Death and the Maiden

Chapter Eighteen

‘“Nay, nay, she’s none drownded,” said Mr Tulliver. “You’ve been naughty to her, I doubt, Tom?”’

GEORGE ELIOT (The Mill on the Floss)

A MONTH later Mrs Bradley and Laura were in London, and the papers were in possession of a curious story. A naiad, it was reported, had been seen in the River Itchen not far from Winchester; this on the apparently unimpeachable evidence of three respectable citizens.

‘Crete!’ said Laura, handing Mrs Bradley the newspaper. ‘They must have gone back to Winchester to kill Arthur Preece-Harvard. We’d better get down there at once!’

‘Do you think so?’ Mrs Bradley enquired. ‘I am inclined to agree that the naiad must be Mrs Tidson. It seems a strange thing for her to have done. One would imagine that the last thing the Tidsons would want would be to attract attention to their presence in Winchester if they mean to kill Arthur Preece-Harvard.’

‘Well, the naiad has greenish hair. It says so here,’ said Laura. She stood behind Mrs Bradley’s chair and pointed to the description of the visitant. ‘Don’t you think we ought to go down and interview these people who say they saw her?’

‘No doubt your Mr Gavin will do that, but, if you want to hear their story at first-hand, why don’t you go alone to Winchester to see them? I can’t come with you just now.’

‘May I? Oh, good. I couldn’t—’ She glanced at Mrs Bradley’s day book, which was on the consulting-room table – ‘I suppose I couldn’t go to-day?’

‘Why not?’ Mrs Bradley comfortably replied. ‘I am called away to Hereford to see what Doctor Watson would call a noble bachelor, and there is no reason for you to stay here by yourself. Henri and Célestine can manage. Off you go, child. There’s a train in an hour. You might catch it.’

‘A jolly good thing Connie wouldn’t come and stay with us,’ said Laura, ‘or one of us would have had to take her along.’

‘She showed the natural repugnance to us,’ said Mrs Bradley, ‘for which I was prepared. I have warned Miss Carmody to keep a strict eye on her movements, but I confess that I should have felt a good deal easier in my mind if Connie had been under our jurisdiction for a bit. Still, it is always a difficult task to save people from themselves. So much so that I sometimes wonder whether the laws of Providence regard as a supremely immoral action any attempt to do it.’

‘Funny that Connie had so much to say about that job, and is still with Miss Carmody,’ said Laura. ‘I suppose you worked it.’

‘I don’t think Connie ever had a job,’ said Mrs Bradley, not for the first time.

The report on the naiad, by the time that Laura reached Winchester, had not received any additions. The creature had been seen twice, each time in the same stretch of water, once by two city councillors walking together, and once by a District Visitor who reported her at once to the police. Laura went out, accompanied by Gavin, to inspect that part of the Itchen in which she had been seen.

They took the now familiar path at the bottom of College Walk, passed through the white wicket-gate, and slackened their rate of walking as they rounded the grassy space where the river made its bend and the stream on the College side of the path ran straight and shallow beside them. They passed the College playing-fields, and the boggy meadows between the swift streams widened.

Thick cresses, darkly, succulently green, the water-mint, the purple loosestrife, seemed a fitting border to the grey-bright floods that were said to house the naiad. The lance-leaved, saw-toothed hemp agrimony, crowding its corymbs at the head of its three-foot stems, was dwarfed by the mighty hogweed, coarse and hairy. The handsome, purple-tinged angelica, with hollow stem, set off and did not diminish the water-level charm of the wild forget-me-not, still blooming at the end of its season. Dark crimson self-heal, square-stemmed, longlipped (the carpenter’s herb, the curative Prunella), reared above purple-edged bracts its dimorphic flowers.

‘Queer about Connie Carmody and the dog,’ said Gavin suddenly. ‘I keep on thinking about it.’

‘I suppose,’ began Laura; and then, urged by some instinct to protect her own sex from the enemy, she stopped short.

‘Go on,’ said Gavin encouragingly. ‘After all, we know who did the murders. But the dog is just a bit odd. Could Connie Carmody be bats, and is that why Mrs Bradley wanted to keep an eye on her and have her in her house for a bit?’

‘I don’t think it’s that,’ said Laura. ‘It was directly Connie had killed the dog, I think, that she gave up all idea of kidding us. She’d killed old Tidson by proxy, I suppose, and she could put up with him after that. Tidson got her worked up about Arthur, and that’s why she ran away from here. She brooded a good bit, and came back and slaughtered his dog.’

‘And then came over all regretful?’

‘No. Only all sick. She didn’t regret what she’d done.’

‘Not a dog-lover, you would say?’

‘No. Only a Tidson-hater, according to Mrs Croc.’

‘But why the dog in that particular spot?’

‘Oh, practice makes perfect, and that’s what Mrs Croc’s afraid of.’

‘I don’t get it.’ Gavin looked at her suspiciously.

‘Neither do I,’ said Laura lightly.

‘You don’t think the old lady is leading us up the garden, and that Connie killed those boys after all?’

‘Good Lord, of course I don’t!’

‘She could have used the same stone, you see, and that would account for the fact that we’ve found only one with prints on it,’ said Gavin.

‘Then what about the absence of prints in Mr Tidson’s room?’

‘I admit that’s a snag. And yet, you see, it’s such a pointer, too.’

‘The lesser of two evils, I expect. Or, at least, the lesser of two obvious risks.’

‘Yes. You know, Laura, this case annoys me a bit. He hasn’t really been so very intelligent, has he? And yet he’s held us up completely.’

‘Comes of having no accomplices, you know. You can get away with most things if you know how to keep your mouth shut and can pick the right time to perform.’

‘Crete must be in his confidence.’

‘Not entirely. They don’t get on too well. But partly, I think. She seems to act as the naiad when he wishes.’

‘In any case, she couldn’t give evidence against him, so I suppose it wouldn’t matter what she did – that is, from one point of view.’

‘It would matter if she gave other people ideas!’

‘What do you suppose is the idea behind this naiad business? Crete being the naiad, I mean.’

‘I don’t know, I’m sure.’ She chuckled. ‘It might be a different idea at different times, don’t you think? If I had to make a guess, I should say that this time it’s to blackleg old Tidson and give away his presence in the vicinity. I doubt whether Crete is a villain. I think she’s just an extravagant cat.’

‘Without much conscience, I should say.’

‘Well, that goes with extravagance.’

‘I don’t know that, of the two of them, I don’t dislike Crete a bit more than old Tidson himself.’

‘Of course you do! Outraged male vanity, because she won’t look at you!’ said Laura.

‘It may interest you to hear,’ said Gavin, ‘that I had some difficulty in getting her out of my hair in the early stages of our acquaintance. She found me handsome, manly and sunburnt, if you really want to know.’

Laura hooted rudely, and startled a gull which had come inland ahead of a gale which had not yet reached the coast.

‘Hush!’ said Gavin. ‘The next thing you’ll frighten is the naiad, and, if you do, we shan’t see her.’

‘I was the naiad myself once,’ said Laura.

‘So I’ve heard. What about a demonstration?’

‘After we’re married, with pleasure. It was quite fun.’

‘It must have been. Rather chilly fun, too, I should have thought. Anyway, here’s the stretch of the river where she’s supposed to have been seen most recently. Ought we to go to ground, and hide behind the willow trees, do you think?’

‘Whatever you say . . . You know, it wouldn’t be quite an impossibility, would it?’

‘What wouldn’t?’

‘To see her. In fact—’ Laura suddenly caught Gavin’s arm – ‘what’s that? See? Over by the reeds in that carrier.’

‘A swan.’

‘I don’t mean the swan. I mean whatever made the swan angry. There’s something or somebody there, and, what’s more, she’s seen us, I think.’

‘Well, we’re here to solve mysteries. Good thing I’ve brought my waders.’ Gavin seated himself and pulled on the thigh-high boots. ‘Here goes. Remember me to Mrs Bradley if I get pulled under and become a little merman or something, won’t you?’

Laura, who had no intention of being left out of any excitement which was being provided, promptly pulled off her shoes, put on a pair of plimsolls and unfastened her skirt. Under it she was wearing shorts. She had no stockings.

‘Stay where you are,’ said Gavin.

‘Rot,’ retorted Laura. ‘Don’t be an oaf.’

Her swain made no rejoinder, and together they entered the water. The stream flowed fast, and it was difficult work to get across it.

‘Hope nobody sees us who has fishing rights here,’ said Laura.

‘Police work,’ grunted Gavin. ‘Can’t help the trout at a time like this. Give me your hand and get a move on.’

‘Right. I’ll pull.’ This was not what Gavin had meant.

She started forward hastily, grabbed at his arm, and fell flat on her face. ‘Oh, Lord! That’s done it!’ she added, as she scrambled to her feet with Gavin’s assistance. ‘Hullo! Neptune’s trident or something!’ She came up holding a forked stick cut from a cherry tree. ‘That’s from no willow bush, cully!’

‘Why the deuce can’t you look what you’re doing?’ demanded her companion. ‘Whoever it was has had time to sheer off by now.’

‘I doubt it,’ said Laura, grimly, as she dropped the branch and scrambled up the opposite bank, her plimsolls slithering wildly on the mud. ‘I think there’s somebody here, and I’m pretty sure—’

She did not finish the sentence. The naked body of Crete Tidson was lying half in and half out of the water in the swiftly-rushing carrier. Her head was under. The two of them dragged her on to the herb-strewn grass, and laid her among the coarse flowers of the lush, late summer.

‘Prop open her mouth,’ said Laura. Gavin’s training had been as thorough as her own. They disposed Crete, glorious in all her pagan loveliness, and then, as the textbooks and not the legends had taught them, they knelt athwart her and took turns at indelicately pumping the river water out of her lungs.

‘Coming,’ said Gavin at last. ‘Hope I’m not bruising her ribs.’

‘So long as you don’t break them,’ said Laura, taking his place and spreading her wide, brown, strong-fingered hands on Crete’s white body. ‘Glad I don’t earn my living doing this!’

‘Don’t talk. It’s waste of strength,’ said Gavin briefly.

Both he and Laura, indeed, were almost exhausted by the time their patient was able to be wrapped up in Gavin’s jacket and placed with her back against a willow.

‘Clothes!’ said Laura. ‘You go.’

‘A car,’ said Gavin. ‘I told Soames to meet us at the bridge. I thought we might not want to walk back. He’ll have rugs and probably an overcoat. I’ll go and get him to help me carry her. You keep moving. Don’t worry about her. You’re soaking wet. I shan’t be long, but I don’t want a wife with pneumonia.’

‘Wife!’ said Laura with a shudder. ‘The one thing I always swore I’d never be. Oh, well, it hasn’t happened yet. All right, I’ll run about and keep warm.’

‘And, look, think this one over: don’t keep holding out on me about Connie. You’re not at your girls’ school now. Well, so long! See you soon!’

It so soon became evident that Crete either could not or would not give any circumstantial account of her dramatic reappearance in the neighbourhood that, at Mrs Bradley’s suggestion, sent by telegram from London (for she had not left for Hereford), Gavin gave up questioning her. He had elicited the statement that Crete had come without her husband, and without Miss Carmody’s knowledge, to have a last look for the naiad after what she had read in the papers, but Crete refused to say more.

‘Where is your husband?’ had been Gavin’s most persistent question. It was one of those which Crete did not answer.

‘I don’t know any more,’ she said. ‘It’s no use to ask me. I don’t know. And, anyway, what does it matter? I suppose I got cramp. I think I did. That’s all.’

Gavin had to leave it at that, and directed his energies to finding Mr Tidson. This did not prove at all difficult. He was back in Miss Carmody’s flat after having been on a short visit to Mrs Preece-Harvard. Arthur had gone to stay with a friend in Cheshire, and was not expected home for a week. Mr Tidson had stayed to lunch, and had heard the news about Crete on his return to London. He could give no information about his wife. She had left him in Alresford, and had said that she was going on to Winchester. He had seen her on to the bus. Apart from this, he knew nothing.

Mrs Preece-Harvard confirmed all this, including the facts that she and Mr Tidson had had lunch together and that he had been in her company until he left for Miss Carmody’s flat. In other words, if he had been suspected of trying to drown his wife, his alibi was perfect, for there seemed no reason why Mrs Preece-Harvard should lie. There was also no reason, as Gavin pointed out moodily to Laura, why Tidson should have wanted to drown his wife, or why she should have wanted to save him by her silence if he had.

‘Besides,’ said Gavin, ‘we should have seen that something was up. He couldn’t have got away. We were right on the spot.’

‘But that’s just what’s so extraordinary,’ said Laura.

‘What is?’

‘That we got there in time to save her. It couldn’t be just coincidence. She’s playing some game.’

‘She’s got me licked if she is. There’s not much doubt she was pretty well finished when we found her.’

‘Yes, I know. But she’s clever, is Crete Tidson. Artistic, too, I expect, and pretty unscrupulous. She wouldn’t spoil the ship for a ha’porth of tar.’

‘She’s got generous ideas of a ha’porth, then,’ said Gavin.

‘Granted. We agreed she’s extravagant.’

Their eyes met like swords flickering, and then they began to laugh.

‘Well, I’m not extravagant,’ added Laura.