Give a Corpse a Bad Name Read Online Free Page A

the self-congratulation on the sergeant’s face. ‘Scotland Yard!’ He laughed cheerlessly.

CHAPTER 4
    Although the road on which the accident had happened was the shortest route from Chovey to Purbrook, there was seldom much traffic upon it. Winding and narrow, it turned driving into a constant caution, a tiresome concentration. Another road, the main road to Wallaford, that unrolled like a piece of stair-carpet over the undulations of the countryside, was, in spite of its indirectness, the more popular. So the sight of a police constable squelching about in the swampy meadows at the side of the road and picking up pieces of broken glass and smelling them, collected no audience, during the first half-hour or so, except one man with a bicycle, one woman with a perambulator, two boys, and a baker’s van. Soon even those dispersed.
    Leat had first searched the sides of the road itself. But the hedges and ditches had yielded only a few rusty tins and decayed ice-cream cartons. Climbing down then at the end of one of the bridges, he had continued his search in the sucking, oozing grass of the meadows and along the sides of the streams. Using a piece of stick to stir up the mud and pebbles, he searched the streams themselves. It was a lugubrious but thorough examination.
    The constable’s waterproof cape, spread on the grass, received all his finds. It was at the moment when, having picked up almost under one of the bridges a beer bottle of more obvious newness than any of the others, he was starting to carry this towards his dump, that he heard a voice above his head inquire: ‘What d’you think he’s doing, George?’
    â€˜Layin’ the cloth for a picnic.’
    Cecil Leat looked up and saw two faces looking down at him over the edge of the brick parapet.
    He saw two pairs of elbows. Above the elbows two pairs of hands supported, in the one case a long, narrow chin with a cleft in it, in the other a broad, chubby chin with a dimple. The long chin went with a hooked nose, a swarthy skin and a lock of dark hair falling almost into one of a pair of slightly slanting, dark eyes. The chubby chin formed part of a pink and plastic-looking mass, approximately circular, that looked as if features had been shaped in it by the gentle pressing here and there of tentative fingers. The dark face was ferocious, dramatic; its owner wore a shirt of a dull crimson, no tie, no hat and a new waterproof of pale parchment colour. The pink face nestled between a greasy blue cap and the high neck of a sailor’s jersey.
    Curious, they watched Leat. It was the pink faced man who first joined in the search. Pushing his way between the hedge and the parapet, he slithered down the bank into the meadow and began looking for glass. Presently the other followed. Silently, looking round at Leat from time to time for reference, they copied his actions, bringing any fragments they found to add to the pile on the waterproof cape. They tried smelling the pieces as well, and this, after a while made the dark man say to the policeman in passing: ‘If you’d tell us what trail it is you’re trying to pick up it’d be a good deal easier.’
    Leat looked at him. ‘Seen you before somewhere haven’t I?’
    â€˜Not impossible,’ said the dark man.
    â€˜I know as ’tisn’t,’ said Leat. ‘I know I seen you.’
    The fair man gave a quick tug at the other’s sleeve. ‘Here,’ he began anxiously. But the dark man grinned. Standing face to face with him, it could be seen that he was as tall as the constsable. His age might have been thirty-three.
    â€˜I can’t recall where,’ said Cecil Leat, ‘but I know I seen you.’
    â€˜Here—’
    â€˜Shut up, George. Overcome your fear of the law.’ He grinned again. ‘Won’t you tell us what smell it is that you’re trying to smell?’
    Leat admitted it: