another journey to the fishing village beside the open sea. Judicious questioning of Marby natives led the policeman to the harbour. He’d find his quarry there for sure, he was told. They were always there, messing about in boats. Or just messing about. But as sure as eggs they’d be there.
So they were.
Two boys.
There had been something that Brian Ridgeford dimly remembered in his training that advised against the questioning of juveniles by a police officer in uniform. Because of the neighbours. Brian Ridgeford squared his shoulders. There weren’t any neighbours on the eastern arm of the harbour wall.
Just two boys.
They saw him coming and at the same time saw that there was no point in retreating. They stood their ground as he approached, one standing against a capstan and the other with one foot on a coil of rope.
“About that ship’s bell,” began Ridgeford generally.
“Wasn’t worth nothing,” said the boy by the capstan.
“The old woman said so,” chimed in the other.
“Load of old iron,” said the first boy, kicking the capstan with his foot.
“Waste of time going over there,” said his friend.
“She wouldn’t give us nothing for it,” said the boy who was kicking the capstan. “You ask her.”
“Where did you get it?” asked Ridgeford.
“Up on the Cat’s Back,” replied the first boy glibly. “Didn’t we, Mel?”
“Up on the Cat’s Back,” agreed Melvin. “Like Terry said.”
“Did you now?” said Ridgeford evenly. “Suppose you tell me exactly where.”
“By an old tree,” said Terry.
“Near the hut,” said Melvin at the same time.
“By an old tree near the hut,” said Terry promptly.
Constable Ridgeford decided that Terry Dykes already had the makings of a criminal mentality.
“I suppose,” said the policeman heavily, “that it fell off the back of a lorry up there.”
“No,” began Melvin, “it was in…”
“There’s only a footpath,” Terry Dykes cut in quickly.
Any resemblance to the tableau formed by the three of them to Sir John Millais’s famous painting “The Boyhood of Raleigh” was purely coincidental. True, there was more than one beached rowing boat on the shore in the background and there were certainly two boys and an adult in the composition but there any likeness ended. In Millais’s picture the two boys had been hanging, rapt, on the words of the ancient mariner as he pointed out to sea and described the wonders he had seen. In the present instance the tales were being told by the boys and Brian Ridgeford wasn’t pointing anywhere. He was, however, projecting extreme scepticism at what he heard.
“So it didn’t fall off the back of a lorry then,” he said.
“No,” said Terry Dykes defensively, “it didn’t.”
“Just lying there then, was it?”
“Yes… No… I don’t know.”
“You must know.”
Terry Dykes shut his lips together.
“Make up your mind, boy,” said Ridgeford not unkindly. “Was it or wasn’t it?”
“No,” said Terry sullenly, “it wasn’t just lying there.”
“Well, then, where was it?” demanded Ridgeford. When there was no reply from Dykes he suddenly swung round on Melvin Bates. “All right, you tell me.”
Melvin Bates started to stutter. “I… I… it was in…”
“Shut up,” said Dykes, unceremoniously cutting off his henchman.
“All right,” said Ridgeford flatly, “I’ve got the message. The bell was inside somewhere, wasn’t it?” He drew breath. “Now then, let me see if I can work out where. Over here in Marby?” They were known as “constraint questions”; those whose answers limited the area of doubt. The best-known constraint question was “Can you eat it?” Ridgeford allowed his voice to grow a harder note. “And you found it inside somewhere, didn’t you?”
It took him another ten minutes to find out exactly where.
Constable Ridgeford was not the only policeman whose immediate quarry lay in Marby. As soon as Sloan and Crosby left Collerton House they too made for the fishing village by the sea.
“We’ll pick up Ridgeford over there,” predicted Sloan, “and he can take us to have a look at this dinghy he’s reported.”
They’d left Basil Jensen still making his way upstream.
“To see if it’s
“It would figure if it were.” He paused and then said quietly, “I think something else figures, too, Crosby.”
“Sir?”
“I think—only think, mind you—that we just may have an explanation for a body decomposed but not damaged.”
“
“You think, too,” adjured Sloan. The road between Collerton and Marby was so rural that not even Crosby could speed on it. He could use his mind instead.
“The boathouse?” offered the detective constable uncertainly.
“The boathouse,” said Sloan with satisfaction. “It’s early days yet, Crosby, but I think that we shall find that our chap—whoever he is—was parked in the water in the boat-house after he was killed.”
“Why in the water, though, sir?”
“The answer to that,” said Sloan briskly, “is something called mephitis.”
“Sir?”
“Mephitis,” spelled out Sloan for him, “is the smell of the dead.”
Crosby assimilated this and then said, “So he was killed by a fall from a height first somewhere else…”
“Somewhere else,” agreed Sloan at once.
“But…”
“But left in the water afterwards, Crosby.”
“Why?”
Sloan waved a hand. “As I said before graves for murder victims don’t come easy.”
“Yes, sir,” Crosby nodded. “Besides, he might have been killed on the spur of the moment and whoever did it needed time to think what to do with the body.”
It was surprising how the word “murderer” hung outside speech.
“He might,” agreed Sloan. He hoped that it had been a hotblooded affair. Murder had nothing to be said for it at any time but heat-of-the-moment murder was always less sinister than murder plotted and planned. “He would need time and opportunity to work out what to do.”
“And then,” postulated Crosby, “the body was just pushed out into the water?”
“Unless I’m very much mistaken,” said Sloan austerely, “the body left the boathouse at night.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Probably,” he added, “in time to catch an ebb-tide.” He, Sloan, would have to look at a tide table as soon as he got back to the police station but darkness and an ebb-tide made sense.
“Do we know when, sir?” asked Crosby, who was perforce driving at a speed to satisfy his passenger.
“Some time before he was found,” said Sloan dourly, “but not too long before.”
That was a lay interpretation of what Dr. Dabbe had said in longer words.
Long enough to pick up
