“Oh, Hamp, Ray was lots of fun, once you got him to shed that bogus courtroom manner of his. You couldn’t ask him to pass the salt at first without being crossexamined.” We laughed at that.
“Yes,” Hamp said, nodding his head. “We missed him the summer before last. He wasn’t around really. There are always other people. One forgets. I will say this, Dermot thought him a very likeable chap.”
“But you didn’t warm to him, Hamp?”
“Me? Oh, I’m still a bit stand-offish, you know. Habit of a lifetime. I have to work at it. I work hard, and I’ve got a good teacher.” Peggy took Hamp’s hand. They smiled at one another and then both, a bit sheepishly, at me.
“We thought we’d drive to the Inn at the Falls for dinner, Benny. I hope that you’ll be able to join us.” I tried to make an excuse, but it was torn away before I’d fixed it firmly to the mast. Hamp knew that the kitchen at Norchris Lodge wasn’t in operation yet and that if I wasn’t going to eat with them, it was because I’d chosen to eat elsewhere alone. When he put it like that, I accepted. What else could I do?
But first, we returned to the cottage. “Cottage” isn’t really an adequate word for this mansion in the woods. It was made of squared logs with fieldstone and other masonry at strategic intervals. The massive fireplace had openings in four rooms. The interior was simply furnished except when you examined the pine closely and discovered that even the kitchen chairs were Early Canadian antiques. While wandering about on my own, according to my hosts’ invitation, I discovered a series of rooms in the back. They were filled with electronic equipment — phones, fax machines, computers, e-mail, the Internet-all manned by three men in shorts and T-shirts. Hamp’s empire was awake and active, even while Hamp was cruising in Wanda III.
After a swim, the inaugural swim in my new suit, off Peggy and Hamp’s dock, I opened the Dermot Keogh book where I’d folded down the page. I let the strong, late-afternoon sun dry me as I half-dozed on a white deck chair. Later, as soon as I’d showered and dressed, I excused myself for an hour or two while they read or napped. I told them I was going off to “explore.” I didn’t know exactly what I was going to explore, but I was feeling a growing connection between pieces of what I had been learning up here. It was the sort of exploration I had to do, or I wouldn’t be able to sleep. I’d been there before. There may have been no connection between the deaths I was hearing about, but I knew I had to exhaust the possibility. Peggy offered me a butterfly net to aid me in my great work. More practically, Hamp let me borrow his sleek black BMW, since my car was still back in town.
The marina in Bala was less rustic than Ifor Evans’s establishment on Segwin Bay. The paint on the clapboard siding was fresher, the sheds for stored boats looked more permanent. It was the same lake, of course, but the highway passing through Bala carried more traffic. A large sign advertising a big American-built outboard motor dominated the cedar-shingled roof of the boathouse. It eclipsed the older and much more modest sign: McCordick Brothers’ Marina. There were extensive docking wharves, most of them empty on this sunny afternoon. There was a sense of languid bustle, of sun-fried picnic hampers, of children smeared with sunblock, of orange life preservers and of the faint smell of gasoline on the wind. Sun reflected from glass, chrome and water as the remaining flotilla in the slips moved with the breeze off the lake, metal rings sounding musically on the tall masts. I parked where Hamp’s car could be seen and walked into that back part of the marina sacred to scuba diving. Here were tanks and suits, regulators, masks, fins and other paraphernalia of the deep. I asked a sunbleached blond kid in cut-off jeans who was in charge of the underwater gear.
“I’ll get Stan,” he said, and off he went like Peter Rabbit through a cabbage patch. He didn’t come back, but he sent along a lean six-footer in a white T-shirt with the printed slogan “Charles Wells, premium bitter” sitting over his heart. He was tanned all over, as far as I could see. From the look of him, you’d have thought the McCordicks would put him on the pink cabin-cruiser runabout detail. He couldn’t miss with the ladies.
I was frank with him to start with; gave him my name and calling. What the hell, I thought, maybe he’ll enter into the spirit of my investigation. I gave him a short version of what Hamp Fisher had told me about the dive to the S.S. Waome a year ago. He remembered the whole thing, of course, from the coming of the Provincial Police to the exit of the reporters and TV trucks. Stan relived the event as he’d experienced it, and, what the hell, I let him. Then he asked me some good questions, which I tried to answer precisely.
“If the equipment was rented from us,” he theorized, “then maybe we’ve got a record of which items went along with them to the dive site.” I gave him the date of the dive, which Fisher had mentioned, and he went to a log attached to a slanted desk, about chest high. It was mostly a record of reservations to rent and appointments for dives using McCordick boats, rafts and other equipment. He turned backwards from the half-filled page that was open, flipping back and back again towards the front of the book.
“Here it is,” said Stan with his finger in the middle of the page. “Yeah, it was quite an expedition: two rafts and four sets of wet suits and tanks. Mike, who was here then, wrote this. Mr. Keogh made the order, let’s see, three, no four days before. He was picking up the tab for everybody. Vern and Will McCordick thought the world of Mr. Keogh.”
“Who ended up paying? After the accident?”
“There’s a note written by Mike. ‘Paid by cheque: B. Foley.’”
“Bob Foley? Dermot’s man of all work. So, he was up here for the dive on Waome.”
“On most dives they take a crew of people to work the topside. If they had a boat and two rafts for four divers, one topside person would be the minimum. Two would be better. Let me see if I can get ol’ Mike on the phone. He’s waitering this summer at the King and Country. That’s a pub outside Port Carling.” Stan started on the phone, and I began examining swimming masks and fins, all of which were new to me. The marina carried professional equipment, with only a few items intended for small fry. I’d missed underwater sport when I was young enough to wear the equipment with no self-consciousness. The sun through the big window looking over the lake was lower than it had been, although I had been there only a short time. Its effect on the boats and wharves was still strong, daunting even. I could feel the sweat in the creases of my arms. I’d have to invest in sunblock, I promised myself.
Stan wasn’t gone long. When he came back, he said, “Bob Foley was Dermot’s chief boat wrangler on the Waome dive. The second person was Keogh’s girlfriend. Mike remembers her as a stunner. Says her name was Renata Bowmaker.”
“Are you sure about the last name?”
“That’s what the man said. He said that. Called her ‘my little Bowmaker.’”
“Good and thanks, Stan. Tell me, if I wanted to sabotage somebody’s dive, how would I go about doing it?”
“You planning to murder somebody?”
“Remember I told you I was a private investigator? What I didn’t tell you was that in my spare time-and there’s a lot of that-I write detective stories. On the side, you know. You may have seen some of my stories in Ellery Queen or Alfred Hitchcock. And there are the novels: Haste to the Gallows, The Glass Key, The Dalton Case, The Lake of Darkness …”
“Oh, yeah. I’ve seen some of them!” I was glad to see we were both liars of about equal skill.
“Well, in my new plot, the murderer wants to do away with his victim by tampering with his aqualung. I try to keep my fiction as close to the truth as possible. Is there some way that my murderer could alter the mechanism of an aqualung and get away with it? It can’t be something that the cops would find.”