Free The Floating Body by Kel Richards Page B

his hands on his hips, looking around him.
    It was an almost flat roof, covered with sheets of lead. There was a slight slope from one side to the other to allow for rainwater runoff. On the lower side was a narrow gutter to catch the rainwater and deliver it into a downpipe.
    The deckchair still stood where we had seen it the day before.
    ‘This is where you saw him?’ the policeman asked.
    ‘Exactly where the deckchair is now,’ I replied. ‘It hasn’t been moved. We saw him—that is to say, Jack and I saw him—flopped down in his deckchair in precisely that spot, with a book and a straw hat resting over his eyes.’
    ‘Where are they now?’
    ‘Where are what?’
    ‘The book and the straw hat.’
    ‘The book,’ I explained, ‘is in my room. I picked it up when we were here on the roof, and somehow, absentmindedly, hung on to it. When I got back to my room I found it was still in my hand. It’s still there. In my room, I mean, not in my hand.’
    ‘And the hat?’ Locke continued.
    ‘We left it here,’ said Jack. ‘In fact, we didn’t touch it.’
    Locke looked around at the open, flat space. There was no straw hat.
    ‘Perhaps the wind caught it,’ Warnie suggested. ‘Very exposed up here. Any gust of wind could whistle away something as light as a straw hat.’
    Inspector Sexton Locke began to pace back and forth on the leads of the roof. Then he turned back to Jack and me and asked, ‘Where, exactly, were you two when you witnessed this incident—or this attack, or whatever it was.’
    By way of reply I walked over to the stone balustrade on the cathedral close side of the roof and pointed to the opposite side of the square.
    ‘In the cathedral itself,’ I explained. ‘I’d been giving Jack the guided tour when David Evans arrived to practise that evening’s anthem and invited us up into the organ loft.’
    Locke patiently and thoroughly took Jack and me back over what we had witnessed the day before. Then back over it again—slowly and in detail. Nothing new emerged, so he finally said that he had learned all he could and we all returned to ground level.
    Standing in the cathedral close, the inspector announced that he had to find Sergeant Drake and left us. I explained to Jack and Warnie that I had a class to take.
    ‘In that case, Warnie and I might have a walk through the town,’ said Jack, who loved any excuse to go for a walk. ‘All right with you, old chap?’ he asked his brother.
    ‘Right as rain,’ replied Warnie with a chuckle. ‘Absolutely as right as rain.’

SEVENTEEN
~
    My class was a difficult one. It’s hard to get schoolboys to concentrate on Robert Browning when their minds are filled with the death of their Mathematics Master.
    We were in the midst of working through ‘My Last Duchess’ when we came to the lines ‘I gave commands; then all smiles stopped together.’
    Jones, in the back row, eagerly thrust his hand in the air, and even before I could call on him asked, ‘Does that mean she was murdered, sir?’
    ‘Quite possibly,’ I said. ‘The young woman Browning was writing about, Lucrezia de’ Medici, was only fourteen when she married the Duke of Ferrara and she died quite suddenly at the age of seventeen.’
    ‘How was she killed?’ asked Blake in the front row. He was the class dummy and was inclined to ask irrelevant questions with a look of blank innocence on his face.
    ‘That’s not really relevant to the poem, Blake, but there were suspicions at the time that she’d been poisoned.’
    I thought this had got their minds off the school’s own tragedy when a voice I couldn’t identify, from somewhere in the back of the room, said in a stage whisper, ‘
Another
murder!’
    And Jones, the class clown, joined in with, ‘But this one wasn’t thrown off a roof!’
    After that they became more restless than ever.
    At length the bell rang, and the mutual torture being enjoyed by the boys and myself—if ‘enjoyed’ is quite the right