Death Among the Sunbathers Read Free Page A

he didn’t do so bad, and another tenner to the Orphanage.’
    â€˜Wonder if it’s the same man,’ mused Mitchell.
    They examined again the side of the embankment where the car had somersaulted down the steep incline, tearing earth and bushes with it, and they examined also the surface of the road. But the weather had been dry, the road surface was newly laid and in good condition; they found nothing to help them. Apparently the car had shot right across, across the pathway, through the railing, down the side of the cutting, and what had caused such a mishap on a perfectly good straight stretch of road there seemed nothing to show.
    By now help was beginning to arrive. A breakdown gang had appeared to clear the line under the superintendence of Ferris. Photographers and other experts were on the scene. Mitchell was kept busy directing the operations, but when a local doctor came at last – there had been difficulty in finding one – he left his other activities to take the newcomer aside for a moment and whisper earnestly in his ear.
    That the unfortunate victim of the accident was past all human aid was plain enough. Nevertheless the doctor carried out a very careful examination, and when he finished and came back to Mitchell there was a look of strange horror in his eyes.
    â€˜There are injuries enough from the fall to cause death,’ he said; ‘the spine is badly injured for one thing. There’s the fire as well, the lower limbs are terribly burnt.’
    â€˜The actual cause of death,’ Mitchell asked, ‘can you say that?’
    â€˜There is a bullet wound in the body,’ the doctor answered. ‘She had been shot before the accident happened.’

CHAPTER TWO
Two Motor-Cyclists
    In all such tragic occurrences, much of the work that has to be done is of a purely routine nature, and Mitchell was soon satisfied that all that custom, regulation, and experience prescribed was being correctly carried out. Now that there was nothing to be seen to here that others could not attend to just as well, he began to think of departing on errands that seemed to him more pressing. Then Ferris with a touch of excitement showing beneath his calm official manner came up to him.
    â€˜A pistol’s been found, sir,’ he reported. ‘A point thirty-two Browning automatic. It’s been pretty badly twisted up with the heat, but it makes it look to me as if it might have been suicide. If she shot herself, going at that speed, it would account for the way the car swerved off a perfectly straight road and went down over the embankment.’
    â€˜So it would,’ agreed Mitchell. ‘Bear looking into... only I can’t help remembering the way the poor thing looked at me just before she died. Sort of surprised she seemed and indignant, too, asking for help, protection, asking what I was going to do about it – that’s how it seemed to me. You think I’m going silly, Ferris, talking a lot of fanciful rot.’
    â€˜Oh, no, sir,’ answered Ferris, in a tone that plainly meant, ‘Oh, yes, sir.’
    â€˜I don’t wonder,’ Mitchell said, answering not the words but the tone. ‘All the same, Ferris, you might have felt the same if you had seen the look she gave me. Too late for help or protection we were, but anyhow I can see whoever did it don’t escape.’
    â€˜Don’t quite see myself,’ Ferris observed, in his voice a carefully restrained note of incredulity, ‘if you don’t mind my saying so, sir, how she could possibly have been still alive – shot through the body same as the doctor says, all smashed up going over the embankment at sixty per hour, and then in the middle of that blaze till we came up. But if she was, sir, and you’re sure of it – why, that goes to show she must have been shot only just the minute or two before the thing happened. And that looks like suicide again.’
    â€˜I