The Mudflats of the Dead

certainly had not come by car.

As the way to the room which was now allotted to her chauffeur was reached by way of the public bar, and as, to get to the bar, the cash customers had to pass the receptionist’s counter, Dame Beatrice was certain that, wherever Camilla might have gone, it was not to join Palgrave at The Stadholder. She was shown her own room, a pleasant apartment on the first floor, and reflected that the next part of her task was likely to present difficulties. It would need to be carried out in Saltacres village and the problem would be to find somebody, preferably a native of the place, who would have something to report and who would be willing to talk to her. From what she knew of the oyster-like impenetrability of the inhabitants of this particular county, especially of this northern part of it, she thought that all further proceedings would be slow ones.

For a start she spent an hour or so during the afternoon in wandering around by the Stack Ferry quay. When she returned to the hotel it was to find her chauffeur seated sedately in the entrance vestibule reading a newspaper and waiting for orders. He rose.

‘George,’ she said, ‘could you get into conversation with a fisherman or a yachtsman and find out how the tides run on these coasts? I am wondering what happens to drowned bodies, but that need not be mentioned, although flotsam and jetsam of non-human origin would be in order as a subject of conversation. The stretch of coast I have in mind is from the bathing beach of this town round to the village of Saltacres.’

George came back with the report she had been expecting. From the Stack Ferry beach, which was to the west of the town, the tides set slantwise, coming in slightly from the west. The outgoing tide at Stack Ferry would carry flotsam round towards a village called Hallings, where the coast dipped southwards. It was impossible for anything put into the sea at Stack Ferry to fetch up at Saltacres. If it fetched up anywhere, it would be round Hallings way, and was unlikely to be washed offshore again, the outgoing tide being sluggish in those parts.

At Saltacres whatever went in on an outgoing tide was apt to come back again on the turn. There was the story of a small yacht which had slipped its moorings and which returned to them on the next tide. Whether the tale was apocryphal or not, Dame Beatrice did not know, but it indicated that Camilla Hoveton St John probably had been drowned at Saltacres and certainly not at Stack Ferry. There remained the question of when she had drowned, since between a yacht which must have remained afloat and a body which, for some time, would have been submerged, there was a difference, Dame Beatrice supposed.

In his letter, however, Adrian Kirby had referred to the visit he and Camilla had made in Palgrave’s car to Stack Ferry. There, in his eagerness to follow his own pursuits, he had lost track of the girl, and he had admitted that while she had been about her own devices she had most probably picked up an acquaintance who might have contacted her again at Saltacres, probably by arrangement rather than by chance.

‘I think we would have known about a man at Saltacres, though,’ Adrian had written, a statement which, from what she had been told about the girl, Dame Beatrice thought unduly optimistic unless some busybody had made a report which Adrian had not mentioned.

The more she thought about it, the more Dame Beatrice realised the kind of task which confronted her. If Camilla had drowned on the night when she swam with Palgrave, either her death was as accidental as the verdict at the inquest had claimed, or else Palgrave might be implicated, and very seriously implicated. That was a fact which had to be faced.

The tide-tables which she studied were not of much help, since it was not known exactly when Palgrave had given up his moonlight bathe and left Camilla still (presumably) enjoying hers. Even so little as half an hour, since they must have been swimming near enough to full tide, could have made all the difference between safe and dangerous bathing on that apparently treacherous coast.

Supposing, however, that Camilla, having removed her suitcase from the cottage while the rest of her party were enjoying Palgrave’s hospitality at the inn, had met some so far unidentified acquaintance and had gone off with him, she could have been drowned, either by accident or design, at an entirely different time from that which had been supposed.

In such a case, her movements between the time Palgrave had left her, and the time of her death, would have to be traced and accounted for. Dame Beatrice went to the police, produced her credentials and asked for their help.

They were courteous, acknowledged the difficulty and agreed that there was much in what she said. They gave her an account of their own so far unavailing efforts to find the suitcase, and admitted that they themselves were no longer completely satisfied by the findings of the coroner and his jury.

‘We’re keeping the case open, of course, madam, and shall continue to prosecute our enquiries into the whereabouts of the missing suitcase, but that’s about all we can do. If this Mr Palgrave, or the married couple he was staying with, know anything about it, they are not telling us. If she did go off with somebody, well, so far he hasn’t come forward, and, if there is any suspicion of foul play, he isn’t likely to. The chances are that the drowning happened just as the coroner indicated and that the girl herself deposited the suitcase earlier, intending to leave the cottage anyway when she knew that Mr Palgrave was determined to do so. In that case, the piece of luggage may be in some lock-up cubbyhole at the bus depot, or in a railway station left- luggage office. Without the ticket it’s going to be a long job finding it. If she was going off with a yachtsman – quite a likely thing in these parts – the suitcase could be on somebody’s boat unless the owner got wind-up when he heard of the girl’s death. In that case he may have dumped her bag in the sea and it could be halfway to Holland by now, if it hasn’t disintegrated.’

‘So much for that!’ said Dame Beatrice, and thanked them. She telephoned Laura.

‘Bathed in brilliant moonlight and knew about the tides?’ said that accomplished swimmer. ‘She wouldn’t have risked it. She could have seen whether the sea was coming in or going out, if there was bright moonlight. No marks of violence? You wouldn’t need to inflict any to drown a person in deep water. The kid was murdered. Wish I were with you!’

CHAPTER 8

TWO INTERVIEWS

‘To lend our hearts and spirits wholly

To the influence of mild-minded melancholy.’

Alfred, Lord Tennyson

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More to the point was the local press in the form of a young reporter from the Stack Ferry Gazette and Advertiser. It was this youth’s practice during the summer season to make a weekly round of the hotels in the town in search of possible celebrities who might grant him an interview.

Visiting yachtsmen were his daily prey, so that his chief haunts were the saloon bars of the Stack Ferry pubs and hotels, as well as the bars down by the harbour. He was also not averse to glancing through the current entries in hotel registers when he could cajole the desk clerk (female, of course, and young) to let him take a weekly look at them.

When he saw Dame Beatrice’s signature he lost no time in getting in touch with her. There came a polite tap on her door just as she was ready to go down to lunch on the third morning of her stay and a voice said:

‘The Gazette on the telephone, Dame Beatrice.’

‘And who or what is the Gazette?’

‘The local paper, madam.’

‘Ask him, her or them to call again when I’ve had my lunch. Two-thirty would be a convenient time.’

‘Very good, madam. I’ll let you know when they ring through.’

However, Dame Beatrice did not receive a telephone call, but a visit from the enterprising young man in person. They met in the lounge, which was otherwise deserted at that hour on a fine summer afternoon. He introduced himself, a self-confident but disarming, friendly youth, as Keith Dunlop.

He was accompanied by an older man who carried a camera.

‘I wonder, Dame Beatrice, whether you will be kind enough to grant me an interview for my paper? I expect you get pretty bored with this kind of thing, but we’d be most awfully grateful. We don’t often get people of your eminence staying in the town.’