The Mudflats of the Dead

‘I always beware of flatterers, Mr Dunlop.’

‘But you will let me talk to you, won’t you?’

‘There are conditions attached.’

‘Don’t say I mustn’t quote you.’

‘That was not what I meant. If I do as you wish, will you, in return, do something for me?’

‘Honoured, Dame Beatrice.’

‘Good. I regard that as a promise. Well, what do you want to know?’

‘I’ve dotted down a list of questions. First, would you mind if we took a few photographs?’

‘Warts and all? Oh, very well. I have seen your paper. The photography is excellent and, I hope, reliable.’

‘Reliable?’

‘Not so much touched up and embellished as to render the subjects unrecognisable by those who, for want of a better description (and we could well do with one) are known as the men in the street.’

Dunlop beckoned to the photographer, who was standing just inside the doorway of the lounge, and Dame Beatrice permitted herself to be photographed.

Dunlop’s attendant sprite, having secured his picture, or, rather, his half-dozen pictures taken from several angles and at varying distances, then took himself and his camera away, since the interview itself held no interest for him. His last sitters had been a well-known pop group, and, after them, a psychiatrist, however eminent, was very small beer. Less well-informed than Keith Dunlop, he did not know that she was also a famous criminologist, or his views about her importance might have been different. However, he was not to be blamed. Her name seldom appeared in the newspapers as a solver of murder mysteries. Like some other famous sleuths, she preferred to leave all the credit to the police, partly, of course, for her own safety. ‘Are you making a long stay, Dame Beatrice?‘ asked Dunlop, creasing back a fresh page in his shorthand notebook.

‘I hardly think so. I shall be here today and tomorrow. After that I may return to London for a time.’

‘I thought – I looked you up, of course – I thought there was an address in Hampshire.’

‘Mr Dunlop, I said I thought you could help me. I know the press are discreet. I have had reason many times to put my faith in their promises. If I tell you the reason I am here, will you undertake that not a word of it will appear openly, or by inference, innuendo, speculation or veiled suggestion, in your paper until I say the word?’

‘That drowning fatality at Saltacres? I covered that, you know.’

‘You are an extremely astute young man. Will you give me your promise?’

‘Of course. It sounds as though you don’t believe it was an accident.’

‘So far, I have no idea whether it was an accident or not. I have merely been asked to make some enquiries. But, first, your questions.’

The interview followed the usual course and Dame Beatrice answered in the usual stereotyped fashion until Dunlop had worked through his list of basic questions and dotted down his last few shorthand notes.

‘Thanks very much,’ he said, ‘that should work up into something worth while. We’ll Special Feature it, with photograph, so it won’t be out until next week, I’m afraid, and you may not still be here.’

‘I am not sure. As I told you, it is very doubtful. My plans depend upon circumstances which are not under my control and the importance or otherwise of which I cannot, at the moment, estimate.’

‘May I send a copy of the Gazette to your home address, then, when my article comes out?’

‘It would be most kind of you.’

‘The Stone House, Wandles Parva, Hampshire, isn’t it?’

‘Yes, that is the address, although, again as I told you, when I leave here I may be in London for a bit. But the Stone House will always find me.’

‘Is the house stone-built?’

‘No, it is built of mellow brick. It is called the Stone House because in its vicinity is a Stone of Sacrifice, so called.’

‘Human sacrifice?’

‘I perceive a gleam in your eye. Yes, human sacrifice, if local legend is founded on fact.’

‘May I use that in my article?’

‘Why not? The legend is current around my area of the New Forest.’

‘Is there any story of haunted woods, sacred groves – anything of that sort?’

‘Not so far as I am aware, but embroider as you will.’

‘Well, that’s marvellous.’

‘For good measure, throw in that a distant ancestress of mine was reputed to be a witch.’

Dunlop looked at her sharp black eyes, beaky little mouth and clawlike, yellow hands and smiled.

‘Maybe the ancestry wasn’t all that far back,’ he said, ‘if what I’ve heard of you, both as a psychiatrist and a solver of murder mysteries, is true. Well, now, you said there was something I could do for you. I’d be glad to have a try.’

‘It is something well within your scope. It concerns this death by drowning which we mentioned earlier, that of the young woman named Camilla Hoveton St John.’

‘Oh, yes, I know. We covered the story pretty thoroughly and were lucky enough to get a snap of the girl which her friends took when they first got to Saltacres. Our photographer who was here a while ago blew it up and we gave it front page treatment.’

‘Ah, then you know the details so far as these are known, and you know what conclusions were arrived at by the coroner.’

‘You don’t mean the verdict wasn’t correct? You don’t mean it was suicide? – not – I say! I say! You don’t think it was murder, do you?’

‘Her friends think so. For myself, I have formed no opinion up to the present. I am merely conducting an investigation on their behalf. You will say nothing about all this?’

‘Dumb as an oyster, I promise you.’

‘I have had it suggested to me that, on the day she spent here, Miss St John picked up some man whom she met again, without her friends’ knowledge.’

‘And he drowned her? Could be, I suppose. The chances are that he was one of the summer visitors, a yachtsman, perhaps. He may be anywhere by now.’

‘A yachtsman? The police wondered about that. In that case, other yachtsmen may know of him.’

‘What makes her friends think that the verdict on the girl was wrong?’

Dame Beatrice explained and Dunlop whistled. ‘They might have something there,’ he said. ‘The undertow on an outgoing tide is notorious all around these coasts, but you say the girl knew about the tides and wouldn’t have taken any risks.’

‘I know only what I have been told.’

‘Well, I’ll see what I can find out. Thanks very much for seeing me and letting me in on this. Silent as the grave until you give me the all-clear.’

‘Yes, silent as the grave,’ said Dame Beatrice. ‘ “The grave’s a fine and private place, but none, I think, do there embrace.” ’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘The girl had no discretion in some matters.’

‘Oh? Oh, I see. Well, there are plenty like her in this day and age.’

‘How much I deplore that overworked expression!’

‘Eh? Oh, me, too. One hears the words so often, though, that they trip to the tip of the tongue.’

‘We are all lazy in some way or another. If we were not, people could not live with us. We should be too much for them. I myself have an intense repugnance to gardening. “When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush”, my reaction is to let them go on doing so.’

‘All the same, you’re prepared to use your time and energy to do quite a bit of weeding in the case of this drowned girl. Why?’

‘Curiosity. It killed the cat, Mr Dunlop, and in the end it will probably kill me.’

Dame Beatrice drove over to Saltacres on the following morning with the intention of inviting the Lowsons to lunch with her at The Stadholder. Cupar had already arranged to go sailing with a yachtsman friend, but Morag