The Crozier Pharaohs

15

Watersmeet Again

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There is something I ought to tell you,’ said Bryony. Dame Beatrice looked interested and nodded.

‘A confession of sorts,’ she said. ‘I have been expecting it, although I have no idea at all of what is about to be disclosed.’

‘I did it with the best of intentions.’

‘One so often does.’

‘It’s about that Watersmeet business. I know it was murder. I know what the murder weapon was and where it is.’

‘Have you told the police?’

‘No. They will be so angry with me that I am quite alarmed at the thought. I believe they could put me in prison for withholding evidence and concealing a murder weapon.’

‘No doubt you had a reason for what you did. You spoke of good intentions.’

‘Oh, yes, of course I had a reason. I thought Susan had done it. She found Sekhmet and the body. I thought perhaps she had seen the man kicking Sekhmet or something of that sort, and had attacked him with a sharp piece of flint. I found it — or, rather, one of the dogs did.’ Bryony proceeded to tell the story of how curiosity had taken her to Watersmeet and of the hole in the bank which had interested the hound.

Dame Beatrice listened and did not interrupt. At the end of Bryony’s confession she said, ‘So why do you now think that Susan is innocent?’

‘Oh, because whoever killed that man at Watersmeet must be the valley murderer. That stands to reason. Susan has an alibi for the whole evening on which Goodfellow was murdered. She was here for supper and we had it later than usual. She spent the rest of the evening at the Crozier Arms. She told us she did and I was mean enough to check. Regrettably, in a way, she got very drunk and the poacher Adams took her home and put her to bed. He seemed to think it was a good joke. I checked again, because it seemed very necessary in view of my previous suspicions, and it seems they made so much noise that they disturbed her neighbours, so there are witnesses.’

‘Susan has now told me where she was at the time of the Watersmeet death, too, and I believe her. I am sure that Susan is not a murderess. I have almost enough evidence to convict the same person of both the crimes.’

‘I suppose I mustn’t ask.’

‘Better not. I should not answer you at this juncture. We had better go and find the Watersmeet weapon, don’t you think? If it was a sharp piece of flint, it should be identifiable among the other stones in the river.’

‘The police will be so angry with me,’ repeated Bryony unhappily.

‘Then let me bear the brunt. Laura and I will go to Watersmeet and retrieve this talisman and bear our sheaves rejoicing to the Axehead police station.’

‘You will have to involve me, of course.’

‘Not unless you are a murderess,’ said Dame Beatrice, with a grim cackle, ‘but, if you were, you would hardly have come to me with this somewhat belated confession.’

‘Remorse might have overtaken me.’

‘Well, it has, but only because you now know that your suspicions of Susan were unjustified, although, to my mind, they were reasonable enough. I shall not involve you with the police if I can help it. After all, the piece of flint can hardly of itself identify the guilty party.’

‘Would the running water have washed away fingerprints?’

‘Yours and those of the murderer? As neither of you is likely to have had your fingerprints taken by the police, the question is immaterial at present.’

‘Do you know who the murderer is, then?’

‘I think I do, but actual proof is missing.’

‘Will he or she murder anybody else?’

‘Myself, perhaps, but that has been my occupational hazard for so many years that I have ceased to regard it as important.’

‘If I may be permitted the question,’ said Laura, ‘why did you tell Bryony that we wanted to borrow Sekhmet and take her to Watersmeet with us? You don’t suppose she will dash into the stream and retrieve this piece of flint, do you?’

‘It is merely to check a statement. We have been told that the dog will go along with anybody who speaks kindly to her. I am relying on you to find out whether that is correct. Furthermore, I trust that you will go prepared to wade into the river and attempt to locate this piece of flint.’

‘Don’t you think the murderer may have gone there and located it and removed it?’

‘No. According to Bryony’s story, it had been hidden in a hole in the riverside bank. He or she — I refer to the guilty party — may have gone back with the intention of retrieving the piece of flint, but would have found it had disappeared from where it had been hidden. I doubt whether it would have occurred to him to look for it in the river. In any case, I doubt whether he will have gone back for it yet. He will let time pass and the story die down.’

‘But by that time there won’t be any point in finding it. It could no longer be dangerous to him.’

Dame Beatrice hummed the air of Among My Souvenirs. Laura looked hopefully at her, but received no satisfaction. She said, harking back to a previous subject, ‘And supposing Sekhmet won’t be cajoled into coming with me?’

‘Then we were given unproven information, for the dog did know the person who led her away that morning.’

Laura tried again.

‘Why didn’t the murderer chuck the piece of flint into the river instead of hiding it in a hole? Did he think the police might search the riverbed and find it?’

‘I think not. I think he wanted to be sure that he himself could find it again when, as I said, all the local interest in the death had died down and he could safely retrieve it.’

‘Well, no doubt it all makes sense, but not to me,’ said Laura. ‘If he wanted to keep the thing, why didn’t he take it away with him?’

‘He was afraid to do so, I imagine, in case, by some freak of fate, it should be traced to his possession. It is so true that conscience doth make cowards of us all.’

‘He’s going to get a nasty jolt when he dives into that hole and finds the flint gone.’

‘He is going to get a nasty jolt, as you put it, long before that, I fancy,’ said Dame Beatrice. ‘Those who try to throw dust into other people’s eyes are likely to blind themselves if the wind happens to be blowing the wrong way. Well, to find out whether we have been told the truth about Sekhmet’s friendly way with strangers, I shall leave it to you to open negotiations with her. Make sure that no one from Crozier Lodge is with you when you make advances to the animal.’

Sekhmet fulfilled the predictions made about her. She received Laura with mindless enthusiasm, tore twice round what once had been the lawn at Crozier Lodge and then crouched adoringly at Laura’s feet while a lead borrowed from Bryony was attached to her collar. Dame Beatrice had waited beside the car which Laura had parked outside the gate. She patted the now quiescent dog and the three of them walked towards the little bridge over the river.

Laura had picked up two things from the car before they left it. One article was a carrier bag containing a pair of rope-soled canvas shoes, the other was a small, light, canvas-seated garden chair. The shoes were to be worn when she waded in the river, the chair was for Dame Beatrice to occupy while Laura was searching for the piece of flint, a business which she guessed might take some time.

‘Let Sekhmet loose,’ said Dame Beatrice, when they had crossed the bridge and were on the rough riverside path. ‘She knows the spot we want and will lead us to it.’

‘Bryony described it as being only a few yards below the confluence of the two streams,’ said Laura. ‘Wonder what Sekhmet was doing when the murderer hit the other fellow over the head?’

‘She may well have been tethered to a tree and released when the deed had been done, the victim’s trousers removed and the body dumped, alive or dead, in the river.’

‘After the piece of flint had been hidden in the bank where Bryony found it?’

‘Yes. She had then been released, given the pair of trousers and told to guard them, I think. We can test that when you give her your walking shoes to mind.’

‘Thanks very much! And supposing she won’t give them up when I want to change back into them? Still, anything in a good cause, I suppose.’

She released the dog, which disappeared immediately into the undergrowth. The two women walked on, Laura giving a whistle occasionally to which Sekhmet responded by making a brief, polite manifestation of herself before resuming her quest for rabbits.

‘I wish our errand weren’t quite so grim,’ said Laura. ‘It’s lovely along here and the last setting on earth for a cowardly murder.’

‘Yes, indeed,’ Dame Beatrice agreed. ‘There is a good deal to be said for the discovery of dead bodies in libraries rather than in beauty spots.’

They had risen very early and had set out for Abbots Crozier in time, they hoped, to reach Watersmeet before the holiday makers found it. Fortunately it was more of an afternoon than a morning walk for most people and they encountered nobody of human kind. They were accompanied, however, by a robin, but whether in friendship or because he wanted to see them off his territory they did not know.

‘I think it must be somewhere about here that Bryony meant,’ said Laura a little later. She unfolded the garden chair. ‘If you’d like to sit here while I go paddling — ’ she added. ‘I should like to identify that hole in the bank Bryony mentioned. It must be quite close at hand. Ought we to have brought her with us after all?’

‘I think not,’ said Dame Beatrice, testing the small chair for firmness and then seating herself. ‘Enjoy your search. I do not suppose the hole will tell us anything new, but time is of no object and this is a pleasant spot.’

Laura whistled up Sekhmet and this time the dog stayed with her. With the Labrador at her heels, she combed the bank. The hedge which crowned it was ragged and untended. Laura identified, in one part, the trailing wild rose with its white, wide-open flowers and, further along, there was the long-styled rose, stout-stemmed, erect and well foliaged, but of the dog rose, Laura’s favourite, there was no sign, since the soil was not suited to it. However, on her walk along the cliff path she had seen the burnet rose in flower in its chosen habitat near the sea.

It was Sekhmet who found the hole. Laura was wearing a short-sleeved shirt. She put her hand and then her arm into the hole while the dog, suspecting the presence of rabbits, nuzzled against her trouser-leg quivering with anticipation.

‘No droppings, so no rabbits, you idiot,’ said Laura, ‘in fact, no nothing.’ She continued to search the bank, but there was no comparable hole, so, accompanied by the disillusioned dog, she returned to Dame Beatrice and the sunshine, which flecked with light the turbulent little river.

She took off her walking shoes, substituted for them the pair of rope-soled sand shoes, rolled her trouser legs up to above her knees and waded in at a nearby spot where the edge of the stream shelved gently into the water.

This was extremely cold, but the rope-soled shoes gave her a reasonable chance of keeping her footing on the wet stones and boulders of the riverbed. Now and again she would pick up a pebble, inspect it and let it fall. Dame Beatrice watched placidly and Sekhmet watched anxiously from the bank. The water splashed joyously over the rocks, and the robin, which had accompanied the seeker all the time that she was exploring the bank, actually perched for a moment on the wooden arm of Dame Beatrice’s garden chair.

‘I remind myself of the chap who got so bored and frustrated looking for the touchstone which turned everything to gold that he realised that he must have found it earlier on and chucked it away without looking at it,’ said Laura, throwing down a pebble and coming out on to the bank.

‘You are walking against the flow of the stream, ’ said Dame Beatrice. ‘Why don’t you try higher up and walk down this way?’

‘Because I don’t much want to take a ducking. The stream is running fast so near the confluence and the stones are slippery. The rush of water against the backs of my legs could upset my equilibrium. Still, if you say so.’ She walked away from Dame Beatrice and up the slope before she stepped into the river again. This time, although her stance was precarious, her efforts met with success. She gave a shout and held up a piece of stone. Sekhmet, aware of drama, barked excitedly.

Two early strollers came along the path, the vanguard to several others. Dame Beatrice resurrected a small towel from the bag she had with her and vacated the chair so that Laura could sit down and dry her hands, arms, legs and feet. The newcomers gave the two women a cursory glance and passed on. Laura put on her walking shoes (in which, incidentally, Sekhmet had shown not the slightest interest) and then carefully dried the piece of flint.

‘Here is a thing and a very pretty thing, ’ she said, handing it over to Dame Beatrice. ‘Matters begin to add up. That is not a casual chunk of stone. It’s been worked over.’

‘It is a particularly fine example of what the Cambridge Book of Ancient History calls a coup de poing, but we wait to examine your find until after we have returned Sekhmet to her owners and Bryony has had a chance to confirm that we have the object she hid in the river.’ They followed this plan and then picked up the car from the gates of Crozier Lodge and returned to the Stone House. Here they closely examined the piece of flint. It had been painstakingly and beautifully shaped, with feather-edged flaking and sharp, straight edges to the blade. It had obviously been intended by its neolithic fabricator as a dagger, for although at one end it had been fined down to a sharpish point, the other end had been smoothed and rounded and was intended to be grasped in the fist.

There was no trace of blood on the flint dagger. If ever there had been, Bryony or the murderer or the action of the running water had cleaned it off. Laura said, ‘Of course we have no proof of where it came from and who owned it.’

‘No, that is true. The first thing, I think, is to get the pathologist’s opinion. We need to verify our own suspicions that this could have been the Watersmeet murder weapon.’

‘Does that mean digging up the corpse?’

‘The photographs may prove our point, but our course is to present the flint implement and leave the decisions to those who are qualified to make them. I shall suggest, however, that the Home Office pathologist is asked to give a second opinion to that of the county man and it may mean that he will insist upon an exhumation. After all, we are dealing with two cases of murder — three, in fact, if my deductions have not misled us — and the more evidence we can produce to lead the police to the guilty party the better.’

‘I’m a bit surprised that you’re so keen to hunt down this chap,’ said Laura. ‘You think he was being blackmailed by one of those he’s killed and I know what you think of blackmailers.’

‘It is on account of Bryony that I am concerned. She tried to hide the murder weapon, this flint artefact, and it was she who, after her father’s death, most irresponsibly transferred the scalpels to the loft above the garage, where, as we have seen, any ill-disposed person could obtain access to them. She is an intelligent young woman and now that we have shown her the coup de poing for what it is, it will not take her long to put two and two together and come to the correct conclusion as to who owns it. Once she does that, I would not go bail for her safety. A person who has killed three is not likely to burke at a fourth, particularly if he has something against her already.’

‘You say “he”. Can it be that you are certain that the murderer is a man, not a woman?’

‘When in doubt, the masculine pronoun covers both sexes,’ said Dame Beatrice aggravatingly.