Dame Beatrice asked no questions, but went immediately to the telephone in the hall. After a very short time she returned and poured Laura a cup of coffee.
‘They’ll be here as soon as they can, but they have some distance to come,’ she said, ‘so you have time for breakfast before you need talk to the Superintendent.’
‘Not sure that I want any breakfast.’ Laura had recovered her breath. She drank the coffee and passed her cup for more. ‘It’s the German girl. I think she’s been murdered. I’ll have to lead the police to the spot. It might take them ages to find it on their own. Fergus is guarding the body and won’t come away.’
‘I will accompany them and disengage the dog. I should not wish him to bite a policeman. Now please have some breakfast. We may have a long morning before us and nothing is to be gained by feeling faint from hunger. No, don’t tell me anything more until you have eaten.’
Laura contrived to grin, and Dame Beatrice, motioning her to sit still, went to the sideboard to serve her. Laura discovered that, in spite of shock, she was still hungry.
‘I suppose you’d like to hear the details now,’ she said, pushing aside an empty plate and helping herself to marmalade. ‘Well, here’s what happened.’
‘You think it is the German girl from whose mother you bought Fergus?’ Dame Beatrice enquired when she had heard the tale. ‘And you think that when the girl realised she was in danger, she blew the dog-whistle which you say is on a cord around her neck?’
‘Well, something caused Fergus to vanish into the mist last night. It looked to me as though somebody had tightened the cord, too. There’s a deep red mark on her neck.’
‘That would have induced unconsciousness, no doubt. I suppose you are perfectly certain she was dead?’
‘Good gracious, yes. No doubt about it at all. You’ll know what I mean when you see her.’
This came about in due course. At Laura’s suggestion, since it would mean shortening by at least a mile the walking-distance between the Stone House and the body, she drove her own small car, with Dame Beatrice as passenger, and led the police car, containing a superintendent, a sergeant and a uniformed constable, through the village and along the main road until they left the two cars on a wide stretch of grass at a stone bridge and followed the path through the wicket-gate which marked the boundary of the enclosure.
At the other side of the enclosure Laura led the way confidently through the woods to the spot where she had come upon the body. The dog was still on guard. Dame Beatrice went up to him, while the Superintendent halted his men and Laura stood back.
‘Come, Fergus,’ said Dame Beatrice. ‘You’re a good dog and you must be hungry.’ She held up a string bag she had brought with her. ‘Come along with me. It’s all right now.’ The dog pricked his ears and looked into her face. ‘Good boy. It’s all right now,’ she repeated encouragingly. The great hound sighed and slowly got to his feet. She led him away from the body and along the path until they came to the river. On the bridge she spread out the food, patted him, and stood beside him. The dog looked up at her again, then, trusting her soothing voice, he ate voraciously, then padded to the edge of the stream. When he had finished drinking, she said to him firmly, ‘Stay’. Then she returned to the others.
‘Perhaps you’d take a look at her, ma’am,’ said the Superintendent, who had worked with Dame Beatrice before, ‘and let me have an opinion as to time of death, then Gunter can stay here until we get back with our own doctor and the photographer. We’ll need a stretcher to move her when they’ve done their stuff. Can’t get an ambulance up here.’
Dame Beatrice looked at her watch and then knelt beside the body. The time was a quarter to eleven.
(5)
‘But it doesn’t make sense,’ said Laura, when she and Dame Beatrice were in her little car and on the way home with Fergus lying along the back seat.
‘What doesn’t make sense, child?’
‘The time of death. You say that poor Miss Schumann has been dead for at least twenty-four hours, so why would Fergus have answered her whistle only about seventeen hours before I found her body?’
‘The answer would be obvious if we could take rigor mortis as an infallible guide, but that, as you heard me remark to the Superintendent, we cannot.’
‘But would even a tricky thing such as rigor be as much as seven or more hours out?’
‘It is unlikely, certainly. The conditions were normal, although I doubt whether she was killed in those woods. There were no signs of a struggle. It would be most interesting to find out how the dog managed to locate the body.’
‘The only thing which would have made Fergus leave me, and go careering off like that, was that somebody he knew even better than he knew me must have called him. He couldn’t have heard a voice, otherwise I would have heard it, too – you’ve said yourself that my hearing is pretty acute – therefore he must have answered a dog-whistle, a sound he can hear, but I, like most other adults, can’t. Even so, a dog-whistle only carries for between three and four hundred yards, or so Mrs Schumann told me when I bought Fergus, and the body was a good two miles from the edge of the common where Fergus left me.’
‘Of course, we have no proof that Fergus heard a dog-whistle at all, have we?’
‘No, and I don’t believe Fergus would have answered any old whistle, any more than he answered mine this morning. Mrs Schumann had a special call for her dogs. She told me so. She wouldn’t teach it to me because she said it would be best to
