Scales of Justice: Inspector Roderick Alleyn #18 by Marsh Ngaio

Author:Marsh, Ngaio
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Felony & Mayhem Press
Published: 2014-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

By midsummer morning light, Colonel Cartarette looked incongruous in the willow grove. His coverings had been taken away and there, close to the river’s brink he was; curled up, empty of thought and motion, wearing the badge of violence upon his temple…a much photographed corpse. Bailey and Thompson had repeated the work of the previous night but without, Alleyn thought, a great deal of success. Water had flooded under duck boards, seeped up through earthy places and washed over gravel. In spite of the groundsheet it had soaked into Colonel Cartarette’s Harris tweeds and had collected in a pool in the palm of his right hand.

Dr Curtis completed a superficial examination and stood up.

‘That’s all I want here, Alleyn,’ he said. ‘I’ve given Oliphant the contents of the pockets. A bundle of keys, tobacco, pipe, lighter. Fly case. Handkerchief. Pocket-book with a few notes and a photograph of his daughter. That’s all. As for general appearances; rigor is well established and is, I think, about to go off. I understand you’ve found out that he was alive up to eight-fifteen and that he was found dead at nine. I won’t get any closer in time than that.’

‘The injuries?’

‘I’d say tentatively, two weapons or possibly one weapon used in two ways. There’s a clean puncture with deep penetration, there’s circular indentation with the puncture as its centre and there’s been a heavy blow over the same area that has apparently caused extensive fracturing and a lot of extravasation. It might have been made by one of those stone-breaker’s hammers or even by a flat oval-shaped stone itself. I think it was the first injury he got. It would almost certainly have knocked him right out. Might have killed him; in any case, it would have left him wide open to the second attack.’

Alleyn had moved round the body to the edge of the stream.

‘And no prints?’ he said, looking at Bailey.

‘There’s prints from the people that found him,’ Bailey said, ‘clear enough. Man and woman. Overlapping and straightforward…walk towards, squat down, stand, walk away. And there’s his own heel marks, Mr Alleyn, as you noticed last night. Half-filled with surface drainage they were then, but you can see how he was, clear enough.’

‘Yes,’ Alleyn said. ‘Squatting on a bit of soft ground. Facing the stream. He’d cut several handfuls of grass with his knife and was about to wrap up that trout. There’s the knife, there’s the grass in his hands and there’s the trout! A whopper if ever there was one. Sergeant Oliphant says the Colonel himself hooked and lost him some days ago.’

He stooped and slipped an exploratory finger into the trout’s maw. ‘Ah, yes,’ he said, ‘it’s still there. We’d better have a look at it.’

His long fingers were busy for a minute. Presently they emerged from the jaws of the Old ’Un with a broken cast. ‘That’s not a standard commercial fly,’ he said. ‘It’s a beautiful home-made one. Scraps of red feather and gold cloth bound with bronze hair, and I think I’ve seen its mates in the Colonel’s study.

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