Death of Jezebel by Christianna Brand

Author:Christianna Brand [Brand, Christianna]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-4532-9048-4
Publisher: MysteriousPress.com/Open Road
Published: 2013-01-15T22:38:00+00:00

Chapter IX

A COURTING COUPLE, ARMS entwined, had sat down upon the torso of Earl Anderson under a bush on the evening after Isabel’s murder: and never felt quite the same towards one another again. It was lying in a patch of deep grass just off the main road to Maidenhead, and with it was a perfectly ordinary bread knife, the blade red and rusted, the handle so charred—doubtless deliberately—as to prevent any possible identification. There was no blood upon the scene nor any sign of a struggle; there were one or two footprints no longer very clear, and apparently made by the victim’s own shoes, which lay chucked down beside the body; and what with one thing and another, the experts decided that the man had been dead not more than forty-eight hours, possibly a great deal less. ‘Rigor begins in the head and neck, you see, old boy… And in this case the neck…’ It was all very unattractive.

Charlesworth shifted wretchedly about the chilly little mortuary. ‘Can’t you give me anything more definite?’

‘Have a heart man, I’ve only just arrived from my breakfast, to be confronted with your assorted heads and bodies.’

Charlesworth leaned over to look at the disembowelled torso on the slab. ‘No question of the wrong head on the wrong body, or anything like that?’

‘My dear Mr. Chesterton—spare us your pretty fancies! We haven’t got half a dozen headless bodies knocking around; not this week we haven’t. You’ve found a head, and you’ve found a body—and by the oddest coincidence, they match.’

‘You don’t know anything about pretty fancies till you’ve been in on the Isabel Drew case,’ said Charlesworth gloomily. ‘As if towers and knights in armour and Biblical analogies weren’t sufficient, I’ve got a little imp of a man called Cockrill making my life hideous, forestalling my every thought, not to mention a few thoughts I don’t have.’

Littlejohn, the pathologist, suggested comfortably that Inspector Cockrill made something of a speciality in decapitations, didn’t he? He flicked an enquiring finger at the slab. ‘Why this one? Do you know yet?’

‘The murderer’s trying to frighten and upset this poor girl: and you can’t send whole bodies through the post—there’s a fifteen pound limit or something. I presume the cause of death wasn’t the beheading?’

‘I haven’t had enough time with him yet to be certain: but, no, I shouldn’t think so. Off the record I should say that he was batted on the head first with the regulation blunt instrument—he’s got a hell of a bruise on the back of his nut. Then strangled—throttled from the back, probably, same as the girl—these people always repeat themselves: and then the head was taken off quite soon after. Whoever it was just hacked away with a knife—nothing skilled about it. It would be frightfully difficult to do, actually—a horrible job. I should say he took quite a bit of time about it.’

‘He? Could a woman have done it?’

‘Anyone could have done it, old boy: whether or not a woman would have—but I suppose that’s just sentimentality.

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