Unperturbed the doctor said, “I think we may be able to help you there, Sloan. Or, rather, Charley will.”
“Or,” continued Sloan grandly, “whether it was an accident or murder.” He didn’t know who Charley was.
“He didn’t walk after he fell,” said Dabbe. “I can tell you that for certain.”
Sloan made a note. Facts were always welcome.
“And, Sloan, my man Burns has something to say to you, too.” Dr. Dabbe waved an arm. “Haven’t you, Burns?”
“Aye, Doctor.”
“His clothes,” divined Sloan quickly. “Do they tell us anything about him?”
“Mebbe, Inspector,” replied Burns. “Mebbe.”
“That’s Gaelic for ‘yes and no,’ ” said Dr. Dabbe.
“Well?”
Burns didn’t answer and it was Dr. Dabbe who spoke. “There was something strange in one of his trouser pockets, wasn’t there, Burns?”
“Yes, Doctor,” said Burns.
“Something strange?” said Sloan alertly.
“Show the inspector what you found, man.”
His assistant reached for a tray. Placed on it was a lump of metal almost the size and shape of a bun. It was a faded green in colour.
Detective Constable Crosby leaned over. “If that was ‘lost property’ we’d call it a clock pendulum.”
“I’m not a metallurgist,” said Dr. Dabbe, “but I should say it’s solid copper.”
“What is it, though?” asked Sloan, peering at it. There was a lip on one side of the bun shape.
“I can’t tell you that, Sloan.”
“It’s not heavy enough to have been to weight him down,” said Sloan, thinking aloud.
“Agreed,” said Dr. Dabbe. He scratched the metal object with the edge of a surgical probe. “It’s old, Sloan. And if you ask me…”
“Yes?”
“I should say it’s been in the water a fair old time, too.”
Police Constable Ridgeford of Edsway might have been green. He was also keen. He had noticed Horace Boiler take out his rowing boat on the River Calle for the third time that afternoon and kept a wary but unobtrusive eye open for his return. If it had been a fishing trip that Horace Boiler had been on then he had been unlucky because he had come back empty-handed for the second time that afternoon.
Brian Ridgeford did not have a boat. He didn’t own a boat himself because he couldn’t afford one; and as his beat did not extend out into the sea a grateful country did not feel called upon to supply him with one in the way in which it issued him with a regulation bicycle. What he did have—as his sergeant never failed to remind him—was a perfectly good pair of legs. He decided to use them to walk upstream along the river bank to Collerton.
As he remarked to his wife as he left the house, “You never know what’s there until you’ve been to see.”
“Curiosity killed the cat” was what she said to that, but then she hadn’t been married very long and hadn’t quite mastered the role of perfect police wife yet. She was trying hard to do so though because she added, “It’s a casserole tonight, darling.”
The only piece of good advice that the sergeant’s wife had given her was to cook everything in a pot that could stand on the stove or in the oven without spoiling.
“Good.” He kissed her and got as far as the door. “I’ll be back soon,” forecast Brian Ridgeford unwisely.
He, too, still had a lot to learn.
The remark wasn’t exactly contrary to standing orders. It was just flying in the face of some sage advice given by one of the instructors at the Police Training School. “Never tell your wife when you’re going to be back, lads,” he’d said to the assembled class. “If you’ve told her to expect you at six o’clock, then by five minutes past six she’ll be standing at the window. At ten minutes past six she’ll have her worry coat on and be out in the street looking for you. By quarter past she’ll have asked the woman next door what to do next and by half past six she’ll be on the telephone to your sergeant.” The instructor had delivered his punch line with becoming solemnity. “And the tracker dogs’ll be out searching for you before you’ve had time to get your first pint down.”
None of this potted wisdom so much as crossed Brian Ridgeford’s mind as he stepped out of the police house door. He was thinking about other things. All he did do was pause in the hall where the hydrographie map of the estuary hung. He had to stoop a little to look at it properly.
It was a purely token obeisance.
Depths in metres reduced to chart datum or approximately the level of lowest astronomical tide meant very little to a landlubber like himself. He was, though, beginning to understand from sheer observation of the estuary something about drying heights. It was a form of local knowledge—almost inherited race memory, you might say— that seemed to have been born in the Boiler tribe. Constable Ridgeford was having to learn it.
It was just as well that he had delayed his departure from the house for a moment or two. It meant that when the telephone bell rang a few minutes later he was not quite out of earshot. His wife came flying down the path after him—casserole forgotten.
“Brian! Brian… Stop!”
He halted.
“You’re wanted, darling.”
He turned.
“They’ve found a dinghy,” called out Mrs. Ridgeford.
“Ah…”
“An empty one.”
He retraced his steps in her direction.
“On the shore,” she said.
“That figures.” He absent-mindedly slipped an arm round her waist. “Whereabouts?”
“Over at Marby.”
“Right round there?” Constable Ridgeford frowned. The tiny fishing village of Marby juxta Mare was on the coast the other side of Edsway—to the south and west. It had never been the same, local legend ran, since a Danish invasion in the ninth century.
“That’s what the man said,” answered Mrs. Ridgeford. “I told him you’d go straight over there. Was that right, Brian?”
Since their marriage was still at the very early stage when it was unthinkable that she could have done anything that wasn’t right—the action being sanctified solely by virtue of its having been taken so to speak—this was a purely rhetorical question.
“Of course it was, darling.” Brian Ridgeford nodded approvingly.
“Or,” she added prettily, turning her face up towards his, “have I done the wrong thing?”
This, too, was a purely token question.
It got a purely token response in the form of a kiss.
“Where did I leave my bicycle clips?” asked Police Constable Brian Ridgeford rather breathlessly.
Marby juxta Mare was a village facing the sea. It was beyond the headland known as the Cat’s Back that protected Edsway from the full rigours of the sea. The road, though, did not follow the coast. It cut across below the headland and made Marby much nearer to Edsway by land than by sea.
A man called Farebrother had taken charge of the dinghy. He was a lifeboatman and knew all about capsized dinghies.
“She wasn’t upside down when we found her,” he said. “And not stove in or anything like that or she’d never have reached where she did on the shore.”
“Has she been there long?” asked Ridgeford cautiously. Boats, he knew, always took the feminine—like the word “victim” in the French language—but he didn’t want to make a fool of himself by asking the wrong question.
“Just the length of a tide,” said the lifeboatman without hesitation. “We reckon she’d have been gone again
