Heads You Lose by Christianna Brand Page B

was off all right.”
    “You could guess it from the way it was set. What was the weapon, do you know?”
    Dr. Newsome did not know and he hated to admit it. He said, taking the cigarette out of Cockie’s hand and lighting his own from it: “The head seems to be more—well, wrenched off, than cut. It’s almost—” he paused with a deprecatory air—“it’s almost as though two hands, two enormous hands, had seized the poor girl and twisted her head right off.”
    Cockie treated this statement with more respect than at first sight it appeared to deserve. He said, after a little thought: “Not the same as Miss Morland? Not the same as the girl in the wood?”
    “No. Miss Morland’s head was hacked off with the chopper—you can see where the blunt edges of the axe have torn the flesh; the first, of course, was cut clean off with the scythe. This is quite different; I can’t tell without the P.M., naturally, but as I say, it’s just as if two hands had choked the life out of the girl as they wrung off her head…”
    Cockie drew long and deeply on his cigarette. “We’ve found no weapon,” he said at last, looking up at the doctor with thoughtful bright brown eyes. “Could this thing actually have been done by hands?”
    “Not by human hands,” said Newsome, and looked round for his instrument bag.
    A sergeant came in from the garden, wiping his snowy boots on the front-door mat. “Well, sir, there’s no sign of anything. We’ve shovelled the snow away from all around the hut and there’s no weapon there; it isn’t in the stream, for she’s running as clear as glass; no sign of a footmark, no sign of a weapon, and no sign of blood.” He shrugged his shoulders as if he, for one, gave up the puzzle.
    “We’ll let the household come down now, and then we can look through the bedrooms,” said Cockie briefly. As the man turned away he called him back. “Bray—you’re a sane sort of fellow with no funny notions, and you’ve had a good look at the place where the body was found… Supposing the girl was murdered there, or even taken and put there after death, is it your opinion that the killer could have got away and left, as you’ve seen for yourself, no footprints in the snow?”
    “Not on human feet,” said the man, meeting the bright brown eyes.
    Photographs, finger-prints, alibis… the family was permitted to come downstairs and was herded into the dining-room and there left in charge of a police-sergeant to drink quantities of coffee and nibble at bacon and toast. Upstairs their rooms were ransacked without success; there was no trace of blood, nothing that might conceivably have been used as a weapon, no sign that anyone had been outside the house during the previous night. Constable Wright, sniffing dreadfully, became all excited at the discovery that Pendock’s shoes and overcoat were damp; but Pendock had seen Pippi home and had come back to the house through fairly heavy snow. The shoes that they had worn on their walk by the river had been drying by the kitchen fire and appeared to be undisturbed. Bunsen’s coat was wet and his shoes were slightly wet, consistent with his having ridden to and from Tenfold, through the snow, on his bicycle. Otherwise clothes, shoes, everybody’s possessions, all were clean and dry and free from the slightest sign of any nocturnal adventure.
    Sergeant Jenkins was dispatched again for interviews with Dr. Newsome and the district nurse. Dr. Newsome said, hopping, that Bunsen’s sister was slightly better, that he believed her brother had been over to see her on the previous evening, that it was nothing to do with him anyway, and that he was in a devil of a hurry to get off on his rounds; the district nurse said that Bunsen had visited his sister again, as he had on the night of Miss Morland’s death; that he had remained with her until about eleven, when he had made preparations to go, finally leaving the cottage at about ten past; and that if Sergeant