Inspector Alleyn 3-Book Collection 7: Off With His Head, Singing in the Shrouds, False Scent. Ngaio Marsh

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      ‘Mortal hard. Started soon after the fatality. I covered up the stone and place where he lay, but that was the best we could do.’

      ‘And with a team of Morris men, if that’s what you call them, galumphing like baby elephants over the terrain there wouldn’t be much hope anyway. Let’s have a look, shall we, Obby?’

      The sergeant removed the inverted box from the top of the dolmen. Alleyn examined the surface of the stone.

      ‘Visible prints where Ernie stood on it,’ he said. ‘Rubber soles. It had a thin coat of rime, I should think, at the time. Hallo! What’s this, Carey?’

      He pointed a long finger at a small darkness in the grain of the stone. ‘Notice it? What is it?’

      Before Carey could answer there was a vigorous tapping on the drawing-room window. Alleyn turned in time to see it being opened by Dulcie evidently under orders from her great-aunt, who, from within, leant forward in her chair, shouted: ‘If you want to know what that is, it’s blood,’ and leant back again.

      ‘How do you know?’ Alleyn shouted in return. He had decided that his only hope with Dame Alice was to meet her on her own ground. ‘What blood?’

      ‘Goose’s. One of mine. Head cut off yesterday afternoon and left on the stone.’

      ‘Good lord!’

      ‘You may well say so. Guess who did it.’

      ‘Ernie?’ Alleyn asked involuntarily.

      ‘How d’yer know?’

      ‘I guessed. Dame Alice, where’s the body?’

      ‘In the pot.’

      ‘Damn!’

      ‘Why?’

      ‘It doesn’t matter.’

      ‘Shut the window, Dulcie.’

      Before Dulcie had succeeded in doing so, they heard Dame Alice say: ‘Ask that man to dinner. He’s got brains.’

      ‘You’ve made a hit, Mr Alleyn,’ said Fox.

      Carey said: ‘My oath!’

      ‘Did you know about this decapitated bird?’

      ‘First I heard of it. It’ll be one of that gang up on the hill there.’

      ‘Near the bulls?’ Fox asked sombrely.

      ‘That’s right. You want to watch them geese, Mr Fox,’ the sergeant said, ‘they so savage as lions and tricksy as snakes. I’ve been minded myself, off and on this morning, to slaughter one and all.’

      ‘I wonder,’ Alleyn said, ‘if it was Ernie. Get a shot of the whole dolmen, will you, Thompson, and some details of the top surface.’

      Sergeant Thompson moved in with his camera and Alleyn walked round to the far side of the dolmen.

      ‘What,’ he asked, ‘are these black stains all over the place? Tar?’

      ‘That’s right, sir,’ Obby said, ‘off of old “Crack’s” skirts.’

      Carey explained. ‘Good lord!’ Alleyn said mildly and turned to the area behind the dolmen.

      The upturned boxes that they had used to cover the ground here were bigger. Alleyn and Fox lifted them carefully and stood away from the exposed area. It was a shallow depression into which had collected a certain amount of the fine gravel that had originally been spread over the courtyard. The depression lay at right angles to the dolmen. It was six feet long and shelved up to the level of the surrounding area. At the farthest end of the dolmen there was a dark viscous patch, about four inches in diameter, overlying a little drift of gravel. A further patch, larger, lay about a foot from it, nearer the dolmen and still in the hollow.

      ‘You know, Carey,’ Alleyn said under his breath and out of the sergeant’s hearing, ‘he should never have been moved: never.’

      Carey, scarlet-faced, said loudly: ‘I know’s well as the next man, sir, the remains didn’t ought to have been shifted. But shifted they were before us chaps could raise a finger to stop it. Parson comes in and says, “it’s not decent as it is,” and, with ’is own hands, Mr Ralph assisting, takes off mask and lays out the pieces tidy-like while Obby, here, and I were still ordering back the crowd.’

      ‘You were here too, Sergeant?’

      ‘Oh, ya-as, Mr Alleyn. All through.’

      ‘And seeing, in a manner of speaking, the damage was done and rain setting in, we put the remains into his own car, which is an old station wagon. Simmy-Dick and Mr Stayne gave us a hand. We took them back to the forge. They’re in his lean-to coach-house, Mr Alleyn, locked up proper with a police seal on the door and the only other constable in five mile on duty beside it.’

      ‘Yes, yes,’ Alleyn said. ‘All right. Now, tell me, Carey, you did actually see how it was before the parson tidied things up, didn’t you?’

      ‘I did, then, and not likely to forget it.’

      ‘Good. How was it?’

      Carey drew the back of his hand across his mouth and looked hard at the shallow depression. ‘I reckon,’ he said, ‘those two patches show pretty clear. One’s blood from head and t’other’s blood from trunk.’

      Fox was squatting above them with a rule in his hands. ‘Twenty-three inches apart,’ he said.

      ‘How was the body lying?’ Alleyn asked. ‘Exactly.’

      ‘Kind of cramped up and on its left side, sir. Huddled. Knees to chin.’

      ‘And the head?’

      ‘That was what was so ghasshley,’ Carey burst out. ‘T’other way round.’

      ‘Do you mean the crown of the head and not the neck was towards the trunk?’

      ‘Just so, Mr Alleyn. Still tied up in that there bag thing with the face on it.’

      ‘I reckoned,’ Sergeant Obby ventured, ‘that it must of been kind of disarranged in the course of the proceedings.’

      ‘By the dancers?’

      ‘I reckoned so, sir. Must have been.’

      ‘In the final dance, after the mock beheading, did the Five Sons go behind the stone?’

      There was silence. The superintendent and the sergeant eyed each other.

      ‘I don’t believe they did, you know, Sarge,’ Carey said.

      ‘Put it that way, no more don’t I, then.’

      ‘But СКАЧАТЬ