Fall of a Philanderer by Carola Dunn Page B

sudden sorrow for his lost Joan swept over him. Did Daisy still grieve for her dead fiance, blown up by a German mine along with the ambulance he drove?
    Putting such unproductive thoughts behind him, he started to wonder who would grieve for George Enderby’s untimely end: not his wife, by the looks of things in the pub last night, nor the Anstruthers.
    None of his business, he reminded himself. He could only hope he would not be called as a witness to anything beyond finding the body.
    The girls and Daisy waved goodbye. Waving back, he watched their progress as they appeared and disappeared among the rocks,
then started up the path. Daisy was moving slowly. Belinda and Deva pulled ahead, and Alec wanted to shout to them to slow down, but they wouldn’t hear, and if they did, he might startle them into missing their footing.
    Was that how Enderby had come to fall? Or had currents and waves brought him from the sea? He wasn’t dressed for bathing, nor for boating, jacketless on such a blustery day and his footwear more suited for walking hills than decks. Unless his jacket had come off in the sea …
    Alec found himself once more standing over the body. He couldn’t help it, the detective instinct was too strong for him.
    The boneless, twisted sprawl told him nothing. It could equally well have resulted from a long fall or from being tossed among the rocks by the pitiless waves, as could the superficial injuries. The clothes held Alec’s attention.
    Enderby’s shirt had come loose from his trousers. It had great rents in it, revealing torn skin beneath. A closer look showed his braces dangling, two of the fastenings missing. The trousers, made of stouter cloth, had only one visible tear. More significant, the parts of the clothes uppermost as he lay, including the raised leg, were bone-dry, blotched with blood, as he had noticed before. The day was warm and windy but not hot enough to dry out sodden flannel trousers since the turn of the tide. Besides, the way they were draped on the motionless form was nothing like the way wet cloth would have clung as it dried. Blood had clotted around the injuries, including two on the top of the head where that distinctive sandy thatch was matted with dried blood.
    Alec badly wanted to turn the body over. Even if it had been his case—supposing it turned out to be a case—he oughtn’t to do so before a medical man had examined it and photographs had been taken.
    Photographs! He’d quite forgotten the cheap Brownie camera he had bought on a whim at a station bookstall on his way down to Devon, to take family snapshots. He had stuffed it into his knapsack
along with the picnic, intending to surprise Daisy. She was the photographer of the family, but the camera she used for photos to go with her articles was too big and complicated for informal holiday pictures. Alec always relied on police photographers at work, or Tom if they were away from London, but the girl at the bookstall had assured him that anyone could use the Brownie.
    She had showed him right then and there how to put the film in. Then all one had to do was set the little lever to sunny or cloudy or indoors, point, and press the button. And not forget to wind the film on, he reminded himself, taking out the black box.
    Set the lever to sunny, peer through the little window at the corpse, reduced in size and oddly distanced, less human almost. Press the button. Move and snap again, from four different angles altogether. And now for a few close-up views.
    Kneeling on a flattish stretch of bedrock, Alec studied the body. The lowest four or five inches of the clothes had clearly been soaked and were still damp. The water mark was obvious. Below, bloodstains were faint discolorations, diluted and dispersed by the sea. He could see two nasty gashes in exposed skin that must have bled freely, for however short a period, before Enderby died; they had been washed clean.
    The obvious inference was