Джозефина Тэй - To Love and Be Wise

‘They usually do, in time.’

‘According to the local police, five people have been drowned in the Rushmere in the last forty years. That is, leaving Mere Harbour and the shipping part out of the reckoning. Two were drowned higher up than Salcott and three lower down. The three who were drowned lower down than Salcott all turned up within a day or two. The two who were drowned above the village have never turned up at all.’

‘It’s a nice lookout for Walter Whitmore,’ Bryce commented.

‘Yes,’ Grant said, thinking it over. ‘They weren’t very kind to him this morning.’

‘The papers? No. Awfully good-mannered and discreet but they couldn’t have made pleasant reading for Bunny-Boy. A nasty spot to be in. No accusation, so no possible defence. Not that he has any,’ he added.

He was silent for a little, tapping his teeth with his pipe as was his habit when cogitating.

‘Well, I suppose there is nothing we can do at the moment. You make a neat shipshape report and we’ll see what the commissioner says. But I don’t see that there is anything more we can do. Death by drowning, no evidence so far to show whether accidental or otherwise. That’s your conclusion, isn’t it?’

As Grant did not answer immediately, he looked up and said sharply: ‘Isn’t it?’

Now you see it, now you don’t.

Something wrong in the set-up.

Don’t let your flair ride you, Grant.

Something phoney somewhere.

Now you see it, now you don’t.

Conjurer’s patter.

The trick of the distracted attention.

You could get away with anything if you distracted the attention.

Something phoney somewhere…

‘Grant!’

He came back to the realization of his chief’s surprise. What was he to say? Acquiesce and let it go? Stick to the facts and the evidence, and stay on the safe side?

With a detached regret he heard his own voice saying: ‘Have you ever seen a lady sawn in half, sir?’

‘I have,’ Bryce said, eyeing him with a wary disapproval.

‘It seems to me that there is a strong aroma of sawn-lady about this case,’ Grant said; and then remembered that this was the metaphor he had used to Sergeant Williams.

But Bryce’s reaction was very different from the sergeant’s.

‘Oh, my God !’ he groaned. ‘You’re not going to do a Lamont on us, are you, Grant?’

Years ago Grant had gone into the farthest Highlands after a man and had brought him back; brought him back sewn up in a case so fault-proof that only the sentence remained to be said; and had handed him over with the remark that on the whole he thought they had got the wrong man. (They had.) The Yard had never forgotten it, and any wild opinion in contradiction to the evidence was still known as ‘doing a Lamont.’

The sudden mention of Jerry Lamont heartened Grant. It had been even more absurd to feel that Jerry Lamont was innocent, in the face of an unbreakable case, than it was to smell ‘sawn-lady’ in a simple drowning.

‘Grant!’

‘There’s something very odd about the set-up,’ Grant said stubbornly.

‘What is odd?’

‘If I knew that it would be down in my report. It isn’t any one thing. It’s the – the whole set-up. The atmosphere. The smell of it. It doesn’t smell right.’

‘Couldn’t you just explain to an ordinary hard-working policeman what smells so wrong about it?’

Grant ignored the Superintendent’s heavy-handedness, and said:

‘It’s all wrong from the beginning, don’t you see. Searle’s walking in from nowhere, into the party. Yes, I know that we know about him. That he is who he says he is, and all that. We even know that he came to England just as he says he did. Via Paris. His place was booked by the American Express office at the Madeleine. But that doesn’t alter the fact that the whole episode has something queer about it. Was it so likely that he would be all that keen to meet Walter just because they were both friends of Cooney Wiggin?’

‘Don’t ask me! Was it?’

‘Why this need to meet Walter?’

‘Perhaps he had seen him broadcast and just couldn’t wait.’

‘And he had no letters.’

‘Who hadn’t?’

‘Searle. He had no letters all the time he was at Salcott.’

‘Perhaps he is allergic to the gum on envelopes. Or I have heard that people leave letters lying at their bank to be called for.’

‘That’s another thing. None of the usual American banks or agencies has ever heard of him. And there is one tiny thing that seems odd to me out of all proportion to its actual value. Actual value to this case, I mean. He had a tin box, rather like an outsize paintbox, that he used to hold all his photographic stuff. Something is gone out of the box. Something roughly nine inches by three and a half by four, that was packed in the lower compartment (it has a tray like a paintbox with a deeper space below). Nothing that is now among his belongings fits the space, and no one can suggest what the thing could have been.’

‘And what is so odd about that? There must be a hundred and one things that might have been packed in a space that size.’

‘As what, for instance, sir?’

‘Well – well, I can’t think offhand, but there must be dozens.’

‘There is ample space in his other cases for anything he wanted to pack. So it wouldn’t be clothes, or ordinary possessions. Whatever was there, in the tin box, was something that he kept where only he would be likely to handle it.’

Bryce’s attention grew more sober at that.

‘Now it is missing. It is of no obvious importance in this case. No importance at all, perhaps. It is just an oddity and it sticks in my mind.’

‘What do you think he might have been after at Trimmings? Blackmail?’ Bryce asked, with interest at last.

‘I don’t know. I hadn’t thought of blackmail.’

‘What could have been in the box that he could turn into cash? Not letters, that shape. Documents, perhaps? Documents in a roll.’

‘I don’t know. Yes, perhaps. The thing against the blackmail idea is that he seemed to have ample means.’

‘Blackmailers usually have.’

‘Yes. But Searle had a profession that kept him very nicely. Only a hog would want more. And somehow he didn’t look to me like a hog.’

‘Be your age, Grant. Just sit quiet for a moment and think of the blackmailers you have known.’ He watched this shot go home, and said, dryly: ‘Exactly!’ And then: ‘Who would you say was the blackmailee at Trimmings? Mrs. Garrowby got a past, do you think?’

‘Possibly,’ Grant said, considering Emma Garrowby in a new light. ‘Yes, I think it’s quite possible.’

‘Well, the choice isn’t very wide. I don’t suppose Lavinia Fitch was ever out on the tiles?’

Grant thought of kind, anxious little Miss Fitch, with the bristling pencils in her mop of hair, and smiled.

‘There isn’t much choice, you see. I suppose if it was blackmail at all it must have been Mrs. Garrowby. So your theory is that Searle was murdered for a reason that has nothing to do with Liz Garrowby.’ And as Grant made no immediate answer to that, ‘You believe that it was murder, don’t you.’

‘No.’

‘No!’

‘I don’t believe he’s dead.’

There was a moment of silence. Then Bryce leaned forward over the table and said with immense self-control: ‘Now, look here, Grant. Flair’s flair. And you’re entitled to your whack of it. But when you take to throwing it about in chunks it becomes too much of a good thing. Have a little moderation, for Pete’s sake. You’ve been dragging a river for a whole day yesterday trying to find a drowned man, and now you have the nerve to sit there and tell me you don’t think he was drowned at all. What do you think he did? Walked away barefoot? Or hobbled away disguised as a one-legged man supported by crutches which he had tossed off in an idle moment from a couple of oak branches? Where do you think he went to? What is he going to live on from now on? Honestly, Grant, I think you must need a holiday. What, just tell me what , put this notion into your head? How does a trained detective mind jump from a straightforward case of “missing believed drowned” into a wild piece of fantasy that has no connection with anything in the case at all?’