Jack on the Gallows Tree Read Online Free PDF

the quarry, John. What else was found?”
    â€œEvidence that the body had been dragged from the car to where it was lying. The clothes would have told us this in any case, but the research boys have been over the ground and say there’s no doubt of it.”
    â€œAny trace of the car itself?”
    â€œNone. It must have stood clear of the verge.”
    â€œNo one see it?”
    â€œWe’ve had no report of anything of the kind. We’ve had no help at all. Even the medical evidence is vague. Our man is very chary of giving the exact time of death. He says, and I daresay he’s right, that nine times out of ten that’s a lot of nonsense and no doctor can tell to an hour, let alone less. It depends on a thousand factors—temperature of the air, state of the murdered person and so on. Beyond saying that he thought Miss Carew had been dead longer than Mrs Westmacott he wouldn’t for a long time commit himself. But in the end he agreed that Miss Carew was probably killed in the early part of the evening, before ten he conjectures, and Mrs Westmacott towards midnight. But he will not give evidence of that on oath, he says. It’s just his feeling on the subject.”
    â€œFair enough. I’d rather have that than one of those doctors who look at a cadaver for a moment then say it has been dead for precisely eighteen and a half hours. Wouldn’t you?”
    â€œYes. It’s more honest. But his information doesn’t helpus much. He is quite convinced, however, that both the women were strangled with something soft like a silk scarf, probably drawn tight from behind.”
    â€œIt’s the most usual method, isn’t it? What information have you about the murder of Mrs Westmacott?”
    â€œThere’s even less to tell you. She was a large woman, older than Sophia Carew but upstanding still. Rather imposing, in a way. She was found in a little sitting-room she used in the evening and there must have been a big fire in the grate till quite late that night, because the embers were still hot in the morning.”
    â€œWho found her?”
    â€œMrs Bickley. She came across as usual at eight o’clock and found the corpse before she had been up to the bedroom. She describes Mrs Westmacott as looking ‘horror-struck’. She cannot understand why she was not summoned on the previous evening, since there is a telephone communicating with the Bickleys’ rooms across the yard.”
    â€œAny signs of a struggle?”
    â€œNone. It would seem that the woman was already sitting on the settee on which her body was found. The murderer probably gave some excuse for passing round the back of it and neatly strangled her before she could raise any alarm.”
    â€œNo fingerprints, of course?”
    â€œNone, needless to say, of anybody except the household. The days when murderers obligingly signed their masterpieces are over, Carolus. There was, however, one rather curious thing found in the room which neither the Bickleys nor any member of the Westmacott family admits seeing before. It looks like something off a Christmas tree. It’s a thin wire with a number of those sparkling things you have for the kids at Christmas. The wire is about a foot long and has been wound round these things at about two inch intervals.”
    â€œThere are six of them then?”
    â€œSeven, actually. But it hadn’t been used to strangle theold woman or anything like that. The sparklets or whatever you call them were quite intact. Besides she, like Sophia Carew, had been strangled with something soft.”
    â€œWhere was it found?”
    â€œOn a little table behind the settee.”
    â€œAnything else?”
    â€œNo. I don’t think so.”
    â€œWhat about Sophia Carew’s car?”
    â€œIt was in the car-park of the Granodeon Cinema. The attendant there went off duty at nine and is almost sure it wasn’t there when he left. There were no