Fall of a Philanderer

by Carola Dunn

  That was an easy question. “No. Leave the poor things be. What a beautiful pool!”

  “Three kinds of seaweed,” said Deva, as proud as if she’d done the decorating herself. “This pink ferny one, and the green ribbons, and this green stuff like moss. Touch it, Mrs. Fletcher, it’s soft and silky.”

  To Daisy’s relief, before she had to decide whether to lower herself to her knees to touch something that looked to her unpleasantly squishy, Alec appeared around a huge rock and called to her.

  “Daisy, would you come here a minute? Come and tell me what you think of the spot I’ve found.” He was too far off for her to make out his expression, but his voice sounded strained.

  The girls didn’t notice. Daisy left them trying to catch in their bare hands the little finny fish that darted from nook to cranny among the pebbles and fronds of seaweed.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked as she joined Alec.

  His face was set. “I saw a shoe sticking up above a rock, at an odd angle. I went closer and saw an ankle. The foot is still in the shoe. I must go and look, but I want you to keep the girls away, so that they don’t follow me.”

  Feeling ill, Daisy sat down suddenly on a nearby rock. “Oh darling, not a … ! I suppose some poor soul fell overboard, or drowned while swimming, and was washed up by the waves.”

  “It’s just possible someone stumbled among the rocks and knocked himself unconscious. I must go and look.”

  “Yes, of course. I’ll stop them if they come this way.”

  Alec was not gone long. He returned tight-lipped and rather pale. Daisy tried not to wonder what could make an experienced CID detective turn pale. A sea-bloated body chewed by fish?

  “Dead,” he said. “I can’t be sure but I think it’s that chap from the inn, the landlord.”

  “Oh no!” Daisy exclaimed, aghast. “Not George Enderby!”

  8

  Flying high above the trenches in his observer plane, Alec had missed the worst horrors of the Great War. As a detective he had seen victims done to death in a variety of ways, but he couldn’t remember ever having seen a body as battered as George Enderby’s. Every visible inch of him was gashed and scraped, his shirt and fawn flannels ripped and blotched with blood. He lay twisted among the rocks near the foot of the cliff, partly on a patch of sand, one leg caught on a larger boulder so that his foot stuck up in the air. The contorted position suggested that most of his bones were broken.

  So much Alec had taken in before returning to Daisy, thanking heaven neither she nor the girls had made the grisly discovery.

  “I think it’s him,” he stressed, “I can’t be sure. I must stay here. You’ll have to get the girls away and report the body.”

  She looked at him in dismay. “Darling, can’t you come too? You’re on holiday, after all.”

  “This has nothing to do with being a copper. It’s my duty as a citizen to stay, as you’re available to report.” He frowned, remembering that she was in no condition to make haste up the cliff path. “Unless you’d rather stay? The tide’s going out, so there’s no danger. And there’s no need to go near the body, just to keep people away, and I rather doubt you’d be swamped with sightseers.”

  “No, I’ll go,” she said with a shudder. “It was … it was an accident, wasn’t it?”

  “That’s what you’ll report. It’s none of my business, I’m happy to say. And you’d better not say it’s Enderby in case I’m wrong. Don’t give me away, will you.”

  “Of course not, darling. You’re on holiday.”

  “And hope to stay that way. Now off you go, and don’t try to hurry, love. Whoever he is, he’s beyond help.”

  “What shall I tell the girls?”

  “I’ll leave that up to you.”

  Alec knew he sounded relieved at not having to face that problem, and he wasn’t surprised when Daisy wrinkled her nose at him. He also knew she was pleased. When he first started seeing her regularly, he had more than once made a fool of himself by accusing her of not caring sufficiently for the welfare of his precious daughter. But Belinda adored her, and he could only plume himself on having married a woman who had turned out to be a wonderful, if unconventional, mother—not to mention an adorable, if unconventional, wife.

  He kissed her and watched her pick her way back towards the girls, careful to take the easiest route and use her hands rather than trying to balance when she had to climb. It was going to be strange starting again with a baby after ten years of watching Bel grow up. A sudden sorrow for his lost Joan swept over him. Did Daisy still grieve for her dead fiance, blown up by a German mine along with the ambulance he drove?

  Putting such unproductive thoughts behind him, he started to wonder who would grieve for George Enderby’s untimely end: not his wife, by the looks of things in the pub last night, nor the Anstruthers.

  None of his business, he reminded himself. He could only hope he would not be called as a witness to anything beyond finding the body.

  The girls and Daisy waved goodbye. Waving back, he watched their progress as they appeared and disappeared among the rocks, then started up the path. Daisy was moving slowly. Belinda and Deva pulled ahead, and Alec wanted to shout to them to slow down, but they wouldn’t hear, and if they did, he might startle them into missing their footing.

  Was that how Enderby had come to fall? Or had currents and waves brought him from the sea? He wasn’t dressed for bathing, nor for boating, jacketless on such a blustery day and his footwear more suited for walking hills than decks. Unless his jacket had come off in the sea …

  Alec found himself once more standing over the body. He couldn’t help it, the detective instinct was too strong for him.

  The boneless, twisted sprawl told him nothing. It could equally well have resulted from a long fall or from being tossed among the rocks by the pitiless waves, as could the superficial injuries. The clothes held Alec’s attention.

  Enderby’s shirt had come loose from his trousers. It had great rents in it, revealing torn skin beneath. A closer look showed his braces dangling, two of the fastenings missing. The trousers, made of stouter cloth, had only one visible tear. More significant, the parts of the clothes uppermost as he lay, including the raised leg, were bone-dry, blotched with blood, as he had noticed before. The day was warm and windy but not hot enough to dry out sodden flannel trousers since the turn of the tide. Besides, the way they were draped on the motionless form was nothing like the way wet cloth would have clung as it dried. Blood had clotted around the injuries, including two on the top of the head where that distinctive sandy thatch was matted with dried blood.

  Alec badly wanted to turn the body over. Even if it had been his case—supposing it turned out to be a case—he oughtn’t to do so before a medical man had examined it and photographs had been taken.

  Photographs! He’d quite forgotten the cheap Brownie camera he had bought on a whim at a station bookstall on his way down to Devon, to take family snapshots. He had stuffed it into his knapsack along with the picnic, intending to surprise Daisy. She was the photographer of the family, but the camera she used for photos to go with her articles was too big and complicated for informal holiday pictures. Alec always relied on police photographers at work, or Tom if they were away from London, but the girl at the bookstall had assured him that anyone could use the Brownie.

  She had showed him right then and there how to put the film in. Then all one had to do was set the little lever to sunny or cloudy or indoors, point, and press the button. And not forget to wind the film on, he reminded himself, taking out the black box.

  Set the lever to sunny, peer through the little window at the corpse, reduced in size and oddly distanced, less human almost. Press the button. Move and snap again, from four different angles altogether. And now for a few close-up views.

  Kneeling on a flattish stretch of bedrock, Alec studied the body. The lowest four or five inches of the clothes had clearly been soaked and were still damp. The water mark was obvious. Belo
w, bloodstains were faint discolorations, diluted and dispersed by the sea. He could see two nasty gashes in exposed skin that must have bled freely, for however short a period, before Enderby died; they had been washed clean.

  The obvious inference was that he had fallen to his death, into shallow water. The local people ought to be able to work out when the tide had been five inches deep at this point on the coast.

  Alec took another four photos, from a distance of about two feet, though he rather doubted the cheap little camera would produce pictures clear enough to make out all the marks he had noted.

  Then, standing, he gazed up at the cliff face and took a shot of that. Daisy and the girls had disappeared from sight, though he thought they must still be climbing. Directly above him, the cliff shelved back in ridges, ledges and steep, rough slopes for some way before rising in a sheer black rock face for the top third. It was not so smoothly vertical as the wall of a building, but a man falling would not have the slightest hope of catching a protuberance to save himself. Some of the cliffs in the area were as much as four hundred feet high, Alec knew. Once Enderby had gone over the edge, his death was certain.

  All the same, there was always a chance his murderer—supposing him to have been pushed—had come down to make sure. The surface of the path down the cliff was mostly too rocky to show footprints, the sandy patches too dry and hardpacked; besides, Alec and Daisy and the girls had all trodden it thoroughly enough to eliminate or confuse any subtle signs.

  Here below, though, some indication might be visible. Stepping from rock to rock, Alec surveyed the patches of beach around the body. His own footprints stood out clearly on the damp sand smoothed by the ebbing tide. The only other marks were dimples and bubbles produced by subterranean marine creatures and those odd curved lines of darker sand often left by receding waves.

  As he trod the low rocks, he realized he was crushing limpets and barnacles. He might be destroying evidence, or at least confusing the trail, if someone else had done likewise.

  Glancing back the way he had come, he couldn’t be sure which of two rocks he had stepped on. He looked more closely. Both seemed to have a few broken shells on top. Of course, rocks moved by the waves must do a certain amount of damage. An expert might distinguish footprints, but the chance of getting an expert here before sundown and high tide hid the evidence seemed remote.

  All the same, Alec decided to move to higher ground to await the forces of the law. Scrambling up on top of a massive nearby boulder, he finished off the film with three shots of the rocks and sand surrounding Enderby’s body. With luck, at least the pattern of rocks would be identifiable from the top of the cliff, giving a good idea of where he had fallen from.

  Putting the camera in his knapsack, he took out the Thermos of tea and found a comfortable perch in the sun. From above, the contorted figure below was so obviously dead that no one need have approached any closer to be certain.

  Was it actually Enderby? He hadn’t taken much notice of the landlord of the Schooner last night until the man had been half strangled with his own tie. The body’s face was unrecognizable. The thick thatch of sandy hair was the only distinguishing mark, a feature not so uncommon as to make it decisive in identification.

  In fact, he had jumped to the conclusion that it was Enderby because when one has seen a man attacked by an avenging berserker one day, to find him dead the next cannot be regarded as entirely unexpected.

  Daisy had not expected to enjoy the trek back up the cliff, but she found it even more trying than she had foreseen. Before they were a quarter of the way up, her legs felt like lead and she was “glowing” like a blast-furnace (“Horses sweat, gentlemen perspire, ladies glow,” had been one of her nanny’s favourite sayings). Maddeningly, the girls outpaced her without the least apparent effort.

  When they reached the big boulder, they were a couple of hundred yards ahead of her. They stopped and looked back. Daisy prayed they were not going to make a fuss about passing it without Alec’s encouragement.

  Belinda came back down the path. “Are you all right, Mummy?” she asked anxiously. “You look awfully hot.”

  “I am. I wish I’d thought to have a drink before we left our picnic with Daddy, but if wishes were horses beggars would ride, as my nanny used to say.”

  “So did my granny.” They exchanged a glance of complicity.

  “It doesn’t stop one wishing, does it? I could do with a horse right now, or perhaps a mule would manage this path better. Failing that, I’ll just have to rely on Shanks’ pony. Onward and upward!”

  “I’ll stay with you, in case you feel faint. You go first.”

  “I’m not ill, darling, merely pregnant. I just need not to be rushed.”

  “We’ll go slowly. I’m sorry we were going so fast before.” She hesitated. “You really are going to have a baby?”

  “I really am. You guessed, didn’t you?”

  “Deva heard you talking to Mrs. Prasad and Mrs. Germond about it.”

  “Are you happy that you’re going to have a brother or sister?”

  “Oh, yes, but actually, I’m so much older it’ll be more like being an aunt.”

  Daisy had no quick answer to this, and she needed her breath for climbing, so they continued in silence until they caught up with Deva. The boulder was negotiated without difficullty.

  A few yards beyond, Deva, in the lead, pointed ahead and said over her shoulder, “There is a flat place where you can sit and rest, Mrs. Fletcher. My ayah says English ladies are very hardy, but this is an awfully high cliff.”

  “I hope there’s room for you to sit, too, Deva, though you’re getting pretty hardy yourself, after all the long walks we’ve dragged you on.”

  “I didn’t think I’d like so much walking, but it’s been fun. And the pool down there was full of interesting creatures. It’s a pity Mr. Fletcher found a murdered man.”

  “I didn’t say he was murdered!” With a sigh of relief, Daisy lowered herself to a patch of scrubby grass and the girls squeezed themselves in on each side. “I’m sure it was an accident.”

  Deva shook her head. “Mr. Fletcher is a detective, so he’s bound to find people who have been murdered.”

  Daisy didn’t feel up to refuting this tangled logic. “Well, that’s as may be,” she said, “but you are absolutely not to tell anyone it’s a case of murder.”

  “If you do, Deva, they’ll make Daddy find the murderer and he won’t have any holiday.”

  “I shan’t tell,” Deva promised.

  After a few minutes they went on. As they moved higher, they began to feel a cooling breeze, which helped Daisy no end. The part that had been the roughest on the way down turned out to be less a walk than a scrambling climb on the way up. At least it used different muscles from the upward plod, and the girls pushed and pulled Daisy over the biggest obstacles. Their solicitude was touching.

  Staggering up the last, smooth stretch to the top, they all collapsed in the heather and lay breathing heavily for a while.

  Then, “I’m dying of thirst,” said Deva.

  “Daddy will be wondering when we’re going to send help,” said Belinda.

  Daisy sat up. “I’m quite restored. Let’s go. It’s all downhill from here.”

  That wasn’t quite true, but the upward slopes were short and gentle compared to the rugged hike up the cliff. They found Daisy’s hat, not too much the worse for lying on the ground with a stone to hold it down. Soon they were looking down on the inlet, then the beach and the guest-house came into view, and the village beyond.

  When they reached the garden wall, Daisy said, “You two can go into the house or garden or down to the beach, but don’t on any account breathe a word to a soul about what’s happened.”

  “What if someone asks where you are?” Deva wanted to know.

  “Just tell them Mr. Fletcher and I will be back soon.”

  “Oh no, Mummy,” said Belinda. “We’ll come with you. You’re going to see that horrid policeman
who put poor Sid in prison, aren’t you? We’re coming too.”

  Deva looked dismayed but resigned. Though Daisy wondered how Belinda proposed to protect her from the horrid policeman, she wondered silently. Like Deva, she recognized Bel’s resolute tone. Once her usually diffident stepdaughter had made up her mind, she was as impossible to budge as a bull elephant.

  They went on along the path. The whole way, Daisy felt eyes on her back, as if Cecily Anstruther and her husband guessed her errand and watched her every move. Daisy even glanced back once, but of course the track was empty behind them.

  The town was empty too, on a Sunday afternoon with all the shops closed, too early for evensong at the square-towered parish church, much too early for the pubs to open. Their footsteps on the cobbles sounded loud as they trudged up the hill to the police station. The door stood open. The front room was empty.

  “Sit down on that bench,” Daisy told the girls. She tapped the bell on the high counter.

  The ping had no immediate effect. Daisy was about to give the bell a sharp thump when Mrs. Puckle bustled through from the back. “You’ll be wanting the constable?” she enquired.

  “Yes, please.”

  “Puckle is just sitting down to his tea, madam. ’Twouldn’t be urgent, would it?”

  “I’m afraid it is,” Daisy apologized.

  “Ah well, ’twon’t be the first time he’s had to let his tea go cold, not by a long shot. I’ll see he comes out to you right away, madam.”

  She went off. A murmur of voices was followed by a loud, protesting “But, Martha … !”

  “Now, Fred, ’tis your job to see what the lady wants.”

  Constable Puckle came through, looking sulky as he shrugged into his uniform jacket. “Oh, it’s you”—sulkiness changed to annoyance—“madam. I let Sid out yes’day morning.”

  “I know you did. This has nothing to do with him. My husband has found a body.”

  Momentarily startled, he then gave her a long, sceptical look. “A body.”

  “A dead person.”