‘We’re going down to have a look at the old bridge,’ Laura replied. ‘And then I’m going to have the inside out of that mermaid Cartwright’
As she vouchsafed no more, but seemed intent upon reaching Caddy Old Bridge in the shortest possible time, the others asked no more questions, and were soon warmed through by the pace she set.
Caddy Old Bridge was thus named to distinguish it from Caddy Swing Bridge, which had been built some centuries later, and spanned not the river but the canal.
A few yards upstream from the Old Bridge was a weir, and the three students stood on the bridge for some moments, absorbed in watching the foaming water.
‘I suppose,’ said Laura, ‘the murderer’s idea was that the force from the weir would carry Cook’s body further downstream than where the police actually found it.’
‘But we don’t know where they found it. It didn’t tell that in the papers,’ objected Alice.
‘Bobby Breen told me,’ replied the leader of the expedition. (Constable Breen received inevitably this soubriquet.)
‘He ought not to have said. He might get into trouble,’ said Alice.
‘Well, I asked him, casually, and he did say. Anyway, all the errand-boys know, because I checked the information with Miggin’s Albert, and he said exactly the same thing. We’re going along there in a minute to have a look, and then I’m going in, a la the corpus, to see what really does happen. Mrs Croc. isn’t the only pebble on the beach when it comes to a spot of detection.’
‘I call it very grubby and little-boy, to take all this morbid interest,’ said Kitty, witheringly, forgetting her past.
‘Do you? We’re on to a big thing here, if I mistake not,’ replied her friend. ’Don’t you see that Cook simply went the way of all flesh — to wit, the way Miss Murchan went last term?’
‘Oh, rot!’ said Kitty and Alice with one accord.
‘And how will you go in? You can’t undress on the bank, and you haven’t even got a towel, let alone a bathing costume,’ said the former. ‘You’re an ass, Dog!’
‘And you’d catch your death of cold,’ said Alice. Laura patted herself on the stomach.
‘Costume on under my clothes; towel round my waist to hide it from our smirking acquaintance as we came through the park,’ she announced. ‘And what’s the use of a pub if you can’t ask permission to use the summer- house on their bowling green as a dressing-room?’
This amount of generalship took away speech from her companions. Moreover, by some gift known to herself but not to them, she did indeed obtain permission to use the summer-house.
‘Here, hang on to my watch, Kitty,’ said she, emerging on to the bank, tall and big-limbed in her scanty bathing suit.
‘I wish you wouldn’t do it, Laura,’ said Alice. ‘You’ve no idea how cold it will be.’
‘Sez you!’ retorted Laura, dancing up and down on the grass. ‘Well, here goes. I’m going to wade in and try it for depth and currents first. Then I’ll come up on the bridge and drop in off the parapet. “When I am dead, my dearest, Sing no sad songs” — Ow! Wow! It’s freezing! — “for me! Plant thou — ” ’; She thrust in, waist deep, and then struck out into midstream, waved to the watchers, and began to thresh down-river. Kitty remained where she was, but Alice, herself a swimmer, walked anxiously along the bank, after having loosened her shoe-laces and unfastened all but a single hook on her skirt. She knew the cramping effects of extremely cold water, and was on hand to render assistance.
Laura, however, needed none. She turned after about a hundred yards of strong, swift crawl, and began to come upstream in a series of duck-dives, testing the depth of the water. It was amusing to watch the white legs and the very white soles of the feet breaking water at every seven or eight yards, and after a few minutes Alice realized that she and Kitty were not the sole observers of the scene. Several of the other students, also out for walks, had come up, and one or two villagers, mostly from the inn, were also upon the bridge or upon the bank.
Having carried out the first part of her experiment, and taking no notice of the spectators, Laura waded through shallow, very muddy water to the bank, climbed out, and trotted up to the bridge.
‘Do hurry up and come out, Dog. We’re attracting attention,’ urged Kitty. But Laura briefly invited her to pass the hat round, and, climbing on to the parapet of the low bridge, breathed deeply and — a martyr to her thirst for knowledge — fell awkwardly and painfully in.
‘No good diving. Wouldn’t have the same effect as tipping in somebody with their hands tied,’ she told the others later.
The current was fairly strong because of the rush from the weir. It carried her, half-drowned (for she did not like to mar her experiment by coming to the surface to breathe more often than she could help), past the inn and towards the right bank of the river. At last, exhausted, and beginning to feel that warning cold which seems to strike internally, she came up, breathed deeply once or twice, and then began to race about to get warm. The patient Alice kept pace along the bank, the public-house portion of the audience offering bets among themselves, meanwhile, as to what it was all about; one section holding that it was for a wager, the other certain that the young lady was in training for something, and that Alice was her trainer.
It was Alice who saw the corsets; at least, it was Alice who, suddenly cupping her hands round her mouth, yelled:
‘Laura! Something pink! Laura! Look, Laura!’
Laura did not hear at first, and was amazed to see Alice come down to the water’s edge as though she were going to wade in. So she would have done, had not Laura’s attention been attracted just in time.
Laura, treading up mud, handed her the corsets. Alice rolled them up, but the watchers had seen what they were, and, having no idea at that moment of connecting them with the body which had been dragged out by the police, now cancelled all bets and assumed, with beery joviality, that they were the object of Laura’s researches. There was some crude chaff, at which the girls grinned and Alice also blushed, and then Laura trotted off to get dressed.
