bell into the ship’s-chandler in Edsway.
To Mrs. Hopton, “boy” was a species not an individual.
Of their age she had been uncertain.
Of their appearance she could tell him nothing beyond that they had been scruffy—but then these days all boys were scruffy, weren’t they?
But she was convinced and Hopton—even with him being the way he was—agreed with her here—that they had been up to no good.
On being pressed to describe them she had advanced the view that one had been taller than the other.
Brian Ridgeford had received this gem of observation in silence.
Mrs. Hopton had cogitated still further and eventually disgorged the fact that one of them had called the other “Terry.”
As he picked up his helmet and made for the door, Constable Ridgeford reflected that it wasn’t a lot to go on. On the other hand with Jack the Ripper they hadn’t even had a name.
“The boathouse?” said Frank Mundill when Elizabeth Busby met him in the hall.
“You’d better go down and have a look,” she said, putting her flower trug down on the settle.
“What about the boat? Has that gone?”
“I didn’t look inside…” Her hands fell helplessly to her sides. “I’m sorry, Frank. I should have done, shouldn’t I? The trouble is that I’m still not thinking straight.”
“Don’t worry.” He gave a jerky nod. “I’ll go down there now and see what’s happened.”
“Anyway,” recollected Elizabeth, pulling herself together with an effort, “I didn’t have a key to the little door on the garden side.”
He turned to the drawer in the hall table over which hung Richard Camming’s venture into the style of David Allan, the Scottish Hogarth. “That should be here somewhere.” He rummaged about until he found it. “Here we are.”
“I couldn’t see if there was a lot of damage,” said Elizabeth.
He essayed a small smile. “Let’s hope the boat’s all right, anyway. Your father likes his fishing, doesn’t he?”
“He’ll be looking forward to it,” she said. That was quite true. Her father would go straight down to the river with rod and line as soon as he arrived.
In the end Elizabeth walked down through the grounds of Collerton House to the river’s edge with him.
“Vandals,” Frank Mundill said bitterly, regarding the damaged doors from the river bank. “They must have taken a bar to the lock.”
Elizabeth nodded.
“Someone had a go at it last year, too, when we were at my sister’s,” he said. “I’ve already had it repaired once.”
“I remember,” she said, although what she chiefly remembered about the visits of Frank and Celia Mundill to Calleford had been that this year’s one had marked the beginning of her aunt’s last illness. Frank Mundill’s sister was married to a doctor in single-handed general practice there. The architect and his wife Celia had made a habit over the years at each Easter of looking after a locum tenens for the Calleford couple while the doctor and his wife had a well-earned holiday. Celia Mundill hadn’t been well then—that was when she had had a really bad attack of stomach pain and, vomiting, though it hadn’t been her first. Then she’d had an X-ray at Calleford Hospital. She’d gone steadily downhill after that…
“Let’s go inside,” said Mundill.
He unlocked the landward doors of the boathouse and led the way in. His footsteps echoed eerily on the hardstanding inside while the water lapped at its edge. The only light came from a small fan light and the open doors. There was quite enough light though in which to see that the boat was gone.
“Thieves as well as vandals,” said Mundill, regarding the empty water.
“Nothing’s safe these days, is it?” commented Elizabeth Busby, conscious even as she said it that the remark was both trite and beyond her years. She must be careful. At this rate she’d be old before her time.
“And where do you suppose the fishing boat’s got to?” asked Mundill.
“Edsway?” she suggested.
“More likely the open sea,” he said gloomily.
“Unless it’s fetched up on Billy’s Finger.”
“We’d have heard,” he said.
“So we would.”
“No,” he said, shaking his head, “we shan’t see that boat again.”
“Pity.”
“Yes,” he said, “your father won’t be pleased.” He sighed. “And neither will the insurance company.”
Her eyes turned automatically to the walls of the boat-house. Along them rested the family’s collection of fishing rods. “Is there anything gone from there too?”
He looked up and then shook his head. “Doesn’t look like it, does it? No, I daresay the boat went for a joy ride.”
“When?” She very nearly added “before or after,” but she stopped herself in time. In her mind she was still dating everything that happened as before or after that dreadful week of the death of her aunt and the departure of Peter Hinton.
Frank Mundill shook his head yet again. “I don’t know when. I don’t use the river path all that often. I usually go the other way.”
“So do I.”
He gave the boathouse a last look round. “There’s not a lot that we can do about it now anyway. Come along back to the house and I’ll ring the constable at Edsway. Not that that’ll do a lot of good. Can’t see the police being interested, can you?”
10
To be hang’d with you.
« ^ »
What at this moment was interesting the police—the police as personified by Superintendent Leeyes, that is—was something quite different.
“Ridgeford rang in,” said Leeyes to Detective Inspector Sloan across his office desk, “excited as a schoolgirl.”
“What about?” It wouldn’t do, of course. Sloan was agreed about that. Being as excited as anybody wouldn’t do at all if Ridgeford was going to make a good policeman. Sometimes the very calm of the police officer was the only thing going for him in a really tight situation.
“The wreck off Marby,” said Leeyes.
Sloan’s head came up with a jerk. If a certain copper ingot had come from there too, then Sloan was prepared to be interested in it as well.
“
“At least,” said Sloan, “that’s one crime we don’t have to worry about now.” Idly he wondered what the exact wording of the charge against the wrecker would have been. There hadn’t been a lot of call for it down at the station since sail went out and steam came in. Perhaps it wasn’t even in the book any more. “Lighting beacons with intent to deceive” didn’t quite seem to fit the gravity of the crime.
“The ship’s bell has come ashore,” Leeyes told him.
“Has it indeed?” said Sloan. “Well, well.”
“As well as that brass weight you said was on the dead body…”
“Copper ingot,” murmured Sloan, his mind on other things. “How long ago do you suppose
