  “It’s what I said. He’s engaged elsewhere,” Braddock said. “And he don’t want any flies for that fish.”

  There was a guffaw of laughter. “Well, he’ll have to make an honest woman of her now it’s out. The padre here will see to that, won’t you, Reverend? There’s seventeen-and-six in the kitty for you.”

  The padre smiled deprecatingly.

  “You’ll fix the lounge out as a chapel, eh, Franky?” The major joined in the joke.

  “And give ’em the bridal suite as a wedding present,” added Sir Edward. “That ought to induce the colonel to wed—free board and lodging.”

  “Ef so be you make it a funeral, I wud give ’ee a coffin free.” The voice came from the back of the company. If the softness of the Cornish accent belied the words, the look on the face of the speaker removed the impression. He eyed the company. “You be outlanders and friends of his’n. Tell him to kep hisself to hisself.” Turning on his heel, he put his glass on the table, and walked out.

  Manson eyed his retreating figure, and then looked inquiringly at Franky.

  “Willie Trepol, our carpenter and undertaker.” Franky answered the question in the Doctor’s glance. “He’s a queer chap, and religious, but his bark is worse ’n his bite. There was a mort of trouble atwixt him and the colonel last year.”

  “Well, I’m off to bed, Colonel or no Colonel.” The major finished his drink and gathered his papers. “Want to be out early in the morning. Anybody fishing the top beat in the Inney, Franky? I’d like to have another try for Old Glory.”

  “I’ll keep the beat for you, Major.”

  “Bet you five to one you don’t grass him.” Sir Edward spoke hopefully. “Old Glory” was an institution!

  The major grimaced. “I’ve been trying for him for five years,” he said. “I’ll take it, Sir Edward. Lend me a fly, Reverend.”

  A chorus of protests rose, followed by a howl of laughter as the padre handed over a Red Spinner. “I’ve used that on him for ten years, Major,” he said.

  Still laughing at the joke, the company dispersed to the bedrooms. It was eleven o’clock.

  CHAPTER II

  THE COLONEL DEAD

  Doctor Manson came downstairs at seven o’clock next morning, walked through the deserted lounge and into the dining-room.

  “Just coffee and rolls, John,” he said.

  John brought them with his news. “Did ’ee hear about Colonel, sir?” he asked.

  “No. What’s he been up to now, John? Out on the tiles all night?”

  “He be proper dead, he be.”

  “Dead!” Manson looked up, startled.

  “Ay. Dead as Cornish Laamb. He were found in river the mornin’. Master Frank, he’s there now. Master Budd, he be farmer, told him on telephone, and Master Frank fetched Sergeant.”

  Manson pushed his chair back from the table. “I think I’ll get up there too, John. Corpses are rather in my line, you know. Where was he found?”

  “In Tamar, Doctor. You goes down to farm, turns right and goes a mile alon’ river bank just afore big pool.”

  “I know the way. Do you mean by the Gulley?”

  “That be right. Master Budd see’d ’un goin’ thru Gulley.”

  Manson whistled softly. “If he’s got into the round pool they’ll have a job to get him out,” he thought, as he got his car out of the garage.

  It was a perfect July morning, and Manson whistled more cheerfully than the occasion warranted as he drove in the direction of the river Tamar. The narrow Cornish lanes, in which there is never room for two cars to pass except where banks are broken by wide gateways into fields, were at their best, he soliloquised, at this time of the day and year. The sun, just getting into its first warm rays, glistened on silvery, dew-spangled cobwebs, thrown as though by fairy hands across the lanes, or festooned in delicate tracery along the hedgerows. Ahead, and on either side, a blue haze shimmered over the trees of the valley, at the foot of which ran the river, sluggishly moving between the rapids, then racing into the deep salmon pools, where its turbulence spent itself in the cool depths.

  Behind, the town perched on the hill stared down as it had done for eight hundred years. Its crowning point, the Castle, dominating approaches from every side for twenty miles around. It must have been a formidable object in the Norman Days that saw its rise, soliloquised Manson.

  Wild roses towered over the low hedge-rows, fox-gloves spread a purplish carpet in the fields beyond. Manson sniffed in the morning perfume as he drove. He waved a greeting to the postmaster at the little roadside office, which lay in the shadow of the big barn that Cornish Baptists had changed into a Bethel, turned a forgotten right-hand hairpin bend on two wheels, and stopped in front of a five-barred gate, enclosing a farm-yard from which a solitary cow gazed reflectively as she chewed the cud.

  Opening the gate, Manson drove through and parked the car beside two others in the shade of a store-barn. Closing the gate behind him he struck right, climbed a fence and entered a field. The river lay below him, and in the distance he saw a small group of men gathered on the bank half-a-mile or so away.

  He approached by way of a winding track between two fields of oats, to find himself standing on a rocky bank, with a deep pool thirty feet beneath. The pool was almost circular in shape, some 160 feet in diameter. At the top end, a wall of granite rock imprisoned it, except for a narrow, funnel-like, opening through which the water raced like a mill-stream. This was “The Gulley,” known to all fishermen as the place where a salmon could invariably be taken on a “Devon Spinner” when the fish were running. At the bottom end of the pool, the water flowed sluggishly forward, and so on to the four-feet-deep shallow flats where trout abounded for the wily angler. Manson knew every inch of the water; he had fished it off and on for several years.

  A labourer greeted him with excited explanation. “He be down there, zur,” he said. “We found where he fell in. He comed down the rapids and water tuk’n thru t’ gulley. Sergeant and Constable be tryin’ to get ’un to bank.”

  Manson moved towards the bank.

  “If you go down, be careful: Et’s dangerous.”

  “I’ll watch out,” was the reply, as Manson began to clamber down the steep slopes to the water edge.

  Sergeant Jones looked round as he heard the scrambling approach. He greeted the Chief Inspector with a grin. The two had met before, both as fishermen and also when the sergeant had visited Scotland Yard!

  “Heard you were down, Doctor, and expected you’d be about afore long. But there’s no need for ’ee to be troubled. We found where he slipped in, a mile back.”

  Manson smiled a reply and looked out across the pond. Fifty feet out
the dead man was floating, just below the surface of the water. “Dashed queer he’s floating like that, isn’t it, Sergeant?” he asked.

  “We reckon it’s his wading clothes keepin’n up,” he said. “They’ll be water-proof and there’ll be air inside.” He scratched his head. “I don’t know how we’ll be gettin’n out,” he said. “The current goes circular-like, and we have been countin’ on it sweeping him to the bank. But he just goes round and round in middle of the pool.”

  “You can’t get a boat in the pool, of course?”

  The sergeant pointed to the Gulley. “We couldn’t get a boat through there, Doctor, as you well know. And, anyways, the only boat is ten miles away.”

  “Swimming any good?”

  “I wouldn’t let any man risk his life theer fur a corpse.”

  Manson nodded. “I think you’re right,” he agreed. “But I don’t think he’ll float much longer. If you don’t soon get him out you’ll lose him for good. If he once touches bottom, the granites will hold him.”

  He paused in thought for a few moments, then bent forward and whispered in the sergeant’s ear. The officer recoiled. “Aw jiminy,” he gasped, “for a ghoulish thing you be thinkin’ of. Howsever, if you think we should do it, all right. Franky is the best of us, if he’ll do’t.”

  Manson climbed the bank and beckoned to his host. The two walked a few yards apart from the waiting group before the Scotland Yard Chief Inspector broached his suggestion. Baker looked at the scientist dumbfounded. “I’d never have the nerve to do it, Doctor,” he said, slowly. “I’d never be able to go to the river again.”

  “But you must try it, Franky,” Manson insisted. “I’d do it myself if I could, but you know damned well I’d be no good at the job.” He eyed the hesitating hotelier for a moment, and then took him by the arm. “After all, Franky,” he said, “he’s your guest, and he’s been your guest for years. He’s entitled to a decent burial.”

  Manson’s eyes twinkled a little as he saw a changing expression in Baker’s face. The Cornishman will break the law for a little smuggling; he will kill; and he isn’t above a little poaching; but Cornish hospitality is something not to be betrayed or broken. And, as Manson knew, so it happened. “If-so-be you look at it that way, Doctor, I’ll do my best,” Franky said.

  “I thought you’d see it that way, Franky,” said Manson. “But I think you’ll have to hurry.”

  “I’ve got some things in the car, Doctor. Always keep them there. I’ll be back in ten minutes.” He turned on his heel and strode rapidly away in the direction of the farm.

  He was back in less than the ten minutes, a bag over his shoulder and a long canvas case under his arm. From it he produced a twelve-foot salmon spinning-rod. Fitting the joints together he slipped in a reel, and threaded the line through the eyelets.

  The group of men had watched these proceedings in puzzled silence. Suddenly their meaning penetrated into the mind of one of them. “Jiminy! He’s going to fish for him,” he shouted.

  Franky fitted a salmon spinner to the line. He eyed the eye of the barbed triangle of hooks with concern. “I doubt it will grip him, Doctor.”

  Manson nodded.

  With a figure-of-eight knot, Franky added an additional cast to the line, attaching to it a large spoon spinner with three sets of triangle hooks. Thus equipped, he scrambled down the bank. The colonel still moved sluggishly along with the circling current.

  There followed thirty minutes: thirty minutes that hung beneath the azure sky, each minute seeming an hour to the watching men, in a setting so bizarre as was never imagined, even by Poe. Trout rose to the morning hatch of fly; a salmon leaped six feet above the centre of the pool, to fall back with a mighty splash, the suddenness of which sent the hearts of the crowd into their mouths.

  Perched precariously with his left foot on the crumbling earth edging the water, and the other resting a pace forward on a jutting rock, Franky sent his line spinning towards the body of the colonel.

  Forty, fifty, feet the line flew out from a free-running reel. The host of the Tremarden Arms was as expert a salmon-spinning fisherman as he was an hotelier; the spinners slipped into the water at the end of the cast with hardly a splash, were reeled in subtly, only to go whirring through the air again.

  Once, the hooks made contact with the colonel, but failed to drive home. The body rolled over, and Franky was violently sick before he could reel in the sinking baits. He put down the rod. “I’ll have to wait till he comes round again,” he said. “There’s too much lag on the line to get a strike.”

  The next cast was the last. The line stretched athwart the body, the hooks a good three yards beyond. For a matter of three seconds Franky stood motionless, letting the baits sink into the water. Then, slowly, he reeled in, until he felt touch. With the line just tautening he struck hard, rod horizontal to the water, with a swift left-handed snatch.

  “He’s held, zur.” A voice came from the top of the bank. “You ben got him below the shoulder.”

  Franky began slowly to wind in, the stout rod bending in an arch as the weight took effect.

  “Take it gently, Franky.”

  The angler nodded at Manson’s unconsciously whispered warning. Slowly, the colonel’s body came towards the bank, the rod lifting as he gained weigh, until at last it touched shore, and the sergeant and constable, kneeling down, held it against the bank.

  “Us’ll never get him up the bank here,” the sergeant said.

  Manson nodded. “If Franky can bring him down to the bottom of the pool we’ll be in the flats, and he can be lifted straight out. You men get a gate and carry it down to the shallows,” he called up to the group on the bank.

  So Colonel Donoughmore came to grass, as does a salmon in the steep-banked Tamar, which had fought for life to a finish—towed at the end, motionless, to a convenient landing-place. And when he was lifted out Franky took the salmon-rod, snapped it across a knee, and hurled the pieces into the river. He had ‘played’ salmon with that rod for nearly twenty years.

  Doctor Tremayne came to the waiting body, panting and angry. “I wish to heaven you’d leave hunting corpses until I’ve finished my morning patients, Sergeant,” he protested.

  The sergeant giggled. “The patients may have something to thank us for, Doctor,” he said. “We may have saved their lives.”

  The Doctor glared. “Where’s the body?” he demanded.

  He eyed the still figure clad from head to foot in khaki-coloured wading outfit. “Fisherman, eh?” he said. “Fell in, I suppose? Not surprised. Most dangerous water in Cornwall, this blasted Tamar. Shoals and pools, and blasted great boulders you fall over. Well, get the things off him.”

  Stripped of his outfit the colonel was almost bone-dry underneath. The Doctor ran his hands over him. “Well, he’s dead right enough, beyond a doubt,” he said. “And he’s been dead a long time. Rigour is well developed. What do you want me to do about him?”

  “Would he have ben drownded?” asked the sergeant.

  “Now how the devil d’ ye expect me to give you an answer to that, man, by just looking at him?” snarled the Doctor. “You found him in the water. You pulled him out. I should say he was drowned right enough. But I cannot make any such pronouncement as you well know, Sergeant, until I have opened him up and looked at the inside of him.”

  “Just so,” agreed Manson. “And he’s had a nasty blow on the forehead. It probably knocked him unconscious, though the actual cause of death may have been drowning.” He stooped over the body, and, taking a magnifying glass from a waistcoat pocket, peered closely at the bruised tissues. Then, returning the glass to his pocket, he ran a hand over the dead man’s skull; his long, tapering fingers exploring the area of the wound. He felt the bone give under their pressure. “Yes, skull fractured,” he announced.

  Doctor Tremayne stared at him. “Would you be a surgeon, sir?” he asked.

  Manson smiled. “No, Doctor,” he said. “No.”

  “Then ye ought
to have been; you’ve been given the very hands for the job.”

  “But not the brains nor the desire for it, Doctor,” Manson retorted. His hands moved over and along the corpse. “There’s a rib broken too, and the hands and arms are bruised.”

  “That ’ud be the rocks in the water,” the sergeant opined.

  “Mebbe,” Manson said. “Well, I don’t see that you can do any more, Sergeant. You’d better get him away to the mortuary and leave him to the Doctor. Then we might have a look at the place where he fell in.”

  CHAPTER III

  BITS AND PIECINGS

  It was a thoughtful chief inspector who led the procession of three back to the river after the colonel’s body had been started on its journey to the town. His brow was puckered; any of the officers at the Yard would have read the symptoms, but Franky and the sergeant put his abstraction down to the grimness of the scene just ended.

  “There’s a short cut, Doctor, to where he went in across the field,” suggested Franky.

  Manson shook his head. “I’d rather follow the river, if the sergeant isn’t in any hurry,” he said.

  The sergeant nodded. He made it plain by his attitude that his job was finished. The colonel wasn’t a young man, he was at pains to point out, and the Tamar was, as Doctor Tremayne had said, a dangerous place for anyone who wasn’t pretty active. Still, it was a pity all round. “It do give the water a bad name, when a fisherman is drowned,” he explained.

  “Still, if it had, betimes, to be, I’d rather it was the colonel than anybody.” He coughed apologetically. “Mebbe I shouldn’t have said that, if he was a friend of yours, zur.”

  “No,” Manson smiled. “Never met him. I gather he wasn’t popular round here. What was the trouble?”

  The sergeant hesitated. “To be shure,” he said, “there have been tales of goings-on with wimmen-folk, and he gived ’isself airs with the men, and that doesn’t do from an outlander. I’ve the idea, Doctor, that Master Frank wouldn’t have took’d it bad if he hadn’t comed to the Arms again.” He glanced at the hotelier, but Franky made no sign.