Bloodhounds

'So you reckon there's a good brain behind this?'

She nodded. 'The way it was set up was really artful. Brilliant, in fact. That rhyme fooled everyone. The stupid bit was tonight-if Milo is the thief-revealing it to everybody.'

'Unless he's still several moves ahead of the rest of you.'

Her eyes widened. Bert was second to none at spotting devious goingson. There was a lot of jockeying for position in sports management.

'So what's he up to, do you suppose?' She leaned across the table with the point of her chin resting on her upturned thumb. Her lips were slightly open. She half hoped Bert would say 'Who cares about Milo?' and lean closer.

Instead he asked, 'Does he know anything about stamps?'

Her chin came to rest less seductively in her cupped hand. 'I've no idea. No one has mentioned it. He seems more hooked on Sherlock Holmes than anything else.'

Bert rotated his finger thoughtfully around the rim of the empty wine glass. 'Do you think he fancies himself as Holmes?'

Shirley-Ann giggled a little. 'I suppose he might. He does wear a deerstalker. But I don't see why it should make him want to steal the Penny Black. Holmes didn't commit crimes; he solved them.'

He expanded on his theory. 'If he wanted to show off a bit, demonstrate his skill at solving a crime, he could pretend to find the stamp by Holmes's methods.'

'But he didn't, did he? It turned up in the pages of a book.'

'A stupid mistake. It proves he isn't in the same league as Holmes,' said Bert. 'He must have tucked it in there for safety and forgotten that he was using the same book to read from.'

She pondered for a moment. 'That sounds quite possible. What was he aiming to do with the stamp?'

'He'd have pretended to find it somewhere nobody else would think of, and he'd have got his fifteen minutes of fame as the modern Sherlock who outwitted the police. The whole episode wouldn't have done anybody any harm provided that the stamp turned up again in perfect condition.'

'That's rather neat. I do hope you're right,' she said. 'I don't like to think of Milo as a thief.'

'I didn't say he wasn't one,' said Bert in a change of tone. 'They don't all wear flat caps and carry bags with SWAG written on them.'

'Haha.'

'He could have demanded a ransom for it. Fifty grand, or he burns it.'

'He's a retired civil servant, for heaven's sake.'

'Maybe he's been waiting all his life to do something really exciting.'

'Silly!'

Bert said huffily, 'If you don't think much of my opinions, why ask me?'

Now she'd offended him. He was so touchy about anything remotely suggesting he was stupid, which he patently was not. She supposed he had to endure a lot of thoughtless remarks at work from users of the Leisure Center who thought he was just a musclebound bloke in a tracksuit.

They cleared the table and watched television for an hour, but Shirley-Ann couldn't have told you what the program was.

Chapter Fourteen

Peter Diamond was still up after midnight watching television, picking holes in the plot of an old film, To Catch a Thief. Stephanie had quit after the first commercial break. 'Far be it from me to drag you away from Grace Kelly,' she told him. 'See it to the end. I'm tired.'

She was amused to see that the new kitten stayed on the arm of his chair, ready to pounce on his hand if he moved. It still had no name. Peter had this weird theory that the kitten would let them know what it wanted to be called. She was content to let the little tabby do its own job of winning approval. On the first evening, after the predictable flare-up when he'd spotted the cat-tray, her bruiser of a husband, the tyrant of Manvers Street, had stayed up most of the night with the kitten in case it cried. Big softie.

Then the phone rang.

She was still sitting up in bed reading when he came into the bedroom to hand over the kitten. 'I'm going to have to go out, love. That was Wigfull.'

Her eyes widened. 'He isn't your boss, is he? What does he want at this time of night?'

'He's found a body.'

'Personally?'

'So he says. Murder is my pigeon, not his.'

'Where is it?'

'On a canal boat.'

'In Bath?'

'Limpley Stoke. That boatyard near the Aqueduct. I've got to go.'

'It's wickedly cold tonight. There's a frost.'

'I'll take it carefully down Brassknocker,' he promised.

'I wasn't thinking of your driving. I meant I'm going to freeze in this bed without you.'

He smiled. 'You'll have warmed up nicely by the time I get in.'

'Thanks-I'll really look forward to that. You'll be as cold as Finnegan's feet on the day they buried him.'

By daylight Brassknocker Hill offers a series of glorious, gasp-inducing views of the Limpley Stoke Valley. By night the descent from Claverton Down is even more dramatic, for you plunge into a vast, black void with just a scattering of lights. He would have driven cautiously anyway, without the frost warning. At the bottom he turned right at the Viaduct pub, joined the A36 and immediately left it by the traffic lights.

The entrance to the Dundas boatyard is an unprepossessing pull-in over uneven ground a few yards along the Bradford Road. The gate was open, and a few frost-coated cars were parked inside. He bumped over a couple of potholes and stopped beside an empty police car. Nobody was about. There was some kind of notice at the far end of the parking area. He groped in his glove compartment for a torch. The notice informed him: YOUR CAR is AT RISK FROM THIEVES.

There was only one way to go: up a slope toward some temporary-looking buildings that turned out to be the boat-yard offices. They stood beside a stretch of the old Somerset Coal Canal that was used for mooring. His torch picked out a small iron bridge and beyond it a row of narrowboats and other small craft.

Along the towpath he discovered that the moorings extended much farther than he had first appreciated, using both sides of the canal. Fifty or sixty boats must have been tied up there. He flicked the torch over some names painted in the florid lettering that is the canal boat style: Henrietta, Occam's 's Razor, Charleen. They were moored for the winter, he guessed, locked up, curtains drawn, with everything portable removed from the decks. If cars were at risk from thieves, then so were boats.

Presently voices carried to him. A torchbeam speared the darkness and dazzled him. He stepped out toward John Wigfull, two uniformed officers, and a bearded man in a deerstalker hat. They were beside a red narrowboat called the Mrs. Hudson. As if to proclaim that it was also a houseboat, some twenty conifers in pots stood along the roof, and there was a television aerial. The interior was lit, but nothing could be seen; the Venetian blinds were closed at all the windows.

'This is Mr. Motion,' Wigfull said, with a nod at the bearded man. 'He owns the boat.'

'Nice boat,' said Diamond to Motion. 'And you say there's a corpse inside?'

Wigfull said, 'We found it together.'

'You found it?' Diamond could have added that Wigfull was supposed to be fully stretched investigating a stamp theft, but there was no need. The point was made in the way he stressed the word You.

'Peter, can we take this from the beginning? We've got to wait for the SOCOs, so you might as well hear what happened. Mr. Motion walked into Manvers Street this evening and informed us that the missing Penny Black had come into his possession.'

'So you've found it.' Diamond took a longer look at Motion in his deerstalker, but without shining a torch into