“Yes?” Perhaps a seaman from an alien country had found landfall on an English shore after all…
“Caucasian,” said Dabbe, reaching for his surgical gown.
Detective Constable Crosby jerked his head dismissively. “Oh, he’s a foreigner then, is he?”
“Not necessarily, Constable.” The doctor grinned. “We’re all Caucasians here, you know.” He waved a hand at his assistant, Burns, who had just entered the office. “Even Burns, here, and he’s a Scotsman.”
“Ready when you are, Doctor,” said Burns impassively.
The pathologist led the way through to the post-mortem room.
4
To die a dry death at land,
Is as bad as a watery grave.
« ^ »
Horace Boiler had never been a man to let the grass grow under his feet. Nor was he one to share confidences—not even with his own son. Certainly not with Mrs. Boiler. After he had got back from Edsway with the body of the unknown man he saw it off in his cousin Ted’s hearse and then stumped along to his own cottage where he proceeded to sink a vast mug of steaming hot tea at speed.
“That’s better,” he said, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. Almost immediately he got up to go out again, pushing his chair back as he did so. It scraped on the floor.
Had he known it, the dialogue he then embarked upon with his wife strongly resembled that between many a parent and an adolescent child.
“Where are you going then, Horace?” she asked, casting an eye in the direction of a saucepan on the cooking stove.
“Out,” he rasped.
“Where?”
“Nowhere.”
“When will you be back?”
“Don’t know.”
Horace was nearer sixty than sixteen but saw no more need to amplify what he said than did a rebellious teenager. Mrs. Boiler sniffed and turned down the flame under the saucepan.
“You’ll have to wait for your supper then.”
From the cottage doorway all he said was, “Expect me when you see me.”
And that was said roughly. His mind was on something else.
If that was too soon for Mrs. Boiler she did not say.
There were some homes that were entirely maintained on the well-established premise that the husband and father was “a saint abroad and a devil at home”; or it may have been that Mrs. Boiler had just given up the unequal struggle.
Horace, on the other hand, hadn’t given up anything and was soon back at the shore pushing his rowing boat out again. The agglomeration of buoys, hardstanding and wooden rafts was too informal to be dignified with the name of marina but that was its function. Horace poked about this way and that, and then, calculating that anyone watching his movements from the village would by now have lost interest in his activities, he steered his prow in a seaward direction and bent his back to the oars.
He was as subconsciously aware of the state of the tide as a farmer was aware of the weather and a motorist of other vehicles on the road. With a nicely judged spurt of effort he moved with the last of the tide before he turned distinctly up river and into fresh water. After a little time in the middle of the stream he let the boat drift inshore again towards the south shore—the same side of the river as Edsway but farther up river.
It was a compound of long experience and the river lore of generations that kept Horace Boiler from grounding his boat on the mud banks. He seemed to know by instinct how to pick his way up river and which channel had deep water in it, and which only looked as if it had. It wasn’t only the apparent depths of the channels that were deceptive. Some of those which looked the most promising led only to the shallows. Horace Boiler, however, seemed also to know where each one went. Daedalus-like, he selected one channel and passed by another with the sureness of much practice.
Presently he found himself in relatively deep water in spite of being near the shore. This was where the river cut alongside the edge of the parish of Collerton. The churchyard came right down to the river bank and as it had got more and more full over the years the land towards the river side had been used for graves.
It was undoubtedly picturesque and in the summertime holidaymakers would come to stroll along the bank and through the churchyard exclaiming at the fine views of the estuary to be had from the little promontory. They seldom came in the winter and never in the spring and autumn when the grand alliance of wind and water almost always flooded the whole bank and part of the churchyard.
The land was dry now and from where he was in his boat Horace could see someone tending one of the graves near the river. He bent to his oars though and carried on upstream without looking up. Presently he passed Collerton House too. Like the churchyard, its land—in this case, lawn—came down to the river’s edge. There was a little landing stage by the water and beyond that a small boathouse. After that there were no more dwellings, only open fields. The main street of Collerton was set back from the church. Those who professed to understand the English rural landscape were in the habit of speaking knowledgeably about the devastation of the Black Death.
“That’s when all the little hovels round the church decayed,” they would say, “and a later medieval village grew up some distance away from the old diseased houses.”
Horace Boiler, who said, “It stands to reason” almost as often as the storybook character Worzel Gummidge, knew perfectly well why the church stood in lonely splendour apart from the village. It had been built on the only patch of remotely high ground in the parish. The houses had been built well back from the river’s edge for the elementary—and elemental—reason that the other land was liable to flooding. Horace was a fisherman. He knew all about the elements.
He rowed steadily up river for purposes of his own. He didn’t stop in his progress until he rounded the last bend before Billing Bridge. Only then did he turn his craft and allow the current to help carry him along and back to the estuary and Edsway. On his way home he looked in on Ted Boiler, back in his carpenter’s shed after his trip to Berebury. When he got back indoors his wife asked him where he’d been.
“Nowhere,” he said.
“Did you see anyone?”
“No one better than myself,” he said obscurely.
“What have you been doing then?”
“Nothing.”
All of which was—in its own way—perfectly true.
Detective Inspector Sloan entered the mortuary and took his first reluctant look at the unknown male of Caucasian stock, aged about twenty-three years. A decomposing body was not a pretty sight.
“He’s not undernourished,” said Dr. Dabbe, who had led the way.
Burns, his assistant, who had brought up the rear, said, “I’ve got a note of his exact weight and height for you. Doctor.”
Deadweight, thought Sloan to himself, was a word they used about ships, too. He took a look at the man for himself, automatically noting that there was nothing about him to show that he had been a seaman.
“He’s not overweight either, Doctor,” he said aloud. That was something to be noted, too, these days. Would historians of the future call this the Age of Corpulence?
“Average,” agreed Dr. Dabbe. “Dark hair and brown eyes… are you making a note of that, Constable?”
“Short back and sides,” observed Sloan. That, in essence, would tell Superintendent Leeyes what he wanted to know. For the superintendent the length of a man’s hair divided the sheep from the goats as neatly as that chap in the Bible had sorted out the men whom he wanted in his army by the way in which they had drunk at the edge of
