Scales of Justice by Ngaio Marsh Page A

mound.
    “We got some groundsheets down and covered him,” the, sergeant said, “when it looked like rain.”
    “Good.”
    “And we’ve covered up the area round the corpse as best we could. Bricks and one or two planks from the old boatshed yonder. But I daresay the water’s got under just the same.”
    Allyn said, “Fair enough. We couldn’t ask for better. I think before we go any nearer we’ll get photographs. Come through, Bailey. Do the best you can. As it stands and then uncovered, with all the details you can get, in case it washes out before morning. By Jove, though, I believe it’s lifting.”
    They all listened. The thicket was loud with the sound of dripping foliage, but the heavy drumming of rain had stopped, and by the time Bailey had set up his camera, a waxing moon had ridden out over the valley.
    When Bailey had taken his last flash-photograph of the area and the covered body, he took away the groundsheet and photographed the body again from many angles, first with the tweed hat over the face and then without it. He put his camera close to Colonel Cartarette’s face and it flashed out in the night with raised eyebrows and pursed lips. Only when all this had been done, did Alleyn, walking delicately, go closer, stoop over the head and shine his torch full on the wound.
    “Sharp instrument?” said Fox.
    “Yes,” Alleyn said, “yes, a great puncture, certainly. But could a sharp instrument do all that, Br’er Fox? No use speculating till we know what it was.” His torchlight moved away from the face and found a silver glint on a patch of grass near Colonel Cartarette’s hands and almost on the brink of the stream. “And this is the Old ’Un?” he murmured.
    The Chief Constable and Sergeant Oliphant both broke into excited sounds of confirmation. The light moved to the hands, lying close together. One of them was clenched about a wisp of green.
    “Cut grass,” Alleyn said. “He was going to wrap his trout in it. There’s his knife, and there’s the creel beside him.”
    “What we reckoned, sir,” said the sergeant in agreement.
    “Woundy great fish, isn’t it?” said the Chief Constable, and there was an involuntary note of envy in his voice.
    Alleyn said, “What was the surface like before it rained?”
    “Well, sir,” the sergeant volunteered, “as you see, it’s partly gravel. There was nothing to see in the willows where the ground was dry as a chip. There was what we reckoned were the deceased’s footprints on the bank where it was soft and where he’d been fishing and one or two on the earthy bits near where he fell, but I couldn’t make out anything else and we didn’t try, for fear of messing up what little there was.”
    “Quite right. Will it rain again before morning?”
    The three local men moved back into the meadow and looked up at the sky.
    “All over, I reckon, sir,” said the sergeant.
    “Set fine,” said the deep-voiced constable.
    “Clearing,” said Sir James Punston.
    “Cover everything up again, Sergeant, and set a watch till morning. Have we any tips of any sort about times? Anybody known to have come this way?”
    “Nurse Kettle, sir, who found him. Young Dr. Lacklander came back with her to look at him, and
he
says he came through the valley and over the bridge earlier in the evening. We haven’t spoken to anyone else, sir.”
    “How deep,” Alleyn asked, “is the stream just here?”
    “About five foot,” said Sergeant Oliphant.
    “Really? And he lies on his right side roughly parallel with the stream and facing it. Not more than two feet from the brink. Head pointing down-stream, feet towards the bridge. The fish lies right on the brink by the strand of grass he was cutting to wrap it in. And the wound’s in the left temple. I take it he was squatting on his heels within two feet of the brink and just about to bed his catch down in the grass. Now, if, as the heelmarks near his feet seem to indicate, he kneeled straight over into