Read Online She Died a Lady by John Dickson Carr - Free Book Online

to fake them, and certainly impossible in the way you’re talking about. This “walking backwards” business has been tried before. It can always be spotted a mile off.
    ‘A person walking backwards can’t help leaving traces of it. The steps are shorter; the heel is turned inwards; the weight’s distributed in a totally different way, slanting from toe to heel. Then there’s the question of the two persons’ weight.
    ‘I’d like you to see some plaster casts of those prints we took on Saturday night. They’re honest prints. No jiggery-pokery about them. The man was five feet eleven inches tall, weighed eleven stone ten, and wore number nine shoe. The woman was five feet six inches tall, weighed nine stone four, and wore number five shoe. If there’s one thing we can be certain about in the business, it’s this: Mrs Wainright and Mr Sullivan walked out to the edge of that cliff, and they didn’t come back .’
    Craft paused, clearing his throat.
    And, as I can see now, what he said was quite true.
    ‘Oh, ah,’ grunted H.M., eyeing him from behind the oily smoke of the cigar. ‘You take your scientific criminology pretty seriously in these parts, don’t you?’
    ‘ I do,’ the superintendent assured him. ‘Though I don’t often get a chance to apply it.’
    ‘Meanin’ that you think you can apply it here?’
    ‘Let me tell you what happened, sir.’ Craft glanced round, raked the garden with his sinister eye, and lowered his voice. ‘As I told you, the bodies were washed up at Happy Hollow very early this morning. They’d been dead and in the water since early Saturday night – I needn’t give all the gruesome details – and you’d naturally have thought they died of fractures or drowning. But they hadn’t died of fractures or drowning.’
    A very curious look had come into H.M.’s eye.
    ‘Hadn’t died of … ?’
    ‘No, sir. Both of them had been shot through the heart at very close range, body-range, with some small-calibre weapon.’
    It was so quiet in the garden that we could hear somebody talking over a back fence two houses away.
    ‘Well?’ growled H.M., though he seemed annoyed by some inner suspicion which made him puff very violently at the cigar. ‘If you’re goin’ to be so ruddy scientific and technical, I can tell you there’s nothing very unusual or surprisin’ in that. Plenty of suicides, especially suicide-pacts, do just that. They make double-sure of flyin’ to glory. They stand on the edge of a river; the man shoots the girl; over she goes; he shoots himself, and over he goes. Finish.’
    Craft nodded solemnly.
    ‘That’s true,’ he agreed. ‘What’s more, the wounds were characteristic suicide-wounds. Naturally, I couldn’t verify anything until we had a post-mortem report. But the coroner phoned Dr Hankins, and Dr Hankins did a post-mortem for us this morning.
    ‘Each victim had been killed by a .32 bullet. Fired, as I told you, at body-range. The clothes were powder-burned. There was burning, blackening, and tattooing of the wounds. That’s to say’ – Craft held up a well-sharpened pencil and sighted along it – ‘unconsumed bits of the propellant were embedded in the skin. Showing for certain sure the shots were fired at body-range. Double suicide.’
    ‘Well, then,’ said H.M., ‘what’s bitin’ you? Why have you got such a funny look on that dial of yours? There’s your evidence.’
    Again Craft nodded solemnly.
    ‘Yes, sir, there’s my evidence.’ He paused. ‘Only, you see, it wasn’t a double suicide. It was a double murder.’
    Now, you who read this record have been expecting it. You have been waiting for that word ‘murder’, and perhaps wondering when it would first occur. To you it is only the preparation for a battle of wits. But to me – having the thing flung in my face like this – every word Craft said came with a cold shock better left to your imagination.
    The talk of shot-wounds, ‘unconsumed bits of the propellant