Chapter 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.