“Have him brought in the same way the ambulance came last night, and I’ll have Lockyer on the lookout for him at the boundary.”
“All right, you shall have him. And one more item of interest for you. Arundale’s Volkswagen has been found. Abandoned at a parking meter in Mayfair, locked, unrifled, everything intact. He took it to London, George. He went to his flat, the girl’s phone call proved that. But he can’t have been there long, there’s no word so far of anybody seeing him. In any case, he won’t go back there now he’s warned. Where d’you reckon he’ll turn up next?”
“Rio, probably,” said George, and reached for his dressing-gown. “I’ll call you from Follymead.”
“Oh, and George…”
“Hullo?”
“Those blood-samples you brought in earlier, from the ground there. Arundale was an AB, a universal recipient. Your specimens are A. They may be Galt’s, we don’t know his group yet. They’re certainly not Arundale’s.”
Duckett’s police frogman was a wiry Blackcountryman who had dived in these parts before. He barely made the minimum height requirement, and had a chronic cigarette-smoker’s cough, but he was tougher than leather, all the same, and had a lung capacity abstemious athletes might well have envied. He stood at the edge of the bank where Edward Arundale had almost certainly entered the water, and looked down into the black pool above the third weir. The surface water whipped across its stillness so impetuously and smoothly that it appeared still itself, to break in a seethe of white foam over the fall. Beneath the surface it would be mercilessly cold; he was going to need his second skin. The colour of the pool was perhaps more truly olive-green than black, and opaque as the moss-grown flags that floored the grotto.
“Soup!” he said disapprovingly, and trod out his cigarette into the soft ground. “How am I supposed to see through that?”
“That’s your problem. We’ve tried fishing for it with hooks, but it’s deep here, deeper than you’d think.”
“I should have thought anything going in here would be carried over the edge. You’ve got some force running there.”
“That’s what we thought, too, and why we looked for him well downstream. Too far downstream, as it turned out. But what we’re looking for now would go down like a stone, and stay down.”
“Yeah,” said the diver, dabbling a toe thoughtfully, “What is it I’m supposed to be looking for? I might as well know, I suppose.”
George told him. Shrewd, deep eyes set in nets of fine wrinkles in the sharp face visualised it, measured, weighed. “If that went in here, it’s still here, all right. Any idea what the bed’s like?”
“Mucky. Maintenance isn’t what it once was. But there doesn’t seem to be much weed.”
“All right, let’s go.”
It was about half past ten when he lowered himself into the pool, and submerged, plunging promptly beneath the rushing surface water. In the yellow drawing-room at the house the first session of the day was still in progress, and even when the students emerged for mid-morning coffee, at eleven, the interval wouldn’t be long enough to allow them to stray. The operators by the river had the grounds to themselves. Given a less absorbing subject and a less expert persuader, there would have been truants by this time. George had half-expected two truants, as it was, but it seemed that Dominic and Tossa were doing their duty.
So there were none but official witnesses when the diver rose for the third time, breaking the surface tension in a surge of unexpected silver in the day’s first watery gleam of sun. The Braide streamed down his black rubber head and shoulders, and pulled at him viciously. George had insisted on having a line on him, in case of accidents; small river though the Braide was, it could be dangerous even to an expert when it ran as high as this. But in the issue he had needed no help. He hoisted himself ashore, black and glistening, with a lizard’s agility, and pushed up his mask.
“Got it! Half sunk in the muck down there. I hit something else, too, that I’d like to have another go at, but this is your prize.”
He unhitched it from the cord at his belt, and held it up to be seen.
Felicity hadn’t been exaggerating, after all, it was a good three inches longer than the span of her forearm and stretched fingers. The laboratory guesses weren’t far out: half an inch thick, roughly two inches wide at the business end, which still retained traces of its last coat of paint, and possibly traces of haemoglobin, too, in spite of the river water; somewhat thicker and wider where it had rested in the wards, and this central part of it was a dead ancient-iron colour, since paint couldn’t reach it, and nobody had used oil on it for years. And at the other end, a huge, coiled handle to balance its weight, decorated with a flourish of leaves. An ideal handle for grasping to strike a blow edge-on. With a thing like that you could hit out and fell an ox. And there it had hung in the wards of the gate, where Felicity had been the last to drop it home when she walked away from Lucien on Saturday afternoon, and went to set light to the fuse and fire the charge that was to blow Follymead apart. Ready and waiting for the hand that would be next to raise it, the hand that drew it out of the wards to use as a weapon of vengeance. Trees were set round in a screen between the gate and the waterside, thirty yards away; the waiting victim would see nothing.
“That’s it,” said George, “just a gate-latch, right there on the spot, waiting to be used.” The weight of it was formidable, and yet not too great for even a scholar’s arm to be able to swing it effectively. “That fills the gap. Thanks!”
“I’m going down again. Maybe it’s nothing, but I’d like to make sure while we’re on the job.”
He slid down from the bank again, feet-first into the water, and dropped from view. They were left contemplating the length of wrought iron that lay on the slippery turf between them.
“It looks straightforward enough now,” said Lockyer. “Arundale came down here pretty well in a state of shock, without thinking what he was going to do. And when he bore down on the handle, he felt the latch loose in the socket. And took it on the spur of the moment. You could say it was this thing put murder in his mind.”
“And then what?” asked George dispassionately. “It was Arundale who got his head stove in and his body slung into the river.”
“He was up against a much younger and fitter man. There was a hand-to-hand struggle, and this thing changed hands in the fight, and the boy hit out at him with it, and found he’d killed him.”
