Fall of a Philanderer (7 page)

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Authors: Carola Dunn

BOOK: Fall of a Philanderer
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The girls had run ahead, with strict instructions to stay away from the edge. They came dashing back to announce that they had found Deva's path down the cliff.
Alec's stride lengthened. Pleased to see his enthusiasm, Daisy didn't try to keep up, saving her energy for a possible climb to come. When she joined Bel and Deva at the top of the path, Alec was already past the first switchback, his hand shading his eyes as he surveyed the rest of the way down.
“Mr. Fletcher said to stay here till he says it's all right to come.”
“And then go carefully. No rushing,” Belinda reminded her friend.
At that moment, Alec looked up and waved. Bel and Deva both immediately set foot on the path side by side. They looked at each other.
“I found it,” said Deva.
Bel nodded reluctantly. “All right, you can go first. I'll help Mummy at the difficult bits.”
“Gosh, thanks, darling,” said Daisy, feeling a hundred years old. But perhaps it wasn't her age that prompted such solicitude. Officially Bel hadn't been told yet that there was a baby on the way, but she was a bright child quite capable of putting two and two together. Children today seemed to know far more of such matters than they had in Daisy's youth.
Deva continued downward at a prudent pace. Bel followed her, glancing back now and then to say anxiously, “Are you all right, Mummy?”
“So far, so good.” The first part was easy, though rather steep, but
soon the way turned rough and rocky. The return journey was going to be quite a toil. The almost sheer drop to Daisy's left was sometimes separated from the path by a rim of rock or a few tussocks of grass, sometimes by nothing at all. She averted her gaze, keeping it firmly fixed on the next couple of yards her feet had to cross. At least they were not buffeted by the wind. Some trick of conformation of cliff and headland sheltered them, and the sun felt warm.
They reached Alec. “I can't see sand at the bottom, if there is any,” he reported, “but there are some flat rocks down there we can sit on for our picnic. They should be sheltered from the wind, and with the tide ebbing we needn't worry about being stranded. How are you doing, love? You don't think it will be too much for you going back up?”
With the girls' pleading looks upon her, and Alec's obvious lust for exploration, Daisy would have felt a monster if she had doubted aloud her ability to prance back up the cliff like a mountain goat. “I'll manage very well,” she said, “as long as I'm not
rushed.
”
As they went on down, they came to a place where the path narrowed alarmingly in bypassing a large boulder. On the sea side, a few clumps of pink-flowered thrift clung to the top of a steep slope of scree.
Alec turned his face to the rock and worked his way past crabwise.
“It's not difficult. There's all sorts of little knobs and cracks you can grip if you need to,” he encouraged Deva. She and Belinda followed without a quiver and passed him.
Daisy, who had been certain her pregnancy barely showed, now felt as if she protruded at least a foot in front. She must not show the white feather, she admonished herself, especially in front of Belinda, whose grandmother would have forbidden this adventure on the grounds that only boys climb cliffs.
“Hm,” said Alec, frowning, “maybe I'd better call the girls back. I'd forgotten the extra inches around your middle.”
“Darling, how rude! I'm not too wide yet.” She edged around the boulder, finding plenty of finger-holds but not really needing them. “See?”
He grinned at her. “Another month and we'd have had to leave you behind up there.”
“Another month and I wouldn't have made it to the top in the first place.”
“Not too much farther.”
The path grew easier from there on, and the girls went on ahead. Soon they called back that they could see sand below, and then they disappeared among the tumble of rocks, all shapes and sizes, at the base of the cliff. Waves dashed against the headlands in fountains of spume, but their force seemed to be spent before they rolled into the sheltered cove.
Belinda briefly reappeared. “Mummy, there's the absolutely best rock pool ever, with amenomes and gobies and a
starfish!
” She had to shout to make herself heard against the muted roar of the sea. “Come and see. Come and see, Daddy.”
“I'm going to find a good picnic place first,” Alec called back. “This knapsack is getting heavier and heavier.”
“That's the Thermos flask of tea,” said Daisy. “Not to mention the lemon squash for the girls.”
“I won't mention it. I just want to put it down.” He picked his way across and between the rocks towards the small beach they had spotted from above.
Daisy scrambled over to join Bel and Deva. She found them arguing over whether a tiny transparent creature with blue and orange stripes could possibly be a shrimp.
“Shrimps are pink,” Deva said dogmatically.
“Not until they're cooked, are they, Mummy?”
No more than Deva had Daisy ever seen an uncooked shrimp. “I have no idea,” she admitted.
“If we catch one, can we take it home and cook it?”
That was an easy question. “No. Leave the poor things be. What a beautiful pool!”
“Three kinds of seaweed,” said Deva, as proud as if she'd done the decorating herself. “This pink ferny one, and the green ribbons,
and this green stuff like moss. Touch it, Mrs. Fletcher, it's soft and silky.”
To Daisy's relief, before she had to decide whether to lower herself to her knees to touch something that looked to her unpleasantly squishy, Alec appeared around a huge rock and called to her.
“Daisy, would you come here a minute? Come and tell me what you think of the spot I've found.” He was too far off for her to make out his expression, but his voice sounded strained.
The girls didn't notice. Daisy left them trying to catch in their bare hands the little finny fish that darted from nook to cranny among the pebbles and fronds of seaweed.
“What's wrong?” she asked as she joined Alec.
His face was set. “I saw a shoe sticking up above a rock, at an odd angle. I went closer and saw an ankle. The foot is still in the shoe. I must go and look, but I want you to keep the girls away, so that they don't follow me.”
Feeling ill, Daisy sat down suddenly on a nearby rock. “Oh darling, not a … ! I suppose some poor soul fell overboard, or drowned while swimming, and was washed up by the waves.”
“It's just possible someone stumbled among the rocks and knocked himself unconscious. I must go and look.”
“Yes, of course. I'll stop them if they come this way.”
Alec was not gone long. He returned tight-lipped and rather pale. Daisy tried not to wonder what could make an experienced CID detective turn pale. A sea-bloated body chewed by fish?
“Dead,” he said. “I can't be sure but I think it's that chap from the inn, the landlord.”
“Oh no!” Daisy exclaimed, aghast. “Not George Enderby!”
F
lying high above the trenches in his observer plane, Alec had missed the worst horrors of the Great War. As a detective he had seen victims done to death in a variety of ways, but he couldn't remember ever having seen a body as battered as George Enderby's. Every visible inch of him was gashed and scraped, his shirt and fawn flannels ripped and blotched with blood. He lay twisted among the rocks near the foot of the cliff, partly on a patch of sand, one leg caught on a larger boulder so that his foot stuck up in the air. The contorted position suggested that most of his bones were broken.
So much Alec had taken in before returning to Daisy, thanking heaven neither she nor the girls had made the grisly discovery.
“I
think
it's him,” he stressed, “I can't be sure. I must stay here. You'll have to get the girls away and report the body.”
She looked at him in dismay. “Darling, can't you come too? You're on holiday, after all.”
“This has nothing to do with being a copper. It's my duty as a citizen to stay, as you're available to report.” He frowned, remembering that she was in no condition to make haste up the cliff path. “Unless you'd rather stay? The tide's going out, so there's no danger. And there's no need to go near the body, just to keep people away, and I rather doubt you'd be swamped with sightseers.”
“No, I'll go,” she said with a shudder. “It was … it
was
an accident, wasn't it?”
“That's what you'll report. It's none of my business, I'm happy to say. And you'd better not say it's Enderby in case I'm wrong. Don't give me away, will you.”
“Of course not, darling. You're on holiday.”
“And hope to stay that way. Now off you go, and don't try to hurry, love. Whoever he is, he's beyond help.”
“What shall I tell the girls?”
“I'll leave that up to you.”
Alec knew he sounded relieved at not having to face that problem, and he wasn't surprised when Daisy wrinkled her nose at him. He also knew she was pleased. When he first started seeing her regularly, he had more than once made a fool of himself by accusing her of not caring sufficiently for the welfare of his precious daughter. But Belinda adored her, and he could only plume himself on having married a woman who had turned out to be a wonderful, if unconventional, mother—not to mention an adorable, if unconventional, wife.
He kissed her and watched her pick her way back towards the girls, careful to take the easiest route and use her hands rather than trying to balance when she had to climb. It was going to be strange starting again with a baby after ten years of watching Bel grow up. A sudden sorrow for his lost Joan swept over him. Did Daisy still grieve for her dead fiance, blown up by a German mine along with the ambulance he drove?
Putting such unproductive thoughts behind him, he started to wonder who would grieve for George Enderby's untimely end: not his wife, by the looks of things in the pub last night, nor the Anstruthers.
None of his business, he reminded himself. He could only hope he would not be called as a witness to anything beyond finding the body.
The girls and Daisy waved goodbye. Waving back, he watched their progress as they appeared and disappeared among the rocks,
then started up the path. Daisy was moving slowly. Belinda and Deva pulled ahead, and Alec wanted to shout to them to slow down, but they wouldn't hear, and if they did, he might startle them into missing their footing.
Was that how Enderby had come to fall? Or had currents and waves brought him from the sea? He wasn't dressed for bathing, nor for boating, jacketless on such a blustery day and his footwear more suited for walking hills than decks. Unless his jacket had come off in the sea …
Alec found himself once more standing over the body. He couldn't help it, the detective instinct was too strong for him.
The boneless, twisted sprawl told him nothing. It could equally well have resulted from a long fall or from being tossed among the rocks by the pitiless waves, as could the superficial injuries. The clothes held Alec's attention.
Enderby's shirt had come loose from his trousers. It had great rents in it, revealing torn skin beneath. A closer look showed his braces dangling, two of the fastenings missing. The trousers, made of stouter cloth, had only one visible tear. More significant, the parts of the clothes uppermost as he lay, including the raised leg, were bone-dry, blotched with blood, as he had noticed before. The day was warm and windy but not hot enough to dry out sodden flannel trousers since the turn of the tide. Besides, the way they were draped on the motionless form was nothing like the way wet cloth would have clung as it dried. Blood had clotted around the injuries, including two on the top of the head where that distinctive sandy thatch was matted with dried blood.
Alec badly wanted to turn the body over. Even if it had been his case—supposing it turned out to be a case—he oughtn't to do so before a medical man had examined it and photographs had been taken.
Photographs! He'd quite forgotten the cheap Brownie camera he had bought on a whim at a station bookstall on his way down to Devon, to take family snapshots. He had stuffed it into his knapsack
along with the picnic, intending to surprise Daisy. She was the photographer of the family, but the camera she used for photos to go with her articles was too big and complicated for informal holiday pictures. Alec always relied on police photographers at work, or Tom if they were away from London, but the girl at the bookstall had assured him that anyone could use the Brownie.
She had showed him right then and there how to put the film in. Then all one had to do was set the little lever to sunny or cloudy or indoors, point, and press the button. And not forget to wind the film on, he reminded himself, taking out the black box.
Set the lever to sunny, peer through the little window at the corpse, reduced in size and oddly distanced, less human almost. Press the button. Move and snap again, from four different angles altogether. And now for a few close-up views.
Kneeling on a flattish stretch of bedrock, Alec studied the body. The lowest four or five inches of the clothes had clearly been soaked and were still damp. The water mark was obvious. Below, bloodstains were faint discolorations, diluted and dispersed by the sea. He could see two nasty gashes in exposed skin that must have bled freely, for however short a period, before Enderby died; they had been washed clean.
The obvious inference was that he had fallen to his death, into shallow water. The local people ought to be able to work out when the tide had been five inches deep at this point on the coast.
Alec took another four photos, from a distance of about two feet, though he rather doubted the cheap little camera would produce pictures clear enough to make out all the marks he had noted.
Then, standing, he gazed up at the cliff face and took a shot of that. Daisy and the girls had disappeared from sight, though he thought they must still be climbing. Directly above him, the cliff shelved back in ridges, ledges and steep, rough slopes for some way before rising in a sheer black rock face for the top third. It was not so smoothly vertical as the wall of a building, but a man falling would not have the slightest hope of catching a protuberance to save himself.
Some of the cliffs in the area were as much as four hundred feet high, Alec knew. Once Enderby had gone over the edge, his death was certain.
All the same, there was always a chance his murderer—supposing him to have been pushed—had come down to make sure. The surface of the path down the cliff was mostly too rocky to show footprints, the sandy patches too dry and hardpacked; besides, Alec and Daisy and the girls had all trodden it thoroughly enough to eliminate or confuse any subtle signs.
Here below, though, some indication might be visible. Stepping from rock to rock, Alec surveyed the patches of beach around the body. His own footprints stood out clearly on the damp sand smoothed by the ebbing tide. The only other marks were dimples and bubbles produced by subterranean marine creatures and those odd curved lines of darker sand often left by receding waves.
As he trod the low rocks, he realized he was crushing limpets and barnacles. He might be destroying evidence, or at least confusing the trail, if someone else had done likewise.
Glancing back the way he had come, he couldn't be sure which of two rocks he had stepped on. He looked more closely. Both seemed to have a few broken shells on top. Of course, rocks moved by the waves must do a certain amount of damage. An expert might distinguish footprints, but the chance of getting an expert here before sundown and high tide hid the evidence seemed remote.
All the same, Alec decided to move to higher ground to await the forces of the law. Scrambling up on top of a massive nearby boulder, he finished off the film with three shots of the rocks and sand surrounding Enderby's body. With luck, at least the pattern of rocks would be identifiable from the top of the cliff, giving a good idea of where he had fallen from.
Putting the camera in his knapsack, he took out the Thermos of tea and found a comfortable perch in the sun. From above, the contorted figure below was so obviously dead that no one need have approached any closer to be certain.
Was it actually Enderby? He hadn't taken much notice of the landlord of the Schooner last night until the man had been half strangled with his own tie. The body's face was unrecognizable. The thick thatch of sandy hair was the only distinguishing mark, a feature not so uncommon as to make it decisive in identification.
In fact, he had jumped to the conclusion that it was Enderby because when one has seen a man attacked by an avenging berserker one day, to find him dead the next cannot be regarded as entirely unexpected.
 
Daisy had not expected to enjoy the trek back up the cliff, but she found it even more trying than she had foreseen. Before they were a quarter of the way up, her legs felt like lead and she was “glowing” like a blast-furnace (“Horses sweat, gentlemen perspire, ladies glow,” had been one of her nanny's favourite sayings). Maddeningly, the girls outpaced her without the least apparent effort.
When they reached the big boulder, they were a couple of hundred yards ahead of her. They stopped and looked back. Daisy prayed they were not going to make a fuss about passing it without Alec's encouragement.
Belinda came back down the path. “Are you all right, Mummy?” she asked anxiously. “You look awfully hot.”
“I am. I wish I'd thought to have a drink before we left our picnic with Daddy, but if wishes were horses beggars would ride, as my nanny used to say.”
“So did my granny.” They exchanged a glance of complicity.
“It doesn't stop one wishing, does it? I could do with a horse right now, or perhaps a mule would manage this path better. Failing that, I'll just have to rely on Shanks' pony. Onward and upward!”
“I'll stay with you, in case you feel faint. You go first.”
“I'm not ill, darling, merely pregnant. I just need not to be rushed.”
“We'll go slowly. I'm sorry we were going so fast before.” She hesitated. “You really are going to have a baby?”
“I really am. You guessed, didn't you?”
“Deva heard you talking to Mrs. Prasad and Mrs. Germond about it.”
“Are you happy that you're going to have a brother or sister?”
“Oh, yes, but actually, I'm so much older it'll be more like being an aunt.”
Daisy had no quick answer to this, and she needed her breath for climbing, so they continued in silence until they caught up with Deva. The boulder was negotiated without difficullty.
A few yards beyond, Deva, in the lead, pointed ahead and said over her shoulder, “There is a flat place where you can sit and rest, Mrs. Fletcher. My ayah says English ladies are very hardy, but this is an awfully high cliff.”
“I hope there's room for you to sit, too, Deva, though you're getting pretty hardy yourself, after all the long walks we've dragged you on.”
“I didn't think I'd like so much walking, but it's been fun. And the pool down there was full of interesting creatures. It's a pity Mr. Fletcher found a murdered man.”
“I didn't say he was murdered!” With a sigh of relief, Daisy lowered herself to a patch of scrubby grass and the girls squeezed themselves in on each side. “I'm sure it was an accident.”
Deva shook her head. “Mr. Fletcher is a detective, so he's bound to find people who have been murdered.”
Daisy didn't feel up to refuting this tangled logic. “Well, that's as may be,” she said, “but you are absolutely not to tell anyone it's a case of murder.”
“If you do, Deva, they'll make Daddy find the murderer and he won't have any holiday.”
“I shan't tell,” Deva promised.
After a few minutes they went on. As they moved higher, they began to feel a cooling breeze, which helped Daisy no end. The part that had been the roughest on the way down turned out to be less a walk than a scrambling climb on the way up. At least it used different
muscles from the upward plod, and the girls pushed and pulled Daisy over the biggest obstacles. Their solicitude was touching.

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