Have His Carcase

Better get on with it. Suppose the farmer comes.’

‘How right you are!’ He gave the halter a shake and cantered off. Harriet mechanically picked up his hat and stood squeezing the crown absently in and out, with her eyes on the flying figure.

‘Allow me, miss.’

Bunter held out his hand for the hat; she relinquished, it with a little start. Bunter shook out the remaining oats, dusted the hat with care inside and out and restored it to its proper shape.

‘Handy to ride or drive,’ said Wimsey, coming back and slipping down from his mount. ‘Might do nine miles an hour on the road — on the shore, through shallow water, say eight. I’d like — my God! how I’d like — to take her along to the Flat-Iron. Better not. We’re trespassing.’

He pulled the halter off and sent the mare off with a clap on the shoulder.

‘It all looks so good,’ he mourned, but it won’t work. It simply won’t work. You see the idea. Here’s Martin. He comes and camps here; evidently he knows all about this place beforehand, and knows that horses are kept out in this field in summer. He arranges for Alexis to be at the Flat-Iron at two o’clock I don’t know how, but he works it somehow. At 1.30 he leaves the Feathers, comes down here, gets the mare and rides off along the shore. We see where he spilt the oats with which he got her to come to him and we see the gap he made getting her through the hedge. He rides along through the edge of the water, so as to leave no marks. He tethers the mare to the ring that he has driven into the rock; he kills Alexis and rides back in a deuce of a hurry. In crossing the rough pebbles below Pollock’s cottage, the mare casts a shoe. That doesn’t worry him, except that it lames the nag a bit and delays him. When he gets back, he doesn’t return the mare to the field, but lets her run. Like that, it will look as though she broke out of the field on her own, and will easily explain the gap, the lameness, and the shoe, if anybody finds it Also, if the horse should be found still blown and sweaty, it will appear perfectly natural. He is back at three o’clock, in time to go round to the garage about his car, and at some subsequent period he burns the halter. It’s so convincing, so neat, and it’s all wrong.’

‘Why?’

‘The time’s too tight, for one thing. He left the inn at 1.30. After that, he had to come down here, catch, the mare and ride four and a half miles. We can’t very well allow him to do more than eight miles an hour under the conditions of the problem, yet at two o’clock you heard the scream. Are you sure your watch was right?’

‘Positive. I compared it with the hotel clock when I got to Wilvercombe; it was dead right, and the hotel clock—’

‘Is set by wireless time, naturally. Everything always is.’

‘Worse than that all the hotel clocks are controlled by a master-clock which is controlled directly from Greenwich.

That was one of the first things I asked about.’ ‘Competent woman.?

‘Suppose he had had the horse all ready before he went to the Feathers — tied up to the fence, or something?’

‘Yes; but if these Darley people are right, he didn’t go from here to the Feathers; he came by car from the Wilvercombe side. And even if we allow that, he’s still got to make rather over nine miles an hour to get to the Flat-Iron by two o’clock. I doubt if he could do it though, of course, he might, if he leathered the poor beast like fury. That’s why I said I’d like to do the ride:’

‘And the scream I heard may not have been the scream. I thought it was a gull, you know and perhaps. it was. I took about five minutes to gather my stuff together and come out into view of the-Flat-Iron. You might put the death at 2.05, I think, if you felt you had to.’

‘All right. But that still leaves it all quite impossible. You see, you were there at 2.10 at the very latest. Where was the murderer?’

‘In the cleft of the rock. Oh, ah — but not the horse. I see. There wouldn’t be room for a horse too. How exasperating! If we put the murder too early, he wouldn’t have time to get there, and if we put it too late, he wouldn’t have time to get away. It’s maddening.’

‘Yes, and we can’t really put the murder earlier than two o’clock because off the blood. Putting the horse’s speed and the condition of the blood and the scream all together, we get two o’clock as the earliest possible and on the whole the most probable time for the murder. Right. You come on the scene, at latest, at 2.05. Allow (which is very unlikely) that the murderer dashed up at full gallop, cut Alexis throat and dashed off again at full speed without wasting a second, and allow him (which is again most unlikely) to do as much as ten miles an hour through water. At 2.05 he will have done just under a mile on his way back. But we proved this afternoon that you have — a clear view of over a mile and a half from the Flat-Iron in the direction of Darley. If he had been there, you couldn’t have failed to see him. Or could you? You didn’t start really looking till 2.10, when you found the body.’