Have His Carcase

She hesitated whether to go on down to the rock. She did not want to wake the sleeper and be beguiled into conversation. Not but what he would prove to be some perfectly harmless tripper. But he would certainly be somebody quite uninteresting: She went on, however, meditating, and drawing a few more deductions by way of practice.

‘He must be a tripper. Local inhabitants don’t take their siestas on rocks. They retire indoors and shut all the windows. And he can’t be a fisherman or anything of that kind; they don’t waste time snoozing. Only the black-coated brigade does that. Let’s call him a tradesman or a bank-clerk. But then they usually take their holidays complete with family. This is a solitary sort of fowl. A schoolmaster? No. Schoolmasters don’t get off the lead till the end of July. How about a college undergraduate? It’s only just the end of term. A gentleman of no particular occupation, apparently. Possibly a walking tourist like myself but the costume doesn’t look right.’ She had come nearer now and could see the sleeper’s dark blue suit quite plainly. ‘Well, I can’t place him, but no doubt Dr Thorndyke would do so at once. Oh, of course! How stupid! He must be a literary bloke of some kind. They moon about and don’t let their families bother them.’

She was within a few yards of the rock now, gazing up at the sleeper. He lay uncomfortably bunched up on the extreme seaward edge of the rock, his knees drawn high and showing his pale mauve socks. The head, tucked closely down between the shoulders, was invisible.

‘What a way to sleep,’ said Harriet. ‘More like a cat than a human being. It’s not natural. His head must be almost hanging over the edge. It’s enough to give him apoplexy. Now, if I had any luck, he’d be a corpse, and I should report him and get my name in the papers. That would be something like publicity. “Well-known Woman Detective-Writer Finds Mystery Corpse on Lonely Shore.” But these things never happen to authors. It’s always some placid labourer or night-watchman who finds corpses….’

The rock lay tilted like a gigantic wedge of cake, its base standing steeply up to seaward, its surface sloping gently back to where its apex entered the sand. Harriet climbed up, over its smooth, dry surface till she stood almost directly over the man. He did not move at all. Something impelled her to address him.

‘Oy!’ she said, protestingly.

There was neither movement nor reply.

‘I’d just as soon he didn’t wake up,’ thought, Harriet. ‘I can’t imagine what I’m shouting for. Oy!’

‘Perhaps he’s in a fit or a faint,’ she said to herself. ‘Or he’s got sunstroke. That’s quite likely. It’s very hot.’ She looked up, blinking, at the brazen sky, then stooped and laid one: hand on the surface off the rock, It almost burnt her. She shouted again, and then, bending over the man, seized his shoulder.

‘Are you all right?’

The man said nothing and she pulled upon the shoulder. It shifted slightly — a dead weight. She bent over and gently lifted the man’s head.

Harriet’s luck was in.

It was a corpse. Not the sort of corpse there would be any doubt about, either. Mr Samuel Weare of Lyons Inn, whose ‘throat they cut from ear to ear’, could not have been more indubitably a corpse. Indeed, if the head did not come off in Harriet’s hands, it was only because the spire was intact, for the larynx and all the great vessels of the neck had been severed ‘to the hause bone’, and a frightful stream, bright red and glistening, was running over the surface of the rock and dripping into a little hollow below.

Harriet put the head down again and felt suddenly sick.

She had written often enough about this kind of corpse, but meeting the thing in the flesh was quite different. She had not realised how butchery the severed vessels would look, and she had not reckoned with the horrid halitus of blood, which streamed to her nostrils under the blazing sun. Her hands were red and wet. She looked down at her dress. That had escaped, thank goodness. Mechanically, she stepped down again from the rock and went round to the edge of the sea. There she washed her, fingers over and over again, drying them with ridiculous care upon her handkerchief. She did not like the look of the red trickle that dripped down the face of the rock into the clear water. Retreating, she sat down rather hastily on some loose boulders.

‘A dead body,’ said Harriet, aloud to the sun and the seagulls. ‘A dead body. How — how appropriate!’ She laughed.

‘The great thing,’ Harriet found herself saying, after a pause, ‘the great thing is to keep cool. Keep your head, my girl. What would Lord Peter Wimsey do in such a case? Or, of course, Robert Templeton?’