Ellis Peters - George Felse 02 - Death and the Joyful Woman by Ellis Peters Read Free Book Online Page A

though I don’t suppose they know anything. My wife’s waiting up, too.”
    “Good, we’ll let her get to bed as soon as we can.” He pricked his eras, catching the expected note of the cars turning in from the road. “That’s them. Go and switch the corner light on for them, Bennie, will you? And then I think you three might join the rest of the household inside.”
    They withdrew thankfully; he felt the release of a quivering tension that made their first steps almost as nervous as leaps. Then the ambulance wagon came ponderously round into the yard, and Detective-Superintendent Duckett’s car impatiently shepherding it, and the machinery of the County C.I.D. flowed into the case of Alfred Armiger and took possession of it. It was a mark of the compulsive power of the deceased that the head of the C.I.D. had climbed out of his bed and come down in person at one o’clock in the morning. Only the murder of his own Chief Constable could have caused him greater consternation. He stood over the body, hunched in his greatcoat against the chill of the small hours and the hint of frost in the air, and scowled down at the deformed head which would never plan mergers or mischief again.
    “This is a hell of a business, George. I tell you, my boy, when you came on the line and told me, I thought you’d gone daft or I had.”
    “I felt much the same,” said George. “But there’s not much mistake about it, is there?”
    Death, like its victim, had never been more positive. Superintendent Duckett viewed the setting, the body and the instrument, and said nothing until the doctor was kneeling over his subject, delicately handling the misshapen skull. Then he asked briefly, growling out of his collar: “How many blows?”
    “Several. Can’t be sure yet, but six or seven at least. The last few possibly after he was already dead. Somebody meant business.” The doctor was youngish, ex-army, tough as teak, and loved his job. He handled Alfred Armiger with fascinated affection; nobody had cherished him like that while he was still alive.
    “And I always thought it would be apoplexy,” said Duckett, “if it ever happened to him at all. How long’s he been dead?”
    “Say half past eleven at the latest, might be earlier. Tell you better later on, but you won’t be far out if you consider, say, ten-fifteen to eleven-thirty as the operative period. And most of these blows were struck while he was lying right here, and I’d say lying still.”
    “The first one put him out, in fact, and then whoever it was battered away at him like a lunatic to make sure he never came round again.”
    “Not like a lunatic, no. Too concentrated and accurate. He was on target every time. But you could call them frenzied blows—they went on long after there was any need.”
    “So it seems. Didn’t stop till the bottle broke. Marvel it didn’t break sooner, but glass plays queer tricks. George, on the details of this we sit, but firmly,” said Duckett heavily. “Dead, yes, of head injuries if we have to go that far, but keep the rest under wraps for the time being. I’ll issue a statement myself, refer the boys to me. And warn off those fellows who found him. We don’t want this released until I see my way ahead.”
    “Very good,” said George. “I don’t think they’ll be wanting to talk about it, they’re too close to it for comfort. Can you make anything of that broken statuette?”
    Duckett approached and stared at it, glumly frowning, then picked up its nearest neighbour, a couple locked in a tango death-grip. He grunted with surprise at its lightness, and turned it upside down to stare with disgust into its thin shell. “Sham as the rest of the set-up.” He put it back in its place and thumped the wall beneath it experimentally, but light as it was it sat sturdily on its broad base, and never even rocked. “Wouldn’t fall even if you crashed into the wall beside it, you’d have to knock the thing off bodily. No trace of