Noonday and Night

Daigh were stabbed, take him by night to White’s boatyard, commandeer a boat and take the body down the loch towards Oban and drop it overboard. If it was weighted down, it could lie on the bed of the loch till Doomsday and nobody except the murderer would know it was there.’

‘You may be right.’

‘Things do go in threes, you know.’

‘I still think we were brought up here to get us away from those areas in Derbyshire and Pembrokeshire where our enquiries were beginning to prove embarrassing to somebody.’

‘But if you thought that, why did you come?’

‘To allay suspicion.’

‘Whose?’

‘Ah, yes, whose?’

‘Well, what’s the next move?’

‘I think I should like to find out for certain whether the head waiter’s Mr Knight is Mrs White’s Mr Carstairs.’

‘I thought you’d made up your mind that they are two different men.’

‘I should wish to be sure. We now have an unbiased description of Knight from the headwaiter. He does not know Carstairs. Mrs White, we assume, does not know Knight, so a comparison of height and the general appearance of the two men may be of interest.’

‘And if the descriptions don’t tally, as you believe they won’t?’

‘Then I may be impelled to accept your Young Hunting theory.’

‘You’ll never find the body if they have dumped it in Loch Linnhe. Once past Sallachan Point, goodness knows how deep it is out in the middle. It’s ten fathoms through the Narrows and then the marine contour lines pretty well follow the line of the shore. If they did weight the body…’

‘We are assuming that there is a body, you know. Do you care to accompany me to Mrs White’s again?’

They mounted the slope. This time a youthful maidservant answered the door. Dame Beatrice produced a card.

‘Please to come ben,’ said the girl. She admitted them and left them in the narrow entrance hall while she went to show the card to her mistress. Mrs White received them effusively.

‘I did not know I would have the pleasure again, Dame Beatrice,’ she said. ‘My husband is at work, of course. He will be sorry to have missed you. Is there any more news?’

‘There seems to be a discrepancy,’ Dame Beatrice replied. ‘We have received two descriptions of the man for whom we are enquiring. Of course, neither may be correct, but it would help our enquiry if you will give us your own description of Mr Carstairs.’

‘I had very little to do with him, you know. He was here today, gone tomorrow – that kind of thing. That is why we thought he might be a commercial traveller, or perhaps be going around to sell his pictures.’

‘Was he tall, short, fat, thin, dark, fair?’

‘Oh, you just want that kind of description. I should call him about medium, taking him all round, I suppose. He was on the sturdy side and had brown hair. I don’t know what colour his eyes were, but I expect they were either brown or grey. He was taller than me, but not as tall as my husband. Mr White is five feet ten.’

‘Did you ever see your husband and Mr Carstairs standing together?’

‘No, I don’t think so, but I’m sure Mr Carstairs wasn’t as tall.’

‘And he was a sturdy type of man? – broad-shouldered, noticeably strongly built?’

‘No, just ordinary I think. Oh, I don’t know, though. Come to think, he had very broad shoulders and I believe he must have been very strong because once’ – she giggled in a girlishly repellent fashion – ‘I had a garment blow off my line of washing and go sailing over the back fence, so, instead of going all the way round, I decided to climb the fence to get it back and my foot got stuck between the railings. Well, I knew Mr Carstairs was at home, so I yelled and shouted and he came out and reached up and lifted me straight into the air to release my shoe – and I weigh all of eleven and a half stone, you know.’

‘Presumably you have heard him speak, then?’

‘Oh, yes. He had to, on that occasion, didn’t he? He had quite a gentlemanly kind of voice, quite public school, you know. If he was a commercial traveller he was a very high class sort of one, I should say. But, of course, he was an artist as well.’

‘But you never saw any of his paintings? He never attempted to interest you in his work?’

‘Oh, no. He was not the type of man to take advantage’ – she giggled again – ‘not of any sort.’

‘How unenterprising of him! Tell me, Mrs White – you must know your husband’s boat-yard pretty well – would it be possible for anybody to get into it after dark and borrow a boat?’

‘Oh, I daresay you could get into the yard easy enough, but it wouldn’t do you much good. My husband hasn’t got any big boats with properly bedded engines. His are all little things with outboard motors and those are all removed and locked up at night. Then he’s got one or two small yachts, but the sails are all stowed in the sail lockers while they’re at the boat-yard.’

‘But if you owned a car and your own outboard motor, you could make shift to borrow a boat and then put it back without anybody being the wiser?’