Five Red Herrings Read Online Free PDF

here, there’s just one possibility. It may have rolled down into the water. For God’s sake get your people together and hunt for it — now. Don’t lose a minute.’
    Dalziel gazed at this excitable Southerner in some astonishment, and the constable pushed back his cap and scratched his head.
    ‘What would we be lookin’ for?’ he demanded, reasonably.
    (Here Lord Peter Wimsey told the Sergeant what he was to look for and why, but as the intelligent reader will readily supply these details for himself, they are omitted from this page.)
    ‘It’ll be important, then, to your way o’ thinking,’ said Dalziel, with the air of a man hopefully catching, through a forest of obscurity, the first, far-off glimmer of the obvious.
    ‘Important?’ said Wimsey. ‘Of course it’s important. Incredibly, urgently, desperately important. Do you think I should be sliding all over your infernal granite making a blasted pincushion of myself if it wasn’t important?’
    This argument seemed to impress the Sergeant. He called his forces together and set them to search the path, the bank and the burn for the missing object. Wimsey, meanwhile, strolled over to a shabby old four-seater Morris, which stood drawn well up on the grass at the beginning of the sheep-track.
    ‘Ay,’ said Constable Ross, straightening his back and sucking his fingers, preliminary to a further hunt among the prickles, ‘yon’s his car. Maybe ye’ll find what ye’re wantin’ in it, after all.’
    ‘Don’t you believe it, laddie,’ said Wimsey. Nevertheless, he subjected the car to a careful scrutiny, concentrated for the most part upon the tonneau. A tarry smear on the back cushions seemed to interest him particularly. He examined it carefully with a lens, whistling gently the while. Then he searched further and discovered another on the edge of the body, close to the angle behind the driver’s seat. On the floor of the car lay a rug, folded up. He shook it out and looked it over from corner to corner. Another patch of grit and tar rewarded him.
    Wimsey pulled out a pipe and lit it thoughtfully. Then he hunted in the pockets of the car till he found an ordnance map of the district. He climbed into the driver’s seat, spread out the map on the wheel, and plunged into meditation.
    Presently the Sergeant came back, very hot and red in the face, in his shirt-sleeves.
    ‘We’ve searched high and low,’ he said, stooping to wring the water from his trouser-legs, ‘but we canna find it. Maybe ye’ll be tellin’ us now why the thing is so important.’
    ‘Oh?’ said Wimsey. ‘You look rather warm, Dalziel. I’ve cooled off nicely, sitting here. It’s not there, then?’
    ‘It is not,’ said the Sergeant, with emphasis.
    ‘In that case,’ said Wimsey, ‘you had better go to the coroner — no, of course, you don’t keep coroners in these parts. The Procurator-Fiscal is the lad. You’d better go to the Fiscal and tell him the man’s been murdered.’
    ‘Murdered?’ said the Sergeant.
    ‘Yes,’ said Wimsey, ‘och, ay; likewise hoots! Murrrderrrd is the word.’
    ‘Eh!’ said the Sergeant. ‘Here, Ross!’
    The constable came up to them at a slow gallop.
    ‘Here’s his lordship,’ said the Sergeant, ‘is of opeenion the man’s been murdered.’
    ‘Is he indeed?’ said Ross. ‘Ay, imph’m. And what should bring his lordship to that conclusion?’
    ‘The rigidity of the corpse,’ said Wimsey, ‘the fact that you can’t find what you’re looking for, these smears of tar on the Morris, and the character of the deceased. He was a man anybody might have felt proud to murder.’
    ‘The rigidity of the corpse, now,’ said Dalziel. ‘That’ll be a matter for Dr. Cameron.’
    ‘I confess,’ said the doctor, who had now joined them, ‘that has been puzzling me. If the man had not been seen alive just after 10 o’clock this morning, I would have said he had been nearer twelve hours dead.’
    ‘So should I,’ said Wimsey. ‘On the other hand, you’ll notice that that painting, which was put on with a quick-drying