“Yes, you do make it all hang together. Mind you, I think you’re arguing too much from your experience on the other side. It seems to me that English criminals haven’t usually the cleverness, or the powers of combination, to bring off a coup of this kind.”
“Who said they were English? Haven’t I read that this Derek Burtell was brought up in the South of France? Mind you, it’s with the greatest possible deference that I make all these suggestions; I’m only a humble amateur.”
XIV
The Man in the Punt
Leyland did not come back till early on Monday morning; and when he came out to the Gudgeon he found Angela already returned. He was plainly despondent.
“There’s simply nothing right about this case,” he explained. “Nothing ever seems to work out according to schedule. What could be easier, in an ordinary way, than to trace the movements of a man who’s gone up river in a punt? He must pass through the locks; he must go up the main stream—you couldn’t take a punt up the Windrush, for example; he can’t leave it about anywhere, at this time of the year, without its being noticed. And yet I’ve lost all trace of him.”
“Poor Mr. Leyland,” said Angela. “Did you start from Oxford, or where?”
“Yes, naturally I went round the boat places on the Upper River; that didn’t take long. I found the man who’d hired the punt to him—the same man, as a matter of fact, from whom the Burtells got their canoe. It was a big punt, with awnings for sleeping out, and the man seems to have come on board with a great crowd of tins and things as if he meant to do his own cooking. He paid a deposit, and hired the punt for a fortnight—gave his name as Luke Wallace, and an address somewhere in Cricklewood. I got through to Cricklewood at once—there are advantages about being a policeman—and the station there, after making inquiries, found that no such name was known anywhere in the neighbourhood. A false address sounds promising, thought I; we aren’t on the track of some common holidaymaker. I found out the date when the man hired the punt; it seems that he had already spent two nights on the river when he reached Shipcote. That’s natural enough; he wasn’t hurrying. I tried the locks between this and Oxford, to see if they could give me any information about the man; they only seemed to remember the circumstance of his passing; one of them showed me, with great pride, the counterfoil of his lock ticket, F.N.2—as if that did any good.”
“Better than nothing,” suggested Bredon. “By an outside chance you might find it lying about somewhere.”
“Yes, but who bothers about a lock ticket? He wasn’t coming back. Probably just pitched it into the water then and there. However, I got the number. And of course we know his number at Shipcote, because it was the one just before the Burtells’. At the inns, so far, they’d seen nothing of him.”
“Poor man, he must have been using condensed milk,” said Angela with a shudder.
“Well, above Shipcote Lock he seems to have changed his method entirely. At Millington Bridge, for example—I can’t think why the landlady didn’t tell us about it—he went in and had an early luncheon. How early? (I asked). Oh, about half-past eleven it would be. Now, notice—this man was clear of Shipcote Lock before nine. The distance he did before lunch was only the distance the Burtells had covered between their breakfast and nine o’clock. Of course, there’s the difference between a canoe going downstream and a punt going upstream. I suppose the distance will be about two miles—rather less, if anything. There’s no reason why our friend in the punt should have been feeling energetic on a hot morning; but it naturally occurs to the mind that he may have been hanging about Shipcote Lock at the very time when the murder was committed. Which makes me all the more anxious to meet him.”
“Did he show any interest in the movements of the Burtells?” asked Bredon.
“That’s the extraordinary thing. Hitherto he hadn’t touched at a hotel, or asked a single question at the locks. But from now onwards he seems to have blazed his trail like a—like an elephant on a lawn-tennis court. At Millington Bridge, for example, he asked all sorts of questions about the Burtells—how long they stayed and whether they saw much of each other and so on. It was the maid he asked, not the landlady; I suppose otherwise she’d have been certain to mention it. He even asked whether they’d been seen about together much. All this, of course, was before any news of Burtell’s disappearance had come through. Then he went off, upstream.”
“Are you sure he went upstream?” objected Bredon. “That pub at Millington Bridge stands well away from the river; they can’t have seen him from there.”
“No, but there’s a boat place at the bridge, and the man in charge there saw him going upstream. He remembered it afterwards, of course, because the Burtell news came through, and everybody on the river began to remember everything that had happened that day, and a good many things which hadn’t. I asked him why on earth he didn’t mention the man in the punt before—why he never told the police about him. He said it never occurred to him, because the accident had happened so far down that it was impossible for a man punting upstream to have been anywhere near the scene of the accident, and yet reach Millington Bridge by half-past eleven. That was true, of course; he had no reason, you see, to suppose that there’d been anything fishy happening at the lock. Anyhow, he was positive of the fact because he remembered discussing the matter with old Mr. So-and-so, and I could ask old
