Lovers Make Moan

Chapter 14

Body on the Foreshore

“… and the green corn

Hath rotted ere his youth attain’d a beard.”

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Some few miles eastward along the coast there was a resort which served as a place of retirement for the moderately affluent elderly. It had built up a reputation for great respectability and a certain exclusiveness. Bath-chairs had been a feature on the broad promenade and the hotels often had permanent residents who established little cliques among themselves and looked with jaundiced eye on any interlopers who commandeered their favourite armchairs in the lounges.

Both residents and visitors were proud of the town, its health-giving properties, its broad sands, its denes and public gardens, the good taste, range and scope of its entertainments, its balmy air and its interesting hinterland.

Times change, however. Because it was prosperous the town grew, shops and restaurants were added, a sprawl of back streets spread out around the railway station, a large bus station and then a coach station came into being and gradually but inexorably the character of the town altered. With the advent of the motor-coaches came the day trippers; when the motor-car became ubiquitous visitors came who no longer booked in for a week, a fortnight, or a month at the hotels and boarding houses, but required only an overnight stop with breakfast before going their way to the next overnight stop.

The next development was more serious still. The formerly insular, prejudiced, stay-at-home English began to seek holidays abroad. The resort’s hotels began to depend more and more on letting their accommodation for political and other conferences, the annual meetings of learned societies, coach parties who would move off on the following morning and who were bitterly resented by even the equally transient birds of passage who had booked privately instead of en bloc, and the occasional wedding reception.

Then, on noisy, ton-up motorcycles, helmeted, black-jacketed, witless, destructive and ruthless, came the Bank Holiday gangs for a short orgy of window-smashing, drunkenness and terrorisation, the modern equivalent of shooting up the town. More frequent nuisances were the local gangs which grew up to combat the invaders and soon infested the back streets. They had their own territories, jealously guarded, which included a favourite pub and a favourite disco, and to enliven life further they made sporadic war on one another, combining only when the motorbike invaders arrived.

However, the town had been free from any major disturbances since the police had had to make a number of arrests on the May Day bank holiday following a bout of shop-window-smashing and insulting behaviour on the part of the invaders, so it was with some surprise that the Superintendent received a report that the stabbed body of a skinhead youth had been found on the foreshore which bordered the busy road to the ferry.

“Must be some sort of gang vengeance,” he said to his uniformed inspector. “We’ve had no trouble for weeks with the local lads. Take a recce and see what you can pick up. Have a comb-out of the pubs these kids use. This kind of thing is usually the result of youngsters having too much to drink.”

The body had been found by two men digging for lug-worms at low tide. When they reported their find they said that the body was a good way further up the shore from where they were looking for bait and they had not noticed it. Later, when they were ready to depart, they did see it and thought at first that it was a heap of flotsam brought in on the tide and left stranded when the tide went out.

However, as it appeared to be neither seaweed nor driftwood, they decided to examine it and were alarmed to find themselves confronted by a very dead youth. It was early in the morning, for they had decided upon a full day’s fishing, so the police got to the spot before any sightseers came along. Spectators were unlikely, anyway, for the foreshore of the inland bay was muddy and uninviting. The beach proper lay on the other side of the road, for the way to the ferry ran along a very narrow peninsula which, on the northern side, had plenty of clean sand, beach huts, a promenade and the waters of the English Channel to attract the visitors. Except to yachtsmen, there was nothing attractive on the other side of the road except the view.

Cars along the road were frequent, for the ferry was always busy, and although pedestrians were few except for those like the two fishermen whose only concern was to dig for bait, the road itself was seldom completely deserted.

“Nasty case in the local rag,” said Jonathan, handing the paper to his aunt. “Boy of about eighteen found dead on the sea-shore. Been stabbed.”

“Yes, I read the account before breakfast,” said Dame Beatrice, laying the paper aside. “I wonder why that boy who bought the expensive rapier from Mrs Wells comes unbidden into my mind? It seems such an unnecessary proceeding to spend a great deal of money on something which was to be used merely as a stage property. That cannot be the reason it was purchased.”

“Oh, I don’t know. Marcus Lynn did the same thing. Those swords and daggers he brought along for our play must have cost a tidy sum.”

“Yes, but Marcus Lynn is a collector. He did not buy the weapons so that they could figure in the play.”

“What, exactly, is on your mind?”

“I do not like the way this youth’s death has followed so closely on the visit Conway and I paid to Mrs Wells’s shop.”

“You connect this boy’s death with that visit, do you? But the kid was a skinhead. Either one of his mates or a member of a rival gang bumped him off. These stabbing affairs are a feature of gang warfare. Mrs Wells said that her customer was a respectable boy with collar-length hair.”

“The head had been completely shaved. Is that a feature of gang warfare? I know that some of these youths have their hair very closely cropped, but could not this one have been assaulted and his head shaved before he was killed?”

“Oh, I think it’s only girls who get their heads shaved as a badge of shame. This chap probably wanted to emulate Kojak or Yul Brynner.”

“I thought that kind of hero-worship was confined to younger boys than this one. Besides, there were other things in the newspaper account which struck me as being significant. One was the description of the hands and feet of the dead boy.”

“I don’t see why that type of boy should not take care of his extremities. Some youths are very vain and go to all sorts of lengths to give themselves the means of making a good impression on the opposite sex. In any case, this lad had been rolled about in the ocean, I expect, for long enough to ensure that his whole body had had a scouring, don’t you think?”

“I accept your argument with becoming meekness, but with certain reservations. I share a bump of caution with Dr Jeanne-Marie Fitzroy-Delahague.”

“In what particular?”

“She, I have been told, was not content to treat Mr Rinkley’s collapse at the last night of the play as a simple bilious attack consequent on the injudicious ingesting of mussels washed down by whisky. She sent him to hospital in case he had poisoned himself with something other than alcohol.”

“There is no chance that this lad poisoned himself, is there? The report says that he died of a stab-wound.”

“Which could have been administered as a coup de grâce if his killer decided to put him out of his agony if he was already dying from poison.”

“You really think he may have been poisoned? But Dr Jeanne-Marie was mistaken about the—what did she call it?—in Rinkley’s case.”

“Myelotoxin, but had I been consulted I should have insisted upon further tests if I had suspected any form of poisoning at all.”

“What sort of tests?”

“A combination of shellfish and whisky could have accounted for Rinkley’s illness, of course, but Dr Jeanne-Marie suspected poisoning. She thought of myelotoxin, but I should also have had the hospital make tests for arsenic.”

“Arsenic? Good Lord, why?”

“A non-lethal dose of arsenic added to the whisky could have produced the symptoms of which we have heard. The more I think about it, the more convinced I am that Rinkley was deliberately removed from the scene in which a dagger was to be used. Whether he removed himself, or whether somebody else removed him, is not yet clear. Neither do we know whether Rinkley knew who was to be his understudy.”

“You could ask him that, I suppose.”

“I doubt whether I could place much confidence in his answer. It might be truthful or it might not. You see, if somebody had intended that Bourton should die in the way he did, it was essential that he should play Pyramus. That involved removing Rinkley from the scene. I do not say that arsenic had been put into the whisky he drank, but the symptoms, to my mind, were definitely suggestive, and when the tests for myelotoxin proved negative, tests for arsenic should have been made. I have no doubt that, if Rinkley had died, they would have been made.”

“But what makes you think of arsenic in the case of this dead boy?”

“The fact that his head was not closely cropped, but was completely shaved and that his hands and feet appear to have received painstaking attention. Arsenic persists for a very long time in the hair and nails.”

“You mean his murderer shaved his head and trimmed up his hands and feet before chucking him into the harbour?”

“Stranger things have happened. It would be interesting to know the truth of the matter. None of it sounds like gang warfare to me.”

“You think this is the boy who bought the rapier, don’t you?”

“His death has followed strangely closely on my visit to Mrs Wells with Detective-Inspector Conway, that is all. As I say, had Mr Rinkley died, I have no doubt that the hospital would have carried out further tests, but he made a complete recovery, so no further action was taken. If somebody had given him arsenic—as I would have thought his symptoms suggested—the quantity was infinitesimal. The object must have been to render him hors de combat and the poison may even have been self-administered. We shall never get him to admit it, if such was the case.”

“It would be interesting, particularly to me, to find out whether the lethal dagger was really intended for Bourton, or whether Rinkley thought that I was to be his understudy.”

“I do not believe we shall know that, unless evidence is forthcoming which at present we do not possess. We may know more when the identity of this dead youth is disclosed. I wonder where the body was put into the water.”

“Goodness knows. I’ve done very little sailing since I came down here, although Simon introduced me to the secretary of the yacht club and told him that I might be using Simon’s boat. I was warned that these almost inland waters are tricky.”

“Because of the sandbanks?”

“Not those so much. The trouble is that in the bay storms are apt to blow up with great suddenness. I made up my mind there and then that I would never risk taking Rosamund and Edmund out in the boat. You can’t take chances with other people’s children. Deb and I had an example once of what the elements can do in these parts. It was really quite freakish. We set off in lovely sunny weather with the water looking like a lake, hardly a movement on the surface at all, so we put off from the yacht club’s little pier and sailed to Castle Island, that’s the largest of the three. Suddenly over those hills beyond the north shore of the island black clouds loomed and blotted out the sun, and the breeze which had been carrying us changed to half a gale. Then the water got up and did its best to swamp us. I was jolly glad to get back, I can tell you. I suppose the trouble is that there is only that one exit to the open sea from the bay; that’s where the ferry runs between those two points and it’s only about a quarter of a mile across.”

“Could the body have been put into the water more or less where it was found? Suppose it was put in at high tide, could not the ebb, in such shallow water, have left it stranded?”

“Possibly. The only thing is that I don’t believe anybody would have risked being seen dumping it. After all, a body is a pretty conspicuous object and, I would think, unmistakable for anything else. Have you been along there?”

“Yes. I realise what a busy road it is which connects with the ferry, but surely that is only while the ferry is working.”

“No, it’s pretty busy until after midnight. You will have noticed that, all the way along, the road is bordered by bungalows, houses and two big hotels. It’s very well-lighted and people who have been to entertainments in the nearby seaside resort come home at all hours. Anybody messing about on the foreshore would be spotted, even by the occupants of a fast car. My bet is that the body was chucked overboard from a boat off the south side of Castle Island for it to fetch up where it did.”

“You think the death-wound was struck while the youth was on board a yacht?”

“The police have examined all the local boats for bloodstains, of course, but there are visiting yachts in and out of the harbour all the time at this season of the year. Anyway, it’s likelier, I think, that death occurred on land and the boy was dead when he was taken aboard.”

“A risky proceeding, surely?”

“Murder is a risky proceeding. It must have happened on the island itself, I should think. People don’t land there as a general rule, but I can visualise a picnic party, a sudden flare-up, then panic as to what to do with the body. The murderer can’t have known much about these waters, or he would have realised what would happen. He must have thought that the ebb would carry the body across the track of the ferry and out into the open sea.”

“So where did the calculations go wrong?”

“The body ought to have been dumped off the opposite side of the island. Then it would have been caught up in the ebb current they call the Fishermen’s Race and that would have taken it right away into the Channel. I was yarning with the secretary of the yacht club and this was his idea. It was he who told me that the police had inspected all the boats for bloodstains. I’ve got a map upstairs. I’ll get it and show you what he means about the island.”

He went off to find the map. Left alone, for Deborah was in the kitchen talking to the cook, Dame Beatrice went to the window and gazed out at the vast expanse of shallow, innocent-looking water which formed the bay, and at its flotilla of small yachts and cruisers. When Jonathan returned with a map of the area, he spread it out on the newly-cleared breakfast table and said,

“The charts are on Simon’s yacht, but this will serve us. Nash, the secretary of the yacht club, has told me about the vagaries of these waters. From what he told me, I reckon that a body which was put into the sea here, on the north side of the island, would stand two chances. Either it would fetch up on the strand, as this body did, or it would get caught up at low tide on one of the sandbanks. On the other hand, if it was chucked in at full tide on the other side of the island, it would get pulled along by the Fishermen’s Race as soon as the tide turned, and be carried across the track of the ferry and, with any luck, out into the English Channel and possibly right across to the Isle of Wight.”

“I see what you mean,” said Dame Beatrice, “but wouldn’t all this be common knowledge?”

“Yes, of course all the local yachtsmen would know how the tides run. My idea is that the boy and his murderer are both strangers to the district, and Nash agrees with me.”

“And my idea is that no boat was involved, but that the murderer planted the body where it was found and that there is a connection between the dead boy and the rapier which was purchased from Mrs Wells. Everything has turned out much too pat for there to have been no such connection.”

“But I thought Mrs Wells said the rapier was purchased weeks ago.”

“Yes, but we did not go to visit Mrs Wells weeks ago.”

“You think the visit gave somebody a fright and he hurried up and killed the kid he had sent into the shop to buy the rapier for him?”

“It could well be so, except that I am surprised the boy was allowed to live so long. As you point out, Mrs Wells sold the rapier weeks ago. Her records were very clear, and there had been several sales noted down in her ledger since she sold the weapon in question.”

“Do you really think there is anything in your arsenic theory?”

“I think the analyst will take precautionary measures on the strength of the shaven head and the evidence of the extremely well-clipped finger and toenails, that is all.”

“Of course it’s easy enough to get hold of arsenic,” said Jonathan. “Rather stupid of murderers to use it, because, if poisoning is suspected, arsenic is just about the first thing people think of. You only need a tin of weedkiller or insecticide in the garden shed to become an immediate suspect. It used to be in flypapers and the paint on children’s toys, and it’s still in some colours and dyes and in wallpapers. Taxidermists use it and it’s put into sheep-dip—remember the case of that woman who got off because her brute of a husband had an open cut on his hand when he was dipping sheep?—and there is arsenic in rat-poisons and ant-repellants, apart from its proper use in medicine.”

“Let us abandon the subject of arsenic and discuss another one.”

“I’ll get away from arsenic if you wish. To me it’s very strange you should have been so much impressed by the purchase of that rapier. So far, there is nothing whatever to connect the dead boy with our play. The fact that a boy mentioned amateur theatricals to Mrs Wells doesn’t really mean a thing. There are hundreds of amateur dramatic societies up and down the country. Are you sure you haven’t got a bee in your bonnet, aunt, dear?”

“Mrs Wells was inclined to think that the dagger Detective-Inspector Conway showed her at the police station had been cut down from the rapier she sold several weeks ago. The hilt had been slightly altered, it is true, but I think only a strong inclination towards caution made her unwilling to commit herself and declare that the dagger had been made from her rapier.”

“Would it help if the rest of the rapier was found? The lower part of the blade must be somewhere. Matter, they say, is indestructible, and I should think that steel is even more indestructible than most things.”

“The discovery of the rest of the blade would help, I daresay, if we could trace the possessor of it or, if it has been discarded, who threw it away. The next thing will be the inquest. I wonder whether it will disclose the identity of the dead boy? Until that is known, the police cannot get much further.”

“We’re doing our best, ma’am,” said Conway, when she put the point to him. “Nobody has come forward to say that a youth of about that age is missing. We’re treating this as a case of murder, but suicide can’t be ruled out, although I’d say he was a bit past the age when teenagers usually go in for it. We’ve rounded up the town gangs, but got nowhere, and we’ve tried remand homes and Borstals for anybody who has absconded and not been traced, but we haven’t turned up a thing. We shall have to get the inquest adjourned, although not for the same reason as the last one.”

“What was he wearing?”

“The usual casual outfit, jeans and a T-shirt, Y-front briefs, no socks, but what had been very expensive shoes until the sea-water ruined ’em. We are convinced he was murdered, though, because the left shoe was on the wrong foot and vice versa.”

“ ‘And madly crammed a right-hand foot into a left-hand shoe’,” quoted Dame Beatrice sadly. “Yes, indeed, that does appear to indicate murder. Was the stab-wound made through the clothing?”

“No, ma’am. The doctors say he was naked when he was stabbed, so it must be murder and somebody clothed the corpse but forgot to make the necessary holes in the clothing.”