Swing, Swing Together

CHAPTER 12

That night, as the rain trickled down the eaves into the guttering of the Roebuck, Harriet returned to Three Men in a Boat. Once or twice she laughed until the bed shook. Men stood so much on their dignity; it was comical to think of them out of their element doing ridiculous things. She would have laughed even more if she had not been reading for a serious purpose. She wanted to decide for herself whether there was anything in the book suggestive of murder, as Sergeant Cribb apparently supposed. The more she read, the more difficult it was to conceive of it as a manual for assassins. George, Harris and J making their inexpert way up the Thames with the dog Montmorency were anything but sinister.

The place-names were there, of course-Hurley Weir, Medmenham Abbey, the Backwater to Wargrave and the islands at Shiplake-so recent events impinged a little on her thoughts, even if they seemed remote from the book. The three mysterious men whose arrival on the scene had created such havoc among the bathers on Tuesday night were not so alarming in retrospect, not now she had got to know Mr. Jerome’s good-humoured trio. To think of them as brutal murderers, callously killing a helpless old tramp and then continuing upriver as if nothing had happened, was difficult in the extreme. Obviously Sergeant Cribb thought otherwise. He had fastened on them as his suspects from the beginning, and the lockkeeper’s information that they were following the route in the book had not discouraged him; it had sent him haring off to Streatley to make an arrest.

Tomorrow he would want her to identify them. She shrank from the business, not because she doubted her ability to recognize them, but because of the significance Cribb put upon it. He made no bones about it; identification was tantamount to guilt. If they did not admit it at once, he would beat them with a truncheon, or whatever policemen did to extract confessions. He was not a man for refinements; that was obvious from the way he treated his subordinates.

If she had witnessed the murder itself, seen the tramp held under the water until the last bubble of breath had risen to the surface, she would not have hesitated to identify the killers. But all she had seen was three men and a dog in a boat moving serenely towards Hurley, unaware of the confusion in the water. Suppose they were not the murderers; suppose somebody else had killed the unfortunate tramp further up the river. Suppose her testimony sent three innocent men to the gallows. It would always be on her conscience.

Too ridiculous; she was getting morbid. This was not the time to lose a sense of proportion. She returned to her book, to Chapter 16, describing, topically enough, the stretch between Reading and Streatley. Her eyes drifted down the page without the fullest concentration until she came to that “something black floating in the water” that George noticed and drew back from “with a cry and a blanched face”: the dead body of a woman.

Harriet drew the sheet closer round her and read, with wide eyes, how the corpse was consigned without fuss to some men on the bank and how the three in the boat paddled on to Streatley and there lunched at the Bull, their appetites seemingly unimpaired by the experience. She shuddered and closed the book, putting it face down on the table beside the bed. It was not, after all, wholly unsuggestive of sudden death.

She pulled the sheet aside, got out of bed and for a second time checked that the door was bolted from the inside. She took a hairbrush from her travelling case and sat at the dressing table, tugging at her hair with short, agitated strokes. For a moment, for just a moment, she wished she were in the boat with the two constables. As company they left something to be desired-more than that, in Hardy’s case-but at least she had the measure of them now. Better the devil you know than the devil you don’t, as Jim Hackett might have said in the circumstances, probably adding chapter and verse as well.

She tossed her head to shake such silly notions out of it, and wielded the brush more vigorously still.

Of course it was out of the question to pass the night with Thackeray and Hardy. Goodness, her reputation was in ruins already after Tuesday’s episode. It was enough to face Mamma and Papa with that when they got back to England. She had been over the scene in her mind a dozen times. Mamma would collapse sobbing into a chair and Papa would pace the drawing room invoking the Almighty and saying he should take a whip to her, but going straight to the whisky instead. Mortifying. To confess after that that she had spent a night sleeping in a boat with two policemen would drive Papa beyond the brink. She could not do it.

Besides, the conditions down there must be insufferable. The canvas was up, admittedly, but it could be counted on to leak, and a night on damp boards was enough to give you rheumatism for life if you did not die of pneumonia within a week. No wonder the constables had spent the entire evening in the public bar.

Not that she pitied them much. Thackeray she had a spark of compassion for-he had not been unkind, and he was rather large to fit into a small boat. She would have preferred to think of Cribb suffering down there, but he was doubtless in a hotel bed himself, the wily man.

Hardy was another matter. It would do that young man no harm at all to suffer some discomfort. His boating clothes would be hideously crumpled by morning and she would leave him in no doubt that she noticed the fact. He might even be a shade more endurable with wrinkles in his trousers. Perhaps it would improve his manner. He had not been so objectionable in uniform; he had behaved quite differently, in fact.

Harriet’s brushing became slower, and the strokes carried to the ends of her hair.

She recollected Tuesday evening. Not the three men in their boat, nor the dangerous time in the water, but the meeting with Constable Hardy. Up to now she had thought of it exclusively from her own point of view.

How must it have seemed to him as he stood shining his bull’s-eye lamp through the spokes of his bicycle wheel?

She put down her brush and flicked her now gleaming hair over her shoulders. Then she got up and went to the curtains. Through the rain she thought she could just make out the shape of the skiff with its canvas awning. She closed the curtain carefully, collected the candle from the bedside table and deposited it on the dressing table to the left of the mirror. From a flower arrangement on the mantelpiece she selected a fern and placed it beside the candle.

She took three steps back from the dressing table and unfastened the bows at the front of her nightdress so that it parted at the bodice. Watching her movements in the mirror, she guided the garment over her shoulders and allowed it to fall to her feet. Without looking down, she stepped over it and advanced slowly towards the mirror, stooping slightly, as she had when she had climbed the riverbank, feeling the movement of her bosom, then straightening as the light caught the bloom of her skin. Her hand reached forward for the fern and held it close to her eyes, so that she could study her reflection through the fronds-the best she could improvise for bicycle spokes. What she saw was neither vulgar nor offensive, but rather elegant. She thought she might understand the effect it could have on an impressionable young man.

Harriet put down the fern and smiled shyly at her image in the glass before extinguishing the light. She picked up her nightdress, drew it quickly over her head and climbed into bed. She slept well.