well be the men I saw on Tuesday night, but I am not ready to swear to it yet. My view was partially obstructed downstairs and the conditions were altogether different, as you must appreciate.”
Cribb nodded tolerantly. “We’ll see if we can get you a better view of them on the river tomorrow. Actually, you must have come quite close to it today. You can’t have been too far behind them. A nifty piece of rowing, gentlemen.”
In the short pause that followed, Hardy did not stir a muscle, even when Harriet in her unease tipped some iodine directly onto his perforated skin. “We-er-came by train, Sarge,” Thackeray confessed. “We left the boat at Goring.”
“If you remember, you left a message there asking us to make the best speed we could,” Harriet quickly added in support, “but up to then we followed their route most faithfully. We established conclusively that they spent last night on an island at Shiplake.”
“You did?” said Cribb, still absorbing the information that they were without a boat.
Rapidly, Harriet moved on to a breathless account of the meeting with Mr. Bustard and Jim Hackett, on the principle that if she bombarded him with detail, something sooner or later would make an impact. It turned out to be Jim Hackett’s habit of quoting from the Bible.
“Do you remember any of the texts?” Cribb asked.
“ ‘Be sure your sin will find you out’ was one, and there was another about giving account for idle words on the day of judgment.”
“I remember a third,” said Thackeray enthusiastically. “ ‘Man goeth forth unto his work and to his labour until the evening.’ Psalm 104. Thirty-five verses. I learned it at school.”
“I wonder if Jim Hackett did,” said Cribb. “Did he have much else to say?”
“Very little,” answered Thackeray. “He corrected Bustard once, I remember, a question over where they’d bought a veal and ham pie. Bustard said it was the George and Dragon at Wargrave, but Hackett insisted it was the Dog and Badger. The way he said it made me think he was talking about the contents of the pie. Which reminds me, would anybody like a slice of polony before we all retire? It wasn’t touched by Towser, I promise you. I’ll use my pocketknife, if nobody objects.”
“Just what I could do with,” said Cribb, his spirits quite restored. “How about you, Miss Shaw?”
“I would rather not,” said Harriet. She was about to add that she had eaten very well at the Railway Hotel, but stopped herself in time. “The smell of the iodine is too strong for me, I’m afraid.”
“A piece for our intrepid hero, then?” said Cribb, clapping his hand on Hardy’s inert thigh. “Got to pull yourself together, man. You’re lying there as though you’re settled for the night.”
Hardy came swiftly to life, rolling onto his side. “Pull myself together? What for, Sergeant?”
Cribb consulted his watch. “For a train journey. In just over an hour you’re going to be at Culham Station to catch the eleven-fifteen to London. It’s a local, the landlord tells me, so you can change at Twyford Junction and with luck you’ll get a connection to Henley before morning. I want you at the mortuary at seven, when the keeper gets there, to compare your dog bite with the tramp’s. We know his name now, by the way. Another vagrant identified him yesterday. He’s called Walters, known among the tramps as ‘Choppy.’ It’s still a mystery why anyone should want to kill him. He kept to himself, but he wasn’t disliked. Stayed mostly in the Thames Valley, but always on the move. Anyway, when you’ve had a look at Choppy’s bite, arrange for drawings to be made of it. And yours, of course. After that, take a cab to Marlow, locate the Crown at the top of the High Street, and check the register for Humberstone, Lucifer and Gold. Then make your way to Oxford and wait for me at the central police station in St. Aldate’s. Any questions?”
“How am I to get to Culham Station from here, Sergeant?”
“You walk, Constable.”
“My leg is injured.”
“I’m aware of that. A stiff walk should do it good. Roll down your trouser leg and have a slice of polony. I can’t send anyone else, can I? You’re exhibit number one! The sooner you’re cheerfully on your way, the sooner the rest of us can get to bed.”
CHAPTER 17
Harriet was surprised on waking to find it as late as ten past seven. Cribb had warned her before retiring that an early start was essential in the morning to catch up with Humberstone and his companions at Culham. He had learned from the landlord that a steam launch left Clifton Hampden at 7:15 a.m. for the convenience of people from the village employed in Oxford. And already it was 7:10. Nobody had called her. A disquieting thought darted into her mind: having dispatched Hardy to Henley last night, had Cribb abandoned her this morning? She flung aside the bedclothes, ran to the curtains and swept them apart. There was no sign of Cribb, nor a steam launch. There was no sign of anything. A dense river mist hung in the air.
So it happened shortly after eight o’clock that Cribb, Thackeray and Harriet took to the water not in a steam launch, but an ancient skiff with broken rowlocks, the only vessel anyone would commit to their use in such conditions.
“Visibility’s improving every minute,” Cribb said with conviction. “This is probably quite local. It’ll be perfectly clear before we get to Culham. Steer us close to the bank, Miss Shaw, and we’ll know exactly where we are.”
Harriet clung grimly to the tiller ropes, sensing that an emergency which brought Cribb to the oars called for exceptional efforts on everyone’s part, but steering was hardly the word for the small influence she had on the direction of the boat. Twice in the first minute they went too close to the bank and the oars struck solid ground. Soon after, they found themselves somewhere in midstream without anything to steer by except the flow of the current.
“No matter,” Cribb encouragingly said. “Somewhere ahead is Clifton Lock. We need to move across for that. If we stayed on the Berkshire side, we’d find ourselves running into the weir.”
Five minutes after, his confidence was noticeably on the wane. “No need to be quite so energetic with the oars, Thackeray. This ain’t the boat race, you know.” He had got to the point shortly afterwards of saying, “This is madness-” when the prow struck something solid and the rowers were pitched off their seats. They had found the lock gate.
They had to disembark to rouse the lockkeeper, and then endure a torrent of abuse about lunatics who put to the water in conditions like that, until Cribb coolly reminded the fellow that he was a public servant and it was no business of his to question the sanity of people considerate enough to keep him in employment. As if to reinforce the point, the mist miraculously lifted as the gates parted to let them out of the lock. In sunshine they got down to the serious business of rowing to Culham in the shortest time they could.
It was after nine when they went through Culham Lock. The keeper there was agreeably civil, but he had discouraging news. There had not been a suspicion of mist at Culham that morning. He was not surprised to hear about the mist at Clifton Hampden. It was quite usual in September for pockets of the stuff to hamper navigation along the river for an hour or so in the mornings. His lock had been open since six. Yes, three men answering Cribb’s description had gone through shortly before he had closed the night before. They had asked the way to the backwater at the end of Culham Cut, where they had proposed passing the night.
Cribb decided not to explore the backwater, assuming instead that the three had already left for Oxford. They would be able to confirm this at the next lock, which was Abingdon.
“Will you arrest them when we catch up with them?” Thackeray inquired.
“I want Miss Shaw to identify ’em first,” said Cribb.
This, they discovered at Abingdon, was likely to take longer than they had earlier supposed. The three had been the first through the lock that morning, at seven o’clock. They could well be in Oxford already.
It was a party exercised in more ways than one that covered the last miles to Oxford, learning at each lock how far behind the
