Free The Grub-And-Stakers Quilt a Bee by Charlotte MacLeod, Alisa Craig Page B

in grievous disrepair. They required to be propped open, which Mrs. Monk had in fact done with bits and pieces she found lying about. Given the meager space he’d have had to squirm through, how would Mr. Fairfield have managed to do so without knocking out the prop and thus being pinned between sash and sill?”
    “Peregrine was a very small man.” Mrs. Fairfield was looking pretty green around the gills by now, Dittany noticed.
    “I grant you that. However, there is the further complication of the window sills.”
    “The window sills? Attic windows don’t have them, surely?”
    “I stand corrected. The proper term would have been ledges.
    On account of the sloping mansard roof, you see, and the windows being set in plumb to the attic floor, there is thus created a flat shelf approximately a foot deep in front of each one.”
    “If you say so. But what-“
    Sergeant Mac Vicar waved a magisterial hand for silence. “Now, since you have seen ample evidence of the state John Architrave’s ancestral home was in at the time it fell into possession of the Grub-and-Stake Gardening and Roving Club, you can well believe, eh, that yon ledges had not been cleaned off for decades.
    Therefore, had your husband gone out one of the aforementioned windows either by accident or by design, he must inevitably have left a trail among the accumulated dirt and debris, as well as transferring some of this material to his clothing. We found no evidence that he did so, therefore we are forced to conclude that he did not make his final exit by that route.”
    “Then it must have been one of the second floor windows he fell from.”
    “Aye, but here again we run up against an enigma. In the first place, Dr. Somervell questions whether the relatively shorter drop could have resulted in such extensive injuries as Mr. Fairfield was found to have sustained. There is the added difficulty that above the spot where his body was discovered, there is only one other window that might conceivably have answered the purpose.
    This is that odd little porthole affair high up in the stairwell, which is accessible only by a most precariously perched ladder. Why it was ever put there, the Lord in His infinite wisdom doubtless knows.”
    “But what about those ropes of Frederick Churtle’s?”
    “A most ingenious suggestion, Mrs. Fairfield. But e’en supposing a man of your husband’s years, dignity, and known aversion to heights presumed to make a monkey of himself by means of the rigging, it would have availed him nowt. That window was painted shut sometime around eighteen hundred and seventy-two, from the look of it, and has obviously never been opened since.”
    “Sergeant Mac Vicar, what are you trying to tell me?”
    “I am trying to point out to you that having ruled out possible alternatives and having found certain evidence to support our thesis, we are led to assume your husband fell off the roof.”
    “The roof? Oh, but that’s impossible. Peregrine would never in the world have gone on the roof. He was scared to death of heights from the time he was a little boy. I can remember that odious Frederick Churtle teasing him about it. Frederick himself doesn’t mind heights a bit. He was an elevator repair man when I first knew him. He’d tell dreadful stories about walking across an elevator shaft forty stories high on a narrow plank, and poor Peregrine would get sick to his stomach just hearing about it. Surely you must be mistaken, Sergeant Mac Vicar. Isn’t it more likely Peregrine lived long enough to have crawled away from the spot where he fell, or that he-he bounced when he hit?”
    She clapped the by now somewhat less pristine handkerchief to her mouth. Sergeant MacVicar shook his head.
    “I fear not, Mrs. Fairfield. He landed in a bed of bee balm, you know. The plants were badly crushed by the impact of his body.
    There is no such crushing anywhere but underneath where he lay when we found him. Dr. Somervell gives it as his