The Documents in the Case

by Dorothy L. Sayers

  ‘We shan’t be long now, then, I suppose,’ said I.

  He did not reply, and I suddenly became aware that I could hear him breathing. Once I had noticed it, I couldn’t seem to shut my eyes to the sound. It was like hearing your own heartbeats in the night – when they seem to grow louder and louder, till they fill the silence and keep you from going to sleep. The breaths seemed quite to rasp my ear, they were so heavy and so close.

  ‘Eh!’ said Lathom, unexpectedly. ‘What did you say?’

  What had I said? It must have been ages ago, for Manaton was well behind us now, and the car was nosing her broken-winded way steadily down and down, with deep cartruts wringing her aged bones. I recollected that I had said I supposed we shouldn’t be long now.

  ‘Oh, no,’ said Lathom. ‘We’re nearly there.’

  We bounced on in silence for ten minutes more; then creaked to a standstill. I put my head out. Dim fields, trees and the tinkling of a distant stream coming remotely up on a puff of south-west wind. No light. No building.

  ‘Is this it?’ I asked, ‘or has the engine conked?’

  ‘What?’ said Lathom, irritably. ‘Yes, of course this is it. What’s the matter? Push along – we don’t want to stay here all night.’

  I wrestled with the door and edged out. Lathom close at my heels. He paid the driver, and the car began to move off, lurching on down the slope to find a place to turn.

  ‘Here!’ said I; ‘have you got the beef?’

  ‘Oh, hell,’ said Lathom, ‘I thought you had it.’

  I plunged after the taxi, reclaiming the food, and came back to where Lathom was standing. His hurry seemed to bave left him. He was striking a match and having a little trouble with it. The car, a hundred yards off, choked, crashed its gears, burbled, choked again, burbled, choked, and came thudding up on bottom gear. It passed us, labouring and bumping, moved up into second, hesitated into top, and its red rear light vanished, showed, jerking, vanished and span slowly skywards.

  ‘Ready?’ said Lathom.

  I did not point out that I had been patiently waiting for him to make a move, but grasped the bags and followed.

  ‘We’ve got a field to cross,’ he explained, holding a gate open for me.

  We staggered along for a little. Then he stopped and I bumped up against him.

  ‘Over there,’ he said.

  I looked, and saw a patch of extra darkness, between the darkness of some tree-stems.

  ‘There’s no light,’ I said. ‘Is he expecting you? I hope he won’t be annoyed with me for coming.’

  ‘Oh, he won’t be annoyed,’ said Lathom, shortly. ‘He’s gone to bed, I expect. Early bird. Up with the lark and down with the sun and all that. It doesn’t matter. We can forage round for ourselves.’

  A few more minutes, and we stood at the door of the shack. You know what it’s like – indeed, all England knows by now – a low, two-roomed cottage, ugly, built of stone, with a slate roof. Only one story – what in Scotland they call a but and ben. The windows were unshuttered, but not a spark of light showed through them – no candle, not so much as the embers of a fire.

  Lathom gave an ejaculation.

  ‘He must have gone to sleep,’ he muttered. I was fumbling for the handle of the door, but he pushed me aside, and I heard the latch click open. He paused, staring into the dark interior.

  ‘I wonder if he’s gone wandering off and got lost somewhere,’ he said, hesitating on the threshold.

  ‘Why not go in and see?’ I countered.

  ‘I’m going to.’ He stepped in and the unmistakable rattle of matches in the box told me that he was getting a light. He was clumsy about it, and only after several futile scratches and curses did the small flame flare up; he held it high, and for a moment I saw the living-room – a kitchen-table cluttered with crockery, a sink, an empty hearth, and a jumble of painting gear, clumped in a corner. Then the match flickered and burnt his fingers, and he dropped it, but made no effort to strike another.

  ‘Juggins!’ said I, defiantly, for this cheerless welcome was getting on my nerves. ‘Here – isn’t there a candle or anything?’

  I hunted through my pockets for a petrol lighter. This gave a steadier light, by which I found and lit a bedroom candle on a bracket just behind the door. The untidy room leaped into existence again. I set the candle down on the table, beside the sordid remnants of a meal. A chair lay overturned on the floor. I righted it mechanically and looked round. Lathom was still standing just inside the door; with his head cocked sideways, as though he were listening.

  ‘Well, I’m damned,’ said I, ‘this is very cheerful. If Harrison—’

  ‘Listen a minute,’ he said, ‘I thought I heard him snoring.’

  I listened, but could hear nothing except a tap dripping into the sink.

  ‘Looks to me as if he’d gone out,’ I said. ‘How about starting the fire up? I’m chilly. Where’s the wood?’

  ‘In the basket,’ said Lathom, vaguely.

  I investigated the basket, but it was empty.

  ‘Oh, well,’ I said, ‘let’s have a drink and get to bed. If Harrison comes in later, you’ll have to do the explaining.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Lathom, eagerly, ‘good idea. Let’s have a drink.’ He wandered about. ‘Where the devil’s he put the whisky?’ He flung open a cupboard door, and groped about, muttering.

  At this point a thought occurred to me.

  ‘Would Harrison go out and leave the door unlocked?’ I said. ‘He’s a careful sort of fellow as a rule.’

  ‘What?’ Lathom’s head emerged for a moment from the cupboard. ‘No – no – I should think he would lock up.’

  ‘Then he must be about somewhere,’ I said. We had been talking almost in whispers – I suppose with the idea of not disturbing the sleeper, but now I lost patience.

  ‘Harrison!’ I shouted.

  ‘Shut up!’ said Lathom. ‘He must have left the whisky in the bedroom.’ He picked up the candle and plunged into the inner room.

  The shadows parted and flowed in after him as he went, leaving me in darkness again. His footsteps shuffled to a halt and there was a long pause. Then he spoke, in a curious, thick voice with a catch in it, like a gramophone needle going over a crack.

  ‘I say, Munting. Come here a minute. Something’s up.’

  The inner room was in a sordid confusion. My hurrying footsteps tripped over some bedclothes. There were two beds in the room, and Lathom was standing by the farther of the two. He stepped aside, and his hand shook so that the candle-flame danced. I thought at first that the man on the bed had moved, but it was only the dancing candle.

  The bed was broken and tilted grotesquely sideways. Harrison was sprawled over it in a huddle of soiled blankets. His face was twisted and white and his eyeballs rolled up so that only the whites showed. I stooped over him and felt for his wrist. It was cold and heavy, and when I released it it fell back on the bed like dead-weight. I did not like the look of the nostrils – black caverns, scooped in wax – not flesh, anyway – and the mouth, twisted unpleasantly upwards from the teeth, with the pale tongue sticking through.

  ‘My God!’ I cried, but softly – and turned to look at Lathom, ‘the man’s dead!’

  ‘Dead?’ He was looking at me, not at Harrison. ’Are you sure?’

  ‘Sure?’ I put a finger beneath the fallen jaw, which woodenly resisted me. ‘Why, he must have been dead for hours. He’s stiff, man, stiff!’

  ‘So he is, poor old b—’ said Lathom.

  He began to laugh.

  ‘Stop that,’ I said, snatching the candle away from him, and dumping him roughly down on to the other bed. ‘Pull yourself together. You want a drink.’

  I found the whisky with some trouble. It was on the floor, under Harrison’s bed. He must have grasped at it his struggles and let it roll away from him. Fortunately, the cork was in place. There was a tumbler, too, but I did not touch that. I fetched another from the living-room (Lathom cried out not to be left
in the dark, but I paid no attention), and poured him out a stiff peg, and made him swallow it neat. Then I stood over him as he sat and shuddered.

  ‘Sorry, old man,’ he said at last. ‘Silly of me to make an ass of myself. Bit of a startler, isn’t it? But your face – oh, Lord! – if you could have seen yourself! It was priceless.’

  He began to giggle again.

  ‘Don’t be a fool,’ said I. ‘We’ve got no time for hysterics. Something’s got to be done.’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ he said. ‘Yes – something must be done. A doctor, or something. All right, old man. Give me another drink and I’ll be as right as rain.’

  I gave him another small one and took some myself. That seemed to clear my mind a little.

  ‘How far are we from Manaton?’

  ‘About three miles, I think – or a little over.’

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘I suppose somebody there will have a telephone, or can send a messenger. One of us had better get along there as fast as possible and get on to the police?’

  ‘Police?’

  ‘Yes, of course, you ass. They’ve got to know.’

  ‘But you don’t suppose there’s anything wrong about it?’

  ‘Wrong? Well, there’s a dead man – that’s pretty wrong, I should think. He must have died of something. Did he have a heart, or fits, or anything?’

  ‘Not that I know of.’

  I surveyed the distasteful bed again.

  ‘It looks more as though – he’d eaten something—’

  I stopped, struck by an idea.

  ‘Let’s look at the things in the other room,’ I said. Lathom jumped to his feet.

  ‘When I left him he said something about fungi – he was going to get some special kind—’

  We went out. In a saucepan on the table was a black, pulpy mess. I sniffed it cautiously. It had a sourish, faintly fungoid odour, like a cellar.

  ‘Oh, Lord,’ whimpered Lathom, ‘I knew it would happen some day. I told him over and over again. He laughed at me. Said he couldn’t possibly make a mistake.’

  ‘Well, I don’t know,’ I said, ‘but it looks rather as if he had. Poor devil. Of course, it would happen the very day there was nobody here to help him. I suppose he was absolutely on his own. Didn’t any tradesmen call, or anything?’

  ‘The carrier comes over on Mondays and Thursdays with supplies,’ said Lathom, ‘and takes the orders for the next visit.’

  ‘No milkman? No baker?’

  ‘No. Condensed milk, and the carrier brings the bread. If there’s nobody in he just puts the things on the window-sill.’

  ‘I see.’ It seemed to me pretty ghastly. ‘Well,’ I went on, ‘will you go or shall I?’

  ‘We’d better both go, hadn’t we?’

  ‘Nonsense.’ I was positive about this. I don’t know why, except that it seemed damnable, somehow, to leave Harrison’s body alone, when leaving it could do no possible harm. ‘If you don’t feel fit to go, I will.’

  ‘Yes – no!’ He looked about him uneasily. ‘All right, you go. It’s straight up the hill, you can’t miss it.’

  I took up my hat, and was going, when he called me back.

  ‘I say – do you mind – I think I’d rather go after all. I feel rather rotten. I’ll be better in the fresh air.’

  ‘Now look here,’ I said firmly. ‘We can’t stay shilly-shallying all night. If you don’t like staying in the house, you’d better go yourself. But make up your mind, because the quicker we get on to somebody the better. Get the police and they’ll probably be able to find a doctor. And you’ll have to give them Mrs Harrison’s address.’

  ‘I hadn’t thought of that. Yes – I suppose – I suppose – they’d better break it to her.’

  ‘Somebody’s got to. It’s a beastly business, but you don’t know any relations you could get hold of, do you?’

  ‘No. Very well. I’ll see to it. Sure you won’t come with me? You don’t mind staying?’

  ‘The sooner you go, the shorter time I’ll have to stay,’ I reminded him.

  ‘Right-ho!’ He paused, appeared about to say something, then repeated ‘right-oh!’ and went out, shutting the door behind him.

  Three miles uphill in the dark – it would take him close on the hour, certainly. Then he had to knock somebody up, find a telephone, if there was one, get on to the police – say half an hour for that. Then, it all depended whether there was an available car in the village – whether he came straight back, or waited for the officials, who would come, presumably from Bovey Tracey. I need not, I thought, expect anything to happen under an hour and three-quarters or so. I suddenly remembered that I was cold, and started to hunt for kindling. I found some, after a little search, in an outhouse. The fire consented to light without much persuasion, and after that, and when I had found and lighted two extra candles, I began to feel in better condition to take stock of things.

  A bottle of Bovril on the mantelpiece presented itself to me with helpful suggestiveness. I took up the kettle to fill it at the tap. A glance at the sink nearly turned me from my intention, but I conquered the sudden nausea and drew my water with care. Impulse would have flooded the repulsive evidences of sickness away, but as the phrase flashed through my mind the word ‘evidence’ asserted itself. ‘I must preserve the evidence,’ I said to myself, and found myself subconsciously taking note that this trifling episode went to prove – as I had always believed – that Anatole France was right in supposing that we always, or at any rate usually, think in actual words.

  The Bovril and the psychology together restored my self-confidence. I began to reconstruct Harrison’s manner of death in my mind. He was quite stiff. I tried to remember what I had read about rigor mortis. One thinks one knows these things till it comes to the point. My impression was that rigidity usually set in about six or seven hours after death, and that it began in the neck and jaw and extended to the limbs and trunk, going away in the same order, after an interval which I could not remember. I braced myself up to go back to Harrison and feel him again. The jaw was rigid, the limbs still fairly flexible. It seemed to me, then, that he must have died some time that morning. I could not quite recollect by what train Lathom had said he had come to town, but, presumably, whenever it was, he had left Harrison fit and well. It was now getting on for midnight on Saturday. Say Harrison had been dead six hours – what then? I had no idea how long fungus-poisoning – if it was fungus-poisoning – took to act. Presumably, it would depend on the amount taken and the state of the victim’s heart.

  What meal was it whose remains lay on the table? I looked into the cupboard. In it there was a large cottage-loaf, uncut. On the table was another from which a couple of slices or so seemed to have been taken. Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday. If two loaves represented four days’ allowance before the carrier called again, the suggestion was that the last meal had been taken some time on the Thursday. Say Harrison had finished up the old loaf on Thursday morning, the remains probably represented Thursday’s midday or evening meal. The cupboard also contained about a pound of shin of beef, still in the paper in which the butcher had wrapped it, and smelling and looking rather on the stale side, a dried haddock, and a large quantity of tinned food. The meat was not ‘off’, but the blood had dried and darkened. It looked as though the carrier had left it on his Thursday’s visit. Evidently, therefore, Harrison had been alive then to take it in. But since he had not cooked it, I concluded that he must have been taken ill some time on the Thursday night or Friday morning.

  Pleased with these deductions, I reasoned a little further. How soon after the meal had the trouble started? He had not cleared the table. Was he the kind of tidy man who clears as he goes? Yes, I thought he was. Then the illness had come on fairly soon after the meal. The chair which had stood before the used plate was now lying on its side, as though he had sprung up in a hurry and knocked it over. Searching about on the floor, I came upon a pipe, filled, and scarcely smoked. There was a cup, half-filled with
coffee. I began to see Harrison, his supper finished, his chair pushed back against the edge of the rug, his pipe lit up, lingering over his after-dinner coffee. Suddenly he is gripped with a spasm of pain or nausea. He jumps up, dropping his pipe. The chair catches the edge of the carpet and falls over as he makes a dash for the sink. He clings to the edge of it and is horribly sick. What next?

  I took up the candle and went out into the little yard at the back of the house, where there was the usual primitive country convenience. It occurred to me, as I pursued my sordid investigations, that the lot of coroners’ officers, policemen, doctors and detectives was much more disagreeable than sensational fiction would lead one to suppose. I soon had enough of the yard and came in again.

  After that – the bedroom, I supposed. And whisky, of course. Pain and exhaustion would call for spirits. Well, I knew where I had found the whisky and the tumbler. Then more sickness – by that time he had been too bad to move. Then – I did not like the look of the broken bedstead. How did one die of fungus-poisoning? Not peacefully, I supposed. There was no peace in that twisted body and face. How long had the agony of delirium and convulsion lasted. It must be a damnable thing to die in so much pain, absolutely alone.

  I did not like these ideas. I took a sheet from the other bed, and laid it gently over Harrison’s body, being careful to disturb nothing. Then I went back and sat by the fire.

  At about half-past two, I heard voices outside, and opened the door to Lathom, a police-sergeant, and a man who was introduced as Dr Hughes of Bovey Tracey. He was a brisk and confident middle-aged man, and brought an atmosphere of reassurance along with him.

  ‘Oh dear, yes,’ he said, ‘I’m afraid he’s quite dead. Been dead for seven or eight hours, if not more. How very unfortunate!’ He drew a pair of forceps from his pocket and rolled up the dead eyelids delicately. ‘Mmm! The pupils are slightly contracted – looks as if your diagnosis might be correct, Mr Lathom. Poisoning of some kind seems indicated. No tablets? Glasses? Anything of that sort?’