“I reckon there’s an answer to that one, ma’am,” said the inspector, who was present at the conference. “While the weapon was sold as a rapier, the dealer could afford to come forward, but whoever cut it down to dagger length might be asked some very awkward questions, don’t you think? Nobody likes getting mixed up with the police, however innocent they are.”
“No doubt you are right, but we need that man.”
“What, ma’am, is a
“Oh, a practice begun in the fourteenth century, and extensively used in the sixteenth century, of leaving a few inches at the top of the blade unsharpened, rough and unpolished as a protection to the fingers of the swordsman. The amount of protection was increased in some cases by the provision of a hook or a bar below the quillons, which are these side-pieces which form the cross-hilt of the weapon. In this case, as Mrs Wells saw, the original
“You say we need this blacksmith, Dame Beatrice,” said the Chief Constable, “and we most certainly do. One thing, there are not so many independent blacksmiths nowadays.”
“Oh, now we’ve got this far, we shall turn him up sooner or later. It’s just a question of time, sir, and the usual spadework,” said Conway.
“I am hoping that he will not turn himself up,” said Dame Beatrice.
“I thought that’s just what we could do with,” said the Chief Constable. “You said so yourself, didn’t you?”
“I mean that I hope he will not present himself to us in the form of a corpse. I have a feeling that Mrs Wells may have started a landslide by coming to the police with her information about the rapier and I am sure no time should be lost in locating this man who turned it into a dagger. I hope he has sense enough to realise that his own safety may depend upon getting in touch with the authorities as soon as possible.”
“Depends whether he knows what the dagger was to be used for, ma’am,” said Conway. “I wish we could find the rest of the blade. There must be quite a length of it somewhere, if the rapier was the length the lady specified.”
“She refused to identify the dagger as having been part of the rapier she sold,” said Dame Beatrice, “but the circumstantial evidence strongly suggests that it was.”
Chapter 14
Body on the Foreshore
“… and the green corn
Hath rotted ere his youth attain’d a beard.”
« ^ »
Some few miles eastward along the coast there was a resort which served as a place of retirement for the moderately affluent elderly. It had built up a reputation for great respectability and a certain exclusiveness. Bath- chairs had been a feature on the broad promenade and the hotels often had permanent residents who established little cliques among themselves and looked with jaundiced eye on any interlopers who commandeered their favourite armchairs in the lounges.
Both residents and visitors were proud of the town, its health-giving properties, its broad sands, its denes and public gardens, the good taste, range and scope of its entertainments, its balmy air and its interesting hinterland.
Times change, however. Because it was prosperous the town grew, shops and restaurants were added, a sprawl of back streets spread out around the railway station, a large bus station and then a coach station came into being and gradually but inexorably the character of the town altered. With the advent of the motor-coaches came the day trippers; when the motor-car became ubiquitous visitors came who no longer booked in for a week, a fortnight, or a month at the hotels and boarding houses, but required only an overnight stop with breakfast before going their way to the next overnight stop.
The next development was more serious still. The formerly insular, prejudiced, stay-at-home English began to seek holidays abroad. The resort’s hotels began to depend more and more on letting their accommodation for political and other conferences, the annual meetings of learned societies, coach parties who would move off on the following morning and who were bitterly resented by even the equally transient birds of passage who had booked privately instead of
Then, on noisy, ton-up motorcycles, helmeted, black-jacketed, witless, destructive and ruthless, came the Bank Holiday gangs for a short orgy of window-smashing, drunkenness and terrorisation, the modern equivalent of shooting up the town. More frequent nuisances were the local gangs which grew up to combat the invaders and soon infested the back streets. They had their own territories, jealously guarded, which included a favourite pub and a favourite disco, and to enliven life further they made sporadic war on one another, combining only when the motorbike invaders arrived.
However, the town had been free from any major disturbances since the police had had to make a number of arrests on the May Day bank holiday following a bout of shop-window-smashing and insulting behaviour on the part of the invaders, so it was with some surprise that the Superintendent received a report that the stabbed body of a skinhead youth had been found on the foreshore which bordered the busy road to the ferry.
“Must be some sort of gang vengeance,” he said to his uniformed inspector. “We’ve had no trouble for weeks with the local lads. Take a recce and see what you can pick up. Have a comb-out of the pubs these kids use. This kind of thing is usually the result of youngsters having too much to drink.”
The body had been found by two men digging for lug-worms at low tide. When they reported their find they said that the body was a good way further up the shore from where they were looking for bait and they had not noticed it. Later, when they were ready to depart, they did see it and thought at first that it was a heap of flotsam brought in on the tide and left stranded when the tide went out.
However, as it appeared to be neither seaweed nor driftwood, they decided to examine it and were alarmed to
