harbour to be built at Kinnisport out of great blocks of granite shipped down by sea from Aberdeen—and Edsway had dropped out of the prosperity race altogether.
But only for the time being.
Every dog did have its day.
Now it was Kinnisport that was in decline while Edsway was enjoying a twentieth-century revival as a sailing centre. The firm sand that had choked its life as a commercial harbour provided an excellent basis for the hardstanding that the little boats needed and some safe swimming for their owners’ families.
The dead man hadn’t been a bather.
You didn’t go swimming in a shirt and trousers. Not voluntarily, that is.
Horace Boiler took another look at the man floating in the water. He might have been a seaman, he might not. The Calleshire shore got its share of those drowned on the high seas and the village of Edsway got more than its quota of them. It had something to do with the configuration of the coast and the way in which the tide came up the estuary to meet the River Calle coming down to the sea.
Bodies usually fetched up on the spit of land known locally as Billy’s Finger. This stretched out into the water and—so the experts said—each year got a little shallower on the seaward side and a little deeper on the river side. The river scoured away from behind what the sea laid up at its front. The ancients used to say that Billy’s Finger moved, that it beckoned mariners to their doom. The moderns—the clever ones who knew everything because a computer had worked it out for them—had said, rather surprised, that the ancients were right after all. Billy’s Finger did move. It moved about an inch every hundred years, a little more at the very tip.
Horace Boiler took a bearing from the spire of St. Peter’s Church and reckoned that this fellow, whoever he was, had for once somehow escaped the beckonings of Billy’s Finger. And he had done that in spite of its being the season of neap tides. Boiler wasn’t too bothered about that. These days it didn’t make any difference exactly whereabouts a dead body found landfall. He would still—unless claimed by sorrowing relatives—end up buried in St. Peter’s churchyard at Edsway. There he—whoever he was—would lie in the goodly company of all those other unknown men who had been washed up by the sea.
Some had unmarked graves and some had those that were dignified by tombstones. There was a melancholy row betokening a remote naval engagement far out to sea in 1917. All those memorials bore the same inscription “A Sailor of the Great War—Known unto God.” They hadn’t even heard the distant thunder of the guns in Edsway but the men had come ashore.
In the end.
It hadn’t always been like that.
Once upon a time when drowned men had been washed ashore on Billy’s Finger the men of Edsway had seen to it that they weren’t found and brought to land for burial in St. Peter’s churchyard. They had, in feet, taken very good care that they weren’t. Some antiquarian who had taken an interest in the estuary’s local history had once told Horace Boiler all about it.
The villagers in those days had felt that they had a big enough Poor Rate to cope with as it was without taking on the cost—as a charge upon it—of burying unknown seamen. What they used to do in olden times, this antiquarian had told an impassive Horace Boiler, was to wait for nightfall and then drag the body over from the seaward aspect of the strand and lower it into the deep water the other side of Billy’s Finger.
The combination of sea and river—tide and current—saw to it then that the next landfall of the dead body was in the neighbouring parish of Collerton. And thus it became a charge on their Poor Rate instead.
Horace Boiler had listened unblinkingly to this recital, saying, “Well, I never!” at suitable intervals, as he knew you had to do with this manner of man. Privately he had considered it an excellent way of keeping the rates down and hadn’t doubted that there would have been Boilers in the clandestine nonburial party.
“The Overseers of the Poor doubtless turned a blind eye,” said the antiquarian. He prided himself on having what he thought was a good knowledge of the seamy side of human nature. That went with a study of the past.
“I daresay,” said Horace Boiler, whose own knowledge went a little deeper, “that they were glad to have it done.”
“Well, yes, but the law was…”
Horace Boiler had only listened with half an ear at the time. The letter of the law wasn’t one of his yardsticks. Besides he himself had found the careful study of the official mind a more rewarding business than history.
“They’d be more at home in Collerton churchyard anyway,” he had said to the antiquarian, who by then was beginning to come between Horace and the job he happened to have on hand at the time.
“Pardon?” The antiquarian had known a lot but he hadn’t known everything.
“The north-west corner of Collerton churchyard floods every time the river rises,” Horace had taken pleasure in informing him. “Didn’t you know that?”
What Horace Boiler was thinking about now, out on the water and with an actual body in view, wasn’t exactly the same as pushing a financial liability into the next parish but it came very near to it. What he was considering was the best move to make next—the best move from the point of view of Horace Boiler, citizen and occasional taxpayer, that is.
He steadied the oars in the rowlocks and considered the state of the tide. He was always conscious of it but particularly when he was out on the water. It wasn’t far off the turn and he certainly wasn’t going to row a body back to Edsway against the tide. The reasoning sped glibly through his mind as he took enough bearings to mark the spot in the water where the body was floating. Already he heard himself saying, “I couldn’t lift it aboard myself, of course, Mr. Ridgeford. Not on my own like. I couldn’t tow it back either. Not against the tide… not without help. I’m not as young as I used to be, you know…”
Half an hour later he was using just those very words to Police Constable Ridgeford. Brian Ridgeford was young enough to be Horace Boiler’s son but Horace still deemed it politic to call him “Mister.” This approach was one of the fruits of his study of the ways of the official mind.
“Dead, you said?” checked Constable Ridgeford, reaching for his telephone.
“Definitely dead,” said Horace. He’d taken off his cap when he stepped into the constable’s little office and he stood there now with it dangling from his hand as if he were already a mourner.
“How did you know it was a man?” asked Ridgeford.
The question didn’t trouble Horace Boiler. “Floating on its back,” he said.
“I’ll have to report it to Headquarters,” said Ridgeford importantly, beginning to dial. A body made a change from dealing with old Miss Finch, who—difficult and dogmatic—insisted that there were Unidentified Flying Objects on the headland behind Marby.
“That’s right,” said Horace.
Ridgeford frowned. “There may be someone missing.”
“So there may.”
“Not that I’ve heard of anyone.” The constable pulled a pile of reports on his desk forward and started thumbing through them with one hand while he held the telephone in the other.
“Nor me,” said Horace at once. It had been one of the factors that had weighed with him when he decided not to bring the body in. It hadn’t been someone local or he would have heard. “But then…”
Ridgeford’s attitude suddenly changed. He stiffened and almost came to attention. “Is that F Division Headquarters at Berebury? This is Constable Ridgeford from Edsway reporting…”
Horace Boiler waited patiently for the outcome.
A minute or two later he heard Ridgeford say, “Just a moment, sir, and I’ll ask the fisherman who reported it. He’ll know.” The young constable covered the mouthpiece of the telephone with his free hand and said to Horace, “Where will that body fetch up if it’s left in the water?”
Boiler screwed up his face and thought quickly. “Hard to say exactly, Mr. Ridgeford. Most probably,” he improvised, “under the cliffs over on the Kinnisport side of the estuary.” He waved an arm. “You know, where the rocks stick out into the water. Not,” he added, “for a couple of days, mind you.”
He stepped back, well pleased with himself. What he had just said to the policeman was a complete fabrication from start to finish. Left to itself the body of the dead man might continue on its course up river to Collerton for the length of a tide or two but then either the change in the tide or the river current would pick it up and bring it back downstream again. Then the timeless eddies of the sea would lay it up on Billy’s Finger as they had always done since time began.
