The Mudflats of the Dead

unknown people could have handled the suitcase quite legitimately, there was nothing to be gained from the prints.

Dame Beatrice saw the Inspector again before she left Stack Ferry, but visited no other of the acquaintances she and George had made either there or at Saltacres. The Lowsons, she knew, had concluded their holiday before Dame Beatrice left her hotel for her home and then London. What she felt might be a crucial interview was yet to come, and it was not with them.

She returned to the Stone House in Hampshire, dealt again with correspondence and then put through a telephone call to Adrian’s flat. He gave her Palgrave’s number.

‘I wanted to keep in touch with him,’ he said. ‘Have you made any progress, I wonder, with you know what?’

‘Very little. I am being forced to conclude that we may have to accept the verdict.’

‘But you yourself? What do you think?’

‘The same as you do, but the evidence is not there. When I have visited Mr Palgrave I will come and talk to you and see whether you have any suggestions to offer.’

Palgrave, she realised, was likely to be still on school holiday and might not be at home, but she rang his number hopefully and found that he was in. He was not best pleased at being disturbed.

‘Who are you?’ he asked. ‘I’m terribly busy.’

‘I am the Home Office psychiatrist. My name is Bradley.’

‘Oh, yes? Are you one of the bees in Adrian Kirby’s bonnet?’

‘I am the queen bee, Mr Palgrave. Will you see me?’

‘I suppose so, but I’m up to my eyes in work. I’m writing a book. Can you manage half past two any day this week? I generally take a short break after lunch, so that’s my best time.’

‘Half past two on Wednesday, then. Thank you so much. Goodbye.’

‘Uncouth cub!’ said Ferdinand, who was visiting his mother again and who, at her suggestion, had been listening on the extension.

‘No, no. I expect he is very busy if he is writing a book,’ she said. ‘I shall not keep him long. All I want from him is an exact account of how he spent the evening on which the girl appears to have left the cottage for good, either with or without her suitcase.’

Palgrave, who, in spite of the tone he had employed over the telephone, appeared to be well-mannered, greeted her courteously.

‘Adrian told me you were looking into this rotten affair,’ he said, ‘but I think you’re wasting your time. Camilla did a damn’ silly thing and got drowned. There’s nothing else to be found out.’

‘So I am beginning to believe – not that there is nothing else to find out, but that my enquiry has foundered.’

‘Well, bad luck, of course, but I hope Adrian will be satisfied. You don’t really believe it was murder, do you?’

‘I am hoping that you will be able to persuade me that it was not.’

‘How do I go about persuading you?’

‘Well, except for the murderer – if there was one – you appear to have been the last person to have seen the girl alive. I understand that you returned to the cottage that night—’

‘Only to change my clothes and pick up my things!’

‘Quite – leaving Miss St John in the sea.’

‘Swimming about as merrily as a young water-beetle, I assure you. The tide certainly hadn’t turned when I left her.’

‘Of course not. I suppose one of the “things” you picked up at the cottage was not Miss St John’s suitcase?’

‘Good Lord, no! – only my own.’

‘You had not already put that in the boot of your car? – before you took the others for an evening drink, I mean.’

‘No, I hadn’t. I only intended to sleep in the car. I was going back to the cottage for breakfast. I thought I could collect my traps then.’

‘But you abandoned that plan. Why, Mr Palgrave?’

Palgrave faced her with hostile, suspicious eyes.

‘Look, what is this?’ he said angrily; but it was the anger of fear, she surmised. ‘You don’t think I had anything to do with that wretched kid’s death, do you?’

‘I am waiting for you to convince me that you had not. Her suitcase has been found, you know.’

‘Well, if she took it out of the cottage, it was bound to turn up sooner or later, I suppose.’

‘It turned up in an unexpected place and under what I consider were very suspicious circumstances.’

‘Oh? How do you mean?’

‘Never mind. I may tell you later. First I must hear your own account of that evening and why you changed your plans about breakfasting at the cottage.’

‘Oh, that’s easily explained. Look here—’ he had abandoned his belligerent attitude and spoke quietly, almost placatingly – ‘please tell me what all this is about, won’t you? Am I being accused of anything?’

‘I am not in a position to accuse anybody. Tell me your story of that night and the following morning.’

‘I suppose,’ said Palgrave, half ruefully, half humorously, ‘you can check what I tell you about myself?’

‘To a certain extent, yes, unless Mrs Kirby and Mr Lowson have been lying to me.’

‘What did they say?’

‘I will fill in the gaps if you leave any.’

‘You’re a hard nut to crack, Dame Beatrice. Does anybody know you are here?’

‘Oh, yes, my son knows, and so does Mr Kirby. I always make certain that more than one person knows where I am when I am employed on Home Office business.’

‘I thought Adrian Kirby was employing you.’

‘I do not accept employment from private persons in cases where there is a suspicion that murder has been committed. Mr Kirby drew my attention to this case, that is all. I could hardly invoke the assistance of the police if —’

‘Oh, the police are still in on this, are they? I was under the impression that they had accepted the verdict given at the inquest, and were going to leave me alone.’

‘The discovery of the suitcase—’

‘Oh, that damned suitcase!’

‘— may have shaken their complacency a little, I fancy. So now, since you are a busy man, let us have your account and then I can be gone and leave you to your writing. How is the book going?’

Palgrave smiled for the first time during the interview. ‘Marvellously!’ he said. ‘Of course I’m finding one or two snags. I suppose every writer does. Apart from that, the thing almost writes itself. I spent months trying to get the right idea, but when it came there was no holding it. Of course I’m only on the first draft and I can see already how I can polish up certain bits, but the main theme is dead right. I know that in my bones. It’s all I can do not to show it around to my friends and have them tell me how damned good it is, but most people shy away from reading a typescript and say they’ll wait until they can get the book from the library.’

‘I am delighted to hear that you are making such good progress with it. You are still on holiday?’

‘Yes. I shall have to slow up when I begin school again, but I shall have the book so well set by then that it won’t matter all that much. Those marshes have been sheer inspiration.’

‘ “Mud, mud, glorious mud, Nothing quite like it for cooling the blood” ’, carolled Dame Beatrice, to her hearer’s astonishment.

‘Yes, well, you wanted to hear how I spent that evening,’ he said. ‘Where do you want me to begin?’

‘Did you dislike Miss St John?’

‘What a question to ask me when you think somebody murdered her!’

‘Well, did you dislike her? And why did you leave the cottage?’

‘Dislike her, no. She wouldn’t have been a bad little bint if only she’d had a bit more sense, but I got sick to death of it when she insisted on pursuing me when I was trying to work out something for my novel. I could have wrung her skinny little neck! All the same, I didn’t drown her.’