Ngaio Marsh - Dead Water

“In the old days, sir, it were always the Major hisself. Since these yurr princely extensions, however, there be a barmaid in the main premises and the Major serves in a little wee fancy kind of place, behind the lounge.”

“Always?”

“When he’m capable,” said Pender drily, “which is pretty well always. He’m a masterpiece for holding his liquor.”

Pender returned to the shop. “There’s one other thing,” Alleyn said to Fox. “The actual times she’s got here between April and July grow later as the days grow longer.”

“So they do,” Fox said. “That’s right. So they do.”

“Well: let it simmer. What’s next? Exhibit Two.”

It was an envelope containing an exposed piece of film and a single print. Alleyn was about to lay the print on Miss Cost’s pillow. This bore the impress of her head and a single gray hair. He looked at it briefly, turned aside, and dropped the print on her dressing-table. Fox joined him.

It was a dull, indifferent snapshot: a tangle of bracken, a downward slope of broken ground and the top of a large boulder. In the foreground, out of focus, was the image of wire netting.

“Above the spring,” Alleyn said. “Taken from the hillside. Look here, Fox.”

Fox adjusted his spectacles. “Feet,” he said. “Two pairs. Courting couple!”

“Very much so. Miss Cost’s anathema. I’m afraid Miss Cost begins to emerge as a progressively unattractive character.”

“Shutter-peeping,” said Fox. “You don’t get it so often among women.”

Alleyn turned it over. Neatly written across the back was the current year, and “June 17th—7:30 p.m.”

“Last month,” Alleyn said. “Bailey!” he called out. “Here a minute, would you?” Bailey came in. “Take a look at this. Use a lens. I want you to tell me if you think the man’s shoes in this shot might tally with anything you saw at the spring. It’s a tall order, I know.”

Bailey put the snapshot under a lamp and bent over it. Presently he said: “Can I have a word with Thompson, sir?” Sergeant Thompson was summoned from outer darkness. “How would this blow up?” Bailey asked him. “Here’s the neg.”

“It’s a shocking neg,” Thompson said. He added grudgingly: “She’s got an enlarger.”

Alleyn said: “On the face of it, do you think there’s any hope of a correspondence, Bailey?”

Bailey, still using his lens, said: “Can’t really say, sir. The casts are in my room at the pub.”

“What about you, Thompson? Got your shots of the prints?”

“They’re in the dish, now.”

“Well, take this out and see what you make of it. Have you found her camera?”

“Yes. Lovely job,” Thompson said. “You wouldn’t have expected it. Very fast.” He named the make with reverence.

“Pender,” Alleyn said, re-entering the shop, “do you know anything about Miss Cost’s camera?”

Pender shook his head and then did what actors call a “double-take.” “Yes, I do, though,” he said. “It was give her in gratitude by a foreign lady that was cured of a terrible bad rash. She was a patient up to hospital, and Miss Cost talked her into the spring.”

“I see. Thompson, would it get results around about 7:30 on a summer evening?”

“Certainly would. Better than this affair, if properly handled.”

“All right. See what you can do.”

Bailey and Thompson went away and Alleyn rejoined Fox in the bedroom.

“Fox,” Alleyn said distastefully, “I don’t know whose feet the male pair may prove to be, but I’m damn sure I’ve recognized the female’s.”

“Really, Mr. Alleyn?”

“Yes. Very good buckskin shoes with very good buckles. She wore them to the Festival. I’m afraid it’s Mrs. Barrimore.”

“Fancy!” said Fox, after a pause, and he added with his air of simplicity: “Well, then, it’s to be hoped the others turn out to be the Major’s.”

There were no other papers and no diary in either of the boxes.

“Did you reach to the end of the cupboard?” Alleyn asked Fox.

“No, I didn’t. It’s uncommonly deep. Extends through the wall and under the counter in the shop,” Fox grumbled.

“Let me try.”

Alleyn lay on the bedroom floor and reached his long arm into the cupboard. His fingers touched something — a book? “She must have used her brolly to fish it out,” he grunted. “Hold on. There are two of them — no, three. Here they come. I think… Yes. Yes, Br’er Fox. This is it .”

They were large commercial diaries and were held together with a rubber band. He took them into the parlour and laid them out on Miss Cost’s desk. When he opened the first he found page after page covered in Miss Cost’s small skeleton handwriting. He read an entry at random.

…Sweet spot, so quaint and unspoiled . Sure I shall like it. One feels the tug of earth and sea. The ‘pub’ (!) is really genuine and goes back to smuggling days. Kept by a gentleman . Major B. I take my noggin “of an evening” in the taproom and listen to the wonderful “burr” in the talk of the fisher-folk. All v. friendly…Major B. kept looking at me. I know your sort, sez I. Nothing to object to, really . Just an awareness. The wife is rather peculiar: I am not altogether taken, a man’s woman in every sense of the word, I’m afraid. He doesn’t pay her v. much attention.

Alleyn read on for a minute or two. “It would take a day to get through it,” he said. “This is her first visit to the Island. Two years ago.”

“Interesting?”

“Excruciating. Where’s that list of dates?”

Fox put it on the desk.

Alleyn turned the pages of the diary. References to Major B., later K., though veiled in unbelievable euphemisms, became more and more explicit. In this respect alone, Alleyn thought, the gallant Major has a lot to answer for. He turned back to the entry for the day after Wally’s cure. It was ecstatic:

I have always believed in fairies. The old magic of water and the spoken rune! The Green Lady! He saw her, this little lad saw her and obeyed her behest. Something led me to this Island.

She ran on in this vein for the whole of the entry. Alleyn read it with a sensation of exasperated compassion. The entry itself was nothing to his purpose. But across it, heavily inked, Miss Cost on some later occasion had put down an enormous mark of interrogation and, besides this, had added a note: “Sept. 30th—8:45.”

This was the second of the two underlined dates on the paper. He turned to it in the diary:

I am shocked and horrified and sickened by what I have seen this evening. My hand shakes. I can hardly bring myself to write it down. I knew , from the moment I first set eyes on her, that she was unworthy of him. One always knows. Shall not tell K. It would serve him right if I did. All these months and he never guessed. But I won’t tell him. Not yet. Not unless — But I must write it. Only so, can I rid myself of the horror. I was sitting on the hill, below the spring, thinking so happily of all my plans and so glad I have settled for the shop and ordered my lovely Green Ladies. I was feeling the magic of the water. (Blessed, blessed water. No asthma, now.) And then I heard them. Behind the boulder. Laughing. I shrank down in the bracken. And then she came out from behind the boulder in her green dress and stood above the pool. She raised her arms. I could hear the man laughing still but I couldn’t see him. I knew . I knew . The wicked desecration of it! But I won’t believe it. I’ll put it out of my mind forever. She was mocking-pretending. I won’t think anything else. She went back to him. I waited. And then, suddenly, I couldn’t bear it any longer. I came back here.…