The Greatest Murder Mysteries - Dorothy Fielding Collection. Dorothy Fielding
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Название: The Greatest Murder Mysteries - Dorothy Fielding Collection
Автор: Dorothy Fielding
Издательство: Bookwire
Жанр: Языкознание
isbn: 4064066308537
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Under the trees he found prints of Rose Charteris's shoes, of a man's boots, and of a woman's high heels, all in inextricable confusion, but the marks of Rose were nowhere on top.
Here, then, he thought, the woman had changed into her own footwear.
He did not think that the body of the dead girl had been flung into the pit. It might in that case have shown cuts which a doctor would know had been made after death. The Scotland Yard officer examined the pit minutely. There were no marks detectable as those of the sinister couple who had walked from one of the farther gates of Stillwater House to the pit last night with a corpse between them. He decided that Bond, Cockburn, and Thornton, the doctor, and the men with the stretcher had obliterated them. There was only one easy way down, to the bottom.
Pointer walked rapidly to the police station, but Superintendent Harris was up in town, the chief constable was down with influenza, and Briggs, the constable in charge, looked to Pointer a better judge of beer than crime.
He returned to Red Gates, where he found Thornton doing a good five miles an hour in front of his fireplace.
"I want to ask you a question or two about the doctor who was fetched when Miss Charteris was found dead. Is he the sensible, family doctor type?" Pointer asked.
"More of the leaky-sieve type, though doubtless the soul of good nature. Why?" Thornton wheeled sharply about.
"I'm thinking about that death certificate that he's going to fill out. You see, it's not so easy opening people's eyes when you're not supposed to exist—officially. You don't happen to know at what hospital he studied? Though we can easily find that out."
"My dear Mr. Brown, I've met the man at least three times! I doubt very much if there's one fact of his past, or present life therefore with which I'm not on nodding terms. Give me a moment for reflection, and I can doubtless supply you with the name of the patent food on which he was reared. As for your question—he's a St. Thomas's man."
Pointer laughed outright. He had the laugh of a boy.
"Good. Yes, I think I can work that." But what it was that he proposed to manipulate he did not say. He turned away, but Thornton stopped him.
"A moment. Of course it's natural that I should be interested in this case." He paused, as though really waiting for an answer.
"Quite so, sir."
"Do you think it's going to be a simple affair, or a—well—complicated case?"
Pointer looked at him with an apparently absent-minded eye.
"Simple cases," he said thoughtfully, '"there aren't many—presuppose a simple life, simple surroundings, simple conditions. Say it's murder. Well, life nowadays is often so complicated that when you take it—obviously, you take something exceedingly complex. At least, that's been my experience."
There followed a long pause.
"Then you think—here—that will prove to be the case? I mean, you think that it's murder, and that there's more than one person implicated, and so on?" Thornton spoke without turning round.
"It's hard to say," Pointer answered. And so exceedingly difficult did he appear to find it that he was evidently disinclined to attempt the feat as he slouched off to the summerhouse again.
CHAPTER THREE
POINTER found the summer house still quite deserted when he returned to it to continue his investigations.
Around where the boughs lay heaped, the flags looked darker than on the other side of the house. Examining them, he saw that this was due to the red tint of the mortar in this one place.
He pried a bit loose. From a phial he dropped a little ammonia on to it. The colour did not change. It was blood, and fresh blood. But such a rain as that of last night would have lashed the bloodmarks off wood, let alone cement. So these, too, must have been made after that short, fierce storm. Yet the tiles here were as clean as elsewhere. There was but one explanation. The tiles had been wiped, but in the deeper cracks of the mortar the blood had remained.
He pushed open an arched, ornamental door that had no lock. Behind it he found a mass of broken geraniums and pots.
The damage was recent, not more than twenty-four hours old.
All around the house, except on the side that interested him, the side below the smudged balustrade, were similar pots set close in against the walls and outlining the paths to the four doors.
Behind another door Pointer found a bag labelled Fertiliser, and some gardener's tools. Out of an iron stove in the middle he fished a piece of sacking that had been used as a floor-cloth. It was smeared with blood, and spots of what he first took to be earth, but which he found differed from the earth around. Then he guessed it, rightly, to be fertiliser spilled in the afternoon by the gardeners, a little of which had got blown against the house in between the pots, and so escaped the downpour.
Pointer stared at the sacking. It was soaked with blood. But whose blood?
Not Rose Charteris's. There was far too much here for that. Besides, this had taken place after the rain. Nothing is more misleading as to the amount of damage done than bloodstains. But even so, this must have been a formidable affair.
Besides the sacking, he found a mass of what might be the remains of six or seven more flower pots, but so ground to powder were they, so trampled the plants, that it was impossible to count them. They told one thing plainly. The paving outside had been washed. Not so these broken remnants. They were soaked with blood, trampled into it.
He cut away a corner of the sacking and dropped it into an indiarubber envelope. He added to his bag a couple of lengths of cord, very stout, and of a kind new to him in colour and texture.
He heard steps on the gravel path. He had replaced everything as he went along, and now lit his pipe and waited.
It was Bennet, the under-gardener, and a boy wheeling a barrow. They began to collect the branches.
"You prune so late?" Brown pointed to the almost stripped thorn.
"The master he thinks the trees at the doors want thinning. Done it before we got to work this morning." Bennet gave a wrathful sniff.
"Must have lost his head over that terrible accident," Brown mused aloud. "I'm staying with Mr. Thornton at his cottage. Colour-printing is my trade. His niece's death must have upset the old gentleman."
"It couldn't upset him beforehand," retorted the gardener. "Not beforehand! And I must say he made thorough job of it all right. Killed the old tree, that's what he's done. Murdered it! And then fell off the ladder on top of them pelargoniums. Collected them in a lump just on purpose, he says, so as not to damage 'em. And then went down bang on top of the lot. Nose bled; too, he says. I don't wonder. Next time he'll leave it to those as understands the СКАЧАТЬ