A Dangerous Deceit by Marjorie Eccles

hope – and he didn’t want her to think he had objectionable habits, not if she was ever to become Mrs Joe Gilmour.
    â€˜And what?’ Reardon repeated, trying to push his chair back a few inches in order to be able to stretch his long legs. There was barely room for anyone other than the occupant of the big desk that had been wedged into the cramped space found for the temporary DI, never mind Joe’s equally solid frame. But Reardon had shown tact in not asking to take over the office of the absent Waterhouse.
    Joe frowned. ‘I don’t know. Stands to reason if you fall head first into a heap of sand and you get it in your mouth and eyes, you find it hard to breathe. But you’d try to get up, wouldn’t you, or at any rate roll over to get your face out of the sand? You wouldn’t just lie there until you died.’
    Reardon was looking over the flash photographs taken at the scene. The victim was lying on his back and the depression where he’d fallen before being turned over was clear. ‘Not unless you were stunned by the fall,’ he said, and added as Joe shook his head, ‘Damp sand can be pretty unyielding. Or if you’d fainted, say, or lost consciousness – there was that wound on his temple, don’t forget – and that was why you fell in the first place.’
    â€˜How many healthy men do that?’ Joe protested. ‘Just faint, I mean. There was no sign he
wasn’t
healthy, though he was overweight and soon out of puff, according to the foreman, and the Path blokes have agreed with Dr Dysart that the cut on the side of his head was superficial, not much more than a graze, and anyway it wasn’t recent and couldn’t have anything to do with his death. There was no sign of a struggle, no handprints or anything to show he’d tried to lever himself up.’
    â€˜Hmm. Didn’t the woman in his office, Eileen Gerrity, seem to think he could have had a stroke, or a heart attack?’
    â€˜Yes, but they say no to that as well. Anyway, there’s something else – if you read the report further, sir, you’ll see there’s a bruise on the back of his neck, right at the base, that can’t be accounted for.’
    â€˜A rabbit punch?’
    â€˜Not that sort of bruise. It’s possible he could have been held down with something heavy.’ He paused. ‘A foot? After he fell – or was pushed.’
    Reardon considered. Twirling his fountain pen between his fingers, he gazed at the map of Folbury and its environs that he’d already managed to dredge up from somewhere and pinned to the wall. His chair was sideways to the window, which faced a brick wall only feet away, and the hideous scars on his left profile were reflected in the glass. Some people found it embarrassing to look Reardon in the face; disrespectful young PCs had been overheard bandying nicknames for the ugly-faced detective inspector when he’d arrived – until they encountered the baleful glance of Sergeant Gilmour, who knew they were honourable scars, acquired during the late war. Joe knew himself to be lucky, as they were, to have escaped the trenches. He’d been conscripted but done no more than his basic training before the Armistice was declared and he’d been sent home. But Reardon’s scars didn’t seem to bother the man himself, or if they did he concealed it, and the more you got to know him, the less you noticed them.
    â€˜Besides,’ Joe continued, ‘there’s the matter of the key to the foundry. That’s a puzzle.’ He explained that Stanley Dowson, the foreman, had told them the foundry door was locked when he went in, but there’d been no door key on Aston’s person, and despite a search, it hadn’t turned up anywhere else.
    â€˜How many keys are there?’
    â€˜Just two it seems, one that’s kept in the office next door, and Aston’s own.’
    â€˜Is it