missus. You mark my words. She was all crumpled up and that hand…I’ll never forget that hand, not if I live to be a hundred.’
The foreman stared at him lividly. He seemed incapable of expressing, his feelings. So was Wilt. He went back to his desk and sat with his head in his hands while the class gaped out of the window and tried to catch what was being said. Presently sirens sounded in the distance and grew louder. A police car arrived, four fire engines hurtled into the car park and an ambulance followed. As more and more uniformed men gathered around what had once been a hole in the ground it became apparent that getting the doll down there had been a damned sight easier than getting it out.
‘That concrete starts setting in twenty minutes.’ the driver explained when a pump was suggested for the umpteenth time. An Inspector of Police and the Fire Chief stared down at the hole.
‘Are you sure you saw a woman’s body down there?’ the Inspector asked. ‘You’re positive about it?’
‘Positive?’ squeaked the foreman. ‘Course I’m positive. You don’t think…Tell them, Barney. He saw her too.’
Barney told the Inspector even more graphically than before. ‘She had this hair see and her hand was reaching up like it was asking for help and there were these fingers…I tell you it was horrible. It didn’t look natural.’
‘No, well, it wouldn’t,’ said the Inspector sympathetically. ‘And you say there was a board on top of the hole when you arrived this morning.’
The foreman gesticulated silently and Barney showed them the board. ‘I was standing on it at one time,’ he said. ‘It was here all right so help me God.’
‘The thing is, how are we to get her out?’ said the Fire Chief. It was a point that was put to the manager of the construction company when he finally arrived on the scene. ‘God alone, knows,’ he said. ‘There’s no easy way of getting that concrete out now. We’d have to use drills to get down thirty feet’
At the end of the hour they were no nearer a solution to the problem. As the Motor Mechanics dragged themselves away from this fascinating situation to go to Technical Drawing, Wilt collected the unread copies of Shane and walked across to the Staff Room in a state of shock. The only consolation he could think of was that it would take them at least two or three days to dig down and discover that what had all the appearances of being the body of a murdered woman was in fact an inflatable doll. Or had been once. Wilt rather doubted if it would be inflated now. There had been something horribly intractable about that liquid concrete.
Chapter 8
There was something horribly intractable about the mudbank on which the cabin cruiser had grounded. To add to their troubles the engine had gone wrong. Gaskell said it was a broken con rod.
‘Is that serious?’ asked Sally.
‘It just means we’ll have to be towed to a boatyard.’
‘By what?’
‘By a passing cruiser I guess,’ said Gaskell.
Sally looked over the side at the bullrushes.
‘Passing?’ she said. ‘We’ve been here all night and half the morning and nothing has passed so far and if it did we wouldn’t be able to see it for all these fucking bullrushes.’
‘I thought bullrushes did something for you.’
