The Mudflats of the Dead

‘I have every right.’

‘Come clean. It will be the better for you,’ said George, in a deep, histrionic growl.

‘I don’t know nothing about no clothes.’

‘Think again,’ Dame Beatrice advised him. ‘My granddaughter went swimming and left her things on the beach. I have reason to think you found them. Will you hand them over, or do you want the police to come for them?’

‘Make your mind up, chummie,’ said George, to the great admiration of his employer. ‘Stealing by finding is an offence under the law.’

‘I ent stole nothing. What’s left on beach is mine.’

‘That may be true of flotsam and jetsam,’ said Dame Beatrice. ‘It is not true of property left on the beach by persons who have every intention of returning to claim it.’

‘What if they’m buried it, then? What about that? That’s buried treasure, that’s what that is.’

‘Buried it?’

‘Ah, that’s right. They buried it in the sand.’

‘In the dunes?’

‘That’s right. So I digs her up, see, and now she’s mine.’

‘Oh, no, she isn’t, not if she belonged to madam’s relative,’ said George. ‘I reckon, if she buried it, it was to hide it away from people like you. So come on, matie. Hand over.’

‘I don’t want trouble.’

‘Of course you don’t, so stop being an Artful Dodger,’ said Dame Beatrice.

‘And keep your nose clean,’ said George, ‘or my superiors will be taking an interest in your doings.’

‘I reckon to sell what I find.’

‘Yes, but not what you steal,’ said Dame Beatrice. ‘You are not a native of these parts, I think.’ She now realised what, to Sleach, ‘talk foreign’ meant.

‘Why you figure that out?’ the beachcomber enquired.

‘Because the local people are honest.’

‘Will you gimme something for my trouble? I been taking good care of that there bit of luggage till I find out who it belong to.’

‘Produce it,’ said Dame Beatrice, scarcely believing that she had heard him pronounce the word luggage, ‘and then we will talk of rewards.’

‘All right, then. I don’t want no trouble.’ He limped to the back of the shack where there was an opening which, judging from the configuration of the building seen from outside, led, Dame Beatrice thought, to a much more extensive part of the old warehouse. He emerged carrying a suitcase. ‘Buried, her was,’ he said, in a beggar’s whine. ‘How were I to know as somebody wanted her back?’ He dumped it down in front of them and waited. Dame Beatrice fished out a pound note and gave it to him. George disembarrassed himself of the cans of beer and put them down in the doorway before he picked up the suitcase and followed Dame Beatrice to what remained of the sea wall of the quay.

‘An outrageous and unkind bluff, George,’ she said, as he set the suitcase on the coping. ‘It is a dreadful thing to take advantage of the old and indigent.’

‘Take advantage nothing, madam,’ said George sturdily as Dame Beatrice opened the suitcase. ‘He would never have got a pound for flogging any stuff that’s in here, and the case itself is only one of those cardboard type things, and battered about, at that.’

‘Mr Kirby, in his letter, said that the girl would have been wearing jeans and a sweater. I notice the jeans, but the sweater appears to be missing.’

‘I fancy that old scoundrel was wearing it, madam.’

‘That would explain its absence from the suitcase, except that I do not believe it was put into the suitcase until after the girl’s death. Well, loth as I am to inform on the Old Mole, the police will have to be told. They are still looking for the suitcase.’

‘If I may ask, madam, how did you know this man had it?’

‘I did not know he had it. From what we were told by Mr Sleach, I guessed he might have collected the drowned girl’s outer garments which she would have shed before she entered the water, but finding the suitcase went far beyond my expectations, and the place in which it was found goes a long way towards proving Mr Kirby’s conviction that the girl was murdered. No girl in her senses would carry a suitcase across the marshes for the pleasure of carrying it back again when she had had her bathe.’

‘Not even if she did not intend to return to her friends, madam?’

‘I think not. There are plenty of places near the road where she could have hidden it, not to speak of the boot of a car. If she had intended to leave the Kirbys, she would not have gone off alone. From what I have been told about her, a man would have been involved.’

‘He might have been her murderer, don’t you think, madam?’

‘I think that whoever took that suitcase down to the sand-dunes and buried it so shallowly was pressed for time and is almost certainly the murderer. I also believe that the girl herself had no idea that the suitcase had ever left the cottage.’

The county police were sceptical, but not completely unimpressed.

‘We’ll look into it, Dame Beatrice, of course,’ said the Inspector. ‘The man who found the suitcase ought to have turned it in, and he must have known he ought. We’ve got that much to go on.’

‘I trust no charges will be pressed. I have committed myself, I fear, to a promise that there will be no repercussions.’

‘Mr Kirby or his wife will have to identify the suitcase and its contents, but so far as the finder is concerned, I daresay a warning that findings are not keepings will be sufficient to impress him. We know all about him and he’s never been in trouble. You say he gave up the suitcase without any bother?’

‘Oh, yes. I think it might be interesting to find out exactly where it was buried.’

‘And, if it was buried, how he came upon it – unless, of course, he knew exactly where to look.’

‘You mean he may have witnessed its interment? Most unlikely, I would have thought. More probably, the strong winds blew the loose sand away and uncovered it.’

‘We’ll find out, I dare say. Anyway, thank you for your information, Dame Beatrice. I’ll have a little talk with the chap and get the suitcase identified, and then we’ll see, but, unless he murdered the girl and then pinched the suitcase, I don’t think the verdict at the inquest will be easily upset.’

‘You really think that a girl intent upon a moonlight bathe would have carried all her belongings across the marshes?’

‘You never know what ideas girls get in their heads, madam, especially runaways.’

‘You do realise, Inspector, don’t you? – that, except for this very dubious business of the suitcase, there is no evidence that the poor child ever intended to leave her friends at all.’

‘That, Dame Beatrice, amounts to the serious implication that if Miss Hoveton St John didn’t remove the suitcase from the holiday cottage, one of its other inmates did. Can you substantiate that?’

‘My statement does not necessarily implicate the other tenants, but I admit it does seem rather far-fetched to suppose that anybody else entered the cottage, packed the suitcase, enticed the girl into the sea and drowned her.’

‘So you do think one of her friends did it!’

‘Unless the verdict at the inquest was the correct one, I hardly know what else to think.’

‘The verdict at the inquest mostly likely was the correct one, but we shall keep an eye on things and if you get hold of any more evidence, I’m sure you’ll let us know. Meanwhile, we’ll put the breeze up that mumping old vagabond and also put out a few feelers elsewhere. We know your reputation, madam, and a hint from you is worth thinking over. Did any of them stand to gain anything by the girl’s death, I wonder? A pity they’re not still here, but there! When there’s trouble round here it’s the visitors who cause it. We shall have to get some co-operation from the London end. I took Mr Kirby’s London address when I spoke to him before the inquest and I daresay he knows where the rest of his party can be found. They are all Londoners, I believe.’

Dame Beatrice had had her interview at the police station in Stack Ferry on the day following the discovery of the suitcase. Back at The Stadholder she decided to pay another visit to the Hamiltons on the following day. Mrs