There was a long silence. “I’m sorry,” Henry went on, “but it seems to me that something very strange happened on Steel Hill Sands that day. Without wishing to be melodramatic, I’d say that—” He stopped abruptly.
Emmy shivered. “What a horrible thought,” she said. “You mean, someone might have seen him hit the sandbank, and then waited until the fog came down and—”
“Oh, for God’s sake—” said Rosemary. She had gone very pale, and sounded near tears.
“Do shut up, darling,” said Alastair, very seriously. “I think Henry’s got something.”
“Presumably,” said Henry, “anybody with a dinghy or a flat-bottomed motorboat could get to the sandbank easily enough, either from the main channel of the river or from Sir Simon’s boathouse.”
“From the river, certainly,” said Alastair. “I doubt if it would be possible to get up that creek from the boathouse in fog. At least—”
Surprisingly, Rosemary said, “Oh, yes, it would. I mean, I’ve heard Riddle say...” Again she stopped in mid-sentence.
Alastair scratched his dark head meditatively. “You’ve got me really worried, Henry,” he said. “It was bad enough when... when all this happened, but it never occurred to any of us that it wasn’t just an accident. If someone really did kill Pete, I’d... Well, look here. Why don’t you look into it a bit further while you’re down here? That is, if you don’t mind. It couldn’t do any harm, could it, if it was unofficial?”
“Oh, Henry—not again,” Emmy protested. “Can’t we have a single holiday in peace?”
“I’m only going to meet people and talk to them a bit,” said Henry mildly. “I promise you it won’t spoil our holiday, darling.” He looked at his watch, and then went on, “We still seem to have quite a while to wait here. Tell me more about Pete Rawnsley. Was there any reason why anyone should want to kill him?”
“None,” said Alastair promptly. “Everybody liked him.”
“Except Colin,” said Rosemary.
“Oh, that.” Alastair looked at his wife with displeasure. “That was just silly.”
“What was?”
Alastair said quickly, “Oh, it was just that Anne—Colin’s fiancée—was having a bit of a thing with Pete. He was very attractive to women—the strong, silent type with a wife in every port and really wedded to his boat.”
“Had he?” asked Henry.
“Had he what?”
“A wife in every port.”
Alastair considered. “Pete was a solitary type by nature,” he said at length. “He certainly ran through an impressive list of girl friends, but he used to take fright and be off as soon as any of them looked like getting serious. That’s what made Colin mad—the fact that he knew Pete was bound to let Anne down in the end. Personally, I don’t think Anne ever did take Pete at more than his face value. After all, she knew his reputation well enough. But when Colin found out that Anne had been down here to the cottage on her own to see Pete, there was a hell of a row. It was the night before Pete died. We were all in The Berry Bush, and Herbert let the cat out of the bag. I don’t know whether he did it deliberately or not. It was just as well for Pete that he wasn’t there, because Colin might have—” Alastair stopped, and then said, “I don’t mean that it was really serious. Just one of Colin and Anne’s usual tiffs, and ending in the usual way with Anne refusing to sleep in Mary Jane and spending the night with us, and then sailing with good old reliable David in Pocahontas next day.”
“So Colin was alone in his boat,” said Henry. “What did he do when the fog came down?”
“Anchored, just as we did.”
“Whereabouts?”
There was a pause, and then Alastair said, “Look here, I can see what you’re driving at, and I’m not going to have you getting ideas about Colin. He’s a friend of mine.”
“Meaning,” said Henry, “that Mary Jane was just off the sandbank when the fog came down.”
“Fool,” said Rosemary quietly.
“What if she was?” Alastair retorted, with some heat. “For that matter, so were Pocahontas and Tideway. They all set off at the same time, and they were still in company when the fog came down. Of course, they all saw Pete on the sands, and waved and so on. When the fog lifted, there was no sign of Pete, but as Blue Gull was still aground, they naturally thought he was below in the cabin, so they just upped anchor and sailed back.”
“No sign of him?” said Henry. “Where was he, then? He must have been—”
“That’s one of the most tragic things,” said Alastair. “Pete must have been lying on the landward side of his boat, so that he was hidden by her hull. I know Hamish can’t get over the thought that he might have saved his uncle if only he’d gone ashore to investigate. But nobody could possibly blame him. The coroner said that.”
“If somebody from one of the anchored boats had put off in a dinghy and rowed over during the fog,” said Henry, “do you think the others would have heard anything?”
Alastair thought for a moment. “Possibly,” he said. “It’s very difficult to say. Fog does the most extraordinary things to sound, you know. You can’t tell where a noise is coming from, or how far away it is. But surely, Henry, you can’t seriously think that any of the Fleet would—”
“I don’t think anything yet,” said Henry. “I’m just feeling my way a little. I suppose Hamish got his uncle’s money.”
“Yes,” said Alastair, rather grudgingly.
“Where did the money come from?”
“Inherited, I think,” said Alastair. “I don’t know. Never asked. But I’m damned sure it was honestly come by. If Pete had a fault, it was an exaggerated respect for law and order. He used to be in some police force—Kenya, I think—he spent a lot of his life abroad—and the one thing he wouldn’t tolerate at any price was dishonesty or double-dealing.”
“How long has Hamish lived down here?” Henry asked. “Only since Pete died?”
“No, no. They shared the cottage in Berrybridge. Hamish is an architect, works in Ipswich. He and Peter were extremely popular round here, right from the word go, even though they were outsiders. They just seemed to settle in right away.” Alastair took a puff at his pipe, and then added, “You know, the more I think of it, the sillier it is to imagine Pete could have been murdered. It’s just stupid.”
“Most murders are,” said Henry sombrely. “Stupid and basically simple. In fact, I think it’s true to say that every murderer kills for love or money. I’m talking about the sane ones now—if anyone can be said to be entirely sane at such a moment. Often you find that the murderer has built up a great pyramid of specious reasoning in his own mind, to convince himself why his victim should die: but under it, you’ll always find one thing or the other. Love or money.”
Rosemary said, “Please don’t talk about murder, Henry. Pete is dead, and there’s nothing we can do to bring him back. Can’t you forget it and leave him in peace?”
For a moment, Henry studied Rosemary’s beautiful, clear-cut profile. He was both puzzled and distressed by the agony that he saw there. He lay back on the sun-warmed sand and closed his eyes.
“I’m sorry, Rosemary,” he said. “I’ll try. I really will try.”
At one o’clock, the tide turned. The marooned sailors, perched on the edge of Ariadne’s sharply tilted deck like sparrows on a telephone wire, watched the water creeping back to them inch by inch, at what seemed a snail’s pace by comparison with the indecent haste of its retreat earlier in the day. Soon after three, however, the first wavelets were lapping at the hulclass="underline" the water grew deeper, climbed the deck rail that lay on the sand, covered it, and swilled along the sloping deck itself.
Henry said, in a voice from which he had not quite succeeded in erasing all traces of alarm, “We don’t appear to be floating, Alastair.”