Dorothy Sayers - Have His Carcass

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 — naturally; since rigor (Harriet did know this bit) does not usually set in till from four to ten hours after death. The blue suit and brown shoes showed no signs of having been wet by seawater; that hat was still 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 any-thing 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 well 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 partially buried in the sand.

The weapon was there, then; suicide seemed to be the solution after all. 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 really 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 illegible. 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 full gush of blood from the throat. Harriet excused herself by thinking that any papers in that pocket would be illegible 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 still 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 still 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 small 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 still as it had fallen 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. All this had taken her about twenty minutes from the time that she first saw the body. She thought she had better, while she was about it, spare time to make sure that the footprints belonged to the body. She removed one shoe from the foot of, the corpse, noticing as she did: so that, though the sole bore traces of sand, there were no stains of sea-water upon the leather of the uppers. Inserting; the shoe into one of the footprints, she observed that they corresponded perfectly. She did not care for the job of replacing the shoe, and therefore took it with her, pausing as she regained the shingle, to take a view of the rock from the landward side.

The day was certainly clouding over and the wind getting up. Looking out beyond the rock, she saw a line of little swirls and eddies, which broke from time to time into angry-looking, spurts of foam, as though breaking about the tops of hidden rocks. The waves everywhere, were showing feathers of foam, and dull yellow streaks reflected the gathering cloud-masses further out to sea. The fishing-boat was almost out of sight, making for Wilvercombe.

Not quite sure whether she had done the right thing or the wrong, Harriet gathered up her belongings, including the shoe, hat, razor, cigarette-case and handkerchief, and started to scramble up the face of the cliff. It was then just after half-past two.

Chapter II. The Evidence Of The Road

‘None sit in doors,

Except the babe, and his forgotten grandsire,

And such as, out of life, each side do lie

Against the shutter of the grave or womb.’

— The Second Brother

Thursday, 18 June

THE road, when Harriet reached it, seemed as solitary as before. She turned in the direction of Wilvercombe and strode along at a good, steady pace. Her instinct was to run, but she knew that she would gain nothing by pumping herself out. After about a mile, she was delighted by the sight of a fellow-traveller; a girl of about seventeen, driving a couple of cows. She stopped the girl and asked the way to the nearest house.

The girl stared at her. Harriet’ repeated her request.

The reply came in so strong a west-country accent that Harriet could make little of it, but at length she gathered that Will Coffin’s, over to Brennerton, was the nearest habitation, and that it could be reached by following a winding lane on the right.