“Just lying there then, was it?”
“Yes… No… I don’t know.”
“You must know.”
Terry Dykes shut his lips together.
“Make up your mind, boy,” said Ridgeford not unkindly. “Was it or wasn’t it?”
“No,” said Terry sullenly, “it wasn’t just lying there.”
“Well, then, where was it?” demanded Ridgeford. When there was no reply from Dykes he suddenly swung round on Melvin Bates. “All right, you tell me.”
Melvin Bates started to stutter. “I… I… it was in…”
“Shut up,” said Dykes, unceremoniously cutting off his henchman.
“All right,” said Ridgeford flatly, “I’ve got the message. The bell was inside somewhere, wasn’t it?” He drew breath. “Now then, let me see if I can work out where. Over here in Marby?” They were known as “constraint questions”; those whose answers limited the area of doubt. The best-known constraint question was “Can you eat it?” Ridgeford allowed his voice to grow a harder note. “And you found it inside somewhere, didn’t you?”
It took him another ten minutes to find out exactly where.
Constable Ridgeford was not the only policeman whose immediate quarry lay in Marby. As soon as Sloan and Crosby left Collerton House they too made for the fishing village by the sea.
“We’ll pick up Ridgeford over there,” predicted Sloan, “and he can take us to have a look at this dinghy he’s reported.”
They’d left Basil Jensen still making his way upstream.
“To see if it’s Tugboat Annie,” completed Crosby, engaging gear.
“It would figure if it were.” He paused and then said quietly, “I think something else figures, too, Crosby.”
“Sir?”
“I think—only think, mind you—that we just may have an explanation for a body decomposed but not damaged.”
“Sir?”
“You think, too,” adjured Sloan. The road between Collerton and Marby was so rural that not even Crosby could speed on it. He could use his mind instead.
“The boathouse?” offered the detective constable uncertainly.
“The boathouse,” said Sloan with satisfaction. “It’s early days yet, Crosby, but I think that we shall find that our chap—whoever he is—was parked in the water in the boat-house after he was killed.”
“Why in the water, though, sir?”
“The answer to that,” said Sloan briskly, “is something called mephitis.”
“Sir?”
“Mephitis,” spelled out Sloan for him, “is the smell of the dead.”
Crosby assimilated this and then said, “So he was killed by a fall from a height first somewhere else…”
“Somewhere else,” agreed Sloan at once.
“But…”
“But left in the water afterwards, Crosby.”
“Why?”
Sloan waved a hand. “As I said before graves for murder victims don’t come easy.”
“Yes, sir,” Crosby nodded. “Besides, he might have been killed on the spur of the moment and whoever did it needed time to think what to do with the body.”
It was surprising how the word “murderer” hung outside speech.
“He might,” agreed Sloan. He hoped that it had been a hotblooded affair. Murder had nothing to be said for it at any time but heat-of-the-moment murder was always less sinister than murder plotted and planned. “He would need time and opportunity to work out what to do.”
“And then,” postulated Crosby, “the body was just pushed out into the water?”
There is a tide in the affairs of men, which, taken at the flood, leads on… No, that wouldn’t do. It wouldn’t have been like that at all. It would have been the furtive opening of the boathouse doors during the hours of darkness, and after the furtive opening the silent shove of a dead body with a boat-hook while the River Calle searched out every cranny of the river bank and picked up its latest burden and bore it off towards the sea.
“Unless I’m very much mistaken,” said Sloan austerely, “the body left the boathouse at night.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Probably,” he added, “in time to catch an ebb-tide.” He, Sloan, would have to look at a tide table as soon as he got back to the police station but darkness and an ebb-tide made sense.
“Do we know when, sir?” asked Crosby, who was perforce driving at a speed to satisfy his passenger.
“Some time before he was found,” said Sloan dourly, “but not too long before.”
That was a lay interpretation of what Dr. Dabbe had said in longer words.
Long enough to pick up gammarus pulex.
Long enough to become unrecognisable.
Long enough to be taken by the river to the sea.
Not so long as to be taken by that same sea and laid on Billy’s Finger.
Not so long as to disintegrate completely.
That would have been something that an assassin might have hoped for, that the body would fall to pieces.
Or that it would reach the open sea and be seen no more…
“Why did the boat go too?” Crosby was enquiring.
“I think,” reasoned Sloan aloud, “that if a boat is found adrift and a body is found in the water simple policemen are meant to put two and two together and make five.”
That was something else a murderer might have hoped for.
“It might have happened too,” said Crosby, “mightn’t it? He’d only got to get a bit farther out to sea and he wouldn’t have been spotted at all.”
Sloan stared unseeingly out of the car window. “I wonder why he was put into the river exactly when he was.”
On such a full sea are we now afloat…
“Well, you wouldn’t choose a weekend, would you, sir?” said Crosby.
Never on Sunday?
“The whole estuary’s stuffed with sailing boats at the weekend,” continued the constable. “You should see it, sir.”
“I probably will,” said Sloan pessimistically, “unless we’ve got all this cleared up by then.”
The detective constable slowed down for a signpost. “This must be the Edsway to Marby road we’re joining.”
“Something,” said Sloan resolutely, “must have made it important for that body to be got out of that boathouse when it was.”
The car radio began to chatter while he was speaking. “The gentlemen from the press,” reported the girl at the microphone, “would like to know when Detective Inspector Sloan will see them.”
“Ten o’clock tomorrow morning,” responded Sloan with spirit, “and not a minute before.” He switched off at his end and turned to his companion. “And Crosby…”
“Sir?”
“While you’re about it,” said Sloan, “you’d better find out about the niece. And what Mrs. Mundill died from too. We can’t be too careful.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Now, where did Ridgeford say this dinghy was?”
“According to his report,” said Crosby, “it’s beyond the Marby lifeboat station. To be exact, to the north of it. We’re to ask for a man called Farebrother.”
12
But hark! I hear the toll of a bell.
« ^ »
Farebrother was quite happy to indicate the stray dinghy to the two policemen. And to tell them that Ridgeford was down on the harbour wall.
“Fetch him,” said Sloan briefly to Crosby. He turned to Farebrother and showed him the copper barbary head. “Ever seen one of these before?”
“Might have,” said the lifeboatman. “Might not.”
“Lately?”
“Might have,” said the lifeboatman again.
“How lately?”
“I don’t hold with such things,” he said flatly.
“No,” said Sloan.