Last Respects

Murder at Ebb Tide

“Found drowned, my foot,” said the pathologist two minutes after looking at the body. The unidentified young man pulled from the salt water near the little fishing village of Edsway hadn’t drowned after all. And he hadn’t been a bather either, observed Detective Inspector C. D. Sloan. One simply didn’t go swimming in a shirt and trousers. Not voluntarily, that is. And then there was the matter of the mysterious copper weight stuffed in the dead man’s pocket…and the sunken ship discovered offshore. It all added up to murder as Inspector Sloan set out in a dinghy to net the killer before he got the chance to send another victim to a watery grave.

“Aird is a quiet, careful writer who gives readers a fine taste of life in the English countryside.”

—Chicago Sunday Times

The Very Best of Catherine Aird

Henrietta Who?

His Burial Too

A Late Phoenix

A Most Contagious Game

Passing Strange

The Religious Body

Slight Mourning

Some Die Eloquent

Stately Home Murder

Parting Breath

Acknowledgment

Michael Burnham, ship scientist

Ma plume pour toutes mes tantes.

1

Suspicion does not become a friend.

The man wasn’t alive and well and living in Paris.

He wasn’t living in the county of Calleshire, England, either.

And he certainly wasn’t alive and well. Actually he wasn’t living anywhere. He was dead. Obviously dead.

Horace Boiler was so sure about that that he didn’t hurry after he had seen him. Not that Horace Boiler was the hurrying sort. In addition to which he was out fishing at the time and fishermen never hurry. It was a universal truth. You couldn’t catch fish if you hurried. The fish didn’t like it: they stopped feeding at once. Like primitive man, fish equated hurry with danger and either kept their heads down or made off. In Horace Boiler’s considered opinion civilised man had a lot to learn about hurrying.

As it happened Boiler hadn’t so much seen the dead man at first as just caught a quick glimpse of something out of the ordinary in the water. It took his brain a moment or two to sort out the message from his eye: that that which was floating beyond the bow of his boat and just out of range of easy vision could be a body. He wedged his fishing rod so that he had a spare hand and reached for one of the oars. He gave it a purposive poke and the rowing boat obediently came round so that he was a little nearer to what was in the water.

It was after that that he had ceased to be in any real doubt about what it was he was looking at. The body was floating just under the surface of the water in the way that bodies did, arms outstretched. It was apparently moving. Horace Boiler was not deceived. It was, he knew at once, totally lifeless. The illusion of movement came from the water, not from the man. It was one of the tricks—the many tricks—that water played. The angle of refraction came into it, too.. Boiler didn’t know anything about angles of refraction but he did know a lot about the tricks that water could play.

This man had been dead for quite a while. He knew that, too, at once. That conclusion was not reached as a result of a long acquaintance with dead bodies—although Horace Boiler had seen some of those in his time too—but from something indefinable about the appearance of the body even at a distance.

If you were to ask him, his considered opinion would be that it had been in the water a fair old time.

There was, of course, no one about to ask him that—or anything else. It was precisely because there was no one about that Horace Boiler had chosen to come out fishing today. You couldn’t catch fish when the water wasn’t quiet. He looked about him now. There wasn’t even one other boat in sight let alone within hailing distance. That was because it was a Tuesday. Now if it had been a weekend he would hardly have been able to get his boat out into the main channel of the river for yachts and sailing dinghies.

It was this indefinable sense that this particular body had been in the water for more than a little while that made Horace Boiler dismiss the idea of taking it in tow.

Well, that—and something else as well…

The Boiler family had been around in Calleshire for a long time. Not quite in the same well-documented way that His Grace the Duke of Calleshire had been at Calle Castle but for pretty nearly the same length of time. There had certainly been Boilers living in the little fishing village of Edsway on the estuary of the River Calle for as long as anyone had bothered to look. Those who looked didn’t include the Boilers. They had better things to do than go searching through old parish records—things, like building boats, running ferries, making sails, digging for bait at low tide…

The tide still mattered in Edsway. Once upon a time—in the dim past when all boats had had a shallow draught—Edsway had been the only port on the estuary. It was always something of a natural harbour, sheltered by a lip of headland from the worst of the storms coming in from the sea—the village of Marby juxta Mare took the brunt of those—but there had never been really deep water at Edsway and now—thanks to the sand—there was less.

Its commercial fate had been sealed in the nineteenth century when some distant railway baron had decreed that Mr. Stephenson’s newfangled iron road should go from Calleford to the river mouth and thus to the sea on the other—the north side—of the river. That was when Kinnisport had come into prominence and Edsway fallen into desuetude. In the wake of thé railway had come another entrepreneur who had caused a proper deep water harbour to be built at Kinnisport out of great blocks of granite shipped down by sea from Aberdeen—and Edsway had dropped out of the prosperity race altogether.

But only for the time being.

Every dog did have its day.

Now it was Kinnisport that was in decline while Edsway was enjoying a twentieth-century revival as a sailing centre. The firm sand that had choked its life as a commercial harbour provided an excellent basis for the hardstanding that the little boats needed and some safe swimming for their owners’ families.

The dead man hadn’t been a bather.

You didn’t go swimming in a shirt and trousers. Not voluntarily, that is.

Horace Boiler took another look at the man floating in the water. He might have been a seaman, he might not. The Calleshire shore got its share of those drowned on the high seas and the village of Edsway got more than its quota of them. It had something to do with the configuration of the coast and the way in which the tide came up the estuary to meet the River Calle coming down to the sea.

Bodies usually fetched up on the spit of land known locally as Billy’s Finger. This stretched out into the water and—so the experts said—each year got a little shallower on the seaward side and a little deeper on the river side. The river scoured away from behind what the sea laid up at its front. The ancients used to say that Billy’s Finger moved, that it beckoned mariners to their doom. The moderns—the clever ones who knew everything because a computer had worked it out for them—had said, rather surprised, that the ancients were right after all. Billy’s Finger did move. It moved about an inch every hundred years, a little more at the very tip.

Horace Boiler took a bearing from the spire of St. Peter’s Church and reckoned that this fellow, whoever he was, had for once somehow escaped the beckonings of Billy’s Finger. And he had done that in spite of its being the season of neap tides. Boiler wasn’t too bothered about that. These days it didn’t make any difference exactly whereabouts a dead body found landfall. He would still—unless claimed by sorrowing relatives—end up buried in St. Peter’s churchyard at Edsway. There he—whoever he was—would lie in the goodly company of all those other unknown men who had been washed up by the sea.

Some had unmarked graves and some had those that were dignified by tombstones. There was a melancholy row betokening a remote naval engagement far out to sea in 1917. All those memorials bore the same inscription “A Sailor of the Great War—Known unto God.” They hadn’t even heard the distant thunder of the guns in Edsway but the men had come ashore.

In the end.

It hadn’t always been like that.

Once upon a time when drowned men had been washed ashore on Billy’s Finger the men of Edsway had seen to it that they weren’t found and brought to land for burial in St. Peter’s churchyard. They had, in feet, taken very good care that they weren’t. Some antiquarian who had taken an interest in the estuary’s local history had once told Horace Boiler all about it.

The villagers in those days had felt that they had a big enough Poor Rate to cope with as it was without taking on the cost—as a charge upon it—of burying unknown seamen. What they used to do in olden times, this antiquarian had told an impassive Horace Boiler, was to wait for nightfall and then drag the body over from the seaward aspect of the strand and lower it into the deep water the other side of Billy’s Finger.

The combination of sea and river—tide and current—saw to it then that the next landfall of the dead body was in the neighbouring parish of Collerton. And thus it became a charge on their Poor Rate instead.

Horace Boiler had listened unblinkingly to this recital, saying, “Well, I never!” at suitable intervals, as he knew you had to do with this manner of man. Privately he had considered it an excellent way of keeping the rates down and hadn’t doubted that there would have been Boilers in the clandestine nonburial party.

“The Overseers of the Poor doubtless turned a blind eye,” said the antiquarian. He prided himself on having what he thought was a good knowledge of the seamy side of human nature. That went with a study of the past.

“I daresay,” said Horace Boiler, whose own knowledge went a little deeper, “that they were glad to have it done.”

“Well, yes, but the law was…”

Horace Boiler had only listened with half an ear at the time. The letter of the law wasn’t one of his yardsticks. Besides he himself had found the careful study of the official mind a more rewarding business than history.

“They’d be more at home in Collerton churchyard anyway,” he had said to the antiquarian, who by then was beginning to come between Horace and the job he happened to have on hand at the time.

“Pardon?” The antiquarian had known a lot but he hadn’t known everything.

“The north-west corner of Collerton churchyard floods every time the river rises,” Horace had taken pleasure in informing him. “Didn’t you know that?”

What Horace Boiler was thinking about now, out on the water and with an actual body in view, wasn’t exactly the same as pushing a financial liability into the next parish but it came very near to it. What he was considering was the best move to make next—the best move from the point of view of Horace Boiler, citizen and occasional taxpayer, that is.

He steadied the oars in the rowlocks and considered the state of the tide. He was always conscious of it but particularly when he was out on the water. It wasn’t far off the turn and he certainly wasn’t going to row a body back to Edsway against the tide. The reasoning sped glibly through his mind as he took enough bearings to mark the spot in the water where the body was floating. Already he heard himself saying, “I couldn’t lift it aboard myself, of course, Mr. Ridgeford. Not on my own like. I couldn’t tow it back either. Not against the tide… not without help. I’m not as young as I used to be, you know…”

Half an hour later he was using just those very words to Police Constable Ridgeford. Brian Ridgeford was young enough to be Horace Boiler’s son but Horace still deemed it politic to call him “Mister.” This approach was one of the fruits of his study of the ways of the official mind.

“Dead, you said?” checked Constable Ridgeford, reaching for his telephone.

“Definitely dead,” said Horace. He’d taken off his cap when he stepped into the constable’s little office and he stood there now with it dangling from his hand as if he were already a mourner.

“How did you know it was a man?” asked Ridgeford.

The question didn’t trouble Horace Boiler. “Floating on its back,” he said.

“I’ll have to report it to Headquarters,” said Ridgeford importantly, beginning to dial. A body made a change from dealing with old Miss Finch, who—difficult and dogmatic—insisted that there were Unidentified Flying Objects on the headland behind Marby.

“That’s right,” said Horace.

Ridgeford frowned. “There may be someone missing.”

“So there may.”

“Not that I’ve heard of anyone.” The constable pulled a pile of reports on his desk forward and started thumbing through them with one hand while he held the telephone in the other.

“Nor me,” said Horace at once. It had been one of the factors that had weighed with him when he decided not to bring the body in. It hadn’t been someone local or he would have heard. “But then…”

Ridgeford’s attitude suddenly changed. He stiffened and almost came to attention. “Is that F Division Headquarters at Berebury? This is Constable Ridgeford from Edsway reporting…”

Horace Boiler waited patiently for the outcome.

A minute or two later he heard Ridgeford say, “Just a moment, sir, and I’ll ask the fisherman who reported it. He’ll know.” The young constable covered the mouthpiece of the telephone with his free hand and said to Horace, “Where will that body fetch up if it’s left in the water?”

Boiler screwed up his face and thought quickly. “Hard to say exactly, Mr. Ridgeford. Most probably,” he improvised, “under the cliffs over on the Kinnisport side of the estuary.” He waved an arm. “You know, where the rocks stick out into the water. Not,” he added, “for a couple of days, mind you.”

He stepped back, well pleased with himself. What he had just said to the policeman was a complete fabrication from start to finish. Left to itself the body of the dead man might continue on its course up river to Collerton for the length of a tide or two but then either the change in the tide or the river current would pick it up and bring it back downstream again. Then the timeless eddies of the sea would lay it up on Billy’s Finger as they had always done since time began.

Constable Ridgeford, though, did not know this. He was young, he was new in Edsway and, most importantly of all, he was from the town. In towns water came in pipes.

“H’m,” he said. “You’re sure about that, are you?”

“Certain,” said Boiler, although the rocks under the cliff near Cranberry Point were a long way from where he had last seen the dead man. They just happened to be the most inaccessible and inconvenient place on the coast from which to attempt to recover a body that Horace could think of on the spur of the moment.

“They’d have to take it up the cliff-face on a cradle from there, wouldn’t they?” said Ridgeford, frowning.

“Oh, yes,” said Boiler at once. “You’d never get a recovery boat to land on those rocks. Too dangerous. Mind you,” he added craftily, “the coastguards up top would probably spot it for you easily enough.”

“Er—yes, of course,” said Ridgeford.

Horace Boiler said nothing but he knew he’d played a trump card. Another of the fruits of his study of the official mind was the sure and certain knowledge that owners of them did not relish cooperation with other official services. Over the years the playing off of one department against another had become a high art with the wily old fisherman.

Ridgeford turned back to the telephone and had further speech with his superior. That officer must have put another question to him because once again Ridgeford covered the mouthpiece. “You marked the spot with a buoy, didn’t you?”

“Sorry, Mr. Ridgeford, ” lied Horace fluently, “I didn’t happen to have one with me. I was just out to catch something for my tea, that’s all.”

There were six orange marker buoys in the locker of Horace’s rowing boat. He would have to make quite sure that the constable didn’t see them.

“I took proper bearings though, Mr. Ridgeford,” said Boiler.

“You mean you could take me out there?”

“If my son came too,” said Horace cunningly. “I reckon we could get him aboard and back to dry land, whoever he is, in no time at all.”

“I’ll meet you on the slipway in twenty minutes,” said the constable briskly.

“Right you are, Mr. Ridgeford.” Horace replaced his cap and turned to go.

“And,” the policeman added drily, “I’ll bring my own rope just in case you were thinking we ought to get a new one from Hopton’s.”

Hopton’s was the ship’s-chandler on Shore Street, It was the store where the myriad of small boat owners bought the necessities of weekend sailing. Mrs. Hopton had been a Boiler before she married.

“Just as you say, Mr. Ridgeford,” said Horace. He felt no rancour: on the contrary. Like Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s hero Ivan Denisovich, he was a great one for counting his blessings. As a little later he settled his oars comfortably in the rowlocks while his son pushed the boat off from the slipway, he even felt a certain amount of satisfaction. There would be a fee to come from Her Majesty’s Coroner for the County of Calleshire for assisting in the recovery of the drowned man and that fee would only have to be shared within the family.

Police Constable Brian Ridgeford settled himself in the bow and looked steadily forward, his thoughts following a different tack. He wasn’t a fool and he hadn’t been in Edsway long, but long enough to learn some of the little ways of the Boiler tribe. He had not been entirely deceived by Horace’s manoeuvres either. He had been well aware, too, that when he, Brian Ridgeford, had dropped in on Ted Boiler, carpenter and undertaker for all the villages roundabout, on his way to the slipway, to warn him that there might be a body for him to convey to the mortuary in Berebury, this fact was not news to Ted Boiler. It had been immediately apparent to the police constable that Horace had wasted no time in alerting Ted, who was Horace’s cousin. Naturally Ted had not said anything to the policeman about this. While Horace was cunning, Ted was sly and he’d just promised to keep an eye open for the return of their boat and to be ready and waiting by the shore when they got back.

The two Boilers pulled steadily on their oars while Horace did some calculations about tide flow.

“Be about an hour and a bit since I left him, wouldn’t it, Mr. Ridgeford?” he said.

“If you came straight to me,” said the constable.

Boiler turned his head to take a bearing from the spire of St. Peter’s Church and another from the chimneys of Collerton House. “A bit farther,” he said.

Both oarsmen bent to their task, while Constable Ridgeford scanned the water ahead.

Presently Horace turned his head again, this time to take in the state of the tide by looking across at the saltings. They were invisible at high water. Birds on them betokened low tide. “Turn her up river a bit more,” he commanded.

Once they reached what Horace Boiler thought was the right place the drowned man took surprisingly little time to locate. Brian Ridgeford spotted him first and the three men got him aboard without too much of a struggle. The victim of the water wasn’t a big man. He had had dark hair and might have been any age at all. That was really all that Brian Ridgeford noted before he helped Horace cover him first with a black plastic bag and then with the tarpaulin that was doing duty as a temporary winding sheet.

Once on dry land and safely in the official care of the Calleshire Constabulary—although still with a member of the Boiler family ready to put his thumb on a fee—the body made greater speed. Ted Boiler and his undertaker’s van soon set off towards Billing Bridge and Berebury. Strictly speaking it was Billing Bridge that marked the end of the estuary. Some medieval men had earned merit by building churches: if you couldn’t build a church, then you built a bridge. Cornelius Billing had bought his way into the history and topography of the county of Calleshire in 1484 by building a bridge over the River Calle at the farthest point down river that it had been possible to build a bridge in 1484.

Ted Boiler slowed his vehicle down as he bumped his way over it in a primitive tribute to his passenger, who was far beyond feeling anything at all, while Constable Ridgeford walked back to his own house, beginning to draft in his mind the details of his report. He wondered idly which day the coroner would nominate for the inquest…

Just as some men liked to toy with a chess problem so Police Constable Brian Ridgeford passed his walk considering whether he could summon a jury in Edsway—should the coroner want to sit with one, that is—without calling upon a single member of the vast Boiler family to serve on it. Like countering one of the rarer chess gambits it would be difficult but he reckoned that it could be done.

Ted Boiler’s hearse duly delivered the unknown man to the mortuary presided over by Dr. Dabbe, Consultant Pathologist to the Berebury District Hospital Group. Such minimal paperwork that the body had so far acquired on its short journey from sea to land and from coast to town accompanied it and said briefly, “Found drowned.”

“Found drowned, my foot,” said the pathologist two minutes after looking at the body.

2

The company are met.

« ^ »

Found drowned, his foot,” repeated Police Superintendent Leeyes not very long afterwards.

As soon as the pathologist’s message had come through to Berebury Police Station he had summoned Detective Inspector C. D. Sloan to his office. Inspector Sloan—known as Christopher Dennis to his nearest and dearest—was for obvious reasons called “Seedy” by his friends. He was the head of Berebury’s Criminal Investigation Department. It was a tiny department but such crime as there was in that corner of Calleshire usually landed up in Detective Inspector Sloan’s lap.

In any case—in every case, you might say—Superintendent Leeyes always saw to it that nothing stayed on his own desk that could be delegated to someone else’s. That desk was usually Sloan’s.

“Found in water, though?” advanced Sloan, who was well versed in his superior officer’s little ways. He was a great one for passing the buck, was the superintendent.

Downwards.

Detective Inspector Sloan could never remember a problem being referred to a higher level—in their case the Headquarters of the County Constabulary at Calleford—if Superintendent Leeyes could possibly help it. Sloan was, though, well aware of—indeed, would never forget—some of those problems that the superintendent had in the past directed downwards to his own desk. A body found in water but not drowned sounded as if it might very well be another of the unforgettables.

“Brought in from the estuary,” expanded Leeyes. “Someone reported it to Constable Ridgeford.”

Sloan nodded. “Our man in Edsway.”

“He’s young,” added the superintendent by way of extra identification.

Sloan nodded again. He wasn’t talking about the body. Sloan knew that. The superintendent had meant the constable.

“Very young.” The superintendent at the same time contrived to make youth sound like an indictment.

Sloan nodded his head in acknowledgement of this observation too. He even toyed with the idea of saying that they had all been young once—including the chief constable—but he decided against it. Medical students, he knew, when certain specific diseases were being taught, were always reminded that the admiral had once been a midshipman; the bishop, a curate… Anyway it was quite true that constables did seem to come in two sizes. Young and untried was one of them. Old and cunning was another. The trouble was that the first group had seen nothing and that the second lot—the oldies—had seen it all. The latter tended to be world-weary about everything except their own lack of promotion. On this subject, though, they were apt to wax very eloquent indeed…

“And,” carried on Leeyes, “I don’t know how much of a greenhorn Ridgeford is.”

The only exception to the rule about old and disgruntled constables that Sloan knew was Constable Mason. He must be about due for retirement now—he’d been stationed over at Great Rooden for as long as anyone could remember. The trouble with Constable Mason from the hierarchy’s point of view was that he had steadily declined promotion over the years. More heretical still, he had continually declared himself very well content widi his lot.

“I don’t,” said Leeyes grumpily, “want to find out the hard way about Ridgeford.”

“No, sir,” said Sloan, his mind’still on Mason. The bizarre attitude of that constable to his career prospects had greatly troubled Superintendent Leeyes. If the donkey does not want the carrot there is only the stick left—and there has to be a good reason for using that. Consequently a puzzled Police Superintendent Leeyes had always watched the crime rate out at Great Rooden with exceedingly close attention. Mason, however, was as good as any Mountie in getting his man. This, he said modestly, was because he had a head start when there was villainy about. He not only usually knew who had committed the crime but where to lay his hands on the culprit as well…

“Besides,” complained Leeyes, “you’ve got to put the young men somewhere.”

“Yes, sir,” Sloan heartily agreed with that. “And some of them have got to go out into the country.”

“As long as they don’t take to growing cabbages,” said Leeyes. Constable Mason—old Constable Mason—insisted that he liked living in the country. That was another of the things that had bothered the urban Superintendent Leeyes. Another was that there really seemed to be no crime to speak of in Great Rooden anyway. The superintendent had put the most sinister construction possible on the situation but three anti-corruption specialists—heavily disguised as government auditors—had failed to find Mason collaborating improperly with anyone.

“We can’t,” growled Superintendent Leeyes, his mind on Constable Ridgeford of Edsway, “keep them all here in Berebury tied to our apron strings, can we?”

“We can’t keep an eye on them all the time even if we do,” said Detective Inspector Sloan, who had ideas of his own about the “being thrown in the deep end” approach. “Besides, we’re not wet nurses.”

That had been a Freudian slip on Sloan’s part and he regretted it at once.

“This body,” said Leeyes on the instant, “was picked up in the water between Collerton and Edsway.” He moved over from his desk to a vast map of the county of Calleshire which was fixed to the wall of his office. It clearly showed the estuary of the River Calle from Billing Bridge westwards down to the sea with Kinnisport standing sentinel on the north shore and Edsway sheltering under the headland on the southern edge, with the village of Marby juxta Mare over on the seacoast to the south-west. It was a contour map and the headland between Edsway and Marby called the Cat’s Back showed up well.

The limits of F Division were heavily outlined in thick black pencil. Each time that he saw it Detective Inspector Sloan was reminded of the ground plan of a medieval fortress. Superintendent Leeyes added to the illusion by presiding over his territory with much the same outlook as a feudal baron.

He put his thumb on the map now. “They found it about here, upstream from Edsway.”

“And downstream from Collerton.” Detective Inspector Sloan made a note. “Is there anyone missing from hereabouts? I haven’t heard of…”

“I’ve got someone pulling a list now,” said Leeyes briskly, “and I’ve been on to the coastguards.”

Sloan lifted his eyes towards the point on the map where the stretch of cliff beyond Kinnisport showed. “Ah, yes,” he murmured, “they might know something, mightn’t they?”

It was the wrong thing to say.

“It all depends on how wide awake they are,” sniffed Leeyes.

“Quite so,” said Sloan.

“I don’t see myself,” said the superintendent heavily, “how anyone can keep an eye on them out on the cliffs like that.”

“Still, they might have seen something.”

“It’s too quiet by half up there,” pronounced Leeyes.

“That’s true,” agreed Sloan. Mercifully Cranberry Point did not have the attractions of Beachy Head. He was profoundly thankful that those who wished to end it all did not often buy single tickets to Kinnisport and walk out to the cliffs. The rocks at the bottom were singularly uninviting. Today’s victim wasn’t likely to be a suicide: not if he was found in the water but not drowned…

“The trouble,” declared Leeyes, still harping on the coastguards, “is that nothing ever happens up there on the cliff to keep them on their toes.”

“No, sir,” agreed Sloan. The superintendent was a great believer in a constant state of alert. In an earlier age he would have been a notable success as a performer with a dancing bear. It would have been on its toes, all right. “This chap could have been a seaman, I suppose.”

“Eight bells,” said Leeyes suddenly.

“Pardon, sir?”

“Sunset and rise and shine,” said Leeyes.

“Er—quite so, sir.”

“The old watch stands down, duty done,” intoned Leeyes sonorously. “The new watch takes over.”

“The coastguards’ll know about shipping, surely though, sir?” Sloan ventured back onto firmer ground.

“Ah,” said Leeyes, unwilling to impute any merit at all to a distinguished service, “that depends if their records are any good or not, doesn’t it?”

“I suppose it does.” Sloan wasn’t going to argue: with anyone else, perhaps, but not with Superintendent Leeyes and not at the very beginning of a case.

“Remember,” said Leeyes darkly, “that not everything gets reported. Especially at sea.”

There was no thick black line extending F Division out into the sea to the territorial limit but in Leeyes’s view there should have been. From time to time he hankered after the autocratic authority of the captain of a ship at sea as well.

“They’ll listen in all the time to radio messages at sea, though,” pointed out Sloan. “Bound to.”

He didn’t know about nothing being sacred any longer but he did know that between radio and computer nothing much remained secret for very long.

“All right, all right,” conceded Leeyes. ‘They may have picked something up. Well have to wait and see what they say.”

Detective Inspector Sloan kept his mind on essentials. “But it isn’t a case of drowning, you say, sir?”

“Not me, Sloan,” countered Leeyes robustly. “I didn’t say any such thing. It’s the pathologist who says that.”

“Ah.”

“And I don’t suppose he’ll change his mind either. You know what Dr. Dabbe’s like when he gets a bee in his bonnet.”

“Yes, sir,” said Sloan. The proper name for that was “professional opinion” but he didn’t say so.

“It doesn’t sound too important anyway,” said Leeyes. He tore off the top sheet of a message pad and added gratuitously, “And if it’s not too important you might as well take Constable Crosby with you. I can’t spare anyone better today.”

If she had happened to have looked out of one of the front windows of Collerton House at the right time that afternoon Elizabeth Busby might actually have seen Constable Brian Ridgeford and the Boiler père et fils shipping the body of the dead man aboard the rowing boat. The uninterrupted view of the estuary was one of the many attractions of Collerton House. The trees planted by the first owner, which were mature now, had been carefully set back behind the building line so that the sight of the gradually broadening river was not impaired and yet the house itself was still sheltered by them.

If Elizabeth Busby had been really interested in what had been going on in the water during the afternoon she could have done more than just glance out of the window. She could have stepped out onto the stone terrace in front of the house and taken a closer look at the River Calle through the telescope that was permanently mounted there.

This telescope was currently kept trained on a pair of great crested grebes which had built their nest at the edge of a large clump of reeds, but it was so mounted that it could be swung easily from side to side and up and down to take in the entire estuary from Kinnisport and the sea to the west right up the river to Billing Bridge in the east.

The reason why Elizabeth Busby did not happen to look out of the window that afternoon was that she had so many other things to do. Collerton House had been built in more spacious times: times when servants were, if not two a penny, at least around for ten pounds a year all found. Now it was a case of first find someone willing to work at all in the house. That couldn’t be done very easily any more—quite apart from the consideration of the expense.

Notwithstanding this there were very few rooms in Collerton House that did not boast a bell-push or a bell-pull of some description—some of them of a very ornate description—as a reminder of a more comfortable past. The only one of them that Elizabeth Busby knew for certain was in good working order was the one that had been in her aunt’s bedroom. Aunt Celia had rung it when she was ill and Elizabeth had answered it—and had gone on answering its each and every summons right up until the day when Celia Mundill had died in that very bedroom.

Another reason why Elizabeth Busby was too busy to look out of the window was that she was deliberately undertaking as much hard work in the day as she possibly could. If there was a job that looked as if it could be packed into her waking hours then she put her hand to it and carried on until it was done. Even Frank Mundill, himself sunk in gloom since his wife’s death, had advised her to let up a little.

“Take it easy, Elizabeth,” he’d mumbled at breakfast time only that morning. “We don’t want you cracking up as well.”

“I’ve got to keep busy,” she’d said fiercely. “Just got to! Don’t you understand?”

“Sorry. Of course.” He’d retreated behind the newspaper after that and said no more about it and Elizabeth Busby had gone on to devote the day to turning out the main guest room. It was too soon to be making up the bed but there was no harm in getting the room ready. Besides, giving the bedroom a thorough spring-clean somehow contrived to bring those who were going to occupy it next a little nearer.

There was some real comfort to be had in that because it was her own father and mother who were due to come to stay and who would be moving into the room. Each and every touch that she put into the spring-cleaning of the bedroom brought its own reminder of them. Quite early on she had gone off through the house in search of a bigger bedside table for her father. He always liked a decent-sized table beside his bed—not one of those tiny shelves that could take no more than book and reading glasses. He’d lived abroad for so long—usually in strange and far-away places—that he was accustomed to having everything he might need in the night right beside him.

She’d never forgotten his telling her that when he was a young man he used to sleep with a gun under his pillow—but she had never known whether that had been true or not. It had been the same night that she had lost a milk tooth. She had been inconsolable to start with about the tooth—or perhaps it had been about the gap that it had left.

“Put it where I put my pistol, Twiz,” he’d said, “and the Tooth Fairy will find it and leave you a silver sixpence.”

“Did the Tooth Fairy find your pistol?” she had wanted to know, forgetting all about her tooth. “What did she leave you for your pistol?”

That had been on one of her parents’ rare and glorious leaves when for once they had all been together as a family. Then, all too soon, it had been over and her mother and father had gone again. By the time they came back on their next furlough Elizabeth had all her second teeth and had grown out of believing in fairies of any ethereal description. Even sixpences had been practically no more.

So today she’d humped an occasional table along to the guest bedroom to put beside the bed. She even knew which side of the bed her father would choose to sleep on. The side nearer the door. That was another legacy from years of living in foreign and sometimes dangerous places…

The table had been heavier than she had expected but when she came to move it she realised that Frank Mundill must have gone back to work—his office was in the converted studio right at the top of the house—and so wasn’t around to give her a hand. That was after they’d had a scratch luncheon together in the kitchen—Mundill had heated up some soup and rummaged about in the refrigerator until he’d found a wedge of pâté for them both. He’d hovered over the electric toaster for a while and promised to rustle up something more substantial that evening.

“Don’t worry, Frank.” She’d brushed her hair back from her face as she spoke. “I’m not hungry.”

“Can’t honestly say that I am either,” he shrugged wryly. “Still, we’d better try to eat something, I suppose…”

She had given him a look of genuine pity. Frank Mundill’s profession might be architect but his great hobby was cooking and it had been quite pathetic during his wife’s last illness to see him trying to tempt her failing appetite with special delicacy after special delicacy. On her part Celia Mundill had gallantly tried to swallow a mouthful or so of each as long as she had the strength to do so—but the time had come when even that was more than she could manage.

“I’ll have the bedroom done by tonight,” Elizabeth had said abruptly. She tried not to think about Aunt Celia’s last illness. It was too soon for that.

“Don’t overdo it, though, will you, Elizabeth?”

She shook her head.

Only her father and mother were allowed to call her Twiz. With everyone else she insisted upon Elizabeth in full. None of the other traditional diminutives were permitted either. She never answered to Liz or Betty or Beth or—save the mark—Bess. Peter had teased her about that once.

“Even Queen Elizabeth didn’t mind that,” he’d said. “Good Queen Bess rolls around the tongue rather nicely, don’t you think?”

“No, I don’t, and don’t you dare call me Bess either, Peter Hinton. I won’t have it!”

And now she had to try not to think about Peter Hinton either.

“Give me a call when you’re ready for some tea,” she’d said to Frank Mundill that afternoon. His secretary was on holiday this week. “I expect I’ll still be up in the bedroom,” she added. “I’m making a proper job of it while I’m about it.”

So the afternoon—the afternoon that the body of the unknown man was brought ashore at Edsway—passed for her in hard work. It was the only way in which Elizabeth Busby could get through the days. Anyway it wasn’t so much the days—they were just periods of time to be endured—as the nights. It was the nights that were the greatest burden.

They were pure hell.

For the first time in her life Elizabeth had come to see the long stretches of the night as something to be feared. The leaden march of the night hours shook her soul in a way that the hours of the day didn’t. The days were easier. There were punctuations in the day. There were, too, the constant demands of civilised behaviour to be met and there were the recurring needs of her body to be attended to. She had to wash, to dress, to eat and to drink—even if she could no longer be merry. All the blessedness of a routine was there for the using.

She found rather to her surprise that she washed, dressed and—sometimes—ate just as she had always done. She answered the telephone, wrote letters, did the dusting and attended—acolyte-fashion—to the washing machine just as if nothing had happened.

That was in the daytime.

It was a constant source of wonder to her that after the day when her own heaven had fallen and “The hour when earth’s foundations fled” she still got through the days at all.

The nights, of course, were different.

In a world that had tumbled about her ears the nights had turned into refined torture. There was no routine about the long watches of the night, no demands on her time to be met until morning, and no requirement of her body that could be satisfied—not even sleep.

Especially not sleep.

The nighttime was when she could have walked mile after mile—however weary she had been when she dropped into bed. Instead custom required that she spend it lying still in a narrow bed in a small room. The room—her room—got smaller and smaller during the night. She could swear to it. There had been a horror story she’d read once when she was young about the roof of a four-poster bed descending on the person in the bed and smothering him…

She’d been of an age to take horror in her stride then, to laugh at it even. Horror in those days had been something weird and strange. Now she was older she knew that horror was merely something familiar gone sadly wrong… that was where true horror lay…

Why, she thought angrily to herself as she shook out a duster, hadn’t someone like Wilkie Collins written about the bruising a girl’s soul suffered when she’d been jilted? That should have given any novelist worth his salt something to get his teeth into…

3

Tell the Sheriff’s Officers that I am ready.

« ^ »

Detective Constable Crosby—he who could most easily be spared from the police station—brought the car round for Detective Inspector Sloan as that officer stepped out of the back door of Berebury Police Station.

The constable was patently disappointed to learn that there was no hurry to get to wherever they were going.

“No hurry at all,” repeated Sloan, climbing into the front passenger seat. “You can take it from me, Crosby, that this particular problem isn’t going to run away.”

The other man withdrew his hand from the switches to the blue flashing light and siren.

“On the contrary,” forecast Detective Inspector Sloan, “I shouldn’t be surprised if it’s not going to be with us for quite a while.”

The trouble with Superintendent Leeyes was that his gloom was catching.

“Yes, sir,” said Crosby, immediately losing interest. “Where to, then, slowly?”

And the trouble with Detective Constable Crosby was that he was only nearly insubordinate.

Sloan settled himself in the car, reminding himself of something he knew very well already: that Detective Constable Crosby wasn’t by any means the brightest star in the Force’s firmament. As far as he, Sloan, could make out, the only thing that Crosby really liked doing was driving fast cars fast. That was probably why Inspector Harpe, who was in charge of Traffic Division, had insisted that the constable was better in the plain clothes branch rather than the uniform one.

“Call us ‘Woollies’ if you like, Sloan,” Harpe had said vehemently at the time.

“I don’t…” began Sloan; though there were those in plenty who did.

“But,” swept on Inspector Harpe, “I’m not stupid enough to want that boy Crosby behind the wheel of one of Traffic Division’s vehicles.”

“No, Harry.”

“First time he was tempted,” sniffed Harpe, “he’d be after a ton-up kid.”

For Adam and Eve temptation had been an apple.

For a traffic duty policeman temptation was a youth behind the wheel of a fast car ahead of him and going faster, ever faster. The driver would be showing the world in general—but the police car in particular—what his car would do. If it was his car: ten to one it would be somebody else’s car. Taken for a joy ride. Taken on a joy ride, too.

Luring on the Law was practically a parlour game.

And as Inspector Harpe of Traffic Division knew only too well, what was begun “sae rantingly, sae wantonly, sae dauntingly” usually ended up on Robert Burns’s present-day equivalent of the gallows-tree—a fatal motorway pile-up. Because, as a rule, the Law’s cars could do rather better than anyone else’s, and the Law’s drivers were trained. They were trained, too, of course, not to respond to taunting behaviour. That training, though, took a little longer than learning to drive well.

“The first time someone tried it on Crosby,” Harpe had predicted, “he’d fall for it. You know he would, Sloan. Be honest now.”

“Well…”

“Hook, line and sinker, I’ll be bound,” said Harpe. “I’m prepared to bet good money that he’d go and chase some madman right up the motorway until they ran out of road. Both of them.”

“But…” Even Superintendent Leeyes wasn’t usually as bodeful as this.

“Catch Crosby radioing ahead to get the tearaway stopped instead of going after him.”

“Oh, come off it, Harry,” Sloan had said at the time. “You were young once yourself.”

At this moment now he contented himself with telling Crosby where to go. “Dr. Dabbe is expecting us at the mortuary,” he said as the police car swung round Berebury’s new multi-storey car park and out onto the main road. Crosby automatically put his foot down.

“In due course,” said Sloan swiftly. “Not on two stretchers.”

The consultant pathologist to the Berebury District Hospital Group was more than expecting them. He was obviously looking forward to seeing the two policemen. He welcomed them both to his domain. “Come along in, Inspector Sloan, and—let me see now—it’s Constable Crosby, isn’t it?”

“Yes, Doctor.” Crosby didn’t like attending post-mortem examinations.

The pathologist was rubbing his hands together. “We’ve got something very interesting here, gentlemen. Very interesting indeed.”

“Have we?” said Sloan warily. Cases that were “open and shut” were what made for a quiet life, not interesting ones.

The pathologist indicated the door to the post-mortem theatre. “What you might call a real puzzler.”

“Really?” said Sloan discouragingly.

“As well as being ‘a demd, damp, moist, unpleasant body’ as Mr. Mantalini said.”

“Not drowned, anyway, I hear,” advanced Sloan, who did not know who Mr. Mantalini was. The case was never going to get off the ground at all at this rate.

“Not ‘drowned dead’ anyway,” agreed the pathologist breezily. “You know your Charles Dickens, I expect, Sloan?”

Sloan didn’t but that wasn’t important. What was important was what the pathologist had found.

He waited.

“In my opinion,” said Dr. Dabbe, getting to the point at last, “confirmed, I may say, by some X-ray photographs, this chap we’ve got here… whoever he is…”

“Yes?” said Sloan, stifling any other comment. The body’s identity was something else that the police were going to have to establish.

Later.

“… and however wet he is,” continued the pathologist imperturbably, “was dead before he hit the water.”

“Ah,” said Sloan.

“Furthermore…”

Even Constable Crosby raised his head at this.

“Furthermore,” said the pathologist, “in my opinion he died from the consequences of a fall from a considerable height.”

Detective Constable Crosby clearly felt it was incumbent on him to say something into the silence which followed this pronouncement. He looked round the room and said, “Did he fall or was he pushed?”

“Ah, gentlemen,” Dr. Dabbe said courteously, “I rather think that your department, isn’t it? Not mine.”

Detective Inspector Sloan was not to be diverted by such pleasantry. There were still some matters that were the pathologist’s department and he wanted to know about them.

“What sort of height?” he asked immediately.

“Difficult to say exactly at this stage, Sloan,” temporised the pathologist. “There’s a lot of work to be done yet. I’ve got to take a proper look at the X-rays, too. I can tell you that there are multiple impacted fractures where the shock effect of hitting terra firma ran through the body.”

Sloan winced involuntarily.

The pathologist was more detached. “It demonstrates Newton’s Third Law of Motion very nicely—you know, the one about force travelling through a body.”

Sloan didn’t know and didn’t care.

“He didn’t fell from the air, did he?” he asked. There had been parts of a dead body dropped from an aeroplane on the Essex marshes just after the last war. That case had become a cause célèbre and passed into legal history and he, Sloan, had read about it. “We’re not talkig about aeroplane height, are we?”

“No, no,” said Dr. Dabbe. “Less than that.”

Sloan nodded. “But he didn’t fell into the water?”

“Not first,” said the pathologist. “I think he hit the earth first.”

That only left fire. If Sloan had been a medieval man he would have promptly enquired about the fourth element—fire—that always went with earth, water and air. He wasn’t, he reminded himself astringently, any such thing. He was a twentieth-century policeman. “A fall from a height,” he said sedately instead.

“Yes,” said the pathologist.

“And onto hard ground,” said Sloan.

“Hard something,” said Dr. Dabbe. “As to whether it was ground or not I can’t say yet.”

“Not into the sea, though?” concluded Sloan.

That stirred Detective Constable Crosby into speech again. “What about Cranberry Point?” he suggested. “That’s a good drop.”

“Rather less than that, too, I think,” said Dr. Dabbe more slowly, “though I can’t tell you for certain yet. I’ll have to have a look at the exact degree of bone displacement…”

The knee bone was connected to the hip bone and the hip bone was connected to the thigh bone…

“You can get out onto the cliff above Kinnisport,” persisted Crosby, “if you have a mind to.”

“But,” pointed out the pathologist, “if you go over the cliff there you don’t hit the water.”

“No more you don’t, Doctor,” agreed the constable, in no whit put out.

Sloan had forgotten for a moment that the pathologist was a Sunday sailor himself. He remembered now that Dr. Dabbe sailed an Albacore somewhere in the estuary. He was bound to know that stretch of the river and coastline well.

“You hit the rocks if you go over the edge up there,” pronounced Dr. Dabbe, thus revealing that he had already given the cliffs beyond Kinnisport some thought.

“But not the water,” agreed Sloan. That was what had saved Cranberry Point from becoming Calleshire’s Beachy Head all right. “The tide never comes in to the very bottom of the cliff.”

“Exactly,” said Dr. Dabbe. “He wouldn’t have ended up in the water if he’d gone over the cliffs there.”

“Unless,” said Inspector Sloan meticulously, “someone had then punted the body into the sea.” It might be Dr. Dabbe’s function to establish the cause of death; it was Detective Inspector Sloan’s bounden duty to consider all the angles of a proposition. “After he’d fallen…”

“Or been pushed,” said Crosby unnecessarily.

It was Sloan whom the pathologist answered. “Yes, Inspecter, I suppose you shouldn’t discount the theoretical possibility that someone dragged him off the rocks at the foot of the cliff and into the sea.”

“They’d have had a job,” said Crosby roundly, forgetting that it was no part of the office of constable—detective or otherwise—to argue with an inspector—detective or otherwise—let alone with a full-blown medical man.

Sloan regarded Crosby with a certain curiosity. It wasn’t the breach of protocol that intrigued him. After all, protocol was only significant in one of two ways—either in its observance or in its breaching. What he had noted was that Detective Constable Crosby—traffic policeman manqué—didn’t as a rule take such an interest in a case early on. He wondered what it was about the matter so far that had caught his wayward attention.

“I must say, Sloan,” added Dr. Dabbe, who never minded with whom he argued, “from my own experience I can confirm that it would be the devil’s own job to get in there under the cliffs with a boat to do any such thing.”

“Would it, Doctor?” Cranberry Point, then, could be discounted.

“It certainly wouldn’t be a job for a man on his own,” said Dabbe, “and the tide would have had to be exactly right.”

“And as for walking round the cliffs from Kinnisport, sir,” put in Crosby.

“Yes?” said Sloan, interested in spite of himself. Crosby was no walker. His stint on the beat had proved that.

“You’d have your work cut out to do it, sir, without the coastguards seeing you.”

If Superintendent Leeyes had been there he would have automatically added a rider to the effect that the coastguards hadn’t anything else to do but look out at the sea and the cliffs. The superintendent wasn’t there, of course, because he never went out on cases at all if he could help it. He stayed at the centre while his myrmidons fanned out and then reported back. The still centre, some might say; others were more perceptive and spoke wisely of the eye of the hurricane…

“Exactly,” said Dr. Dabbe, who was fortunately able to concentrate entirely on the matter in hand. Forensic pathologists didn’t have superior officers chasing them. In theory, at any rate, they pursued absolute accuracy for its own sake—at the request of Her Majesty’s Coroner and at the behest of no one else. The only people of whom pathologlsts had to be wary, thought Sloan with a certain amount of envy, were opposing counsel in court who wanted to give the Goddess of Truth a tweak here and there to the benefit of their particular client.

Detective Inspector Sloan took out of his notebook the copy that he had brought with him of Constable Ridgeford’s brief report. “Our man at Edsway says that there weren’t any clues as to this chap’s name at all that he could see.”

“And none that we could either,” agreed the pathologist. “Not to his name,” he added obscurely. “Well have to leave his personal identity to you people, Sloan, for the time being. Even his own mother wouldn’t know him now.”

Sloan nodded. The doctor’s “we” included his own assistant, Burns, a taciturn man who rarely spoke, but who would have gone through the dead man’s clothes with the meticulousness of an old-fashioned nanny. “We’ll need as much as we can to go on, Doctor.”

The pathologist started to take his jacket off and to look about him for a green gown. “His physical identity’s no problem.”

“Good,” said Sloan warmly.

“He’s male,” said Dr. Dabbe, obligingly beginning at the very beginning.

Sloan wrote that down. The Genesis touch, you could say. “And how old, Doctor?”

Surely that did come after sex, didn’t it? “About twenty-three,” said the doctor promptly. “Give or take a year or two either way.”

Sloan looked down at his notebook and wondered what came next in the pathologist’s logical sequence after sex and age.

“As to his race…” began Dr. Dabbe cautiously.

“Yes?” Perhaps a seaman from an alien country had found landfall on an English shore after all…

“Caucasian,” said Dabbe, reaching for his surgical gown.

Detective Constable Crosby jerked his head dismissively. “Oh, he’s a foreigner then, is he?”

“Not necessarily, Constable.” The doctor grinned. “We’re all Caucasians here, you know.” He waved a hand at his assistant, Burns, who had just entered the office. “Even Burns, here, and he’s a Scotsman.”

“Ready when you are, Doctor,” said Burns impassively.

The pathologist led the way through to the post-mortem room.

4

To die a dry death at land,

Is as bad as a watery grave.

« ^ »

Horace Boiler had never been a man to let the grass grow under his feet. Nor was he one to share confidences—not even with his own son. Certainly not with Mrs. Boiler. After he had got back from Edsway with the body of the unknown man he saw it off in his cousin Ted’s hearse and then stumped along to his own cottage where he proceeded to sink a vast mug of steaming hot tea at speed.

“That’s better,” he said, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. Almost immediately he got up to go out again, pushing his chair back as he did so. It scraped on the floor.

Had he known it, the dialogue he then embarked upon with his wife strongly resembled that between many a parent and an adolescent child.

“Where are you going then, Horace?” she asked, casting an eye in the direction of a saucepan on the cooking stove.

“Out,” he rasped.

“Where?”

“Nowhere.”

“When will you be back?”

“Don’t know.”

Horace was nearer sixty than sixteen but saw no more need to amplify what he said than did a rebellious teenager. Mrs. Boiler sniffed and turned down the flame under the saucepan.

“You’ll have to wait for your supper then.”

From the cottage doorway all he said was, “Expect me when you see me.”

And that was said roughly. His mind was on something else.

If that was too soon for Mrs. Boiler she did not say.

There were some homes that were entirely maintained on the well-established premise that the husband and father was “a saint abroad and a devil at home”; or it may have been that Mrs. Boiler had just given up the unequal struggle.

Horace, on the other hand, hadn’t given up anything and was soon back at the shore pushing his rowing boat out again. The agglomeration of buoys, hardstanding and wooden rafts was too informal to be dignified with the name of marina but that was its function. Horace poked about this way and that, and then, calculating that anyone watching his movements from the village would by now have lost interest in his activities, he steered his prow in a seaward direction and bent his back to the oars.

He was as subconsciously aware of the state of the tide as a farmer was aware of the weather and a motorist of other vehicles on the road. With a nicely judged spurt of effort he moved with the last of the tide before he turned distinctly up river and into fresh water. After a little time in the middle of the stream he let the boat drift inshore again towards the south shore—the same side of the river as Edsway but farther up river.

It was a compound of long experience and the river lore of generations that kept Horace Boiler from grounding his boat on the mud banks. He seemed to know by instinct how to pick his way up river and which channel had deep water in it, and which only looked as if it had. It wasn’t only the apparent depths of the channels that were deceptive. Some of those which looked the most promising led only to the shallows. Horace Boiler, however, seemed also to know where each one went. Daedalus-like, he selected one channel and passed by another with the sureness of much practice.

Presently he found himself in relatively deep water in spite of being near the shore. This was where the river cut alongside the edge of the parish of Collerton. The churchyard came right down to the river bank and as it had got more and more full over the years the land towards the river side had been used for graves.

It was undoubtedly picturesque and in the summertime holidaymakers would come to stroll along the bank and through the churchyard exclaiming at the fine views of the estuary to be had from the little promontory. They seldom came in the winter and never in the spring and autumn when the grand alliance of wind and water almost always flooded the whole bank and part of the churchyard.

The land was dry now and from where he was in his boat Horace could see someone tending one of the graves near the river. He bent to his oars though and carried on upstream without looking up. Presently he passed Collerton House too. Like the churchyard, its land—in this case, lawn—came down to the river’s edge. There was a little landing stage by the water and beyond that a small boathouse. After that there were no more dwellings, only open fields. The main street of Collerton was set back from the church. Those who professed to understand the English rural landscape were in the habit of speaking knowledgeably about the devastation of the Black Death.

“That’s when all the little hovels round the church decayed,” they would say, “and a later medieval village grew up some distance away from the old diseased houses.”

Horace Boiler, who said, “It stands to reason” almost as often as the storybook character Worzel Gummidge, knew perfectly well why the church stood in lonely splendour apart from the village. It had been built on the only patch of remotely high ground in the parish. The houses had been built well back from the river’s edge for the elementary—and elemental—reason that the other land was liable to flooding. Horace was a fisherman. He knew all about the elements.

He rowed steadily up river for purposes of his own. He didn’t stop in his progress until he rounded the last bend before Billing Bridge. Only then did he turn his craft and allow the current to help carry him along and back to the estuary and Edsway. On his way home he looked in on Ted Boiler, back in his carpenter’s shed after his trip to Berebury. When he got back indoors his wife asked him where he’d been.

“Nowhere,” he said.

“Did you see anyone?”

“No one better than myself,” he said obscurely.

“What have you been doing then?”

“Nothing.”

All of which was—in its own way—perfectly true.

Detective Inspector Sloan entered the mortuary and took his first reluctant look at the unknown male of Caucasian stock, aged about twenty-three years. A decomposing body was not a pretty sight.

“He’s not undernourished,” said Dr. Dabbe, who had led the way.

Burns, his assistant, who had brought up the rear, said, “I’ve got a note of his exact weight and height for you. Doctor.”

Deadweight, thought Sloan to himself, was a word they used about ships, too. He took a look at the man for himself, automatically noting that there was nothing about him to show that he had been a seaman.

“He’s not overweight either, Doctor,” he said aloud. That was something to be noted, too, these days. Would historians of the future call this the Age of Corpulence?

“Average,” agreed Dr. Dabbe. “Dark hair and brown eyes… are you making a note of that, Constable?”

“Short back and sides,” observed Sloan. That, in essence, would tell Superintendent Leeyes what he wanted to know. For the superintendent the length of a man’s hair divided the sheep from the goats as neatly as that chap in the Bible had sorted out the men whom he wanted in his army by the way in which they had drunk at the edge of the water. He’d forgotten his name…

“Short back and sides,” agreed the pathologist. “What’s left of it.”

Gideon, thought Sloan to himself: that’s who it was. He’d beaten the army of the Midianites with his hand-picked men, had Gideon.

“I’ve been looking for occupational signs for you,” said Dr. Dabbe.

“That would help,” said Sloan warmly. “In fact, Doctor, anything would help at this stage. Anything at all.”

“You haven’t got anyone like him on the books as missing, then,” said the doctor, correctly interpreting this.

“Not in Calleshire,” said Sloan. “Not male.”

Detective Constable Crosby hitched a shoulder in his corner. “Plenty of girls missing, Doctor. All looking older than they are. All good home-loving girls,” he added, “except that they’ve left home.”

The white slave trade mightn’t be what it had been but it kept going. It wasn’t, however, Sloan’s immediate concern. He kept his mind on the matter in hand: an unknown body. “What sort of occupational signs, Doctor?”

“Well, he’s quite muscular, Sloan. You can see that for yourself. I’d say he wasn’t a man used to sitting at a desk all day. Or if he was, he went in for some strenuous sport too.”

Sloan wondered what the masculine equivalent of housemaid’s knee was.

“Actually,” said Dabbe, “there’s no specific sign of a trade about him at all.”

“Ah,” said Sloan non-committally.

“He didn’t have cobbler’s knee or miller’s thumb,” said the pathologist, “and I can’t find any other mark on his person that’s come from using the same tool day after day.”

Sloan wondered what sort of occupational mark the police force made on a man—day after day. Varicose veins, probably.

“And he isn’t covered in oil,” said Dr. Dabbe.

Oil wouldn’t have come off in the water, Sloan knew that.

As a possible cause of death shipwreck after a fall on board receded a little from the front of his mind.

“There’s something else that isn’t there,” said the pathologist.

“What’s that, Doctor?” All that came into Sloan’s mind was that ridiculous verse of everyone’s childhood: “I met a man who wasn’t there…”

“Nicotine stains,” replied Dr. Dabbe prosaically. “I should say he was a non-smoker.”

“We don’t know at this stage what will be a help.”

“Well, I hope you aren’t counting on a fingerprint identification because this chap’s skin’s more than a bit bloated over now.”

Even the deceased’s physical identity was taking a little time to put together.

“Fingernails—what’s left of them—appear to have been clean and well cared for,” continued Dabbe.

“Make a note of that, Crosby,” commanded Sloan. Manners might maketh man but appearance mattered too.

“As far as I can see,” said the pathologist, “he was clean generally.”

That, too, ruled out a whole subculture of the voluntarily dirty. The involuntarily dirty didn’t have well-cared-for fingernails and they weren’t well nourished as a rule either.

“And he’s not a horny-handed son of the soil,” concluded Sloan aloud. “Is that all you can tell us, Doctor, from the—er—outside, so to speak?”

“Bless you, no, Sloan,” said the pathologist cheerfully. “That’s only half of my superficial examination. I, of course, use the word ‘superficial’ in its purely anatomical connotation of appertaining to the surface, not in its pejorative one.”

“Naturally,” murmured Sloan pacifically. The doctor wasn’t in court now. He didn’t have to choose his words so carefully.

“And for the record,” added the pathologist breezily, “he hasn’t any distinguishing marks within the meaning of the Act.”

Detective Inspector Sloan nodded, any vision he might have had of easy identification fading away. Even with what the Passport Office engagingly called “special peculiarities” listed just for that very reason—to help identify a particular person—it wasn’t always easy. Without them it could be very difficult indeed. “Anything else, Doctor?”

“He wasn’t mainlining on drugs…”

Times had certainly changed. Once upon a time drug-taking hadn’t been one of the characteristics of dead young men that pathologists looked for and—having found them—echoed Housman’s parodist, “What, still alive at twenty-two…?”

“There are no signs of repeated injections anywhere,” said Dr. Dabbe smoothly, “and no suspicious ‘spider’s web’ tattoos on the inside of the forearm to cover up those signs.”

An old art put to a new use.

“No tattooing at all, in fact,” said Dr. Dabbe, proceeding in an orderly manner through the fruits of his superficial examination.

Detective Constable Crosby made a note of that.

“His ears haven’t been pierced either,” remarked the pathologist.

Times had certainly changed. Detective Inspector Sloan decided that he was getting old. Unpierced ears were a feature that he should have noticed for himself. The Long John Silver touch was something that had grown up since he was a boy. When he, Sloan, saw ear-rings on a man he was still old-fashioned enough to look beyond them for the wooden leg.

“In fact, Doctor,” concluded Sloan aloud, “he was a pretty ordinary sort of man.”

“You want to call him John Citizen, do you?” Dr. Dabbe raised a quizzical eyebrow. “There you would be barking up the wrong tree, Sloan.”

“He seems ordinary enough to me,” persisted Sloan.

“There’s no such thing as an ordinary man,” responded Dr. Dabbe instantly. “We’re all quite different, Sloan. That’s the beauty of the system.”

“There doesn’t appear,” he said flatly, “to be anything out of the ordinary about this man.” One thing that Sloan wasn’t going to do was to get into that sort of debate with the pathologist.

“Ah, but I’m not finished yet, Sloan.”

Dr. Dabbe had in some respects hardly started. He beckoned Sloan nearer to the post-mortem table and tilted an inspection lamp slightly. “You will observe, Sloan, that this man—whoever he is—has been in the water for quite a time.”

Sloan repressed a slight shudder. “Yes, Doctor.”

“And,” continued the pathologist, “that in spite of this the body is scarcely damaged.”

Detective Inspector Sloan obediently leaned forward and peered at the supine figure.

“The lack of damage is interesting,” declared Dr. Dabbe.

Sloan held his peace. If the pathologist wanted to be as oracular as Sherlock Holmes and start talking about dogs not barking in the night there was very little that he, Sloan, could do about it.

“It isn’t consistent with the length of time the body has been in the water, Sloan.”

So that was what was interesting the doctor…

Before Sloan could speak the pathologist had moved the shadowless overhead lamp yet again. This time the beam was thrown over the deceased’s left hand.

“There are a couple of grazes on what’s left of the skin of the fingers,” he remarked in a detached way. “He might—only might, mind you, Sloan—have got them trying to save himself from falling.”

Sloan tightened his lips. For all his scientific objectivity, it wasn’t a nice picture that the pathologist had just conjured up.

5

For death is a debt,

A debt on demand.

« ^ »

Although Horace Boiler had told his wife that he had seen nothing and nobody and had been nowhere he had, in fact, noticed that there had been someone in Collerton churchyard when he had rowed upstream past it. Whoever it was who was there had looked up as he drew level with the churchyard in his rowing boat but Horace hadn’t paused in his steady pulling at the oars as he went by. It didn’t do to pause if you were rowing against the current. Coming downstream was different. You could even ship oars coming down on the current if you caught the river in the right place.

So Horace, although never averse to a little bit of a gossip with anyone—he collected sundry information in the same way that some men collected postage stamps—had pulled away at the oars and passed by without speaking. He hadn’t gone on his way, though, without recognising the figure tending the grave by the river. Most people who lived round about the shores of the estuary knew Mr. Mundill’s wife’s niece, Elizabeth Busby, by sight. She’d been coming to Collerton House on and off for her school holidays ever since she was a little girl. She’d practically grown up by the river, in fact, and when her aunt, Mrs. Celia Mundill, had fallen ill, it had seemed only right that she should give up her job and come back to Collerton to nurse her. Had been engaged to be married, too, Horace had heard, but not any longer.

By the time Horace Boiler came down river on his return journey, she had gone from the churchyard and all he could see from the river was a fine display of pale pink roses on the new grave.

Elizabeth Busby hadn’t planned to visit the Collerton graveyard that afternoon at all. She had fully intended to finish spring-cleaning the guest room and leave it all ready and waiting for the day—the welcome day—when her parents would arrive from South America. What had made her change her mind about finishing preparing the room was something so silly that she didn’t even like to think about it. She’d swept and dusted the room and moved the furniture about and taken the curtains down before she even noticed that the picture over the bed had been changed.

She had stopped the vacuum cleaner in full flight so to speak and had stood stock still in the middle of the floor, staring.

There was no shortage of pictures in Collerton House. On the contrary, it had them everywhere. But everywhere. Her grandfather, Richard Camming, had been an enthusiastic amateur artist and his efforts were hanging in every room of the house. He was not exactly an original… The painting that had hung over the bed in the guest room ever since she could remember had been a water-colour of a composition owing a great deal to the works of the late Richard Parkes Bonington.

It had been replaced by an oil painting done in what his two daughters—her aunt Celia and her own mother—affectionately called their father’s “Burne-Jones period.” Richard Camming had even called it “Ophelia” and Elizabeth knew it well. The portrayal of Ophelia’s drowning in a stream usually lived on the upstairs landing not far from the top of the stairs.

“He might have put it nearer the bathroom,” her own father used to say irreverently. “All that water going to waste…”

Elizabeth Busby had rested her hands on the vacuum cleaner in the same way as a gardener rested his on his spade while she considered this.

She was not in any doubt about the pictures having been changed; she knew them both too well. And if she had been in two minds about it a thin line of unfaded wallpaper under the new picture—hidden a little from the casual gaze by the frame—would have confirmed it. The size of the new picture didn’t exactly match that of the old.

As soon as she had taken in this evidence—before her very eyes, as the conjurers said—she had gone out onto the landing to look there for the painting that usually hung over the head of the spare bedroom bed. It had been of a stretch of beach… When she got to the top of the stairs, though, to the spot where Grandfather’s version of Ophelia usually hung the painting of the beach—presumably at Edsway (after Bonington)—wasn’t there in its stead.

There wasn’t a gap there either of course.

Elizabeth would have noticed a gap straightaway. Everyone would have noticed a gap. What was there in the place of Ophelia drowning among the lilies—it must have been a very slow-moving stream, she thought inconsequentially—was a water-colour of the estuary of the River Calle as seen from Collerton House. This owed nothing to any artist save Richard Camming himself and it was not very good. Moreover it was a view that he had painted many, many times—like Monet and the River Thames.

“And not got any better at it,” decided Elizabeth judiciously.

Unlike Monet.

There were at least a dozen efforts by Richard Camming at capturing on canvas the oxbow of the river as it swept down towards the sea at Collerton. This particular painting could have been any one of them. Elizabeth wasn’t aware of having seen this one anywhere else in the house before but there were several piles of pictures stacked away in the attics of Collerton House and it could easily have been among them without her knowing.

She went back at once to the bedroom to check that only one picture had been changed. Over the fireplace there had hung throughout her lifetime a picture in which her grandfather had tried to capture the elusive gregariousness of the work of Sir David Wilkie—the Scottish Breughel. Richard Camming hadn’t actually got a blind fiddler in the picture but there was a general feeling that the musician wasn’t far away.

That picture was still there. Elizabeth was not surprised. She would have noticed much earlier in the day if there had been any change in the picture hanging over the fireplace. The head of the bed, though, was at an angle from the window and only got full sunshine in the afternoon.

She had tried after this to go back to her vacuum cleaning but her determined concentration on the mundane had been broken and suddenly her thoughts and carefully suppressed emotions were unleashed in unruly turmoil.

Abruptly she left the cleaner where it was standing in the middle of the floor and went out of the bedroom. As she looked over the landing balustrade she saw with approval the glass case reposing on a window sill in the entrance hall. There was absolutely nothing amateur about her greatgrandfather’s legacy to posterity. What he had left behind him had been something much more useful than dozens and dozens of indifferent paintings. Gordon Camming—Richard Camming’s father—had designed a valve that the marine engineering world of his day had fallen upon with delight and used ever since.

A Camming valve had been fitted into a model and stood for all the world to see in the house built by its designer with the proceeds of the patent. But it was really paintings and not patents that Elizabeth Busby had on her mind as she passed along the landing on her way to Frank Mundill’s office. The studio, with its mandatory north light added fifty years earlier by an indulgent father for his painter son, served now as the drawing office of Frank Mundill, architect. Elizabeth didn’t usually disturb him there, although she’d done so once or twice when her aunt had taken a turn for the worse—not otherwise—but she didn’t hesitate now.

And almost immediately she wished that she hadn’t.

Another time she would make a point of not going to his office unheralded because Frank Mundill was not alone. Sitting in the client’s chair in his room was a neighbour—Mrs. Veronica Feckler.

“Elizabeth, my dear,” said Mrs. Feckler at once, “how nice to see you.”

“I’m sorry,” said Elizabeth gruffly. “I didn’t know there was anyone here.”

“How could you?” asked Veronica Feckler blandly. “1 crept round the back with my miserable little plans. I was sure that Frank was going to laugh at them and he did.”

“I certainly did not,” protested Frank Mundill.

“I’m sure I detected a twitch of the lips,” insisted Mrs. Feckler. She was a widow who had come to live in the village of Collerton about three years ago. Elizabeth’s aunt had not greatly cared for her.

“It’s just,” said the architect with professional caution, “that it’s a long way from a quick sketch on the back of an envelope…”

“A shopping list, actually,” murmured Mrs. Feckler.

“… to the finished design that a builder can use.”

She turned to Elizabeth. “I had this brilliant idea while I was in the greengrocer’s,” she said eagerly. “Dear old Mr. Partridge was telling me about Costa Rican bananas—did you know that they grew bananas in Costa Rica?”

Elizabeth knew a great deal about Costa Rica, but Mrs. Feckler hadn’t waited for an answer.

“I said I’d have three when I suddenly thought what about building out over my kitchen.”

“I see,” said Elizabeth politely.

“And it’s an even bigger step from the plans to the finished building,” warned Frank Mundill. “Clients don’t always realise that either.”

“But I do.” She turned protestingly to Elizabeth. “Tell him I do, there’s a darling.”

“I was turning out a bedroom,” said Elizabeth obliquely, conscious that she must look more than a little scruffy. Mrs. Feckler was wearing clothes so casual that they must have needed quite a lot of time to assemble.

“And I was wasting your poor uncle’s time,” said the other woman, sensitive to something in Elizabeth’s manner. She rose to go. “But I do really want something doing to my little cottage now that Simon has said he’s coming back home for a while.” She gave a little light laugh. “Mothers do have their uses sometimes.”

Elizabeth assented politely to this, silently endorsing the sentiment. She would be so thankful to see her own mother again. Mrs. Busby hadn’t come back to England from South America for her sister’s funeral because she couldn’t travel by air. Pressurised air travel didn’t suit a middle-aged woman suffering from Ménière’s disease of the middle ear. Even now, though, both her parents were on the high seas on their way home from South America. They had been coming for a wedding…

Frank Mundill was still studying the piece of paper that Mrs. Feckler had given him. “I’ll have to think about this, Veronica, when I’ve had a chance to look at it properly.”

He was rewarded with a graceful smile.

“Give me a day or so,” he said hastily, “and then come back for a chat. I’ll have done a quick sketch by then.”

Mrs. Veronica Feckler gathered up her handbag. “How kind…”

Elizabeth Busby waited until Frank Mundill returned to his drawing office after showing her out. “I came about a picture,” she said.

He sank back into the chair behind his desk and ran his hands through his hair. “A picture?”

“Three pictures, actually,” she said.

He looked up.

“Three pictures,” she said, “that aren’t where they were.”

“I think I know the ones you mean,” he said uneasily.

“Ophelia.”

“It’s been moved,” he said promptly.

“I know,” she said. Frank Mundill wasn’t meeting her eye, though. “And a river one and a beach scene…”

He didn’t say anything in reply.

“The beach one has gone,” she said.

“I know.” He was studying the blotting paper on his desk now.

“Well?”

He cleared his throat. “Peter wanted it.”

“Peter?” Her voice was up at high doh before she could collect herself.

He nodded. “I knew you wouldn’t like that.”

“Peter Hinton?” She heard herself pronouncing his name even though she had sworn to herself again and again that her lips would never form it ever more.

Frank Mundill looked distinctly uncomfortable. “He asked me if he could have it.”

“Peter Hinton asked you if he could have the picture of the beach?” she echoed on a rising note of pure disbelief. “He didn’t even like pictures.”

He nodded. “He asked for it, though.”

“That sloppy painting?” She would have said that detective stories were more Peter’s line than paintings.

“Let’s say ‘sentimental,’ ” he murmured.

“That’s what I meant,” she said savagely. “And you’re sitting there and telling me that Peter wanted it?”

“So he said.” Frank Mundill was fiddling with a protractor lying on his desk now. He gazed longingly at the drawing board over in the window.

“It wasn’t something to remember me by, I hope?” All the pent-up bitterness of the last few weeks exploded in excoriating sarcasm.

“He didn’t say.”

“St. Bernard dogs aren’t a breed that are faithful unto death, are they?” she said, starting to laugh on a high, eerie note. “If so, he should have taken the imitation Landseer.”

“Not that I know of,” said the architect coldly.

“That would be too funny for words,” she said in tones utterly devoid of humour.

“I’m sorry if you think I shouldn’t have given it to him…”

“Why shouldn’t he have a picture?” she said wildly. “Why shouldn’t he have all the pictures if he wanted them? Why shouldn’t everybody have all the pictures?”

“Elizabeth, my dear girl…”

“Well? Why not? Answer me that!”

“If you remember,” Frank Mundill said stiffly, “I wasn’t aware of the provisions of your aunt’s will at the time he asked me for it.” He gave his polo-necked white sweater a little tug and said, “Strictly speaking I suppose the picture wasn’t mine to give to him.”

That stopped her all right.

“I didn’t mean it that way, Frank,” she said hastily. “You know that. That side of things isn’t important.” She essayed a slight smile. “Besides, there’s plenty more pictures where that one came from.”

“You can say that again,” said Frank Mundill ruefully.

“Sorry, Frank,” she said. “It’s just that I’m still a bit upset…” Her voice trailed away in confusion. Collerton House and all its pictures—in fact the entire Camming inheritance—had come from Richard Camming equally to his two daughters—his only children—Celia Mundill and Elizabeth’s mother, Marion Busby. Celia and Frank Mundill had had no children and Marion and William Busby, only one, Elizabeth.

When she had died earlier in the year Celia Mundill had left her husband, Frank, a life interest in her share of her own father’s estate. At his death it was to pass to her niece, Elizabeth…

“There’s no reason why Peter shouldn’t have had a painting if he wanted one,” she said, embarrassed. “It isn’t even as if they’re worth anything.”

Mr. Hubert Cresswick of Cresswick Antiques (Calleford) Ltd. had confirmed that when he had done the valuation after her aunt’s death. Very tactfully, of course. It was when he praised the frames that she’d known for certain.

“It’s just,” she went on awkwardly, “that I never thought that his having that particular one would be the reason why it wasn’t there on the wall, like it always was.”

“I should have mentioned it before,” he mumbled. “Sorry.”

“No reason why you should have done,” she said more calmly.

What she really meant was that there were a lot of reasons why he shouldn’t have done. Peter Hinton’s name hadn’t been mentioned in Collerton House since he’d left a note on the hall table—and with it the signet ring she’d given him. A “Keep off the grass” ring was what he’d said as he slipped it on his finger.

It didn’t matter any longer, of course, what it was called. Elizabeth had returned the ring he’d given her—in the springtime, “the only pretty ring time”—the one with “I do rejoyce in thee my choyce” inscribed inside it, to Peter’s lodgings in Luston.

That devotion hadn’t lasted very long either.

Frank Mundill picked up the sketch Mrs. Veronica Feckler had left on his desk and appeared to give it his full attention. He said, “I suppose I’ll have to go down and look at her timbers…”

“You will,” she agreed, her mind in complete turmoil.

Elizabeth Busby hadn’t known whether to laugh or to cry. On impulse she had gone out into the garden, swept up a bunch of her aunt’s favourite roses—Fantin-Latour—and walked down to the churchyard by the river’s edge.

She cried a little then.

6

How can I support this sight!

« ^ »

The pathologist to the Berebury District Hospital Group was a fast worker. Nobody could complain about that. He was also a compulsive talker—out of the witness box, that is. His subjects were in no position to complain about this or, indeed, anything else. His assistant, Burns, was not able either—but for different, hierarchical, reasons—to voice any complaints about the pathologist’s loquacity. Should he have been able to get a word in edgeways, that is.

In fact, Bums, worn down by listening, had retreated into a Trappist-like silence years ago. Detective Constable Crosby, normally a talker, didn’t like attending post-mortems. He had somehow contrived to drift to a point in the room where, though technically present, he wasn’t part of the action. It fell, therefore, to Detective Inspector Sloan to maintain some sort of dialogue with Dr. Dabbe.

“You’ll be wanting to know a lot of awkward things, Sloan,” said the pathologist, adjusting an overhead shadowless lamp.

“We’ll settle for a few facts to begin with, Doctor,” said the detective inspector equably.

“Like how long he’d been in the water, I suppose?”

“That would be useful to know.”

“And damned difficult to say.”

“Ah…”

“For sure, that is.”

Sloan nodded. In this context, “for sure” meant remaining sure and certain “under determined and sustained cross-examination by a hostile Queen’s Counsel.

And under oath.

The pathologist ran his eyes over the body of the unknown man. “He’s been there—in the water, I mean—longer than you might think, though,” he said.

“I don’t know that I’d thought about that at all,” said Sloan truthfully.

“I have,” responded Dr. Dabbe, “and I must say again that I would have expected rather more damage to the body. Something doesn’t tie up.”

Detective Inspector Sloan brought his gaze to bear on the post-mortem subject because it was his duty to do so but without enthusiasm. The body looked damaged enough to him. Detective Constable Crosby was concentrating his gaze on the ceiling.

“The degree of damage,” pronounced the pathologist, “is not consistent with the degree of decomposition.”

“We’ll make a note of that,” promised Sloan, pigeonholing the information in his mind. By right, Crosby should have been regarding his notebook, not the ceiling.

“There’s plenty of current in the estuary, you see, Sloan,” said the doctor. “That’s what makes the sailing so challenging. But current damages.”

“Quite so,” said Sloan, noting that fact—perhaps it was a factor, too—in his mind as well.

“To say nothing of there being a good tide,” said Dr. Dabbe, “day in, day out.”

“I daresay, Doctor,” said Sloan diffidently, “that the tide’ll still be pretty strong opposite Edsway, won’t it?”

“If you’d tacked against it as often as I have,” replied the pathologist grandly, “you wouldn’t be asking that.”

“No, Doctor, of course not.” Sloan wasn’t a frustrated single-handed Atlantic-crossing yachtsman himself. Growing roses was his hobby. It was one of the few relaxing pursuits that were compatible with the uncertain hours and demands of detection. Owning a sailing boat, as the doctor did, wasn’t compatible with police pay either—but that was something different.

“The wind doesn’t help,” said Dabbe, stroking an imaginary beard in the manner of Joshua Slocum. “You get a real funnel effect out there in mid-channel.”

“I can see that you might,” agreed Sloan. “What with the cliffs to the north…”

“And the headland above Marby to the south,” completed the doctor. “That’s the real villain of the piece.”

Sloan was thinking about something else that wasn’t going to help either and that was the official report. It would have to note that the subject was relatively undamaged but not well preserved. It was the sort of incongruity that didn’t go down well with the superintendent; worse, it would undoubtedly have to be explained to him.

By Sloan.

“There’s the shingle bank, too,” said the doctor.

“Billy’s Finger.” Sloan had looked at the map. “I’m going out there presently to have a look at the lie of the land…”

“And the water,” interjected Detective Constable Crosby.

Everyone else ignored this.

“There’s always a fair bit of turbulence, too,” remarked the pathologist sagely, “where the river meets the tide.” It was Joshua Slocum who had sailed alone around the world but Dr. Dabbe contrived to sound every bit as experienced.

Immutable was the word that always came into Sloan’s mind when people started to talk about tides. He might have been talking about tides at that moment, but it was the face of the superintendent which swam into his mental vision. He would be waiting for news.

“Let’s get this straight, Doctor,” he said more brusquely than he meant. “This man—whoever he is—has been in the water for a fair time.”

“That is so,” he agreed. “There is some evidence of adipocere being present,” supplemented the pathologist, “but not to any great degree.”

“But,” said Sloan, “he hasn’t been out where the tides and currents and fish could get hold of him for all that long?”

“That puts it very well,” said Dr. Dabbe.

“And he didn’t meet his death in the water?”

“I shall be conducting the customary routine test for the widespread distribution of diatoms found in true drowning in sea or river water,” said the pathologist obliquely, “but I shall be very surprised if I find any.”

“Yes, Doctor,” said Sloan. He wasn’t absolutely sure what a diatom was—and now that the atom wasn’t the indivisible building block of nature any longer he was even less sure.

Something in what the doctor had said must have caught the wayward attention of Detective Constable Crosby. He stirred and said, “You mean that that test wouldn’t have done for the Brides-in-the-Bath?”

“I do,” said Dr. Dabbe. “There aren’t any planktons in bath water.”

“And,” said Sloan, gamely keeping to the business in hand, “we don’t know who he is either…” He had just the one conviction about all things atomic—that the only really safe fast breeder was a rabbit.

“No,” agreed Dabbe.

“Of course,” said Sloan, “we could always try his fingerprints…”

“You’ll be lucky,” said Detective Constable Crosby, taking a quick look at what was left of the swollen and distended skin of the unknown man. He caught sight of his superior officer’s face and added a belated “sir.”

“We don’t even know,” carried on Sloan bitterly, “if he went into the river or the sea.”

Unperturbed the doctor said, “I think we may be able to help you there, Sloan. Or, rather, Charley will.”

“Or,” continued Sloan grandly, “whether it was an accident or murder.” He didn’t know who Charley was.

“He didn’t walk after he fell,” said Dabbe. “I can tell you that for certain.”

Sloan made a note. Facts were always welcome.

“And, Sloan, my man Burns has something to say to you, too.” Dr. Dabbe waved an arm. “Haven’t you, Burns?”

“Aye, Doctor.”

“His clothes,” divined Sloan quickly. “Do they tell us anything about him?”

“Mebbe, Inspector,” replied Burns. “Mebbe.”

“That’s Gaelic for ‘yes and no,’ ” said Dr. Dabbe.

“Well?”

Burns didn’t answer and it was Dr. Dabbe who spoke. “There was something strange in one of his trouser pockets, wasn’t there, Burns?”

“Yes, Doctor,” said Burns.

“Something strange?” said Sloan alertly.

“Show the inspector what you found, man.”

His assistant reached for a tray. Placed on it was a lump of metal almost the size and shape of a bun. It was a faded green in colour.

Detective Constable Crosby leaned over. “If that was ‘lost property’ we’d call it a clock pendulum.”

“I’m not a metallurgist,” said Dr. Dabbe, “but I should say it’s solid copper.”

“What is it, though?” asked Sloan, peering at it. There was a lip on one side of the bun shape.

“I can’t tell you that, Sloan.”

“It’s not heavy enough to have been to weight him down,” said Sloan, thinking aloud.

“Agreed,” said Dr. Dabbe. He scratched the metal object with the edge of a surgical probe. “It’s old, Sloan. And if you ask me…”

“Yes?”

“I should say it’s been in the water a fair old time, too.”

Police Constable Ridgeford of Edsway might have been green. He was also keen. He had noticed Horace Boiler take out his rowing boat on the River Calle for the third time that afternoon and kept a wary but unobtrusive eye open for his return. If it had been a fishing trip that Horace Boiler had been on then he had been unlucky because he had come back empty-handed for the second time that afternoon.

Brian Ridgeford did not have a boat. He didn’t own a boat himself because he couldn’t afford one; and as his beat did not extend out into the sea a grateful country did not feel called upon to supply him with one in the way in which it issued him with a regulation bicycle. What he did have—as his sergeant never failed to remind him—was a perfectly good pair of legs. He decided to use them to walk upstream along the river bank to Collerton.

As he remarked to his wife as he left the house, “You never know what’s there until you’ve been to see.”

“Curiosity killed the cat” was what she said to that, but then she hadn’t been married very long and hadn’t quite mastered the role of perfect police wife yet. She was trying hard to do so though because she added, “It’s a casserole tonight, darling.”

The only piece of good advice that the sergeant’s wife had given her was to cook everything in a pot that could stand on the stove or in the oven without spoiling.

“Good.” He kissed her and got as far as the door. “I’ll be back soon,” forecast Brian Ridgeford unwisely.

He, too, still had a lot to learn.

The remark wasn’t exactly contrary to standing orders. It was just flying in the face of some sage advice given by one of the instructors at the Police Training School. “Never tell your wife when you’re going to be back, lads,” he’d said to the assembled class. “If you’ve told her to expect you at six o’clock, then by five minutes past six she’ll be standing at the window. At ten minutes past six she’ll have her worry coat on and be out in the street looking for you. By quarter past she’ll have asked the woman next door what to do next and by half past six she’ll be on the telephone to your sergeant.” The instructor had delivered his punch line with becoming solemnity. “And the tracker dogs’ll be out searching for you before you’ve had time to get your first pint down.”

None of this potted wisdom so much as crossed Brian Ridgeford’s mind as he stepped out of the police house door. He was thinking about other things. All he did do was pause in the hall where the hydrographie map of the estuary hung. He had to stoop a little to look at it properly.

It was a purely token obeisance.

Depths in metres reduced to chart datum or approximately the level of lowest astronomical tide meant very little to a landlubber like himself. He was, though, beginning to understand from sheer observation of the estuary something about drying heights. It was a form of local knowledge—almost inherited race memory, you might say—that seemed to have been born in the Boiler tribe. Constable Ridgeford was having to learn it.

It was just as well that he had delayed his departure from the house for a moment or two. It meant that when the telephone bell rang a few minutes later he was not quite out of earshot. His wife came flying down the path after him—casserole forgotten.

“Brian! Brian… Stop!”

He halted.

“You’re wanted, darling.”

He turned.

“They’ve found a dinghy,” called out Mrs. Ridgeford.

“Ah…”

“An empty one.”

He retraced his steps in her direction.

“On the shore,” she said.

“That figures.” He absent-mindedly slipped an arm round her waist. “Whereabouts?”

“Over at Marby.”

“Right round there?” Constable Ridgeford frowned. The tiny fishing village of Marby juxta Mare was on the coast the other side of Edsway—to the south and west. It had never been the same, local legend ran, since a Danish invasion in the ninth century.

“That’s what the man said,” answered Mrs. Ridgeford. “I told him you’d go straight over there. Was that right, Brian?”

Since their marriage was still at the very early stage when it was unthinkable that she could have done anything that wasn’t right—the action being sanctified solely by virtue of its having been taken so to speak—this was a purely rhetorical question.

“Of course it was, darling.” Brian Ridgeford nodded approvingly.

“Or,” she added prettily, turning her face up towards his, “have I done the wrong thing?”

This, too, was a purely token question.

It got a purely token response in the form of a kiss.

“Where did I leave my bicycle clips?” asked Police Constable Brian Ridgeford rather breathlessly.

Marby juxta Mare was a village facing the sea. It was beyond the headland known as the Cat’s Back that protected Edsway from the full rigours of the sea. The road, though, did not follow the coast. It cut across below the headland and made Marby much nearer to Edsway by land than by sea.

A man called Farebrother had taken charge of the dinghy. He was a lifeboatman and knew all about capsized dinghies.

“She wasn’t upside down when we found her,” he said. “And not stove in or anything like that or she’d never have reached where she did on the shore.”

“Has she been there long?” asked Ridgeford cautiously. Boats, he knew, always took the feminine—like the word “victim” in the French language—but he didn’t want to make a fool of himself by asking the wrong question.

“Just the length of a tide,” said the lifeboatman without hesitation. “We reckon she’d have been gone again after the turn of the tide if we hadn’t hauled her up a bit.”

Ridgeford nodded sagely. “That’s a help.”

“No one’ll thank you for letting a dinghy get away.” Farebrother wrinkled his eyes. “It’s a danger to everyone else, too, is a dinghy on the loose. No riding lights on a dinghy. You could smash into it in the dark and then where would you be?”

“Sunk,” said Ridgeford.

“Depend on your size, that would,” said the lifeboatman, taking this literally, “and where she hit you.” He hitched his shoulder, and sniffed. “Anyways we put her where she can’t do any harm and,” he added, “where she can’t come to any more harm either.”

“Any more harm?” said Ridgeford quickly. “But I thought you said she wasn’t damaged…”

“So I did,” said Farebrother. “But she must have come to some harm to be out on the loose like she was, mustn’t she? That’s not right.”

“I see what you mean,” said the constable. Put lost dinghies into the same category in your mind as lost children and things fell into place.

“An insecure mooring is the least that can have happened.“ Farebrother picked up his oilskin jacket. He was a tall man with a thin, elongated face and high cheek-bones. From his appearance he might have descended directly from marauding Viking stock.

“I don’t think that that’s what it was,” said the young policeman, mindful of the dead body that he’d helped to bring ashore that afternoon.

“Anyways,” said the other man, “she’s safe enough now. She’s over this way… the other side of the lifeboat station… just follow me.”

This was easier said than done. Farebrother set off at a cracking pace along the rocky sea-shore of Marby juxta Mare, so different from the fine estuary sands of Edsway, his sea-boots crunching on the stones. Constable Ridgeford stepped more cautiously after him, slipping and sliding as he tried to pick his way over the difficult terrain. Farebrother slackened his pace only once. That was when a small trawler suddenly emerged from the harbour mouth. He stopped and took a good look at it. Ridgeford stopped too.

“Something wrong?” he asked.

“She’s cutting it a bit fine, that’s all.”

“Cutting what?” asked Ridgeford. He could read the name The Daisy Bell quite clearly on her prow.

“The tide,‘ said Farebrother. “She’d have had a job to clear the harbour bar if the water was any lower.”

“I didn’t think you went out on an ebb-tide,” said Ridgeford naïvely.

“You don’t,” said Farebrother. “Not without you have a reason.” He resumed his fast pace over the shingle, adding, “Unless you’re dying, of course.”

“Dying?”

“Fishermen always go out with the tide. Didn’t you know that? They die at low water…”

The dinghy that had been beached was old, weather-beaten and very waterlogged.

“She’s still got her rowlocks with her though,” said the lifeboatman professionally. “Funny, that.”

“But there’s no name on her,” noted the policeman with equal but different expertise. “She could have come from anywhere, I suppose?”

“Not anywhere.” Farebrother looked the police constable up and down and evidently decided as a result of his appraisal to be helpful. “The tide brings everything down from the north hereabouts.”

That hadn’t been quite what Ridgeford meant but he did not say so.

“Not up from the south,” continued the lifeboatman. “You never find anything that’s come up from the south on this shore.”

That, thought Ridgeford silently, tied in with a body floating in the estuary of the River Calle.

“Especially with the wind in the west like it’s been these past few days,” added the other man. “It’s a south-east wind that’s nobody’s friend.”

“Yes,” said Ridgeford. While Horace Boiler almost instinctively knew the state of the tide, so Farebrother would be equally aware of the quarter of the wind. You probably needed to be a farmer to consider the weather as a whole. It was a case of each man to his own trade. Stockbrokers doubtless knew the feel of the market—by the pricking of their thumbs or something—and equally the police… Ridgeford wasn’t sure what it was that a policeman needed to be constantly aware of… There must be something that told a policeman the state of play in the great match “Crime versus Law and Order.” The knocking off of helmets, perhaps.

“Against the current that would be, too,” continued Farebrother, who was happily unaware of the constable’s train of thought.

He made going against the current sound almost as improbable as flying in the face of nature. Had Farebrother been a carpenter, decided Ridgeford to himself, he would have said “against the grain.”

Aloud he said to the lifeboatman, “What about this rope at the bow?”

“The painter?” Farebrother looked at the end of the dinghy and the short length of line dangling from it. “She either slipped her mooring or she was untied on purpose.”

“Not cut loose or anything like that, then?”

Farebrother shook his head, while Brian Ridgeford limped over to the dinghy. He steadied himself against it as he felt about in his shoe for a stray piece of shingle that had made its way into it.

“Someone’ll be along soon looking for it,” predicted the lifeboatman, indicating the beached dinghy.

Ridgeford wasn’t so sure about that. He found the pebble and removed it.

“With a red face,” added Farebrother.

The face that sprang at once to the policeman’s mind was white. Dead white was the name that artists’ colourmen gave to paint that colour. The owner of that particular face wouldn’t be along Not this tide, nor any tide, as the poet had it, For what is sunk will hardly swim, Not with this wind blowing, and this tide.

“Maybe he will,” was all he said to Farebrother though. Ridgeford turned his mind to practicalities, and immediately wished that he had his reference books with him. He wasn’t well up in the technicalities of the law yet. Was a dinghy washed up on the foreshore “flotsam” or “jetsam” or the forgotten third of that marine trio “lagan”? More importantly, was it “lost property” or “salvage”?

“Anyways,” pronounced Farebrother, resolving that difficulty for him, “we’ll keep it here until the owner—whoever he is—turns up. And if he doesn’t, you’ll let the Receiver of Wrecks and the Department of Trade know, won’t you?”

“Of course,” said Ridgeford hastily. So the dinghy was none of these things. It was officially a wreck. “I’ll get on to him.”

“Department of Trade!” Farebrother spat expertly across the shore. “Huh! Trade! I don’t suppose anyone there knows the meaning of the word.”

“Well…” Ridgeford temporised. He was a civil servant himself now and he was beginning to find out that civil servants did know what they were doing.

“And why they couldn’t go on calling it the Board of Trade beats me.” Farebrother rolled his eyes. “At least everyone knew what you meant then. Department. Huh!”

“They’ve always got to change things, haven’t they?” agreed the young constable briskly. He cast a long glance in the direction of the headland at the south side of the estuary. Some change was for the better. In olden times the good citizens of Marby juxta Mare used to light beacons on this stretch of coast with intent to mislead poor mariners in search of safe landfall. Golden times for the citizens, hard ones for the drowned seafarers. They did say that somewhere out to sea off the headland was the wreck of a merchantman lured to its doom by the ancestors of men like Farebrother…

The lifeboatman spat again. “Things should be let alone with, that’s what I say. I don’t hold with disturbing things that have always been the way they are and I don’t mind who knows it.”

By the time the constable got back to his home in Edsway his wife was on the look-out for him. He dismounted, undid his bicycle clips and announced portentously, “It’s all right, love. It was just an empty boat. Nothing to worry about—it’s safely in police hands now.”

His helpmeet rather spoilt the effect of this pronouncement by giggling.

“Call police hands safe, do you?” she said saucily. “I don’t, Brian Ridgeford.”

7

Gentlemen, I am ordered immediate execution.

« ^ »

I think it was murder, all right, sir,” said Detective Inspector Sloan into the telephone in Dr. Dabbe’s office.

“An accident at sea, Sloan,” boomed Superintendent Leeyes into his mouthpiece at the police station in Berebury.

Sloan cleared his throat and carried on manfully. “He was killed in a fall from a height first and…”

“Washed overboard from an old dinghy,” swept on Leeyes.

“And then,” continued Sloan with deliberation, “put into the water.”

“The dinghy’s been found over at Marby juxta Mare,” said the superintendent.

“With a copper weight of sorts in his pocket,” said Sloan doggedly.

“On the foreshore at Marby,” said Leeyes. “Constable Ridgeford has just rung in from Edsway.”

There was a flourishing school of thought at the police station which held that the superintendent was deaf. Older hands—more perceptive, perhaps—did not subscribe to this theory. They insisted that the superintendent always heard the things that he wanted to hear all right.

“Why was it murder?” Leeyes asked Sloan suddenly.

“The fall killed him,” explained Sloan, “and he certainly wouldn’t have got into the water on his own afterwards. Dr. Dabbe’s done some X-rays to prove it…”

Leeyes grunted. “That’s something to be thankful for anyway, Sloan. The last time Dyson and Williams went anywhere near his precious X-ray machine with their cameras I thought we’d never hear the last of it.”

Dyson and Williams were the police photographers and there had been a memorable occasion when the pathologist’s X-ray equipment had silently ruined all the film in their cameras and about their persons; something they hadn’t discovered until after they had shot it…

“The fall killed him,” repeated Sloan. “I don’t know how he fell—I don’t know yet who was there when it happened”—his lips tightened as he thought about the young man in the mortuary—“but before I’m done I intend to find out.”

“Person or persons unknown,” supplied the superintendent, falling back upon an ancient formula. “That’ll do for the time being anyway.”

“They,” continued Sloan with a fine disregard for number and gender, “put his body into the water after that.”

“Hrrrrumph.”

“Yes, sir,” Sloan responded to the sentiment as much as to the sound. “Exactly.”

“Don’t say it, Sloan.”

“No, sir.”

“I know the dead can’t walk.”

“Yes, sir.”

“What was that about a copper weight?” The superintendent never forgot anything he wanted to remember either.

“It was a small round lump,” said Sloan. “In his pocket.”

Leeyes grunted. “Clothes?”

“He didn’t have a lot on, sir,” replied Sloan. “Shirt and trousers, socks and underclothes…”

“Seaboots?” queried Leeyes sharply. “Was he wearing seaboots?”

“No, sir,” said Sloan. It had been one of the first things he had looked for. Pincher Martin had had seaboots on. A young Christopher Dennis Sloan had been brought up on the story of Pincher Martin, and when in later life an adult Detective Inspector C. D. Sloan came across a body in the water in the way of business, the poor drowned seaman who had been Pincher Martin came to the front of his mind. Pincher Martin’s seaboots hadn’t saved him from drowning. “This chap didn’t have any seaboots on, sir. Only what I said. Shirt, trousers, socks and underclothes.”

“Traceable?” queried Leeyes, who had not been thinking about Pincher Martin.

“Easily,” said Sloan.

“Ah!”

“In the first instance, that is,” said Sloan.

“Oh?”

“To a well-known store that clothes half the nation.”

“But after that?”

“Who’s to say?” said Sloan wearily, consciously suppressing an unhappy vision of the routine work it would take to find out.

“Labels not cut out then?” concluded Leeyes briskly.

“Oh, no, sir. We were meant to think that this was a simple case of drowning—if we found the body, that is.”

“Oh, we were, were we?” responded Superintendent Leeyes energetically, forgetting for a moment that it had been Dr. Dabbe who had told them it wasn’t.

“This dinghy, sir…” It was Sloan’s turn to do the remembering.

“Old,” quoted Leeyes, “but not truly waterlogged. Ridgeford’s no seaman but he did notice that much.”

“Over at Marby, you said, sir…”

“Yes, Sloan.” The superintendent’s voice faded as he spun round in his swivel chair and consulted the map that hung on the wall. “The tide would have had to take your man round the headland—what’s it called?”

“The Cat’s Back.”

“The Cat’s Back and into the estuary of the Calle.”

“That,” began Sloan carefully, “would mean that he would have had to have been swept out to sea first and then brought in by the tide against the river current.”

He heard the swivel chair creak as Leeyes turned back to face the telephone again. “Naturally, Sloan.”

“Sir, Dr. Dabbe says that this fellow—whoever he is—hadn’t been knocked about by the tide and the river current all that much.” Sloan had meant to lead into the point he had to make with the delicacy of a diplomat but in the event he didn’t bother. “Not anything like as much as he would have expected.”

“But you said he’d been in the water quite a long while,” Leeyes pounced.

“Dr. Dabbe said that, sir. Not me,” responded Sloan. The superintendent had a tendency which he shared with the ancient Greeks to confuse the messenger with the source of the news. Harbingers had a notoriously bad time with him.

“What you’re trying to tell me, Sloan, and I must say you’ve taken your time about it, is that things aren’t quite what they seem.”

“That’s right, sir.”

“There’s still this empty dinghy over at Marby,” said Superintendent Leeyes down the telephone to the head of his Criminal Investigation Department. “No doubt about that.”

“Yes, sir.” Sloan got the message. “I’ll get over there as soon as I can and have a look at it.”

“Doesn’t add up, Sloan, does it?”

“No, sir.”

“I don’t like coincidences,” growled Leeyes.

“No, sir,” agreed Sloan. No policeman did. Sorting them out from circumstantial evidence in court could get very tricky indeed. Sloan knew—sight unseen—that the superintendent’s bushy eyebrows would have come together in a formidable frown as he said that.

“Now what, Sloan?”

“I’m following up the piece of copper, sir, and Dr. Dabbe’s lining someone up for me to see, too, who may be able to help with something else… a Miss Hilda Collins.”

He did not add that that someone was a schoolmistress. Some of Superintendent Leeyes’s responses were altogether too predictable.

Police Constable Brian Ridgeford was addressing himself to a mug of steaming hot tea. One thing Mrs. Ridgeford—good police wife that she was trying too hard to be—had learnt well. That was to put the kettle on the hob and leave it on.

He had dutifully made his report to his Headquarters at Berebury about the beached dinghy and was sitting back considering what to do next. He hadn’t forgotten that before he had been diverted over to Marby juxta Mare he had been going to walk up the river bank from the Edsway to Collerton, but before that there was his report to be written. One of the tenets at the Police Training School was that—as far as records went—the telephone was no substitute for pen and paper.

“Anything come in while I was out, love?” he asked, conscientiously pulling his report book towards him.

“Hopton’s rang,” said Mrs. Ridgeford, sitting back and joining him in some tea. She was still at that early stage in their police married life when handing over the message was synonymous with handing over the responsibility. Her sleepless nights would come later.

Brian Ridgeford said, “What’s up with Hopton’s?” As a rule his wife gave him any messages that had come in almost before he’d got his foot over the threshold, so this one couldn’t be too important.

“They want you down there.”

Ridgeford frowned. Hopton’s was always wanting him down there at the store. Every time a bunch of schoolchildren had been in Mrs. Hopton was convinced that they had stolen things. As far as the weekend sailors and fishermen were concerned—Hopton’s prices being distinctly on the high side—all the robbery was on the other side of the counter. And in daylight, too.

“Profits down or something?” he said.

“Boys,” said Mrs. Ridgeford succinctly.

So it was to the ship’s chandler by the shore in Edsway that Ridgeford made his way—not too quickly—after he’d had his tea and filled in his report about the dinghy.

Mrs. Hopton was vocal. “There were two of them,” she said. “And I had to deal with them myself on account of Hopton being the way he is.”

“What did they do?” enquired Ridgeford patiently. Mr. Hopton spent his life lurking in the little parlour at the back of the shop. He was a little man and his wife was a large woman. No doubt he was the way he was by virtue of being locked in holy wedlock to Mrs. Hopton. It wasn’t a fate that he, Brian Ridgeford, would have chosen either.

“Do?” she said, surprised. “They didn’t do anything.”

“Well, then…” Somebody had once tried to explain to his class of new constables the difference between crimes of commission and the sins of omission—the latter mostly, it seemed, to do with their notebooks—but Ridgeford hadn’t listened too hard.

“Unless,” carried on Mrs. Hopton, “you count trying to make me buy something that wasn’t theirs to sell.”

“Ah.” Ridgeford thought he was beginning to understand. The far end of the ship’s-chandler store was devoted to the sale of second-hand equipment.

“At my time of life!” said Mrs. Hopton with every appearance of remorse. “Well, they say there’s no fool like an old fool. I should have known better, shouldn’t I?”

“Well…” temporised the policeman. The theory that all were responsible for their own actions was highly important in law. It was apt to be overlooked in real life.

“Smelt a rat, I should have done, shouldn’t I,” she sniffed, “as soon as they said where they’d found it.”

“But you didn’t?” suggested Ridgeford for appearance’ sake.

“Not then,” said Mrs. Hopton.

“When?” prompted Ridgeford.

“Afterwards,” said Mrs. Hopton, challenging him to make something of that. “When they’d gone.”

“What made you wonder?”

“When I began to think about it.” She shifted her shoulders uneasily. “I wasn’t happy.”

“About what?”

“Them saying they found it up on the Cat’s Back.”

“The headland?”

She nodded. “Whoever heard of anyone finding a ship’s bell up there?”

“It is a funny place to find anything from a ship,” agreed Ridgeford, professionally interested. Common things took place most commonly—he knew that—but it was the uncommon that attracted most police attention. “A bell, did you say?” He imagined that—like policemen’s helmets—ships’ bells had a symbolic importance all of their own.

“It’s a bell all right,” said Mrs. Hopton heavily.

Police Constable Ridgeford shifted his gaze in the direction of the jumble of second-hand nautical gear at the end of the store. “Had I better have a look at it, then?”

“Wait a minute,” she said. “I’ve got it safe in the parlour. My husband’s keeping an eye on it for me.”

Ridgeford was a puzzled man as she turned away.

When she came back it was with a very shabby and encrusted piece of metal and he was more puzzled still.

“It’s a bell all right,” he agreed after a moment or two, “but you couldn’t use it, could you? Not with that crack in its side.” There was evidence of some scraping too, from a penknife, he guessed.

“That’s what I told the boys,” said Mrs. Hopton. “No use to anyone, I said, it being the way it was.”

“So,” said Ridgeford a trifle impatiently, “what did you want me down here for then?”

“Ships’ bells,” she said impressively, “have the names of ships on them.”

“What about it?”

“They have them cut into the metal so that they last.”

“Well?” If Brian Ridgeford was any judge this one had had to last a long time.

“I was curious, you see,” she said, looking him straight in the eye. “So I got out a piece of paper and a soft pencil…”

“You traced the name,” finished the policeman for her.

“Not all of it. Some of it’s too far gone.”

“You traced some of it,” said Ridgeford with heavy patience.

“That’s right.” Mrs. Hopton was above irony. “I traced some of it and came up with some letters.”

“Did you then?” said Ridgeford expressionlessly.

She pulled out a drawer behind the counter. “Do you want to see them?”

Police Constable Brian Ridgeford bent over a piece of grubby paper and read aloud the letters that were discernible. “E…M…B…A…L…D. EMBALD? Is that what it says?”

She gave him a nod of barely suppressed excitement. “I know what the other letters are. Don’t you?”

“No,” he said. “Tell me.” “C…L… A… R,” she said. She was speaking in lowered tones now. “To make Clarembald.”

“All right then,” he conceded. “If you say so—The Clarembald. What about it?”

She tossed her head. “I’d forgotten you were new here, Mr. Ridgeford.”

“Yes.”

“You wouldn’t know, I suppose?”

“No.”

“Everyone else knows.”

“Everyone else knows what?”

She delivered her punch line almost in a whisper. “The Clarembald was the name of the ship that went down off Marby all those years ago. Didn’t you know that?”

8

But at present keep your own secret.

« ^ »

Detective Inspector Sloan had not been inside the museum at Calleford since he was a boy.

It was situated inside an old castle that had started life under Edward III as a spanking new bastion against the nearest enemy, degenerated over the years into a prison, and in the twentieth century been revived as a museum. At first Sloan and Crosby followed the way of the ordinary visitor. This led them past glass cases of Romano-British pottery and Jutish finds. They turned left by the vast exhibition of stuffed birds willed by a worthy citizen of bygone days, and kept straight on to the main office through the Darrell Collection of nineteenth-century costume.

There was nothing out of date about the museum’s curator.

Mr. Basil Jensen took a quick look at the lump of copper and immediately took over the questioning himself. “Where did you find this?” he demanded excitedly.

“The River Calle.”

“The river?” squealed Jensen. “Are you sure?”

“Quite sure,” said Sloan, “What is it?”

“A barbary head,” said Basil Jensen impatiently. He was a little man who obviously found it hard to keep still. “Where did you say you found it?”

“The river,” said Sloan.

“I know that.” He danced from one leg to the other. “Whereabouts in the river?”

“Between Edsway and Collerton,” said Sloan accurately. The police usually asked the questions but Sloan was content to let him go on. Sometimes questions were even more revealing than answers. “What’s a barbary head?”

“I don’t believe it,” declared Mr. Jensen with academic ferocity. “Not between Edsway and Collerton.”

“No,” said Sloan consideringly, “I can see that you might not. What’s a barbary head?”

“Now, if you’d said the sea, Inspector…”

“Yes?”

“That would have made more sense.”

Anything that made sense suited Sloan. Crosby was concentrating more on his surroundings. The museum curator’s room was stuffed with improbable objects standing in unlikely juxtaposition. Two vases stood on his desk—one clearly Chinese, one as clearly Indian. Even Sloan’s untutored eye could see the difference between them—two whole civilisations summed up in the altered rake of the lip of a vase…

“What’s a barbary head?” asked Sloan again. Crosby was staring at an oryx whose head—a triumph of the taxidermist’s art—was at eye level on the wall. The oryx stared unblinkingly back at him.

“A single head of barbary copper,” said Basil Jensen authoritatively, “moulded into a circular shape.” He blinked. “Any the wiser?”

“No,” said Sloan truthfully.

“An ingot, then.”

“Ah.”

“It was the way they used to transport copper in the old days.”

“I see.”

Mr. Jensen pointed to the copper object. “You’d get tons and tons of it like this. A man could move it with a shovel, you see. Easier than shifting great lumps that needed two men to lift them.”

“What sort of old days?” asked Sloan cautiously.

“Let’s not beat about the bush,” said Mr. Jensen.

Sloan was all in favour of that.

“Mid-eighteenth century,” said the museum curator impressively.

“Make a note of that, Crosby,” said Sloan.

“Mid-eighteenth century,” repeated Mr. Jensen.

“That would be about 1750, wouldn’t it, sir?” said Sloan. “Give or take a year or two.”

“Or five,” said Mr. Jensen obscurely. He tapped the barbary head. “And at a guess…”

“Yes?”

“This has been in the water since then.” He thrust his chin forward. “If you don’t believe me, Inspector, take it to Greenwich. They’ll know there.” He suddenly looked immensely cunning. “There’s something else they’ll be able to tell you, too.”

“What’s that, sir?”

“Whether it’s been in salt water or fresh all these years.”

Sloan said, “I think I may know the answer to that, sir.”

The museum curator nodded and pointed to the piece of copper. “And I think, Inspector, that I know the answer to this.”

“You do, sir?”

“Someone’s found The Clarembald.” He spoke almost conversationally now. “She was an East Indiaman, you know…”

Across the years Sloan caught the sudden whiff of blackboard chalk at the back of his nostrils and he was once again in the classroom of a long-ago schoolmaster. The man—a rather precise, dry man—had been trying to convey to a class of boys that strange admixture of trade, empire-building and corruption that had made the East India Company what it was. He’d been a “chalk and talk” schoolmaster but one rainy afternoon he’d made John Company and the investigation of Robert Clive and the impeachment of Warren Hastings all come alive to his class.

“Someone’s found her,” said Jensen.

They’d been all ears, those boys, especially when the teacher had come to that macabre incident in British history that everybody knows. It was strange, thought Sloan, that out of a crowded historical past “when all else be forgot” everyone always remembered the Black Hole of Calcutta.

“We knew it would happen one day,” said the museum curator. “In fact,” he admitted, “we’d heard a rumour. Nothing you could put your finger on, you know…‘’

“Ah.”

“And people have been in making enquiries,” said Jensen.

Sloan leaned forward. “You wouldn’t happen to know which people, sir, would you?”

“They don’t leave their names,” said Jensen drily. “And we get a lot of casual enquirers, you know.”

“Short, dark and young?” said Sloan.

Jensen shook his head. “Tallish, brown hair and not as young as all that.”

“This ship,” said Sloan. “You know all about it then?”

“Bless you, Inspector, yes.” Jensen started to pace up and down. “It’s perfectly well documented. And it’s all here in the museum for anyone to look up. She was lured to her doom by wreckers in the winter of 1755…”

“The evil that men do lives after them,” murmured Sloan profoundly.

Jensen’s response was immediate. “Yes, indeed, Inspector. We see a lot of that in the museum world.”

Sloan hadn’t thought of that.

Jensen waved a hand. “I daresay that I can tell you what The Clarembald was carrying too…”

Quinquireme of Nineveh from distant Ophir…

“We have a copy of the ship’s manifest here,” said Jensen, jerking to a standstill. “I daresay the East India Office will have something about it too.” He pointed to the barbary head and went on enthusiastically, “And if she wasn’t carrying a load of copper ingots I’ll eat my hat. Mind you, Inspector, that won’t have been all her cargo by a long chalk. She’ll have had a great many other good things on board.”

Sloan motioned to Crosby to take a note.

“A great many other things,” said the museum curator, “that certain people would like to have today.”

“Gold?” suggested Sloan simply.

Topazes and cinnamon, and gold moidores, it had been in the poem.

Mr. Jensen gave a quick frown. “Gold, certainly. Don’t forget it was used as currency then. But it won’t be so much the gold as the guns that they’ll be going for today.”

“Guns?” said Sloan. “Guns before gold?” He was faintly disappointed. Pieces of eight had a swashbuckling ring to them.

“They’re easier to find underwater,” said Jensen. “And if I remember rightly she had a pair of Demi-Culverin on board and some twelve pounders.”

Sloan was struck by a different thought. “Armed merchantmen were nothing new, then?”

“If you worked in a museum, Inspector, you’d realise that there is nothing new under the sun.”

“Quite so,” said Sloan.

Mr. Jensen came back very quickly to the matter in hand. “There are treasure-seekers, Inspector, who would blow her out of the water for her guns and not care that they were destroying priceless marine archeology. Do you realise that everything that comes out of an underwater find should be kept underwater?”

“She doesn’t,” observed Sloan moderately, “appear to have been blown out of the water yet.”

“Matter of time,” said Jensen, resuming his restless pacing. “Only a matter of time. Depends entirely on who knows she’s been found and how quickly they act.”

“I can see that, sir.” There were villains everywhere. You learned that early in the police force. “There must be something that can be done about stopping her being damaged.”

“Done? Oh, yes,” said Jensen. “For those in peril in the sea, Inspector, we can get a Department of Trade protection order making it an offence to interfere with the wreck or carry out unlicenced diving or salvage.” He turned on his heel suddenly and faced Sloan. “But we’d need to know where she was. How did you say you’d come by this barbary head?”

“I didn’t,” said Sloan quietly, “and I’m not going to.”

Elizabeth Busby felt strangely relaxed and comforted after her cry at the graveside. She was sure that her aunt would have understood her need to leave the house and seek out a quiet spot in the out of doors. Celia Mundill would have understood the tears too—there was a marvellous release to be had in tears. And Collerton graveyard was certainly quiet enough—it was a fine and private place for tears, in fact.

True, Horace Boiler from Edsway had rowed past on his way upstream but he hadn’t disturbed her thoughts at all. Perhaps this was because those thoughts were still too inchoate and unformed to admit intrusion from an outside source. Perhaps it was only because—more mundanely—she hadn’t liked to lift a tear-stained face for it to be seen by the man who had been going by.

She felt much better in the open air; she was sure about that. Collerton House had begun to oppress her since Celia Mundill had died—it wasn’t the same without her warm presence, ill as she had been. It wasn’t the same either—subconsciously she stiffened her shoulders—since Peter Hinton had so precipitately taken his departure. There was no use baulking at the fact—no matter how hard she tried to think of other things, in the end her thoughts always came back to Peter Hinton.

She had felt at the time and she still felt now that a note left on the table in the hall was no way for a real man to break with his affianced. If he had felt the way he said he did, then the very least he could have done was to have told her so—face to face. A note left behind on the hall table beside the signet ring she had given him was the coward’s way.

For the thousandth time she took the folded paper which Peter Hinton had written out of her pocket and—for the thousandth time—considered it. Its message was loud and clear. It could scarcely have been shorter or balder either.

It’s no go. Forgive me. P.

There was not a word of explanation as to why a man who had quite unequivocally declared that he wanted to marry her should suddenly leave a note like that. Time and time again she had turned it over to see if there had been more—anything—written on the back but there wasn’t.

There still wasn’t.

She had resolved not to keep on and on reading the note—and forgotten how many times she had made the resolution. She’d broken it every day. She didn’t know why she needed to look at it anyway. It wasn’t as if she didn’t know what it said. Sadly she folded it up again and put it away.

She sat back on her heels then, more at peace with herself than she’d been all day. There was something very peaceful about the churchyard—you could begin to see what it was about a churchyard that had moved Thomas Gray to write his elegy and why her aunt hadn’t wanted to be cremated. There was something very soothing, too, about the sound of the water lapping away at the edge of the churchyard grass. Cray hadn’t had that at—where was it? Stoke Poges.

Elizabeth reached over and picked out the flowers that she had brought with her on her last visit. They were fading now. That gave her something to do with her hands and that was soothing too. As she carefully started to arrange the roses in the vase she began to understand why it was that her aunt’s husband had been so insistent about his wife’s grave being within the sound of the water.

“She’d spent all her life by the river,” he’d said, immediately selecting the plot that was closest to the river’s edge.

The sexton had murmured something about flooding.

“But she loved the sound of the river,” Frank Mundill had insisted.

The sexton had hitched his shoulder. “You won’t like it in winter, Mr. Mundill.”

Architects spend at least half their working lives persuading recalcitrant builders to do what architect and client want and Frank Mundill had had to prove his skill in this field in the five minutes that followed.

“It couldn’t be too near the river for her,” he had said.

“The first time the Calle comes up,” sniffed the sexton obstinately, “you’ll be on to me. You see.”

“I won’t,” undertook Frank Mundill.

“And there won’t be anything I can do then,” said the man as if he hadn’t spoken.

“I shan’t want you to do anything.”

“It’ll be too late then,” said the man obdurately. “Mark my words.”

“My wife was born over there, remember.” Frank Mundill had waved a hand in the direction of Collerton House. He introduced a firmer tone into his voice. “She loved this river.”

His gesture had reminded Elizabeth Busby of something and she had taken herself off at that point to have a look at her grandparents’ grave. That was over by the church—not far from the west door. And next to it was the polished marble monument to her great grandparents. Cordon Camming—he who had invented the Camming valve—had made it clear that he intended to found a dynasty too. He’d bought half a dozen plots around his own tomb; the sexton hadn’t hesitated to remind Frank Mundill of this.

The word “dynasty” had started up another unhappy train of thought, in her mind at the time, not unconnected with Peter Hinton, and she had drifted back to the river’s edge where the exchange between Frank Mundill and the sexton was drawing to a close. By the time she had reached the two men, the site of the plot for the grave of her aunt had been agreed upon and the sexton, if still not happy about it, at least mollified.

“She’ll be content here,” she heard Celia Mundill’s widower insisting as she drew closer.

Elizabeth hoped then and hoped now as she tended the flowers on the grave that this was true. It was still summertime, of course, and flooding was a long way from her mind as she took away the last of the dead flowers from her previous visit. She sat back on her heels while she carefully picked out the best rose for the centre position. Her aunt had known she would never see this year’s Fantin-Latour roses on the bush—she’d told Elizabeth so in spite of all Dr. Tebot had said—but there was no reason, she told herself fiercely, why she shouldn’t have them on her grave.

As she placed each succeeding stem of the double blush-pink clusters of flowers in the grave’s special frost-proof vase she began to see why it was that this particular rose had been such a favourite—and not only of Celia Mundill but of Henri Fantin-Latour and the old Dutch flower painters—of real artists, in fact.

Involuntarily her lips tightened into a smile.

There was a family joke about the word “artist.” Grandfather Camming had called himself an artist and filled canvas upon canvas to prove it. The family had tacitly agreed therefore that he must be known as an artist. Other artists—those who did improve as time went by, those whose pictures were fought over by art galleries—even those whose paintings were bought with an eye to the future—deserved to be distinguished from Richard Camming and his amateur efforts. They had been known—in the family and out of earshot of Richard Camming—as real artists.

“Poor Grandfather!” she thought. Time and money weren’t what made a painter. “Nor,” she added fairly in her mind, “was application.” Grandfather Camming had certainly applied himself. She gave a little, silent giggle to herself.

Richard Camming had cheerfully applied paint to every canvas in sight.

As Elizabeth placed the roses in the vase she was conscious of how the lively shell-pink of the centre of the flower made a fine splash of colour against the newly turned earth. She would have liked to have had that bare earth covered in stone or even grass but the sexton said it had to stay the way it was until it had settled. Frank Mundill didn’t seem worried about the bare earth either. When she had mentioned it to him later he had said he was still thinking about the right monumental design and so she had left the subject well alone.

She sat back on her heels for a moment to consider her handiwork in flower arrangement. She hoped it wouldn’t flood in this corner of the churchyard but you never could tell with the River Calle. The river seemed to have a will of its own. Way, way inland—above Calleford, and almost as far inland as the town of Luston—it was a docile stream, little more than a rivulet, in fact. By the time it got to Calleford itself it was bigger, of course, but it was tamed there by city streets and bridges, to say nothing of the odd sluice gate.

Once west of the county town, though, and out onto the flat land in the middle of the county—those very same low-lying fields in which Grandfather Camming had painted during his Constable period—the River Calle broadened and steadily grew into a force of water to be reckoned with. The bends in its course through Collerton towards Edsway and the sea it seemed to regard as a challenge to its strength. In spring and autumn, that is.

Her flowers arranged and her tears dried and forgotten for the time being, Elizabeth Busby rose to her feet and dusted off her knees. She decided that she would walk back to the house along the river bank. It was a slightly longer way back to Collerton House than by the paved road but what was time to her now?

She slipped out of the little kissing gate that led from the churchyard onto the river walk feeling rather as if she had stepped out of a William Morris painting—or was it another of the Pre-Raphaelites who had been so fond of having girls stationed prettily beside a river as they put brush to canvas? Perhaps it was Millais? Not Baron Leighton, surely? She always felt a little self-conscious when she was walking along the river bank with a wooden gardening trug over one arm. At least she didn’t have a Victorian parasol in the other.

It was while she was walking back along the path on the river bank and rounding the bend that matched the curve of the river that the boathouse at the bottom of the garden of Collerton House came into view.

Someone, she noticed in a detached way, had left the doors of the boathouse open.

9

See my courage Is out.

« ^ »

Detective Inspector Sloan and Detective Constable Crosby made their way back to the pathologist’s mortuary. They found the pathologist in his secretary’s room, there talking to a squarish woman with shaggy eyebrows and cropped hair, Rita, the pathologist’s secretary, was there too. She was a slim girl whose eyebrows showed every sign of having had a lot of loving care and attention lavished upon them. Dr. Dabbe introduced the older woman to the policemen as Miss Hilda Collins.

“We’ve met before,” she announced, acknowledging them with a quick jerk of her head.

Sloan bowed slightly.

“I never forget a face,” declared Miss Collins.

“It’s a gift,” said Sloan, and he meant it. For his part Sloan remembered her too. Miss Collins was the biology mistress at the Berebury High School for Girls. “I wish we had more policemen who didn’t forget faces,” he said—and he meant that too. What with Identikits, memory banks and computer-assisted this and that, the man on the beat didn’t really have to remember any more what villains looked like. It was a pity.

At the other side of the room Constable Crosby was exhibiting every sign of trying to commit Rita’s face to memory. Sloan averted his eyes.

“Miss Collins,” said the pathologist easily, “is an expert.”

“I see.” Sloan remained cautious. If his years in the Force had taught him anything, it was that experts were a breed on their own. Put them in the witness box and you never knew what they were going to say next. They could make or mar a case, too. Irretrievably. There was only one thing worse than one expert and that was two. Then they usually differed. “May I ask on what?” he said politely.

“Good question,” said Dr. Dabbe. “I must say I’d rather like to know myself. It’s in the lab… this way.” He led them through from his secretary’s room into the small laboratory that Sloan knew existed alongside the post-mortem room. “I called him Charley because he travelled,” said the pathologist obscurely.

“With the body, I think you said,” murmured Miss Collins gruffly.

“It was my man Burns who said that,” said Dr. Dabbe. “He found it wriggling inside the man’s shirt. That was still very wet.”

“He found what…” began Sloan peremptorily, and then stopped.

The pathologist was pointing to a wide-necked retort that was almost full of water. Swimming happily about in it was a small creature. “Burns said they call it a ‘screw’ in Scotland,” he said.

As if to prove the point the creature wriggled suddenly sideways. It was a dull greenish-yellow colour and quite small.

“It’s still alive,” said Detective Constable Crosby unnecessarily.

“That proves something,” said Miss Collins immediately. “What’s it in?”

“Aqua destillata,” said the pathologist who belonged to the old school which felt that the Latin language and the profession of medicine should always go together.

Sloan made a mental note that sturdily included the words “distilled water.” Latin used where English would do always made him think of Merlin and spells.

Miss Collins advanced on the specimen in the glass. “It’s one of the Crustacea,” she said.

“That’s what I thought,” said Dr. Dabbe.

“Amphipod, of course,” announced Miss Collins. “The order is known as ‘Sand-hoppers’ although few live in the sand and even fewer still hop.”

There were inconsistencies in law, too. Sloan had stopped worrying about them now but when he had been a younger man they’d sometimes come between him and a good night’s sleep.

“You’ll find it demonstrates negative heliotropism very nicely,” Miss Collins said.

If she had been speaking in a foreign tongue, Detective Inspector Sloan would have been allowed to bring in an interpreter at public expense. And as far as Sloan was concerned she might as well have been.

The pathologist must have understood her, though, because he pushed the jar half into and half out of the rays of sunlight falling on the laboratory bench. Whatever it was in the water—fish or insect—jerked quickly away from that part of the jar and scuttled off into such dimmer light as it could find.

“We do that with the third form,” said Miss Collins in a kindly way, “to teach them phototropism.”

Dr. Dabbe was unabashed while Miss Collins bent down for an even closer look. “The family Cammaridae,” she pronounced.

Detective Constable Crosby abandoned any attempt to record this. He too bent down and looked at the creature. “Doesn’t it look big through the glass?” he said.

“You get illusory magnification from curved glass with water in it,” the pathologist informed him absently.

Both Miss Collins and Crosby were still peering, fascinated, at the glass retort and its contents. Some dentists, Sloan was reminded, had tanks with goldfish swimming in them in their waiting rooms. The theory was that patients were soothed by watching fish move about. In a cool curving world he lies… no, that was the river in Rupert Brooke’s Fish but no doubt the principle was the same. There were insomniacs, too, who had them by their beds. The considering of fish swimming was said to lower tension all round.

He looked across at Detective Constable Crosby. He didn’t want his assistant’s tension lowered any more.

“Have you got a note of that, Crosby?” he barked unfairly.

Miss Collins said, “It can’t osmoregulate, you know, Inspector.”

Sloan didn’t know and said so.

“True estuarine species can,” declared Miss Collins.

Sloan did not enjoy being blinded with Science.

“Gammarus pulex, Inspector, is a good example of a biological indicator.”

Sloan said he was very glad to hear it.

The pathologist leaned forward eagerly and said, “So Charley here…”

“I’m not at all sure that I can tell you its sex,” said Miss Collins meticulously. She raised her head from considering the water creature and asked clearly, “Is sex important?”

Sloan stiffened. If Crosby said that sex was always important then he, Detective Inspector Sloan, his superior officer, would put him on report there and then… murder case or not. Detective Constable Crosby, however, continued to be absorbed by half an inch of wriggling crustacean and it was Sloan who found himself answering her.

“No,” he said into the silence.

He felt that sounded prim and expanded on it.

“Not as far as I know,” he added.

That sounded worse.

He lost his nerve altogether and launched into further speech.

“In this particular case,” he added lamely.

Miss Collins looked extremely scientific. “Gammarus pulex enjoys a curious sort of married life.”

As a quondam bobby on the beat Sloan could have told her that that went for quite a slice of the human population too.

“But,” she carried on, “you don’t get the really intricate sex reversal as in—say—the Epicarids.”

Sloan was glad to hear it. If there was one thing that the law had not really been able to bend its mind round yet, it was sex reversal.

“Can you eat it?” asked Detective Constable Crosby.

Miss Collins gave a hortatory cough while Sloan had to agree to himself that food did come a close second to sex most of the time. She shook her head and said, “Its common name of freshwater shrimp is a complete misnomer.”

In the end it was Sloan who cut the cackle and got down to the horses. “What you’re trying to tell us, miss, is that this… this… whatever it is… is a freshwater species, not a sea one.”

“That’s what I said, Inspector,” she agreed patiently. “Gammarus pulex can’t live in sea water and that’s what makes it a good biological indicator.”

“So,” said Sloan slowly and carefully, “the body didn’t come in from the sea.”

“I don’t know about the body,” said the biologist with precision, “but I can assure you that Gammarus pulex didn’t.”

“Are you telling me,” asked Sloan, anxious to have at least one thing clear in his mind, “that it—this thing here—would have died in sea water then?”

“I am,” she said with all the lack of equivocation of the true scientist on sound territory covered by natural laws.

A little hush fell in the laboratory.

Then Sloan said heavily, “We’d better get our best feet forward then, hadn’t we?”

Perhaps in their own way policemen were amphipods too.

Or amphiplods.

Gammarus pulex scuttled sideways across the bottom of the glass vessel as he spoke.

He’d have to prise Crosby away from that jar if he watched it much longer. He was practically mesmerized by it as it was.

“We’ll have to go up river,” Sloan announced to nobody in particular. He turned. “Come along, Crosby.”

Detective Constable Crosby straightened up at last. “We might find some Dead Man’s Fingers, too, sir, mightn’t we?”

“Alcyonium digitatum,” said Dr. Dabbe.

“Not in fresh water,” said Miss Collins promptly. “Dead Man’s Fingers are animals colonial that like the sea-shore.”

Sloan didn’t say anything at all.

Police Constable Brian Ridgeford was confused. He had duly reported the finding of the ship’s bell to Berebury Police Station and had in fact brought it back to his home with him. Home in the case of a country constable was synonymous with place of work. His wife was less than enchanted when he set the bell down on the kitchen table.

“Take that out to the shed,” commanded Mrs. Ridgeford immediately.

Ridgeford picked it up again.

“What is it anyway?” she asked. “It looks like a bell to me.”

“It is a bell,” he said. That sounded like one of those childhood conundrums that came in Christmas crackers.

Question: When is a door not a door?

Answer: When it’s ajar.

When was a bell not a bell?

When it was treasure trove. Or was it only that when it—whatever it was—had been hidden by the original owner with the intention of coming back for it? Not lost at sea. He would have to look that up. He felt a little self-conscious anyway about using the words “treasure trove” to his wife.

“It’s a ship’s bell,” he said lamely.

“I can see that.”

“It’s stolen property, too, I think.” He cleared his throat and added conscientiously, “Although I don’t rightly know about that for sure.” Unfortunately when he’d telephoned the police station he’d been put through to Superintendent Leeyes. This had compounded his confusion.

“Dirty old thing,” she said, giving it a closer look.

“I think it could be lagan as well.”

“I don’t care what it is, I’m not having anything like that in my clean kitchen.” She looked up suspiciously. “What’s lagan anyway?”

“Goods or wreckage lying on the bed of the sea.”

She sniffed. “I’m still not having it in here.”

“Mind you,” he said carefully, “in law things aren’t always what they seem.” Being in the police force gave a man a different view of the legal system. “In law an oyster is a wild animal.”

“Get away with you, Brian Ridgeford.”

“It’s true. A judge said so.”

“Oh, a judge.” Brenda Ridgeford hadn’t been a policeman’s wife for very long, but long enough to be critical of judges and their judgements.

“Sat for a day in court they did to decide.”

“The law’s an ass, then,” she giggled.

“An ass is a domestic animal,” said her husband promptly.

She gave him a very sly look indeed. “So’s a wife or have you forgotten?”

In the nature of things it was a little while before the ship’s bell was moved out to the shed and Brian Ridgeford was able to concentrate on his duties again. These centred on finding the two boys who had taken the bell into the ship’s-chandler in Edsway.

To Mrs. Hopton, “boy” was a species not an individual.

Of their age she had been uncertain.

Of their appearance she could tell him nothing beyond that they had been scruffy—but then these days all boys were scruffy, weren’t they?

But she was convinced and Hopton—even with him being the way he was—agreed with her here—that they had been up to no good.

On being pressed to describe them she had advanced the view that one had been taller than the other.

Brian Ridgeford had received this gem of observation in silence.

Mrs. Hopton had cogitated still further and eventually disgorged the fact that one of them had called the other “Terry.”

As he picked up his helmet and made for the door, Constable Ridgeford reflected that it wasn’t a lot to go on. On the other hand with Jack the Ripper they hadn’t even had a name.

“The boathouse?” said Frank Mundill when Elizabeth Busby met him in the hall.

“You’d better go down and have a look,” she said, putting her flower trug down on the settle.

“What about the boat? Has that gone?”

“I didn’t look inside…” Her hands fell helplessly to her sides. “I’m sorry, Frank. I should have done, shouldn’t I? The trouble is that I’m still not thinking straight.”

“Don’t worry.” He gave a jerky nod. “I’ll go down there now and see what’s happened.”

“Anyway,” recollected Elizabeth, pulling herself together with an effort, “I didn’t have a key to the little door on the garden side.”

He turned to the drawer in the hall table over which hung Richard Camming’s venture into the style of David Allan, the Scottish Hogarth. “That should be here somewhere.” He rummaged about until he found it. “Here we are.”

“I couldn’t see if there was a lot of damage,” said Elizabeth.

He essayed a small smile. “Let’s hope the boat’s all right, anyway. Your father likes his fishing, doesn’t he?”

“He’ll be looking forward to it,” she said. That was quite true. Her father would go straight down to the river with rod and line as soon as he arrived.

In the end Elizabeth walked down through the grounds of Collerton House to the river’s edge with him.

“Vandals,” Frank Mundill said bitterly, regarding the damaged doors from the river bank. “They must have taken a bar to the lock.”

Elizabeth nodded.

“Someone had a go at it last year, too, when we were at my sister’s,” he said. “I’ve already had it repaired once.”

“I remember,” she said, although what she chiefly remembered about the visits of Frank and Celia Mundill to Calleford had been that this year’s one had marked the beginning of her aunt’s last illness. Frank Mundill’s sister was married to a doctor in single-handed general practice there. The architect and his wife Celia had made a habit over the years at each Easter of looking after a locum tenens for the Calleford couple while the doctor and his wife had a well-earned holiday. Celia Mundill hadn’t been well then—that was when she had had a really bad attack of stomach pain and, vomiting, though it hadn’t been her first. Then she’d had an X-ray at Calleford Hospital. She’d gone steadily downhill after that…

“Let’s go inside,” said Mundill.

He unlocked the landward doors of the boathouse and led the way in. His footsteps echoed eerily on the hardstanding inside while the water lapped at its edge. The only light came from a small fan light and the open doors. There was quite enough light though in which to see that the boat was gone.

“Thieves as well as vandals,” said Mundill, regarding the empty water.

“Nothing’s safe these days, is it?” commented Elizabeth Busby, conscious even as she said it that the remark was both trite and beyond her years. She must be careful. At this rate she’d be old before her time.

“And where do you suppose the fishing boat’s got to?” asked Mundill.

“Edsway?” she suggested.

“More likely the open sea,” he said gloomily.

“Unless it’s fetched up on Billy’s Finger.”

“We’d have heard,” he said.

“So we would.”

“No,” he said, shaking his head, “we shan’t see that boat again.”

“Pity.”

“Yes,” he said, “your father won’t be pleased.” He sighed. “And neither will the insurance company.”

Her eyes turned automatically to the walls of the boat-house. Along them rested the family’s collection of fishing rods. “Is there anything gone from there too?”

He looked up and then shook his head. “Doesn’t look like it, does it? No, I daresay the boat went for a joy ride.”

“When?” She very nearly added “before or after,” but she stopped herself in time. In her mind she was still dating everything that happened as before or after that dreadful week of the death of her aunt and the departure of Peter Hinton.

Frank Mundill shook his head yet again. “I don’t know when. I don’t use the river path all that often. I usually go the other way.”

“So do I.”

He gave the boathouse a last look round. “There’s not a lot that we can do about it now anyway. Come along back to the house and I’ll ring the constable at Edsway. Not that that’ll do a lot of good. Can’t see the police being interested, can you?”

10

To be hang’d with you.

« ^ »

What at this moment was interesting the police—the police as personified by Superintendent Leeyes, that is—was something quite different.

“Ridgeford rang in,” said Leeyes to Detective Inspector Sloan across his office desk, “excited as a schoolgirl.”

“What about?” It wouldn’t do, of course. Sloan was agreed about that. Being as excited as anybody wouldn’t do at all if Ridgeford was going to make a good policeman. Sometimes the very calm of the police officer was the only thing going for him in a really tight situation.

“The wreck off Marby,” said Leeyes.

Sloan’s head came up with a jerk. If a certain copper ingot had come from there too, then Sloan was prepared to be interested in it as well.

“The Clarembald,” said Leeyes, “wrecked by the people of Marby in olden times.”

“At least,” said Sloan, “that’s one crime we don’t have to worry about now.” Idly he wondered what the exact wording of the charge against the wrecker would have been. There hadn’t been a lot of call for it down at the station since sail went out and steam came in. Perhaps it wasn’t even in the book any more. “Lighting beacons with intent to deceive” didn’t quite seem to fit the gravity of the crime.

“The ship’s bell has come ashore,” Leeyes told him.

“Has it indeed?” said Sloan. “Well, well.”

“As well as that brass weight you said was on the dead body…”

“Copper ingot,” murmured Sloan, his mind on other things. “How long ago do you suppose The Clarembald was found?”

“I wouldn’t know about that,” responded Leeyes irritably. “All I can tell you is that Ridgeford’s only just come across the bell.”

“I should have thought,” said Sloan slowly, “that we should have heard, sir, if it wasn’t very lately.”

Leeyes grunted. “Good news gets about.”

“We mostly do hear,” said Sloan. It was true. The police usually heard about good fortune as well as bad. For one thing good fortune could be as dangerous to the recipient as the reverse… Sloan pulled himself up with a jerk. He was begining to think like a latter-day Samuel Smiles now.

Leeyes grunted again.

“Besides, sir, presumably the coroner would have had to know if anything had been found, wouldn’t he?”

“Coroners,” pronounced Leeyes obscurely, “only know what they’re told.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And all I know,” said Leeyes flatly, “is what my officers choose to tell me.”

“Quite so, sir.”

“And that’s not a lot, Sloan, is it?”

“The young man’s body was put into the river where the water is fresh,” responded Sloan absently, answering the implication rather than the question.

“And if that’s not enough,” continued Leeyes, aggrieved, “we’ve got Ridgeford playing pirates.”

“He’s having quite a day for a beginner, isn’t he?” said Sloan. “A body and buried treasure.”

“Hrrrrumph,” said Leeyes.

“He’ll have to remember today, won’t he,” said Sloan, “when the routine begins to bite.”

Leeyes sniffed. “He’d have me out there, Sloan, if he could…”

Sloan didn’t say anything at all to that.

“Mind you, Sloan, with my background I’ve always been interested in the sea.”

Sloan could see where this was leading.

“Did I,” said Leeyes, “ever tell you how we got ashore at Walcheren?”

“Yes,” said Sloan with perfect truth. Nobody had been spared that story. Recitals of the superintendent’s wartime experiences were well known and were to be avoided at all costs. He didn’t even “stoppeth one in three.” Every officer on station got them.

“Bit of a splash,” said Leeyes with the celebrated British understatement favoured by men of action in a tight corner.

Detective Inspector Sloan could see where this was leading, too. In another two minutes Superintendent Leeyes would have constituted himself Berebury’s currently ranking expert on underwater archeology. And then where would they be?

“I’ll see Ridgeford presently, sir,” Sloan said firmly, “and find out about the ship’s bell too.”

“And this dinghy that he keeps on about over at Marby,” said Leeyes. “You won’t forget that, will you, Sloan?”

“No, sir, I’ll see about that as soon as I can…” But before that, come wind, come weather, he had every intention of going up the River Calle.

A little later a police car with Detective Constable Crosby at the wheel and Detective Inspector Sloan in the front passenger seat swept out of the police station at Berebury for the second time that afternoon. The driver negotiated the traffic islands with impatience and then steered past the town’s multi-storey car park. Eventually he swung the car onto the open road and out into the Calleshire countryside. In a wallet on the back seat of the police car was a hastily drawn-up list of everyone who lived beside the River Calle on both sides of the river east of Billing Bridge.

“There’s a note of the riparian owners, too, sir,” said Detective Constable Crosby, “whoever they are when they’re at home.”

“The fishing rights belong to them,” said Sloan.

“Oh, the fishing…” said Crosby, putting his foot down.

“There’s no hurry,” said Sloan as the car picked up speed.

“Got a catch a murderer,” said Crosby, “haven’t we?”

That, at least, decided Sloan to himself, had the merit of reducing the case to its simplest. And he had to admit that that was not unwelcome after a session with Superintendent Leeyes…

“Chance would be a fine thing,” he said aloud.

“Someone did for him,” said the constable. “He didn’t get the way he was and where he was on his own.”

“True.” As inductive logic went it wasn’t a very grand conclusion but it would do. “Can you go any further?”

“We’ve got to get back to the water,” said Crosby, crouching forward at the wheel like Toad of Toad Hall.

Sloan nodded. In all fairness he had to admit that what Crosby had said was true. All the action so far had been in water… He said, “What do we know so far?”

“Very little, sir.”

It was not the right answer from pupil to mentor.

In the Army mounting a campaign was based on the useful trio of “information, intention, method.” He wasn’t going to get very far discussing these with Crosby if the detective constable baulked at “information.”

“Could you,” said Sloan with a hortatory cough, “try to think of why a body killed in a fall should be found in water?”

“Because it couldn’t be left where it fell,” responded Crosby promptly.

“Good. Go on.”

“I don’t know why it couldn’t be left where it fell, sir,” said the constable. “But if it could have been left, then it would have been, wouldn’t it?”

“True.”

“Heavy things, bodies…”

Sloan nodded. What Crosby had just said was simple and irrefutable but it wasn’t enough. “Keep going,” he said.

Crosby’s eyebrows came together in a formidable frown. “Where it fell could have been too public,” he said.

“That’s a point,” said Sloan.

“And it might have been found too soon,” suggested Crosby after further thought.

“Very true,” said Sloan. “Anything else?”

“Where it was found might give us a lead on who killed him.”

“Good, good,” said Sloan encouragingly. “Now, why put the body in the water?”

But Crosby’s fickle interest had evaporated.

“Why,” repeated Sloan peremptorily, “put the body in the water?”

Crosby took a hand off the steering wheel and waved it. “Saves digging a hole,” he said simply.

“Anything else?” said Sloan.

Crosby thought in silence.

“Are there,” said Sloan tenaciously, “any other good reasons why a body should be put in the water?” It looked as if they were going to have to make bricks without straw in this case anyway…

Crosby continued to frown prodigiously but to no effect.

“It is virtually impossible to hide a grave,” pronounced Detective Inspector Sloan academically.

“Yes, sir.”

“And,” continued Sloan, “the disposal of a murdered body therefore presents a great problem to the murderer.”

“Yes, sir.”

“It often,” declared Sloan in a textbook manner, “presents a greater problem than committing the actual murder.”

“Murder’s easy,” said Crosby largely.

“Not of an able-bodied young man,” Sloan reminded him. “Of women and children and the old, perhaps.” He considered the tempting vista opened up by this thought—but unless you were psychotic you murdered for a reason, and reason and easy victim did not always go hand in hand.

The constable changed gear while Sloan considered the various ways in which someone could be persuaded into falling from a height. “He must have been taken by surprise on the edge of somewhere,” he said aloud.

“Pushed, anyway,” said Crosby.

“Yes,” agreed Sloan. “If he’d fallen accidentally, he could have been left where he fell.”

“Shoved when he wasn’t looking, then,” concluded Crosby.

“We have to look for a height with a concealed bottom…”

“Pussy’s down the well,” chanted Crosby.

“And not too conspicuous a top,” said Sloan.

“Somewhere where the victim would have a reason for going with the murderer,” suggested Crosby.

“He’d have had to have been pretty near the brink of somewhere even then,” said Sloan. “That’s what parapets are for.”

“With someone he trusted then,” said Crosby.

“With someone he didn’t think there was any need to be afraid of,” said Sloan with greater precision. He reached over to the back seat for the list of riparian owners. He wasn’t expecting any trouble from them. Fishing in muddy waters was a police prerogative and he didn’t care who knew it.

Horace Boiler was as near to being contented with his day as he ever allowed himself to be. As he pushed his rowing boat off from the shore at Edsway—Horace had never paid a mooring fee in his life—he reflected on how an ill wind always blew somebody good.

He would have known that his two passengers were policemen even if the older one hadn’t said so straightaway. There was a certain crispness about him that augured the backing of an institution. Horace Boiler was an old hand at discerning those whose brief authority was bolstered by the hidden reserves of an organisation like the police force and the Army—the vicar came in a class of his own—and those who threw their weight about because they were merely rich.

Horace had quite a lot to do with the merely rich on Saturdays and Sundays. The rich who liked sailing were very important in the economy of Edsway. From Monday to Friday ihey disappeared from Horace’s ken—presumably to get richer still in a mysterious place known simply as the city. Horace himself had never been there and when someone had once equated the city with London—which he had been to—Horace’s mind failed to make the connection.

Nevertheless Sunday evenings always saw a great exodus of weekenders, albeit tired and happy and sometimes quite weather-beaten, from Edsway back to the city. The following Friday evening—in summertime anyway—saw them return, pale and exhausted, from their labours in the town and raring for a weekend’s pleasure—and sunburn in the country. Horace, whose own skin bore a close resemblance to old and rather dirty creased leather, could never decide whether sunburn was a pleasure or a pain for the weekenders.

As a rule therefore Horace Boiler only had Saturdays and Sundays in which to pursue the important business of getting rich himself. This accounted for his contentment this day which was neither a Saturday nor a Sunday. Extra money for one trip on a weekday and at the expense of Her Majesty’s Government to boot was a good thing; extra money twice was a cause for rejoicing. Not that anyone would have guessed this from Horace Boiler’s facial expression. His countenance bore its usual surly look and his mind was totally bent on the business of deriving as much financial benefit as he could from this particular expedition—as it was on every other excursion which he undertook.

He gave his starboard oar an expert twist to get the boat properly out into the water and then set about the important business of settling the oars comfortably in the rowlocks. Some weekend sailors, rich and poor, conceded Boiler to himself, also threw their weight about because they knew what they were doing in a boat—but they were few and far between.

He didn’t know for certain yet if his two passengers were sailors or not, although he already had his doubts about the younger man. Both men had distributed themselves carefully about the boat in a seaman-like manner and had actually managed not to rock the boat while clambering into it. They had even accomplished this without getting their feet wet, which was something of an achievement, and was connected, although his passengers did not know this, with the fact that Horace was sure of getting a handsome fee for the outing. Doubtful payers and those who were so misguided as to attempt to undertip the boatman always got their feet wet.

The question of a fee for the journey they were about to undertake was very much on Detective Inspector Sloan’s mind too. The payment—whatever it amounted to—would eventually have to come out of the Berebury Division imprest account. This was guarded by Superintendent Leeyes with a devotion to duty and tenacity of purpose that would have done credit to a Cerberus.

“Take you to where I found the poor man?” Horace nodded his comprehension. “That’s what you want, isn’t it?”

“It is,” said Detective Inspector Sloan, detaching his mind with an effort from an unhappy vision of Superintendent Leeyes standing like a stag at bay over the petty cash at Berebury Police Station. “Can you do that for us?”

“Certainly, gentlemen,” said Horace readily, even though he already knew that they were policemen not gentlemen; Horace’s usage of modes of address was a nicely calculated affair and closely linked with the expectation of future reward. “No trouble at all.”

Sloan settled himself at the bow of the boat, reminding himself that any hassle to come over payment for their trip should take second place to tangling with a murderer. He only hoped Superintendent Leeyes would feel the same.

For the fourth time that day the boatman began to row out into the estuary of the River Calle. Detective Inspector Sloan looked about him with interest. Seeing a map of the estuary with a cross marking the spot where the body had been found was one thing, but it was quite a different matter seeing the spot for oneself. He’d have to trust the boatman that it was the same spot though—he’d tried to rustle up Constable Ridgeford to get him to come with them, but according to Mrs. Ridgeford he’d had to go off on his bicycle to see to something. And so they had had to put to sea without him. Just, thought Sloan to himself, a distant memory stirring, the Owl and the Pussy-cat… except that Boiler’s old boat wasn’t a beautiful pea green…

Horace Boiler had bent to the oars with practised ease and was rowing in a silence designed to save his breath. Then…

“You’re going out to sea,” observed Sloan sharply. “I thought you’d found him ferther up river.”

“Got to get round Billy’s Finger, haven’t I?” responded Boiler resentfully.

“I see…” began Sloan.

“And pick up the tide.” Nobody could be surlier than Boiler when he wanted to be.

“Of course.”

“I’m an old man now,” said Boiler, hunching his shoulders and allowing a whine to creep into his voice. “I can’t go up river like I used to do.”

“Naturally,” said Sloan, crisply, nevertheless taking a good look at his watch. “Let me see now—what time was it exactly when we left?”

“I go by St. Peter’s clock myself,” snapped Boiler. “Always keeps good time, does St. Peter’s.”

“Splendid,” said Sloan warmly. “That’ll make everything easier…” He settled back onto his hard seat. A warning shot fired across the bows never came amiss…

Presently the rowing boat did turn up river. Rowing against the eddies was not such hard work for Horace Boiler as it would have been for most other men because he came of river people and knew every stretch of quiet water that there was. This did not stop him giving an artful pant as he eventually shipped his oars and caught a patch of slack water.

“ ’Bout here it was, gentlemen,” he said, histrionically drooping himself over the oars as if at the end of a fast trip from Putney to Mortlake against another crew.

Detective Inspector Sloan was concentrating on the water. “How far does the tide come up the estuary?”

The boatman wrinkled his eyes. “The sparling—they turn back half-way between Collerton and Edsway no matter what.”

“They do, do they?” responded Sloan vigorously. The habits of sparling were no sort of an answer for a superintendent sitting at a desk in Berebury Police Station.

“Always go to the limit of the salt water, do sparling,” said Boiler.

“Ah,” said Sloan. That was better. Sparling must be biological indicators too.

“Only see them in the summer, of course,” said the boatman.

“Been this year then, have they?” asked Sloan, unconsciously lapsing into the vernacular himself.

“Not yet.” Horace Boiler unshipped an oar to stop the boat drifting too far.

“It’s summer now,” remarked Detective Constable Crosby from the stern.

“Not afore Collerton Fair,” said Horace Boiler flatly. “Sparling come at fair time.”

Detective Inspector Sloan turned his head and regarded the southern shore of the river mouth with close attention. Not far away a heron rose and with an almost contemptuous idleness put the tips of his wing feathers out as spoilers. They’d left Edsway and the open sea well behind but they could now see Collerton Church clearly up river of them. Far inland were urban Berebury and ancient Calleford and what townspeople chose to call civilisation…

“Do smell of cucumber,” rasped the boatman unexpectedly.

“What does?” asked Sloan. They were a long way from land.

“Sparling.”

“An,” said Sloan again, his mind on other things. “Pull the boat round a bit, will you? I want to see the other way.”

The view down river was unrevealing. Edsway itself, though, was clearly visible, as was the headland beyond. Kinnisport and the cliffs at Cranberry Point were just a smudge in the distance.

“That headland behind Marby stands out, doesn’t it?” observed Sloan, surprised. Seen from nearer to, the rise in the land wasn’t quite so apparent.

“That’s the Cat’s Back,” said Boiler. “Proper seamark, that is.”

“Funny,” said Crosby ingenuously, “I never thought you had seamarks like you had landmarks.”

Somewhere not very far away a gull screamed.

“Take us up river now,” commanded Sloan abruptly.

Horace Boiler bent to his oars once more. He rowed purposefully and without comment out of the narrowing estuary and into the river proper. Detective Inspector Sloan, sitting at the bow, was almost as immobile as a carved figurehead at the prow. He did turn once to begin to say something to Detective Constable Crosby, but that worthy officer was settled in the stern of the boat, letting his hand dangle in the water and regarding the consequent and subsequent wake with the close attention that should have been devoted to the duties of detection.

Sloan turned back and looked ahead. Speech would have been wasted. Instead he turned his mind to studying the river banks. That was when, presently, he too saw the doors of the boathouse belonging to Collerton House. Even from midstream he could see where a crowbar had been used to prise open the lock.

11

This is a downright deep tragedy.

« ^ »

Frank Mundill was soon back at the riverside. This time he had Detective Inspector Sloan and Detective Constable Crosby with him, not Elizabeth Busby. Sloan had a distinct feeling that he had seen the man from Collerton House before but he couldn’t immediately remember where.

Mundill indicated the boathouse doors very willingly to the two policemen and then pointed to the empty stretch of water inside the boathouse.

“Our dinghy’s gone, Inspector,” he said.

“And this, I take it, sir, is where she was kept, is it?” said Sloan, giving the inside of the boathouse a swift looking-over.

“It was.” Mundill tightened his lips wryly. “She wasn’t exactly the Queen Elizabeth, you know, but she was good enough for a day on the river with a rod.”

Sloan examined the broken lock and loose hasp as best he could without getting his feet wet. There was a scar on the woodwork where something had rested to give leverage to a crowbar. Every picture told a story and this one seemed clear enough…

“Prised open all right, sir,” he agreed presently. “Have you any idea when?”

Frank Mundill shook his head and explained that the damage would only have been visible from the path along the river bank and from the river itself. “I haven’t been this way much myself recently, Inspector. My wife was ill from Easter onwards and I just didn’t have the time.” He gave a weary shrug of his shoulders. “And now that she’s gone I haven’t got the inclination.”

Sloan pointed to the fishing rods on the boathouse wall. They looked quite valuable to him. “Are they all present and correct, sir?”

Mundill’s face came up in a quick affirmative response, reinforcing Sloan’s impression that he’d seen it before somewhere. “Oh, yes, Inspector. We think it’s just the boat that’s gone.”

“We?” queried Sloan. The list of riparian owners had dealt in surnames. It hadn’t gone into household detail.

“My late wife’s niece is still with me. She came to nurse my wife and she’s staying on until her parents get back from South America next week.”

“I see, sir.”

“She was out here with me earlier and we both agreed it was just Tugboat Annie that’s gone.”

Detective Inspector Sloan reached for his notebook in much the same way as Police Constable Brian Ridgeford had reached for his. A name put a different complexion on a police search for anything. A name on the unfortunate young man at Dr. Dabbe’s forensic laboratory would be a great step forward. “Tugboat Annie, did you say, sir?”

“It won’t help, I’m afraid, Inspector.” Frank Mundill was apologetic. “That was just what we called her in the family.”

The dead young man would have been called something in the family too. Sloan would have dearly liked to have known what it was.

“The name,” expanded Frank Mundill, “wasn’t actually written on her or anything like that.”

“I see, sir,” Sloan said, disappointed.

“She was only a fishing boat, you see, Inspector.” He added, “And not a very modern fishing boat, at that. She was one of the relics of my father-in-law’s day.”

Sloan nodded, unsurprised. His own first impression had been of how very dated everything about Collerton House was. There was something very pre-Great War about the whole setup—house, boathouse, grounds and all.

“I mustn’t say, ‘Those were the days,’ ” said Mundill drily, waving an arm to encompass the boathouse and the fishing rods, “but I’m sure you know what I mean, Inspector.”

“I do indeed, sir,” agreed Sloan warmly. “Spacious, I think you could call them.” As he had first entered Collerton House the stained glass of the inner front door and the wide sweep of the staircase had told him all he needed to know about the age of the house. It was Edwardian to a degree. Similarly the white polo-necked jersey of Frank Mundill had told him quite a lot about the man before him. He could have been a writer…

“Unfortunately,” Mundill was saying, “the boathouse is very carefully screened from the house so I couldn’t have seen anyone breaking in even though my studio faces north.”

“An artist…” To his own surprise Sloan found he had said the words aloud.

“I’m an architect, Inspector,” he said, adding astringently, “There are those of my professional brethren who would have said ‘yes’ to the word artist though.”

“Well, sir, now that you come to mention it…”

“An architect is something of an artist certainly but he’s something of an engineer too.”

A policeman, thought Sloan, was something of a diplomat.

“As well as being a craftsman and a draughtsman, of course.”

A policeman was something of a martinet, of course. He had to be.

“And, Inspector, if he’s any good as an architect he’s something of a visionary, too.”

If a policeman was any good as a policeman he was something of a philosopher too. It didn’t do not to be in the police force.

Mundill waved a tapered hand. “However…”

Then it came to Sloan where it was that he had seen the man’s face before. “Your photograph was in the local paper last week, sir, wasn’t it?”

The architect squinted modestly down his nose. “You saw it, Inspector, did you?”

“I did indeed,” said Sloan handsomely. “The opening of the new fire station, wasn’t it?”

“A very ordinary job, I’m afraid,” said Mundill deprecatingly.

In the police force very ordinary jobs had a lot to be said for them. Out of the ordinary ones usually came up nasty.

“It is difficult,” continued the architect easily, “to be other than strictly utilitarian when you’re designing a hose tower.”

“Quite so,” said Sloan.

“We had site problems, of course,” continued Frank Mundill smoothly, “it being right in the middle of the town.”

Sloan nodded. Site problems would be to architects what identity problems were to the police, obstacles to be overcome.

“Mind you, Inspector, I have designed buildings in Berebury where there’s been a little more scope than down at the fire station.”

Municipal buildings being what they were Sloan was glad to hear it.

“There was the junior school,” said Mundill.

“Split level,” said Sloan, who had been there.

“Petty crime,” added Crosby professionally. He had been there too.

“Plenty of site leeway in that case,” said Mundill.

There was precious little leeway with an unknown body. Where did you start if “Missing Persons” didn’t come up with anyone fitting the description of the body you had? The architect was warming to his theme. “There’s more freedom with a school than there is with some domestic stuff.”

Sloan looked up. “You do ordinary house plans, too, sir, do you?”

“Oh, yes, Inspector.” He smiled thinly. “I do my share of the domestic side, all right.”

All policemen did their share of the domestic side. “Domestics” were what new constables on the beat cut their wisdom teeth on. It aged them more quickly than anything else.

Sloan took a final look round the boathouse, and said formally, “I’ll be in touch with you again, sir, about this break-in. In due course. Come along, Crosby…”

He turned to go but as he did so his ear caught the inimitable sound of the splash of oars. Sloan leaned out over the path and looked downstream as far as he could. He recognised Horace Boiler and his boat quite easily. He had to screw up his eyes to see who his passenger was. And then he recognised him too. It was Mr. Basil Jensen, the curator of the Calleford Museum…

“Terry?” Miss Blandford pursed her lips. “Terry, did you say?”

“I did.” Police Constable Brian Ridgeford had begun his search for a boy named Terry at the village school at Edsway.