‘Bother ‘Bother my books! I quite see what you mean. Well, then, some time or the other, Bright arrives to keep his appointment. How? And when?’
‘By walking through the edge of the water, from any point you like to suggest. As for the time, I can only suggest that it was while you, my child, were snoozing over Tristram Shandy; and I fancy he must have come from the Wilvercombe side, otherwise he would have seen you. He’d hardly have taken the risk of committing a murder if he knew — positively that somebody was: lying within a few yards of h
‘I think it was pretty careless of him not to take a look round the rocks in any case.’
‘True; but apparently he didn’t do it. He commits the murder, anyhow, and the time of that is fixed at two o’clock. So he must have reached the Flat-Iron between 1.30 and 2—or possibly between one o’clock and two o’clock because, if you were lunching and reading in your cosy corner, you probably wouldn’t have seen or heard him, come. It couldn’t be earlier than 1 p.m., because you looked along the shore then and were positive that there wasn’t a living soul visible from the cliffs.’
‘Quite right.’
‘Good. He commits the murder. Poor old Alexis lets out a yell when he sees the razor, and you wake up. Did you shout then, or anything?’
‘No.’
‘Or burst into song?’
‘No.’
‘Or run about with little ripples of girlish laughter?’
‘No. At least, I ran about a few minutes later, but I wasn’t making a loud noise.’
‘I wonder why the murderer didn’t start off home again at once.’ If he had, you’d have seen him. Let me see. Ah, I was forgetting the papers! He had to get the papers!’
‘What papers?’
‘Well, I won’t swear it was papers. It may have been the Rajah’s diamond or something. He wanted something off the body, of course: And just as he was stooping over his victim, he heard you skipping about among the shingle. — Sound carries a long way by the water. The baffled villain pauses, and then, as the sounds come nearer, he hurries down to the seaward side of the Flat-Iron and hides there.’
‘With all his clothes on?’
‘I’d forgotten that. He’d be a bit damp-looking when he came out, wouldn’t he? No. Without his clothes on. He left his clothes at wherever it was he started to walk along the shore. He, probably put on a bathing-dress, so that if anybody saw him he would just be a harmless sun-bather paddling about in the surf.’
‘Did he put the razor in the pocket of his regulation suit?’
‘No; he had it in his hand, or slung round his neck. Don’t ask silly questions. He’d wait in his little niche until you’d gone; then he’d hurry back along the shore-’
‘Not in the direction of Wilvercombe.’
‘Blow! Obviously, you’d have seen him. But not if he kept close to the cliff. He wouldn’t have to bother so much about footprints when the tide was coming in. He could manage that all right. Then he’d come up the cliff at the point where he originally got down, follow the main road towards Wilvercombe, turn back at some point, or other, and meet you on the way, back., How’s that?.
‘It’s very neat.’
‘The more I look at it, the more I like it. I adore the thought of Might’s being Perkins. I say, though, how about this lop-sided, hunch-backed business. Was Perkins upright as a willow-wand, or how?’
‘Not by any means. But I shouldn’t have called him actually crooked. More sloppy and round-shouldered. He had a rucksack on his back, and he was walking a bit lame, because he said he had a blister on his foot.’
‘That would he a good way of disguising any one-sidedness in his appearance. You’re always apt to hunch up a bit on the lame side. Bright-Perkins is our man. We ought to get the police on to this right away, only I do so want my lunch. What time is it? Four o’clock. I’ll slip along in the car and telephone to Glaisher, and then come back. Why should we give up our picnic for any number of murderers?’
Chapter X. The Evidence Of The Police-Inspector
‘My life upon ‘t some miser,
Who in the secret hour creeps to his hoard,
And, kneeling at the altar of his love,
Worships that yellow devil, gold.’
— The Bride’s Tragedy
Monday, 22 June
‘You may say what you like, my lord,’ said Inspector Umpelty, ‘and I don’t mind admitting that the Super is a bit inclined to your way of thinking, but it was suicide for all that, and if I was a sporting man, I wouldn’t mind having a bit on it. There’s no harm done by tracing this fellow Bright, because, if the identification of the razor is correct, that’s who this Alexis must have brought it from, but there’s no doubt in my mind that when the poor chap left his lodgings on Thursday, he never meant to come back. You’ve only got to look at the place. Everything. tidied away, bills all paid up, papers burnt in the grate — you might say he’d regular said good-bye and kissed his hand to everything.’
‘Did he take his latch-key with him?’ asked Wimsey.
‘Yes, he did. But that’s nothing. A man keeps his key in his pocket and he mightn’t think to put it out. But he left pretty well everything else in order. You’d be surprised. Not so much as an envelope, there wasn’t. Must have had a regular old bonfire there. Not a photograph, not a line that would tell you anything about who he was or where became from. Clean sweep of the lot.’
‘No hope of recovering anything from the ashes?’
‘Not a thing. Naturally, Mrs Lefranc — that’s the landlady — had had the grate cleaned out on the Thursday morning, but she told me that everything had been broken down into black finders and dust. And there was a rare old lot of it. I know, because she showed it me: in the dust-bin. There certainly — was nothing there you could have made out with a microscope.’ As you know, my lord, generally these folk aren’t thorough — they leave a few bits half-burnt, maybe, but this chap had gone the right way about it and no mistake. He must have torn’ everything into small scraps first, and burnt it on a hot fire and beaten it into atoms with the poker. “Well,” I said to Mrs Lefranc, “this is a nice set-out, this is!” And so it was, too.’
‘Any books or anything with writing in the fly-leaves?’
‘Just a few novels, with “Paul Alexis” inside, and some with nothing at all, and one or two paper-backed books written in Chinese.’
‘Chinese?”
‘Well, it looked’ like it Russian, maybe. Not in proper letters, anyhow. You can’ see them any time you like but I don’t expect you’ll get much out of them. One or two history-books there was, mostly about Russia and that. But no writing of any kind.’