Opening the folder, Daisy groaned. “Third carbon copy. I need more light.” She moved to a chair with a reading light on a table beside it.
She didn’t start on them immediately. She watched Alec remove two sheets of handwritten paper from the envelope, scan them quickly, then go back and read carefully. He looked up.
“The preliminary medical report. Interesting, though not exactly helpful. Pardoe says there’s no external evidence of what killed Raymond.”
“He definitely wasn’t stabbed like the Empress of Austria?”
“No. Given the excess weight he was carrying, Pardoe suspects he had hardening of the arteries, leading to high blood pressure. A spike in blood pressure caused by a sudden shock such as his fall between the trams could have caused a stroke if he happened to have an aortic or intracranial aneurysm.”
“What’s an aneurysm?”
“A weak spot in the wall of a blood vessel. A spike in pressure could make it rupture.”
“Ugh!”
“If he had one. It’s all speculative.”
“And you’re always telling me not to speculate. Dr. Pardoe seems to be oblivious to that rule. Let me get this straight. Strictly within the realm of speculation, the fall caused a shock, and the shock caused a fatal stroke. But what caused the fall?”
“It’s possible that the stroke caused the fall in the first place. However, besides skinned knuckles and bruised knees, he had an odd bruise in the middle of his back, a small round bruise. Its appearance suggests a sudden forceful jab approximately forty minutes before his death.”
“Does Dr. Pardoe suggest what might have made a bruise like that?”
“No pathologist will ever speculate on that sort of thing on paper.”
“He may be the exception that proves the rule.”
Alec laughed. “Perhaps. I’ll talk to him tomorrow after the autopsy and suggest some possibilities, and he’ll tell me yes or no. If I’m lucky.”
“A walking stick,” Daisy proposed. “Poked between the people waiting to cross the street. Vincent probably had his. So did Raymond himself, come to that. Frank didn’t have one, but he could have bought one—”
“In which case we’ll find the seller.”
“Or he could have found one lying about somewhere. Men who carry one as part of their getup, not for support, are always forgetting them, especially in railway stations. I don’t know whether Sam usually carries one, but he didn’t have one when we met him in the park, remember?”
“He could have bunged it into a ditch or under a convenient bush anywhere between here and Worcester.”
“A man dressed like a sailor, as Sam was, would have been conspicuous. Someone would remember him.”
“He could have worn a suit on the train and changed somewhere after the ‘accident.’”
“I suppose so,” Daisy acknowledged. “By the way, I told Sam and Frank that you’d probably want to talk to them this evening.”
“I do, but they’ll be waiting up for me till three in the morning if we don’t get on.”
Thus admonished, Daisy set about puzzling over the appallingly smudged typescript. She had to concentrate too hard to catch what Alec was saying on the telephone. Ernest brought him a pot of coffee and a large cup, and he set down a smaller cup and saucer beside Daisy.
“Mr. Lowecroft thought as you might like some cocoa,” he whispered.
“Perfect, thanks.”
She took a sip, and then forgot to drink as she delved back into the reports. At last she came to the end. She reached for her cup, but the usual revolting skin had formed on the cocoa.
Alec finished dictating a telegram and turned to her. “Well?”
“I’m not much wiser than I was when I started. None of the bystanders the police managed to nab as witnesses could say more than that the person who prevented Raymond falling under the wheels was ‘an ordinary looking man.’ The same description, over and over. No one can remember whether he had a moustache, even. None of them admitted to having been that man. No one so much as mentioned Raymond’s having been pushed on to the tracks in the first place. They all assumed he had stumbled on the edge of the kerb.”
“What about the copper on point duty? He must have had a bird’s-eye view.”
“He saw Raymond falling, out of the corner of his eye, and then he focussed on stopping all the traffic as quickly as possible. I doubt you’ll find anything useful in this lot.”
“As expected. Thanks for reading them, love. You might as well go to—” The phone rang. “Yes, miss, DCI Fletcher speaking.” He listened, made a note. “Thank you, miss.” He hung up with a sigh. “She’s getting quite chatty—pleased that I’ve received a wire after sending so many.”