‘Fear of discovery?’ said Alec.
‘What discovery?’ I said. ‘No one knows who No. 5 is and we haven’t been able to come up with a single scrap of evidence that Fleur had anything to do with her murder. She can’t have felt the noose tightening.’
‘But scarpering like that and leaving Jeanne Beauclerc in the lurch does look like fear,’ Alec said. ‘So if not fear of discovery, arrest, conviction and hanging, because she didn’t really kill No. 5 in the legal sense, then what?’
‘Not in the legal sense, no,’ I said slowly. ‘But if she felt that she killed her father purely by being born, she might have felt that she killed No. 5 because she put the woman in harm’s way quite inadvertently.’
‘Yes, of course!’ said Alec. ‘Which makes perfect sense of her saying “Five” like that when she saw the corpse!’
‘Oh, hallelujah! At last!’ I said. ‘She already felt she was putting this person at risk of harm and when she saw the corpse she knew that the harm had come.’
We beamed at one another.
‘But we’ve got side-tracked. What did she fear? Why did she run away?’
‘Perhaps,’ said Alec with a quiet thrill of triumph in his voice, ‘because she knew where the harm had come from. She didn’t kill No. 5 any more than she killed No. 1, but-’
I joined him and we spoke in chorus.
‘She knows who did.’
‘And,’ continued Alec, ‘she thinks she’s next.’
‘So she didn’t dare take Jeanne Beauclerc along.’
‘We have to find her,’ Alec said. ‘And it is pretty urgent, after all.’
11
We did not, however, get off at the next station and try to tell all of that to Sergeant Turner on the telephone. Even if he had let us speak to Constable Reid we might have been struggling to unwind the plaited threads of poor Fleur’s history and convince him. Instead we spent the rest of the journey devising the plainest, clearest report into which such a twisty tale could be straightened out and when we finally fell out of the little train at Portpatrick again some thirty-six hours after we had left we went straight to the police station.
Constable Reid was on the back shift and we found him in the office all trussed up with his tunic closed and his hat on, ready to go out and make one of his rounds. Since the weather was so filthy, though – it had started raining almost precisely at the border on our journey north and sheets of water were coursing down over the sea, turning even this summer evening as black as January – he took little persuasion to abandon the plan and give us his ear.
‘Nobody’ll be out causin’ bother on a night like this,’ he said. After that his contributions dwindled.
‘Uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh,’ was all he offered as we laid it out for him, and he stopped taking notes a little way in. By the end, he had his hat off and his head in his hands.
‘So…’ I finished, ‘if you can at least find the boat you’ll know which way she went and then you’ll know which police force to ask to look for her. Or however you do it. Obviously you know best.’
‘The boat,’ said Reid. ‘That you knew about on Monday afternoon, and here we are on Thursday night.’
‘Yes, sorry about that,’ I said. ‘But you know now and so you can get started.’
‘I cannae start somethin’ like that,’ said Reid. ‘It’ll need to be the sarge and he’ll need to ask the inspector and even he’ll mebbes need to go right to the top.’
‘I see,’ said Alec.
‘And that’s fine by me,’ said Reid. ‘I’ll go straight up to his house right now and tell ’im.’
‘Won’t he be angry if you bother him at home?’ I asked. ‘I’d rather wait until the morning and have it done than antagonise the sergeant tonight and get nowhere.’
‘I’m no’ carin’,’ said Reid. ‘I want to see Cissie. She answers their door, you know.’
‘She still hasn’t forgiven you?’
‘Not a word since she said she didn’t want to see me Tuesday afternoon,’ Reid said. ‘I’ve left two notes in our wee place and she’s taken them out but no’ answered.’
‘Well, she can hardly avoid you if you turn up on the doorstep,’ I said. ‘Shall we come too?’
‘I’ll manage fine myself,’ said Reid and he shooed us out of the little police station so that he could lock it behind him.
Portpatrick was battened down, either for the rainstorm or just for the night, with windows and doors closed, no washing left out to catch the warmth of the fading day and no one leaning on the harbour wall or sitting on the bollards outside Aldo’s. In fact, Aldo’s was in darkness.
‘Joe must have given up on any custom tonight in this dreadful weather,’ I said.
Alec shook his head.
‘It’s hard to believe you live in Scotland sometimes, Dandy,’ he said. ‘No purveyor of fried fish would ever close before the pub, you know.’
‘Well, maybe Thursday is his half-day,’ I said. ‘The man must rest sometimes.’
‘Thursday?’ said Alec. ‘Pay-day? Never.’
‘I bow to your greater knowledge,’ I said. ‘I hope he’s all right.’
We stood looking across the harbour to the little shack for a moment, but the rain was coming down in drilling icy rods and my hat brim was beginning to droop.
‘I’ll go and see him tomorrow,’ Alec said. ‘Come inside, Dandy, before you catch a chill.’ Thus cloaking his sloth in chivalry, he held open the door of the Crown and, shaking ourselves like dogs, we entered.
‘What are you going to do tomorrow?’ he said as we waited for the landlady to respond to our ringing. ‘The police will take over looking for Fleur and Fleur, when she’s found, will tell us at last who No. 5 is. What’s left for you? A day of rest?’
‘I think I’ll go to Parents’ Day,’ I said. ‘Gatecrash it, I mean. I’d dearly love to work out what’s going on up there and I’ve got some examination papers and a letter to return to Miss Shanks. That will be my protection if she calls Sergeant Turner on me. And as for a day of rest: I’m certainly not sticking around the Crown. The convalescent widow and I have had a falling out, you know, and I can’t face another round of hostilities.’
The rain had let up by the morning, but it did not leave the world new-washed and sparkling the way English rain does. Instead, the stone of the houses, harbour and cobbles was soaked and dark and the sky was a kind of exhausted grey. I looked across to Joe Aldo’s shack from my window as I dressed and felt again a small flare of worry.
There was a knock at my door and I opened it, expecting Alec, but found Constable Reid standing there.
‘Good morning,’ I said and leaned out to call along the passageway. ‘Alec? Reid’s here. Come in, Constable. What news?’
‘Aye, I thought ye’d like to know,’ said Reid, entering and looking round with a true policeman’s eye, not at all the bashful gaze of a young man in a strange woman’s hotel bedroom. He would go far if his luck fell that way. ‘The sarge took some convincin’ and I kind of had to make your friend sound a wee bit dangerous and no’ just soft, but he’s agreed she might ken who our corpse is and there’s no denyin’ she’s pinched the boat, so he’s away gettin’ the coastguard and them sorted out.’
Alec gave a quick rap at the door and entered. ‘Reid,’ he said.
‘The search is on,’ I told him. ‘Go on, Constable.’