by Carola Dunn
“A dead person. And where is this husband o’ yourn? Why don’t he report this dead person hisself, like a good citizen?”
“Because,” said Daisy with all the patience she could muster, “like a good citizen he stayed with the body. In case anyone came by, to make sure they didn’t touch him. It’s at the bottom of the cliff in that little cove you have to climb down to—”
“So your husband stayed down in this tiny cove you have to climb down the cliff to get to, to keep chance passers-by away from this dead body he found … Sounds like a fairy-tale to me.”
Scarlet with fury, Belinda marched up to the counter. “It’s not a fairy-tale. My father knows what to do when you find a body, because he’s a detective chief inspector at Scotland Yard. So there!”
Casting her an alarmed glance, Constable Puckle at last took out his notebook and found a pencil.
Daisy suppressed a sigh. Fat chance of keeping Alec out of the investigation now! Their holiday was doomed.
9
The first Alec knew of the arrival of relief troops was a hail from the sea.
“Ahoy there!”
“Ahoy!” he shouted back, hoping that was the correct nautical response. He stood up on his rocky seat. A lifeboat bobbed in the surf, the very sight of it making him slightly queasy. He waved.
“Ahoy! Chief Inspector Fletcher?”
“Oh hell!” he muttered. What had possessed Daisy to give him away? Reluctant but resigned, he waved acknowledgement.
The lifeboatmen shipped their oars. At that moment, Alec was hailed from behind. “Hulloo!”
Turning with caution he saw a stout constable, very red in the face, about two thirds of the way down the cliff path. Behind him came a shortish, slim young man in tennis whites. In place of a racquet, a black bag swung jauntily in his hand, proclaiming his profession.
At any moment, the beach was going to be covered with footprints. Alec cast a last quick glance around. The only marks he could see on the sea-smoothed sand were those of his own feet, but he wished he had his sergeant, Tom Tring, with him to make a proper survey of the area.
“No I don’t!” he muttered to himself. He must remember he was on holiday.
He climbed down from his perch. Two of the lifeboatmen trudged towards him, ungainly in their bulky life-jackets. One carried a folding stretcher.
“Bloody hell,” said the other, stopping with hands on hips, “he’s a bit of a mess, an’t he.” He looked up at the towering cliff. “Long way to fall. You reckon he fell, Chief Inspector, or’d the tide bring him in?”
“That’s for the local police to decide.”
The man with the stretcher stared at the body. “Hey, an’t that Enderby? Look at un’s hair, Jimmy.”
“Could be. An’ if so ’tis, the question’s not did he fall or did he drownd, ’tis did he fall or were he pushed?”
A third man joined them. “Pushed? Hey, that’s Enderby! If Enderby got pushed, I know who done it.”
“Give over, Tom Stebbins!” said Jimmy. “I dunno why you got it in for Pete just acos he’s done well for himself and you ha’n’t.”
“I say!” The voice was the same which had hallooed from the cliff path.
They all, including Alec, turned to see the young tennis player scrambling across the rocks towards them. Close to, he looked even younger than from a distance: an unlined face with a narrow fuzz of moustache, looking as if it was barely winning the struggle for existence, and ingenuous eyes now bright with excitement.
“Gosh, the poor chap’s a bit of a mess, isn’t he?” Staring, he unconsciously echoed Jimmy.
“Are you the police surgeon, Doctor?” Alec asked.
“Well, no, not exactly.” He flushed to the roots of his dark, sleeked-back hair. “As a matter of fact, I’m not exactly quite qualified yet. Student at Guy’s, don’t you know. I’m staying with my uncle, who’s the local GP. He’s gone out to some farm at the back of beyond, so when the bobby said a doctor was needed, I said what-ho, I’ll come along and lend a hand. Oh, the name’s Vernon, sir, Andrew Vernon.”
“I see, Mr. Vernon,” Alec said grimly. “And where, may I ask, is the bobby?”
Vernon swung round and pointed at the cliff. “Couldn’t get down the path, I’m afraid. There’s a bally great rock sticks out and he’d have gone over for sure if he’d tried to get past it. Stout sort of chap, don’t you know.”
The lifeboatmen nudged each other, pointed at the forlorn blue-clad figure up on the path, and snickered. “Aye, he’s a stout chap, Fred Puckle is, surely,” the man with the stretcher agreed, grinning.
For the moment at least, Alec was the only authority. He was going to have to make the decisions.
“I say, sir, you’re the Scotland Yard ’tec, aren’t you?” asked the youthful not-exactly-quite doctor.
“Detective Chief Inspector Fletcher of the Metropolitan Police, CID. Well, Mr. Vernon, it looks as if I’m the only police officer available and you’re the only medical man. You’d better have a look at him, and we’ll worry later about the legality of a student pronouncing death.”
“Gosh, may I? Wait till the fellows hear about this!” But the moment he opened his black bag, Vernon put on the gravity proper to his future profession. He took out a small hand-mirror and a magnifying glass. “I’m afraid there’s not much doubt about his decease, though. Should I try not to disturb the body?”
“Too late to worry about that.” Another lifeboatman had arrived, a middle-aged, prosperous-looking man with COXSWAIN painted on his life-jacket. “We’ve got to take him aboard and get back to port. I don’t like the look of the weather.” He gestured out to sea, where a white bank of fog was creeping in, though not yet hiding the sun. The wind had dropped, but the waves crashed against the headlands with unabated vigour. “We need to be ready in case of a real emergency. Let’s get that stretcher put together, Bill.”
“Aye, sir.”
While Bill, Jimmy and Tom Stebbins screwed together the poles and slung the canvas between, Vernon stooped to the mortal remains of George Enderby.
Held to the mashed mouth and nose, the mirror predictably failed to cloud over. Undeterred, Vernon felt for pulses and peered into mercifully unmashed eyes before he looked up to say, “Should I try the stethoscope, sir?”
“I don’t believe that’s necessary.”
“No, he’s about as dead as a corpse can be. I don’t know much about rigor mortis, or cadaveric cooling, I’m afraid. Most of what we get in the hospital has died naturally and as often as not been pickled in formalin.”
“The sun and the water may have changed the timing anyway. With luck we … they will be able to establish the time of death by other means.”
Assuming Enderby had stayed behind his bar till the end of opening hours at three—no, two thirty on a Sunday, he had to have time to reach the top of the cliff. He must have left the pub on the dot and walked up at a good clip. Meeting someone?
Alec himself had been up there by half past three or soon after, and had seen no one else. Not that it was his problem, but as a witness he could narrow the time of the fall to a very short period.
He turned to the lifeboat coxswain. “I believe he fell into four or five inches of water. Can you tell me what time the tide would have been at that level?”
“Well, now.” The coxswain eyed the level of barnacles, limpets and seaweed on the rocks, the edge of the wave presently creaming up the beach, the steel-cased chronometer he pulled from a pocket of his life-vest, and the position of the body. “Midway between neap and spring,” he said, and his men nodded. “On-shore wind. Well, now, this is not a cove I’m very familiar with, so I won’t commit myself, but I should say around three o’clock there would have been four or five inches right here.”
The men nodded. “Aye, thereabouts,” Jimmy agreed.
Their estimate matched Alec’s. Barring definitive evidence to the contrary, Enderby had died at approximately three o’clock that afternoon. Which would not leave much time for
an assailant—if any—to descend the cliff path, re-ascend, and be out of sight when Alec, Daisy and the girls arrived.
“Sir!” Crouching by the body, Vernon was examining the back of the neck with his magnifying glass. “Sir, there are splinters of wood in his skin here. Do you think it’s important? Do you think someone hit him before he fell? Shall I leave them there or pull some out? I have tweezers in my bag. I could—”
“Hold your horses, lad!”
Alec scanned the surrounding area. A few small sticks, bleached by salt water, and the smashed remains of a packing case lay scattered among the rocks, none within a dozen feet of the body. A hundred feet to his left, a weathered log leant up against the cliff, jammed between two boulders. He looked up at the cliff. As his gaze rose higher and higher, he saw tufts of grass, thrift, even red valerian clinging to ledges, cracks and niches, but nothing remotely resembling a tree. Nothing Enderby could have hit on the way down that would have lodged splinters in his skin.
“Here.” The coxswain, shaking his head, handed over binoculars. They failed to miraculously reveal a tree of any size, with or without broken branches, even right at the top of the cliff.
“Summun hit him,” said Tom Stebbins with ghoulish satisfaction.
“Sir!” Vernon was almost dancing with excitement. “Shall I extract a couple of splinters? I can put them in a specimen bottle. There’d be some left in the skin for the autopsy. Sir, do you think I could attend the autopsy?”
“That’s not for me to say,” Alec pointed out firmly. “You’ll have to ask the local authorities. Yes, you’d better pull a couple of splinters, just in case the body is damaged … further damaged on the way to port. I’ll take responsibility.”
Three splinters, ranging from a quarter-inch long to nearly invisible, were safely deposited in a small glass specimen bottle with a rubber-sealed stopper, which was then safely tucked away in the black bag. Alec went through the dead man’s pockets, but anything that had been in them must have fallen out on the way down. Even through the binoculars, there had been no sign of a jacket on the cliff face. If the local police wanted to climb down the cliff to search along the way, that was up to them. Alec wasn’t going to attempt it.
The lifeboatmen, with solemn mien, lifted the body and laid it on the stretcher. Covering it with a tarpaulin, they strapped it down and started down the beach towards their vessel.
“You’ll be coming back with us?” the coxswain asked Alec.
Alec eyed the waves, which recalled to mind all too clearly his interior distress last time he went to sea. With relief, he remembered the village bobby who had failed to negotiate the cliff path. The blue figure still stood up there by the big boulder, feet the regulation distance apart, hands behind his back, staring into the distance, doing his best to look as if he were on guard duty.
“I must talk to the constable.” Alec tried to sound regretful. “Puckle, is it?”
“Fred Puckle. You want to come with us, Vernon?”
“No, thanks, sir. Another day.”
“I expect you’d better deliver the body to the police station,” said Alec, “unless by then there’s a Devon detective waiting for you on the quay to direct matters. Thanks for your help, Coxswain. I hope you’re not called out again today.”
“Believe me, so do I, Chief Inspector. I’d rather have a hurricane than a fog, and after lawyering all week, I must say I like to put my feet up on a Sunday afternoon.” With a gesture halfway between a wave and a salute, the coxswain went after his men.
“A lawyer!” Alec stared after him. “I assumed he was a seaman.”
“Oh no, sir, though he’s a keen sailor. He has his own yacht. The lifeboatmen are all volunteers, mostly fishermen. When the maroon goes up, they come running from whatever they’re doing. They’ve let me go out with them a couple of times. I generally spend a few weeks in the summer at my uncle’s, don’t you know. Mr. Wallace is a solicitor, the only one in Westcombe. If it’s really murder, he’ll be kept busy! Do you think it’s murder, sir? It must be, mustn’t it?”
As Vernon chattered, he and Alec made their way towards the foot of the cliff path. At this point, Alec stopped and gave the young man a stern look.
“I have not said so, and you are not to say so. To anyone at all. This is not my case; you are not a qualified medical practitioner, far less a police surgeon. I want your word that you won’t speak to anyone of murder.”
“Oh no, sir, I wouldn’t. I can be the soul of discretion, I promise you.” He followed Alec up the path. “I don’t usually rattle on this way, it’s just … Well, seeing a chap one knows lying there on the beach, it’s a bit different from a pickled pauper on a slab of marble, isn’t it?”
“I don’t believe a name was mentioned after you joined us. Who do you think it was?”
“Why, George Enderby, the chappie at the Schooner. Not that I ever cared for him overmuch, but it’s unsettling all the same, I don’t mind telling you.”
“Why didn’t you care for him?”
“A bit of a cad, wasn’t he? Fancied himself a lady-killer, and by all accounts a fair number of women fell for it.”
Alec glanced back. Conditions for an interrogation were far from optimum, but he shouldn’t be interrogating in the first place. “Were you in the Schooner last night?” he asked.
Vernon blushed. “No. As a matter of fact, I was at the Vicarage. Julia—Miss Bellamy is rather a friend of mine, don’t you know.” He changed the subject hurriedly. “I’m quite sure it was Enderby.”
“What makes you so certain?”
“Oh, the hair, the eyes, the ears. One or t’other might be anyone, but all three together, in this place, add up to Enderby. I rather make a point of observing that sort of thing.”
“Oh? A budding Sherlock Holmes?”
“No. When I was young I used to think he was the last word, but honestly, however clever he seems he’s got to be a bit of a fool to be using cocaine, hasn’t he? And as for learning to play the violin! And now Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s got mixed up in this spiritualist bosh. No, Dr. Thorndyke is much more the thing. Did you know R. Austin Freeman is actually a doctor himself? Of course, Dr. Thorndyke is a lawyer and criminologist as well, but it’s something to work towards, isn’t it? Besides, one can follow his logic, which I can’t always with Holmes, and I like it that Thorndyke is as keen on defending the innocent against unjust accusations as hunting the guilty. Do you know The Red Thumb-Mark, sir?”
Alec admitted to having read the book, distressing to a policeman since it proved that fingerprints could be forged. He let Vernon continue his prattle, saving his own breath for climbing. With the youth hard on his heels, he didn’t care to slow down. The lifeboat had disappeared around the eastern headland. He was almost beginning to wish he had risked seasickness and gone with it.
They reached and passed the boulder, and on the other side came face to face with Constable Puckle.
Standing rigidly at attention, he saluted. “Chief Inspector, sir, I thought as summun ought to stay on guard here to keep people away that didn’t ought to go down.”
“Good thinking, Officer. Besides, it was your decision. You’re in charge until your superiors arrive.”
“Me, sir? Oh no, sir! Them in Exeter was going to ring up Scotland Yard on the telephone and ask ’em to put you on the case. Seeing you’re here already, sir.”
“Dammit, man, I’m on holiday!” Alec had no illusions that Superintendent Crane would refuse his services. As soon as the super and the assistant commissioner heard that Daisy was involved, however peripherally—and since she had reported the incident, they were bound to hear—they would positively insist on his taking the case. They still laboured under the delusion that he was capable of reining her in. “Besides,” he added, his tone irate, “what made them think this is a case worthy of the attentions of the CID?”
“Well, sir, murder, sir. The county constabluary often calls in the CID for murder, sir.”
“
But why should they think it was murder, not an accident?”
Puckle looked at him in surprise. “Acos of I told ‘em you was here, sir. Stands to reason. If ’tweren’t murder, why would a detective chief inspector from the Yard be on the spot, like?”
Turning a baleful glare on Vernon, who suppressed his snickers with an effort, Alec said irritably, “All right, let’s get back to the police station and see what’s going on.” Until he was officially in charge, he really ought not to enlighten the village constable about the presumed identity of the dead man, nor his theory as to the cause of death. Puckle seemed too abashed even to wonder.
With the constable in the lead, the trek up the cliff slowed to a crawl. Unlike Tom Tring, also a large man, Fred Puckle’s bulk was not mostly muscle. Alec found himself longing for his sergeant, but nonetheless determined not to send for him and spoil the Trings’ holiday as well as his own and Daisy’s.
Vernon’s stream of confidences had stopped. After a few sighs of impatience, he was silent, even his rubber-soled tennis shoes making little sound on the path. Then a triumphant exclamation stopped Alec.
“Sir! Look here!”
Alec glanced back. Vernon was standing a few yards back, by a rocky outcrop at a point where the path doubled back on itself.
“What is it?”
“Do come and see.”
Puckle had also come to a halt, puffing like a steam engine. “You go on ahead, Constable,” said Alec. “We’ll catch up with you. What is it?” he asked again, retracing his steps.
“Splinters, here on this rock. With the magnifying glass they look just like the ones from Enderby’s neck. I bet with a microscope I could tell for sure. Dr. Thorndyke could, anyway.”
“A pity we don’t have him with us,” Alec said dryly. “Well, you might as well take a sample. I suppose it’s remotely possible the object used to hit Enderby was thrown over and happened to hit here on its way down.” He looked down a steep slope of scree ending in a jumble of particularly jagged rocks between which the waves still surged, though the tide must be near its lowest ebb. “But if so, I doubt we’ll ever recover it.”
