Death Among the Sunbathers (2 page)

‘Asking for trouble,' he said, ‘going round a corner like that at such a speed – want talking to.'

‘Girl driving,' remarked Ferris, rather as if that explained all.

‘Hope her life's insured,' commented Jacks. ‘She was doing all of sixty m.p.h. – those little Bayard Sevens can travel all right.'

‘Alone, wasn't she?' asked Mitchell. ‘If she breaks her neck, as she probably will, she'll break it alone, that's one thing. I'm glad I wasn't in that car though – what's that?'

They had all heard the same sound, dull, strange, and ominous, distinct in the evening quiet, where the echo of the roaring progress of the little Bayard Seven seemed still to be hanging in the air, and to it they all gave instinctively the same interpretation. Then, as they looked, they saw a sudden crimson glow develop, shining red through the trees that lined the road, and across the hedges of the fields. None of them said a word. Jacks left his tools lying there, scattered by the roadside, and leaped into the driver's seat. Mitchell, quick enough at need, was already in his place, already had in his hands the chemical fire extinguisher. Ferris, a trifle less quick and active, tumbled after him. Jacks shot the car into the road, sent it flying along to where the crimson glow shone before them.

They came thundering at speed to where the road crossed by a bridge, a deep railway cutting. Their headlights showed them, half-way across, the railing that ran along the side of the bridge smashed clean away. Someone at a distance was running and shouting. Jacks brought the car to a standstill with a fierce grinding of tyres and brakes. Mitchell leaped out and was through the broken railing in a flash and down the steep side of the cutting to where across the rails a shapeless heap of wreckage smoked and burned. Somehow he arrived on his feet, still carrying the chemical extinguisher unharmed in his hands. Ferris, less fortunate, arrived on his back, head foremost. Jacks came last, more cautiously. He had taken time to bring the car close to the gap in the railing so that the light from its headlamps might illumine the scene. The fire was blazing furiously, but it had not yet obtained complete control, for all this had happened in two or three minutes and the chemical extinguisher was efficient. The flames spluttered, died down, smouldered a little. Presently, remained only a few tiny tongues of fire the three men beat out without difficulty. The car, or rather what was left of it, was lying on its side. Within, they could see a dark, motionless, huddled form that told them tragedy was there.

‘Lend a hand here,' Mitchell grunted to the others, and added, for the wrecked car was lying right across the lines, ‘Hope a train doesn't come along.'

The door of the car had jammed, but they managed to force it open. With some difficulty, and at the cost of a badly bruised hand for Ferris, they were able to disentangle a body from the wreckage. They laid the broken form on the grass at the foot of the steep embankment.

‘Past help,' Ferris said, ‘must have been killed on the spot.'

Mitchell had taken an electric torch from his pocket. With it in his hand he knelt down by the body.

‘A woman,' he said. ‘Young, too, poor thing.' And then the next moment: ‘Good God,' he said below his breath. ‘Ferris, Ferris.'

Ferris turned abruptly, startled.

‘Sir!' he said.

‘She was alive,' Mitchell half whispered, moved beyond his wont. ‘I'll swear she was... just for a moment.... I saw her look at me... as if she wanted... something she wanted to say... then she was gone.'

‘Are you sure, sir?' Ferris asked, more than a little incredulously. ‘After a fall like that... it must have killed her on the spot... going over that embankment at sixty miles an hour... and if it didn't, then the fire would have, for it was all round her.'

‘I saw her look at me,' Mitchell repeated, his voice not quite steady now, for though his profession had habituated him to scenes of terror and of grief, yet something in that momentary dying look had touched him to the quick, had seemed to convey to him some message he was but half conscious of. ‘Young, too,' he said again.

‘What I can't make out,' observed Jacks, ‘is how it happened – a perfectly good straight road, night quite clear, no sign of any obstruction anywhere. Of course the steering might have gone wrong.'

‘Bear looking into,' agreed Mitchell.

A voice from above asked what had happened, and then a man came scrambling down the steep embankment side. Mitchell became the brisk executive. The newcomer described himself as the landlord of a small public house, the George and Dragon, on the road just the other side of the bridge. His establishment did not boast a phone, but there was a call box close by. Mitchell sent Jacks to report to headquarters, to ask for more help, to summon the nearest doctor, to warn the railway people that the line was blocked, for the debris of the car, and part of the railing from the bridge it had carried down with it, lay right across the line. The landlord of the George and Dragon, who gave his name as Ashton, was set to work, too, while Mitchell and Ferris made as careful an examination as was possible of the half-burnt wreckage. But it was Ashton who called their attention to the smashed fragments of a bottle in what once had been the dicky of the car.

‘Whisky, if you ask me,' he said. ‘There's been whisky there all right – what about that?'

‘Bear looking into,' agreed Mitchell, ‘whisky explains a lot, and maybe it explains this, too – and maybe it don't.'

‘There's the poor creature's hat,' Ferris remarked, pointing to it, where it lay, oddly uninjured, flaunting as it were its gay and fashionable self against the background of dark tragedy.

Somehow or another it had rolled to one side and had escaped both the fire and the effects of the fall.

They found a handbag, too. It was badly burned, but within were two different sets of visiting cards, comparatively slightly damaged. One set bore the name of Mrs John Pentland Curtis and an address in Chelsea, the other was inscribed, ‘Miss Jo Frankland', with the same address, and at the bottom the legend,
Daily Announcer
.

‘One of the
Announcer
staff perhaps,' Mitchell commented. ‘Looks as if Curtis were her married name and Jo Frankland her own name she used in journalism still. Curtis – John Pentland Curtis,' he repeated thoughtfully, ‘seem to know the name somehow.'

‘Amateur middle heavyweight champion two years ago,' said Ferris, who was something of a boxer himself. ‘Beat Porter of the City force in the final, fined five pounds last year for being drunk and assaulting one of our men, but apologized handsome after, and gave another tenner to our man, so he didn't do so bad, and another tenner to the Orphanage.'

‘Wonder if it's the same man,' mused Mitchell.

They examined again the side of the embankment where the car had somersaulted down the steep incline, tearing earth and bushes with it, and they examined also the surface of the road. But the weather had been dry, the road surface was newly laid and in good condition; they found nothing to help them. Apparently the car had shot right across, across the pathway, through the railing, down the side of the cutting, and what had caused such a mishap on a perfectly good straight stretch of road there seemed nothing to show.

By now help was beginning to arrive. A breakdown gang had appeared to clear the line under the superintendence of Ferris. Photographers and other experts were on the scene. Mitchell was kept busy directing the operations, but when a local doctor came at last – there had been difficulty in finding one – he left his other activities to take the newcomer aside for a moment and whisper earnestly in his ear.

That the unfortunate victim of the accident was past all human aid was plain enough. Nevertheless the doctor carried out a very careful examination, and when he finished and came back to Mitchell there was a look of strange horror in his eyes.

‘There are injuries enough from the fall to cause death,' he said; ‘the spine is badly injured for one thing. There's the fire as well, the lower limbs are terribly burnt.'

‘The actual cause of death,' Mitchell asked, ‘can you say that?'

‘There is a bullet wound in the body,' the doctor answered. ‘She had been shot before the accident happened.'

In all such tragic occurrences, much of the work that has to be done is of a purely routine nature, and Mitchell was soon satisfied that all that custom, regulation, and experience prescribed was being correctly carried out. Now that there was nothing to be seen to here that others could not attend to just as well, he began to think of departing on errands that seemed to him more pressing. Then Ferris with a touch of excitement showing beneath his calm official manner came up to him.

‘A pistol's been found, sir,' he reported. ‘A point thirty-two Browning automatic. It's been pretty badly twisted up with the heat, but it makes it look to me as if it might have been suicide. If she shot herself, going at that speed, it would account for the way the car swerved off a perfectly straight road and went down over the embankment.'

‘So it would,' agreed Mitchell. ‘Bear looking into... only I can't help remembering the way the poor thing looked at me just before she died. Sort of surprised she seemed and indignant, too, asking for help, protection, asking what I was going to do about it – that's how it seemed to me. You think I'm going silly, Ferris, talking a lot of fanciful rot.'

‘Oh, no, sir,' answered Ferris, in a tone that plainly meant, ‘Oh, yes, sir.'

‘I don't wonder,' Mitchell said, answering not the words but the tone. ‘All the same, Ferris, you might have felt the same if you had seen the look she gave me. Too late for help or protection we were, but anyhow I can see whoever did it don't escape.'

‘Don't quite see myself,' Ferris observed, in his voice a carefully restrained note of incredulity, ‘if you don't mind my saying so, sir, how she could possibly have been still alive – shot through the body same as the doctor says, all smashed up going over the embankment at sixty per hour, and then in the middle of that blaze till we came up. But if she was, sir, and you're sure of it – why, that goes to show she must have been shot only just the minute or two before the thing happened. And that looks like suicide again.'

‘I don't know that that follows,' Mitchell objected; ‘it might have been done some time before – she might have been lying unconscious till the shock of fall and fire brought her back to life for a moment just before the end came. For life's a rum thing, Ferris, and I've read stories of men having been executed by beheading and the head showing signs of consciousness afterwards, as if life still clung to it. Anyhow, I'm certain there was life and meaning in that poor creature's eyes for just the moment when she looked at me, and I'll swear she was asking what I meant to do about it.'

‘Yes, sir,' agreed Ferris, slightly in the tone of one humouring a child's fancies, while to himself he thought that after all Mitchell must be getting near the age limit and no doubt his years were telling. He went on, ‘I sent Jacks to find out at the pub up the road if they had heard anything like a shot. I thought we had better inquire before they got to know about the pistol, or half of them would most likely be ready to swear they heard the report and believe it, too. People will swear anything, you know, sir, once they let their imaginations go.'

Jacks came up and saluted.

‘No one at the George and Dragon seems to have heard anything, sir,' he said, ‘not even the sound of the smash. Anything they did hear, they just thought was something on the railway; they seem sort of trained not to notice noises on the line. But it seems a lady driving a Bayard Seven stopped there this afternoon to ask the way to Leadeane Grange. I don't know if you would like to speak to Mr Ashton yourself, sir.'

Mitchell nodded acquiescence. Ashton, interested and busy, was not far away. He remembered the incident clearly. He was certain the car had been a Bayard Seven. To the driver of the car, however, he had apparently given less attention. That she had been a woman, and young, was about all he could say.

‘She wanted to know if she was right for Leadeane Grange,' Ashton said. ‘I told her all she had to do was cross the bridge and keep straight on.'

‘Leadeane Grange far? Who lives there?' Mitchell asked.

Ashton permitted himself a grin.

‘No one don't live there,' he said. ‘Not more than three miles or it might be four, but there's no one lives there.'

‘How's that?' Mitchell asked. ‘How do you mean?'

‘It's a place for them sun bathers,' Ashton explained. ‘Sit out there on the lawn without any clothes on, they do, and if there ain't any sun, there's rays instead. A fair scandal I call it.'

Mitchell asked a few more questions and gathered that Ashton cherished a faint grudge against the sun-bathing establishment, partly on those high moral grounds which make us all disapprove of the activities of others, and still more because, though since it had come into existence it had greatly increased the traffic passing by, none of that traffic ever stopped at the George and Dragon except to ask the way.

‘I get fair fed up,' he admitted, ‘telling 'em to cross the bridge and keep straight on – a poor skeleton lot if you ask me, that look as if a good glass of beer would do 'em more good than sitting in the sun dressed same as when they were born. Only I will say I seem to remember she looked better than most, and so did the fellow on the motor-bike that caught her up.'

Ferris interrupted suddenly. He exclaimed:

‘Leadeane Grange? Of course, I thought I knew the name – it's where Lord Carripore said he was the other day, where he caught his sciatica most like, though he wouldn't admit it.'