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

‘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 the other two. The man-woman and the Hobby Horse?’

‘They were every which-way,’ Carey said.

Alleyn muttered: ‘If they’d come round here they could hardly fail to see what was lying there. What colour were his clothes?’

‘Whitish, mostly. And they reckon they did see them.’

‘There you are,’ Fox said.

‘Well, Thompson, get on with it. Cover the area again. When he’s finished we’ll take specimens of the stains, Fox. In the meantime, what’s outside the wall there?’

Carey took him through the rear archway. ‘They waited out here before the performance started,’ he said.

It was a bleak enough spot, now: an open field that ran up to a ragged spinney and the crest of the hill. On the higher slopes the snow still lay pretty thick but down near the wall it had melted and, to one side of the archway, there was the great scar left by the bonfire. It ran out from the circular trace of the fire itself in a blackened streak about fourteen feet long.

‘And here?’ Alleyn said, pointing his stick at a partially burnt out drum, lying on its side in the fire-scar. ‘We have the tar barrel?’

‘That’s so, Mr Aleyn. For “Crack”.’

‘Looks as if it caught fire.’

‘Reckon it might have got overturned when all the skylarking was going on between Mr Ralph and Ernie. They ran through here. There was a mighty great blaze sprung up about them. The fire might have spread to it.’

‘Wouldn’t the idea be to keep the fire as an extra attraction, though?’

‘Maybe they lit it early for warmth? One of them may have got excited-like and poured tar on it.’

‘Ernie, for instance,’ Alleyn said patiently, and Carey replied that it was very likely.

‘And this?’ Alleyn went on. ‘Look at this, Carey.’

Round the burnt-out scar left by the bonfire lay a fringe of green brushwood that had escaped complete destruction. A little inside it, discoloured and deadened by the heat, its wooden handle a mere blackened stump, was a steel blade about eighteen inches long.

‘That’s a slasher,’ Alleyn said.

III

‘That’s Copse Forge,’ Carey said. ‘Stood there a matter of four hundred year and the smith’s been an Andersen for as long as can be reckoned.’

‘Not so profitable,’ Fox suggested, ‘nowadays, would it be?’

‘Nothing like. Although he gets all the shoeing for the Mardian and adjacent hunts and any other smith’s job for miles around. Chris has got a mechanic’s ticket and does a bit with cars. A big oil company’s offered to back them if they convert to a service station. I believe Simmy-Dick Begg’s very anxious to run it. The boys like the idea but the Guiser wouldn’t have it at any price. There’s a main road to be put through too.’

‘Do they all work here?’ Alleyn asked. ‘Surely not?’

‘No, no. Dan, the eldest, and the twins, Andy and Nat, are on their own. Farming. Chris and Ernie work at the forge. Hallo, that’s Dr Otterly’s car. I axed him to be here and the five boys beside. Mr Ralph and Simmy-Dick Begg are coming up to the pub at two. If that suits, of course.’

Alleyn said it did. As they drew up, Dr Otterly got out of his car and waited for them. His tweed hat was pulled down over his nose and his hands were thrust deep in the pockets of his covert-coat.

He didn’t wait to be introduced but came up and looked in at the window of their car.

‘Morning,’ he said. ‘Glad you’ve managed to get here. Morning, Carey. Expect you are, too.’

‘We’re damn’ pleased to see you,’ Alleyn rejoined. ‘It’s not every day you get police officers and a medical man to give what almost amounts to eye-witness’s evidence of a capital crime.’

‘There’s great virtue in that “almost”, however,’ Dr Otterly said, and added: ‘I suppose you want to have a look at him.’

‘Please.’

‘Want me to come?’

‘I think so. Don’t you, Carey?’

They went through the smithy. There was no fire that morning and no heat in the place. It smelt of cold iron and stale horse-sweat. Carey led the way out by a back door into a yard. Here stood a small ramshackle cottage, and, alongside it, the lean-to coach-house.

‘He lived in the cottage, did he?’ Alleyn asked.