The Mudflats of the Dead

‘It is splendid.’

‘Yes, it is,’ the artist agreed without boastfulness but with the solid satisfaction of a master craftsman acknowledging quite impersonally the feeling for a job well done. The other three made appropriate murmurs of agreement. The socialite Mevagissey, whose first name, it appeared, was Claire and whose signature to her pictures was ‘in honour,’ she informed Dame Beatrice, ‘of the most ravishing little fishing port on earth, for Mevagissey, of course, is not my surname,’ fingered a necklace of jade as she listened and talked.

‘Ah, you paint fishing-boats and seascapes,’ said Dame Beatrice.

‘So did Camilla, when she went to the seaside with Miranda and Adrian,’ said the beautiful, voluptuous Fenella, leaning back in her chair and yawning. ‘It doesn’t seem the healthiest of subjects to choose, does it, if one gets drowned in the end?’

‘Well, that’s one way of looking at it,’ said the newly joined member of the group. ‘But what I think—’

‘Has no significance, Val, darling,’ said Gerda. ‘Fenella, in her elephantine way – all right, Fen! Don’t bother to aim your bosom at me! You’ve done us a favour by bringing up the subject Dame Beatrice wants to talk about. What do you want us to tell you about Camilla, Dame Beatrice?’

‘How many people knew that she was going to Saltacres with Mr and Mrs Kirby?’

‘I should think anybody at the art school could have known,’ said Mevagissey. ‘There was nothing secret about it. Miranda usually took one or even two of the students with her and Adrian when they went away in the summer.’

‘Do you know of anybody who would wish to harm her?’

‘Again, there could be any number,’ said Gerda, ‘but they wouldn’t murder her, you know. Nobody took her seriously enough for that.’

‘She swiped their boyfriends, though,’ said the youthful Valerie.

‘Not mine,’ said Fenella complacently, ‘and the men didn’t stay swiped very long. They soon began looking for something a bit more beddable.’

‘She really was her own worst enemy, I expect,’ said Mevagissey, ‘and, as you say, she never managed to keep the boyfriends after she’d stolen them. They soon tired of her. She was a bit of a laughing stock actually.’

‘She was a little rat. I wonder anybody was ever tempted to sample her,’ said Fenella.

‘Anyway, nobody would have bothered to murder her,’ said Gerda again.

‘Would she ever have contemplated suicide, I wonder?’ asked Dame Beatrice.

‘Oh, no!’ said Valerie and Mevagissey together.

‘No,’ said Fenella. ‘She enjoyed life in her own way, poor little sod.’

‘I don’t think she minded losing her men after she’d collected them,’ said Gerda. ‘It was the chase she liked.’

‘But what of the deprived young women?’ Dame Beatrice enquired.

‘Oh, Camilla wasn’t the only predator,’ said Fenella. ‘People are always changing their sleeping partners. Nobody we know would murder anybody because of a swap-over of bodies, otherwise we’d all be in Kensal Green by now.’

‘Do you know anything of her background – her parentage, education, that sort of thing? Her real name appears to have been Smith. There seems to be no evidence that she herself ever made a Will, but presumably her father or another relative left her something, or she would not have been in a position to give up her paid employment and live on a private income.’

Fenella and Claire Mevagissey exchanged glances and Gerda, Dame Beatrice thought, looked troubled. Nobody spoke until Valerie said, ‘We’ve wondered about that ourselves.’

‘Better not talk,’ said Gerda. ‘We don’t know anything.’

‘You can’t libel the dead,’ said Fenella.

‘You can blacken their memory.’

‘Her reputation wasn’t all that shiny.’

‘This,’ said Dame Beatrice, ‘is an enquiry into what I am convinced was a case of murder. Anything you may tell me or the police will be held to be entirely confidential unless it is needed as evidence in a court of law.’ She looked at each one of them in turn. It was Fenella who spoke.

‘We always thought she had managed to get somebody on a piece of string,’ she said. ‘We – Gerda and Claire and I – were at a party with her. She got pretty high and she, well, let a rather big cat out of the bag when we got her home. I don’t suppose she remembered afterwards what she’d said. She had been too much under the influence to remember anything much at all, I guess.’

‘She was just full of wild babble,’ said Gerda. ‘She didn’t know what she was talking about.’

‘They do, you know,’ retorted Fenella. ‘They know perfectly well what they’re talking about until they actually go under the ether, and by the time they wake up, complete with hangover, they haven’t the blindest conception of what they’ve let out and nobody is more surprised than themselves if someone repeats it to them.’

‘But you did not repeat it to her, I imagine,’ said Dame Beatrice.

‘Heavens, no! It was none of our business if she was putting the screw on somebody.’

‘Man or woman, I wonder?’

‘She didn’t say, but we thought, knowing Camilla and her ways, that it was a man and probably not one of our gang at all, but somebody who couldn’t afford not to pay up. The inference was that she’d collected a little bundle, and that this evidence was still available to earnest enquirers, and that it would be pretty serious for the man if somebody talked.’

‘This would have happened while she was still employed at the shop, I take it, otherwise you would not need to infer, because you would know, if she had been living here at the time.’

‘Well— ’ Fenella and Mevagissey exchanged glances again. ‘Well— only sort of while she was still at the shop, if you know what I mean,’ said Fenella.

‘She had to go to hospital,’ said Claire.

‘I am accustomed to reading between the lines.’ Dame Beatrice rose to go. ‘Thank you all for your help. You have clarified my own ideas to a most gratifying extent. Blackmail is a particularly nasty business.’

Gerda accompanied her downstairs.

‘I don’t believe Camilla had a baby,’ she said. ‘She was far too fly to go so far as that.’

‘She was not fly enough to avoid being murdered,’ said Dame Beatrice.

‘People shouldn’t write or do things for which they can be blackmailed. It’s their own fault if somebody takes advantage of them and cashes in.’

‘What did you really think of Miss St John?’

‘I was sorry for her. She was all the time chasing the bluebird and every time she caught it it died on her.’

‘But the dog it was that died,’ said Dame Beatrice.

‘The little bitch, you mean. Oh, she was that, all right,’ said Gerda, ‘and we’re pretty sure about the blackmail, although we don’t know any names.’

CHAPTER 15

THE MUDFLATS, LONDON RIVER

‘It’s a long, long watch that he’s a-keeping there,

And a dead cold night that lays a-creeping there.’

Henry Newbolt

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Briefed by Dame Beatrice when she returned to the hotel which they used when they were staying only a day or two in London, Laura went to the art dealer’s shop which the Kirbys had mentioned. She was armed with a list of requisites consisting of light-to-carry articles such as charcoal, paint brushes, a small sketching block and some varnish and Dame Beatrice had also prepared for her a series of questions to put to the proprietor.

She was served by an auburn-haired girl of Burne-Jones aspect while a man whom Laura took to be the