Have His Carcase (3 page)

There she washed her fingers over and over again, drying them with ridiculous

care upon her handkerchief. She did not like the look of the red trickle that

dripped down the face of the rock into the clear water. Retreating, she sat

down rather hastily on some loose boulders.

‘A dead body,’ said Harriet, aloud to the sun and the seaguls. ‘A dead

body. How – how appropriate!’ She laughed.

‘The great thing,’ Harriet found herself saying, after a pause, ‘the great thing

is to keep cool. Keep your head, my girl. What would Lord Peter Wimsey do

in such a case? Or, of course, Robert Templeton?’

Robert Templeton was the hero who diligently detected between the covers

of her own books. She dismissed the image of Lord Peter Wimsey from her

mind, and concentrated on that of Robert Templeton. The latter was a

gentleman of extraordinary scientific skil, combined with almost fabulous

muscular development. He had arms like an orang-outang and an ugly but

attractive face. She conjured up his phantom before her in the suit of rather loud

plus-fours with which she was accustomed to invest him, and took counsel with

him in spirit.

Robert Templeton, she felt, would at once ask himself, ‘Is it Murder or

Suicide?’ He would immediately, she supposed, dismiss the idea of an accident.

Accidents of that sort do not happen. Robert Templeton would carefuly

examine the body, and pronounce –

Quite so; Robert Templeton would examine the body. He was, indeed,

notorious for the sang-froid with which he examined bodies of the most

repulsive description. Bodies reduced to boneless jely by faling from

aeroplanes; bodies charred into ‘unrecognisable lumps’ by fire; bodies run over

by heavy vehicles, and needing to be scraped from the road with shovels –

Robert Templeton was accustomed to examine them al, without turning a hair.

Harriet felt that she had never fuly appreciated the superb nonchalance of her

literary offspring.

Of course, any ordinary person, who was not a Robert Templeton, would

leave the body alone and run for the police. But there were no police. There

was not a man, woman or child within sight; only a smal fishing-boat, standing

out to sea some distance away. Harriet waved wildly in its direction, but its

occupants either did not see her or supposed that she was merely doing some

kind of reducing exercise. Probably their own sail cut off their view of the

shore, for they were tacking up into the wind, with the vessel lying wel over.

Harriet shouted, but her voice was lost amid the crying of the guls.

As she stood, hopelessly caling, she felt a wet touch on her foot. The tide

had undoubtedly turned, and was coming in fast. Quite suddenly, this fact

registered itself in her mind and seemed to clear her brain completely.

She was, as she reckoned, at least eight miles from Wilvercombe, which was

the nearest town. There might be a few scattered houses on the road, but they

would probably belong to fishermen, and ten to one she would find nobody at

home but women and children, who would be useless in the emergency. By the

time she had hunted up the men and brought them down to the shore, the sea

would very likely have covered the body. Whether this was suicide or murder,

it was exceedingly necessary that the body should be examined, before

everything was soaked with water or washed away. She puled herself sharply

together and walked firmly up to the body.

It was that of a young man, dressed in a neat suit of dark-blue serge, with

rather over-elegant, narrow-soled brown shoes, mauve socks and a tie which

had also been mauve before it had been horridly stained red. The hat, a grey

soft felt, had falen off – no, had been taken off and laid down upon the rock.

She picked it up and looked inside, but saw nothing but the maker’s name. She

recognised it as that of a wel-known, but not in the best sense, famous, firm of

hatters.

The head which it had adorned was covered with a thick and slightly too-

long crop of dark, curly hair, carefuly trimmed and smeling of briliantine. The

complexion was, she thought, naturaly rather white and showed no signs of

sunburn. The eyes, fixed open in a disagreeable stare, were blue. The mouth

had falen open, showing two rows of carefuly-tended and very white teeth.

There were no gaps in the rows, but she noticed that one of the thirteen-year-

old molars had been crowned. She tried to guess the exact age of the man. It

was difficult, because he wore – very unexpectedly – a short, dark beard,

trimmed to a neat point. This made him look older, besides giving him a

somewhat foreign appearance, but it seemed to her that he was a very young

man, nevertheless. Something immature about the lines of the nose and face

suggested that he was not much more than twenty years old.

From the face she passed on to the hands, and here she was again surprised.

Robert Templeton or no Robert Templeton, she had taken for granted that this

elegantly-dressed youth had come to this incongruous and solitary spot to

commit suicide. That being so, it was surely odd that he should be wearing

gloves. He had lain doubled up with his arms beneath him, and the gloves were

very much stained. Harriet began to draw off one of them, but was overcome

by the old feeling of distaste. She saw that they were loose chamois gloves of

good quality, suitable to the rest of the costume.

Suicide – with gloves on? Why had she been so certain that it was suicide?

She felt sure she had a reason.

Wel, of course. If it was not suicide, where had the murderer gone? She

knew he had not come along the beach from the direction of Lesston Hoe, for

she remembered that bare and shining strip of sand. There was her own solitary

line of footprints leading across from the shingle. In the Wilvercombe direction,

the sand was again bare except for a single track of footmarks – presumably

those of the corpse.

The man, then, had come down to the beach, and he had come alone.

Unless his murderer had come by sea, he had been alone when he died. How

long had he been dead? The tide had only turned recently, and there were no

keel-marks on the sand. No one, surely, would have climbed the seaward face

of the rock. How long was it since there had been a sufficient depth of water to

bring a boat within easy reach of the body?

Harriet wished she knew more about times and tides. If Robert Templeton

had happened, in the course of his briliant career, to investigate a sea-mystery,

she would, of course, have had to look up information on this point. But she

had always avoided sea-and-shore problems, just precisely on account of the

labour involved. No doubt the perfect archetypal Robert Templeton knew al

about it, but the knowledge was locked up within his shadowy and ideal brain.

Wel, how long had the man been dead, in any case?

This was a thing Robert Templeton would have known, too, for he had been

through a course of medical studies among other things and, moreover, never

went out without a clinical thermometer and other suitable apparatus for testing

the freshness or otherwise of bodies. But Harriet had no thermometer, nor, if

she had had one, would she have known how to use it for the purpose. Robert

Templeton was accustomed to say, airily, ‘Judging by the amount of rigor and

the temperature of the body, I should put the time of death at such-and-such’,

without going into fiddling details about the degrees Fahrenheit registered by the

instrument. As for rigor, there certainly was not a trace of it present – naturaly;

since rigor (Harriet did know this bit) does not usualy set in til from four to ten

hours after death. The blue suit and brown shoes showed no signs of having

been wet by sea-water; that hat was stil lying on the rock. But four hours

earlier, the water must have been over the rock and over the footprints. The

tragedy must be more recent than that. She put her hand on the body. It

seemed quite warm. But anything would be warm on such a scorching day. The

back and the top of the head were almost as hot as the surface of the rock. The

under surface, being in shadow, felt cooler, but no cooler than her own hands

which she had dipped in the sea-water.

Yes – but there was one criterion she
could
apply. The weapon. No

weapon, no suicide – that was a law of the Medes and Persians. There was

nothing in the hands – no signs of that obliging ‘death-grip’ which so frequently

preserves evidence for the benefit of detectives. The man had slumped forward

– one arm between his body and the rock, the other, the right, hanging over the

rock-edge just beneath his face. It was directly below this hand that the stream

of blood ran down so uninvitingly, streaking the water. If the weapon was

anywhere it would be here. Taking off her shoes and stockings, and turning her

sleeve up to the elbow, Harriet groped cautiously in the water, which was about

eighteen inches deep at the base of the rock. She stepped warily, for fear of

treading on a knife-edge, and it was as wel that she did, for presently her hand

encountered something hard and sharp. At the cost of a slight cut on her finger,

she drew up an open cut-throat razor, already partialy buried in the sand.

The weapon was there, then; suicide seemed to be the solution after al.

Harriet stood with the razor in her hand, wondering whether she was leaving

finger-prints on the wet surface. The suicide, of course, would have left none,

since he was wearing gloves. But once again, why that precaution? It is

reasonable to wear gloves to commit a murder, but not to commit suicide.

Harriet dismissed this problem for future consideration, and wrapped her

handkerchief round the razor.

The tide was coming in inexorably. What else could she do? Ought she to

search any pockets? She had not the strength of a Robert Tempeton to haul the

body above high-water mark. That was realy a business for the police, when

the body was removed, but it was just possible that there might be papers,

which the water would render ilegible. She gingerly felt the jacket pockets, but

the dead man had obviously attached too much importance to the set of his

clothes to carry very much in them. She found only a silk handkerchief with a

laundry-mark, and a thin gold cigarette-case in the right-hand pocket; the other

was empty. The outside breast-pocket held a mauve silk handkerchief,

obviously intended for display rather than for use; the hip-pocket was empty.

She could not get at the trouser-pockets without lifting the corpse, which, for

many reasons, she did not want to do. The inner breast-pocket, of course, was

the one for papers, but Harriet felt a deep repugnance to handling the inner

breast-pocket. It appeared to have received the ful gush of blood from the

throat. Harriet excused herself by thinking that any papers in
that
pocket would

be ilegible already. A cowardly excuse, possibly – but there it was. She could

not bring herself to touch it.

She secured the handkerchief and the cigarette-case and once more looked

around her. Sea and sand were as deserted as ever. The sun stil shone brightly,

but a mass of cloud was beginning to pile up on the seaward horizon. The wind,

too, had hauled round to the south-west and was strengthening every moment.

It looked as though the beauty of the day would not last.

She stil had to look at the dead man’s footprints, before the advancing water

obliterated them. Then, suddenly, she remembered that she had a camera. It

was a smal one, but it did include a focusing adjustment for objects up to six

feet from the lens. She extracted the camera from her pack, and took three

snapshots of the rock and the body from different viewpoints. The dead man’s

head lay stil as it had falen when she moved it – canted over a little sideways,

so that it was just possible to secure a photograph of the features. She

expended a film on this, racking the camera out to the six-foot mark. She had

now four films left in the camera. On one, she took a general view of the coast

with the body in the foreground, stepping a little way back from the rock for the

purpose. On the second, she took a closer view of the line of footprints,

stretching from the rock across the sand in the direction of Wilvercombe. On

the third, she made a close-up of one of the footprints, holding the camera, set

to six feet, at arm’s-length above her head and pointing the lens directly

downwards to the best of her judgement.

She looked at her watch. Al this had taken her about twenty minutes from

the time that she first saw the body. She thought she had better, while she was