Have His Carcase Read Free Page B

carefuly-tended and very white teeth.
    There were no gaps in the rows, but she noticed that one of the thirteen-year-
    old molars had been crowned. She tried to guess the exact age of the man. It
    was difficult, because he wore – very unexpectedly – a short, dark beard,
    trimmed to a neat point. This made him look older, besides giving him a
    somewhat foreign appearance, but it seemed to her that he was a very young
    man, nevertheless. Something immature about the lines of the nose and face
    suggested that he was not much more than twenty years old.
    From the face she passed on to the hands, and here she was again surprised.
    Robert Templeton or no Robert Templeton, she had taken for granted that this
    elegantly-dressed youth had come to this incongruous and solitary spot to
    commit suicide. That being so, it was surely odd that he should be wearing
    gloves. He had lain doubled up with his arms beneath him, and the gloves were
    very much stained. Harriet began to draw off one of them, but was overcome
    by the old feeling of distaste. She saw that they were loose chamois gloves of
    good quality, suitable to the rest of the costume.
    Suicide – with gloves on? Why had she been so certain that it was suicide?
    She felt sure she had a reason.
    Wel, of course. If it was not suicide, where had the murderer gone? She
    knew he had not come along the beach from the direction of Lesston Hoe, for
    she remembered that bare and shining strip of sand. There was her own solitary
    line of footprints leading across from the shingle. In the Wilvercombe direction,
    the sand was again bare except for a single track of footmarks – presumably
    those of the corpse.
    The man, then, had come down to the beach, and he had come alone.
    Unless his murderer had come by sea, he had been alone when he died. How
    long had he been dead? The tide had only turned recently, and there were no
    keel-marks on the sand. No one, surely, would have climbed the seaward face
    of the rock. How long was it since there had been a sufficient depth of water to
    bring a boat within easy reach of the body?
    Harriet wished she knew more about times and tides. If Robert Templeton

    had happened, in the course of his briliant career, to investigate a sea-mystery,
    she would, of course, have had to look up information on this point. But she
    had always avoided sea-and-shore problems, just precisely on account of the
    labour involved. No doubt the perfect archetypal Robert Templeton knew al
    about it, but the knowledge was locked up within his shadowy and ideal brain.
    Wel, how long had the man been dead, in any case?
    This was a thing Robert Templeton would have known, too, for he had been
    through a course of medical studies among other things and, moreover, never
    went out without a clinical thermometer and other suitable apparatus for testing
    the freshness or otherwise of bodies. But Harriet had no thermometer, nor, if
    she had had one, would she have known how to use it for the purpose. Robert
    Templeton was accustomed to say, airily, ‘Judging by the amount of rigor and
    the temperature of the body, I should put the time of death at such-and-such’,
    without going into fiddling details about the degrees Fahrenheit registered by the
    instrument. As for rigor, there certainly was not a trace of it present – naturaly;
    since rigor (Harriet did know this bit) does not usualy set in til from four to ten
    hours after death. The blue suit and brown shoes showed no signs of having
    been wet by sea-water; that hat was stil lying on the rock. But four hours
    earlier, the water must have been over the rock and over the footprints. The
    tragedy must be more recent than that. She put her hand on the body. It
    seemed quite warm. But anything would be warm on such a scorching day. The
    back and the top of the head were almost as hot as the surface of the rock. The
    under surface, being in shadow, felt cooler, but no cooler than her own hands
    which she had dipped in the