Swing, Swing Together

“And are his two companions smaller men, with spectacles?”

“Absolutely correct!” said Harriet, clapping her hands.

“Small white dog?”

“The very same!” said Thackeray.

“Haven’t seen ’em,” said Mr. Bustard.

There was a pause. Thackeray was the first to say, “But how the devil did you know-”

“Jim Hackett met ’em this morning when I was cooking breakfast and told me about ’em. Straight out of Jerome K. Jerome, I said. We had a laugh about it. You must meet Jim. You’ve time for a cup of tea on the island, haven’t you?”

As duty obviously required that they meet Jim Hackett, they made the skiff fast beside the one already under the willow, and stepped ashore. They found him squatting beside a small fire not far from the bank, cooking a sausage on the end of a toasting fork. He got quickly to his feet, putting fork and sausage guiltily behind his back, which looked quaint, because he was built like a barge horse, with massive shoulders and three inches of height to spare over Thackeray.

“What’s this, Jim?” said Mr. Bustard. “This ain’t supper-time, you know.”

“How right you are, Percy,” said Jim Hackett. “ ‘Be sure your sin will find you out.’ Numbers, Chapter 32, Verse 23.”

“He’s very knowledgeable about the Good Book,” explained Mr. Bustard. “Never mind, Jim. You can eat it cold at the proper time. Has the kettle boiled? That’s the question. We’ve got visitors, as you can see. Miss Shaw, this is Jim Hackett. I wouldn’t shake his hand-it’s thick with sausage grease. This is Mr. Thackeray, Jim, who is escorting Miss Shaw and her young man, Mr. Hardy, up to Tilehurst. They rowed me up from the lock.”

“Kettle just boiled,” said Jim Hackett, picking it up and thrusting it into the fire. Harriet was relieved not to shake his hand. Besides being very large, it was calloused and, from the slowness of his movement with the kettle, insensitive to heat.

“Do you prepare all your meals like this?” she asked.

“Lord no, my dear,” said Mr. Bustard. “When we have the chance we buy our creature comforts from riverside inns such as the one you’re making for. It’s boiling, Jim. We got a very good veal and ham pie from the George and Dragon at Wargrave on Tuesday evening. Very welcome, veal and ham.”

“Dog and Badger,” said Jim Hackett, removing the kettle from the flames.

“Eh?”

“Dog and Badger, not George and Dragon.”

“If you insist, Jim, old boy, if you insist.”

“There’s a Dog and Badger at Medmenham,” said Hardy. “It’s my local pub.”

“It was a spanking pie, wherever it came from,” said Mr. Bustard. “Milk and sugar, Miss Shaw?”

“I believe you spoke this morning to some people we were looking for,” Thackeray said to Jim Hackett. “Three men in a boat-not to mention a dog.”

“That’s right. Helped push them out. Was they mates of yours?”

“Not exactly,” said Thackeray, who must have seen a glint of menace in Jim Hackett’s eye. “We was told they was ahead of us on the river and we want to find them if we can.”

“They wasn’t your sort. Swells, they was. Threw me a tanner piece after I gave ’em a shove.”

“I wonder if we’re talking about the same three,” said Thackeray artfully. “Was one of them a large, bearded cove? Not large by your standard, but just as tall as I am and a sight heavier?”

“One of ’em, yes.”

“And the others?” chipped in Constable Hardy.

“Half-pints. Dressed and talked like they owned the river, but couldn’t even push their own bleeding boat out.”

“Language, Jim,” protested Mr. Bustard.

“God, I’m sorry, lady,” Jim Hackett told Harriet. “‘Every idle word that men shall speak, they shall give account thereof in the day of judgment.’ St. Matthew, Chapter 12, Verse 36.”

“He should have gone into the Church,” said Mr. Bustard.

“Did these men say where they was going, by any chance?” Thackeray asked.

“Streatley,” said Jim Hackett. “They was making for Streatley.”

“They didn’t mention where they came from?”

“They’d been three days on the river. Spent the first night at Runnymede and the second in the Crown at Marlow.”

Later in the afternoon, when they set off again, with Thackeray ostentatiously pushing the skiff away from the bank without assistance, Harriet opened Three Men in a Boat. If Jim Hackett’s memory of the movements of the suspects was reliable, they were scrupulously faithful to the itinerary of George, Harris and Mr. Jerome K. Jerome.

CHAPTER 12

Night thoughts in the Roebuck-Murder and Mr. Jerome-Nude with fern

That night, as the rain trickled down the eaves into the guttering of the Roebuck, Harriet returned to Three Men in a Boat. Once or twice she laughed until the bed shook. Men stood so much on their dignity; it was comical to think of them out of their element doing ridiculous things. She would have laughed even more if she had not been reading for a serious purpose. She wanted to decide for herself whether there was anything in the book suggestive of murder, as Sergeant Cribb apparently supposed. The more she read, the more difficult it was to conceive of it as a manual for assassins. George, Harris and J making their inexpert way up the Thames with the dog Montmorency were anything but sinister.

The place-names were there, of course-Hurley Weir, Medmenham Abbey, the Backwater to Wargrave and the islands at Shiplake-so recent events impinged a little on her thoughts, even if they seemed remote from the book. The three mysterious men whose arrival on the scene had created such havoc among the bathers on Tuesday night were not so alarming in retrospect, not now she had got to know Mr. Jerome’s good-humoured trio. To think of them as brutal murderers, callously killing a helpless old tramp and then continuing upriver as if nothing had happened, was difficult in the extreme. Obviously Sergeant Cribb thought otherwise. He had fastened on them as his suspects from the beginning, and the lockkeeper’s information that they were following the route in the book had not discouraged him; it had sent him haring off to Streatley to make an arrest.

Tomorrow he would want her to identify them. She shrank from the business, not because she doubted her ability to recognize them, but because of the significance Cribb put upon it. He made no bones about it; identification was tantamount to guilt. If they did not admit it at once, he would beat them with a truncheon, or whatever policemen did to extract confessions. He was not a man for refinements; that was obvious from the way he treated his subordinates.

If she had witnessed the murder itself, seen the tramp held under the water until the last bubble of breath had risen to the surface, she would not have hesitated to identify the killers. But all she had seen was three men and a dog in a boat moving serenely towards Hurley, unaware of the confusion in the water. Suppose they were not the murderers; suppose somebody else had killed the unfortunate tramp further up the river. Suppose her testimony sent three innocent men to the gallows. It would always be on her conscience.

Too ridiculous; she was getting morbid. This was not the time to lose a sense of proportion. She returned to her book, to Chapter 16, describing, topically enough, the stretch between Reading and Streatley. Her eyes drifted down the page without the fullest concentration until she came to that “something black floating in the water” that George noticed and drew back from “with a cry and a blanched face”: the dead body of a woman.

Harriet drew the sheet closer round her and read, with wide eyes, how the corpse was consigned without fuss to some men on the bank and how the three in the boat paddled on to Streatley and there lunched at the Bull, their appetites seemingly unimpaired by the experience. She shuddered and closed the book, putting it face down