Chapter 9 #2
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. ”
Vernon took an empty specimen bottle and a pair of tweezers from his black bag. “I never would have noticed if Puckle wasn’t so slow. I ought to have examined the path closely all the way. Thorndyke would have. Only I didn’t think of it till we slowed down,” he said with regret.
“I’m sure you would have made an apt pupil if he were not a fictional character.”
Unoffended, the medical student grinned.
“Julia thinks I’m an absolute ass, but I do think I’d make a better pupil than Jervis.
He’s definitely not too swift in the uptake.
It seems to be the fashion to give the top detectives rather thick assistants.
Look at Dr. Watson. And do you know this new chappie, the Belgian detective?
Same thing—he has the bumbling Colonel Hastings to crow over.
There.” Stoppering the bottle, he added optimistically, “You never know. It may be a vital clue!”
“Since it appears that I’m to be thrust willy-nilly into the case, I hope so.
However, at present I’m no more than a witness.
The Devonshire police would have every right to strongly resent my interference.
I therefore do not feel justified in making a search of the area from which Enderby fell, though it would be a pity if any evidence were lost by delay. ”
“I’m with you, sir.” Vernon’s grin broadened. “You can count on me, and I’ll claim it was my own idea.”
Though he had half hoped for this response, Alec reconsidered. The youth was keen, but he was an amateur. If evidence was destroyed by his bungling, Alec would hold himself responsible whether or not anyone found out he had encouraged the boy.
Silently cursing his anomalous position, he said, “No, I think not, though I appreciate the offer.”
He went on after Constable Puckle and caught up with him near the top. Glancing back, he expected to see the would-be medico-legal practitioner close behind, but Vernon had stopped some way down, apparently to examine the surface of the path.
With a smile and a shake of the head, Alec left him to it.
He was in a hurry to get to the police station and find out whether he really was going to have to take over the investigation.
Anything to be discovered on the cliff-top could wait.
It wasn’t as if the place was going to be overrun by trippers who might confuse the evidence, especially as that sinister bank of fog was advancing landward.
A solitary man stood at the top of the path, however, a dark figure against the sky. “What’s going on, Constable?” It was Baskin, walking staff in hand. “Oh, it’s you, Mr. Fletcher. I’ve been watching from up here. What’s happened? I hope Mrs. Fletcher and the girls are all right?”
“Perfectly, thank you.” Alec eyed his stick—six feet of polished, seasoned oak, an excellent weapon but with no sign of splintering. “You’ve been walking up here?”
“I was on my way home when I saw the lifeboat and stopped to watch the rescue. A holiday visitor, I presume? I doubt the local people are such fools as to sail close to shore or go bathing in a sea like this.”
“Not such fools as to go sea-bathing at all,” Puckle grunted.
“It’s a local resident.”
“Now who might that be, sir? Mrs. Fletcher didn’t tell me.”
“Mrs. Fletcher didn’t know. I wasn’t certain until the lifeboatmen and Mr. Vernon confirmed my guess, and as I’m sure you are aware, Constable, legal identity must be established by next-of-kin, if possible. However, I’ll tell you: It appears to be George Enderby.”
“Mr. Enderby bain’t what I’d call a local man,” muttered Puckle, shaking his head in dismay, “but there’s them as won’t be sorry.”
Baskin’s reaction was unexpected and much more interesting. After
a moment of shock, he looked perplexed and frustrated. “Is he badly hurt?” he asked.
“Dead.”
Relief lit Baskin’s face.
As though a huge burden had fallen from his shoulders, Alec thought.
A little delving into the connection between the landlord and the schoolmaster was called for.
But not here and now—first to the police station to discover whether the delving was for him to do, or whether by some miracle it was none of his business.