Editing Have His Carcase (section)

==Plot==
During a hiking holiday on the South West coast of England, the detective novelist Harriet Vane discovers the body of a man lying on an isolated rock on the shore, not far from the resort of Wilvercombe; his throat has been cut. Harriet takes photographs and collects the razor used in the death, and other personal items. The man's blood is still liquid, from which it is concluded that he had died shortly before she arrived. There are no footprints in the sand other than hers and those of the victim. Unfortunately, the corpse is washed away by the rising tide before she can summon help.

Alerted to the discovery by a friend, Lord Peter Wimsey arrives, and he and Harriet start their investigations. The victim is identified as Paul Alexis, a young man of Russian extraction, employed by a Wilvercombe hotel as a professional dancing partner. The police tend to the view that Alexis' death was suicide and that he had cut his own throat.

Alexis had been engaged to a rich widow in her fifties, Mrs Weldon. Her son, Henry Weldon, ten years older than his mother's lover and by all appearances a simple and brutish man, is appalled at the prospect of his mother's remarriage to a [[gigolo]], and at his potential loss of inheritance. He travels to Wilvercombe to monitor the investigation while ostensibly comforting his mother after her loss. Weldon appears to be a likely murder suspect, but he has an unshakeable alibi for the time of Alexis' death – as do a large number of other possible suspects.

Staged to look like suicide, Alexis' death is gradually revealed to be the result of an ingenious murder plot that played upon Alexis' fantasies. Wimsey and Harriet discover that in the period leading up to his death Alexis, an avid reader of [[Ruritanian romance]]s, had believed himself to be a descendant of Tsar [[Nicholas I of Russia]]. A series of cipher letters received from an unknown source convinced him that he was being called to return to Russia to take his place as the new rightful Tsar.

He had been lured to the rock by his anonymous correspondent who urged him to be ready to meet a "Rider from the Sea", a rider who it was said would be carrying instructions for his onward journey to Warsaw.  Once at the rock, Alexis met his death at the hand of the murderer who had ridden his horse along the beach through the incoming tide to avoid leaving tracks.

Wimsey and Harriet ultimately realise that Weldon is not the simple character he has been presenting, but a criminal who has been living under two different identities. Weldon was himself the rider, and had been provided with his alibi by two co-conspirators, a friend and his wife. Although his alibi was secure for the believed time of death, the investigators discover that Alexis had died far earlier than had been thought; he had suffered from the blood-clotting disorder [[haemophilia]] (a disorder known to have affected the Russian royal family), resulting in his blood remaining liquid for much longer than would normally be expected.

Weldon and his co-conspirators are undone by their unsuccessful attempts to reshuffle their alibis to match the new information about the time of death — and by proof of their actual friendship. 

Even as Wimsey and Harriet solve the case, Mrs Weldon has already moved on to another gigolo at the hotel, a sympathetic French dancer named Antoine.