Rodgers had gone back to Wickham, but it seemed that the Press had arrived; both the local man and the Crome correspondent of the London dailies wanted to know why the river was being re-dragged. There was also the Oldest Inhabitant. The Oldest Inhabitant had a nose and chin that approximated so closely that Grant wondered how he shaved. He was a vain old party but he was the representative in this gathering of something more powerful than any of them: Race Memory; and as such was to be respected.
"No use you draggin' any furner'n the village," he said to Grant, as one giving the under-gardener instructions. "No?"
"No. No use. She lets everything down, there. Down into the mud."
"She" was evidently the river. "Why?"
"She go slow there. Tired, like. Drops everything. Then when she be round the turn, half-way to Wickham there, she go tearing off agin all light and happy. Ah. That is what she do. Drops everything she be carrying into the mud, and then she go quiet for a little, lookin' round t'see if people notice what she done, than woops! she be off to Wickham at the tear." He cocked a surprisingly clear blue eye at Grant "Sly," he said. "That's what she be. Sly!"
Rodgers had said, when first he had talked to him, that it was no use dragging below Salcott St. Mary, and he had accepted the local man's verdict without asking for an explanation. Now here was Race Memory offering him the explanation.
"Not much use you draggin' anyway," said Race Memory, wiping the drop from its nose with a gesture that was subtly contemptuous.
"Why? Don't you believe there is a body there?" "Oh, ah! Body there all right. But that mud there, it don't give up nothin”cept in its own time."
"And when is that likely to be, would you say?" "Oh! Any time 'tween a thousand years and tomorrow. Powerful sticky that mud be. Quicksand mud. When my great-grandfer were a little boy he had a barra run down the bank, like, into the water. Quite shallow it were there. He could see the barra but he were frightened, see, to wade in for it. So he run to the cottage. No more'n a few yards. And brung his father out to reach the barra for him. But the mud had it. Ah. The mud had it in time you'd turn yer back. Not a blink of the barra left. Not even when they got a rake and dragged for it. The mud had it, see. Cannibal mud, that is, I tell ee, cannibal mud." "But you say it does give up its victims sometimes." "Oh. Ah. Happen." "When? In flood?"
"Nah! In flood she just spread herself. Go broody and drop more mud'n ever. Nah. But sometime she be taken aback. Then she let go in surprise."
"Taken aback?"
"Ah. Same as she were a week since. Cloud come and hit the high country above Otley and burst there, and pour water into the river like someone pouring bath-water away. She have no time to spread out decent and quiet. The water come down channel like a scouring brush and churn her up. Then happen sometimes she loose something from the mud."
It was a poor outlook, Grant felt, if he had to wait until the next cloudburst to recover Searle's body. The gathering greyness of the day depressed him; in a couple of hours they would have to call it off. By that time, moreover, they would have reached Salcott, and if they had found nothing, what hope was there? He had had a horrible feeling all day that they were merely scratching the surface of that "immemorial mud." If this second dragging proved useless, what then? No inquest. No case. No nothing.
By the time a watery sunset was bathing the scene in pallid light they were within fifty yards of the end of their beat. And at that moment Rodgers reappeared and produced an envelope from the pocket of his coat
"This came for you when I was at the station. It's the report from the States."
There was no urgency about it now, but he opened it and read it through.
The San Francisco police had no record against Leslie Searle, and knew of none. He was in the habit of coming to the Coast for the winter months. For the rest of the year he travelled and photographed abroad.
He lived well but very quietly, and there was no record of expensive parties or other extravagances of conduct He had no wife with him and no history of emotional entanglements. The San Francisco police had no record of his origins but they had applied to the Publicity department at Grand Continental, for which studio Searle had photographed Lotta Marlow and Danny Minsky, the reigning stars of the moment. According to Grand Continental, Searle had been born in Jobling, Connecticut. Only child of Durfey Searle and Christina Mattson. Police at Jobling, Connecticut, asked about the Searles, said they left town more than twenty years ago and went South somewhere. Searle was a chemist, with a passion for photography, but that is all anyone remembered about them.
Well, it was a dull enough report. An uninspiring collection of unhelpful facts. No clue to the thing he had wanted most; Searle's intimates in the States. No illumination on Searle himself. But something in the report rang a bell in his head.
He read it over again, waiting for that warning click in his mind that was like the sound a clock makes when it is preparing to strike. But this time there was no reaction.
Puzzled, he read it through again, slowly. What was it that had made that warning sound in his mind? He could find nothing. Still puzzled, he folded up the paper and put it away in his pocket
"We're finished, I suppose you know?" Rodgers said. "We'll find nothing now. Nothing has ever been taken back from the river at Salcott. In this part of the country they have a proverb. When they want to say: Give a thing up, or: Put it out of your mind for good, they say: "Throw it over the bridge at Salcott.' "
"Why don't they dredge the channel instead of letting all this stuff silt up on them," Grant said, out of temper. "If they did they wouldn't have the river flooding their houses every second winter."
Rodgers's long face shortened into amusement and kindliness. "If you'd ever smelt a bucket of Rushmere mud, you'd think a long time before you'd willingly arrange for it to be dragged up in wagon loads and carted through the street. Shall I stop them now?"
"No," said Grant, mulishly. "Let them go on dragging as long as the light lasts. Who knows, we may make history and be the first to take something back from the river at Salcott. I never did believe in those country superstitions, anyhow."
They did go on dragging till the light went, but the river gave nothing back.
SIXTEEN
"Shall I give you a lift back to Wickham?" Rodgers asked Grant, but Grant said no, that he had his own car up at the Mill House and would walk up and fetch it.
Marta came out into the windy twilight to meet him, and put her arm through his.
"No?" she said.
"No."
"Come in and get warm."
She walked beside him in silence into the house and poured him an out-size whisky. The thick walls shut out the sound of the wind, and the room was quiet and warm as it had been last night. A faint smell of curry came up from the kitchen.
"Do you smell what I am cooking for you?"
"Curry. But you can't be expected to feed the Department."
"Curry is what you need after a whole day of our English spring glories. You can, of course, go back to the White Hart and have the usual Sunday evening supper of cold tinned beef, two slices of tomato, three cubes of beetroot, and a wilting lettuce leaf."
Grant shivered unaffectedly. The thought of the White Hart on Sunday evening was death.
"Besides, tomorrow I shan't be here to give you dinner. I am going back to town. I can't stand the Mill House any more at the moment. I’ll stay in town till Faint Heart goes into rehearsal."
'.'Having you here has practically saved my life," Grant said. He pulled the American report from his pocket and said: "Read that, would you, and tell me if anything rings a bell for you."
"No," she said, having read. "No bells. Should it?"
"I don't know. It seemed to me when I read it first that it rang a bell in my mind." He puzzled over it again for a moment and then put it away.
"When we are both back in town," Marta said, "I want to be introduced to your Sergeant Williams. Perhaps you would bring him to dinner one nigh
t?"
"But of course," Grant said, pleased and amused.
"Why this sudden passion for the unknown Williams?"
"Well, I have actually two different reasons. The first is that anyone who has the mother-wit to see that Walter Whitmore is a 'push-ee' is worth meeting. And the second is that the only time I have seen you look happy today was after talking to Sergeant Williams on the telephone."
"Oh, that!" he said; and told her about Benny Skoll, and the Watchman, and Williams rebuking virtue. And so they were gay after all over their Sunday supper, with Marta supplying libellous stones of the Watchman's theatre critic. So that it was not until he was going that she asked what he was going to do now that the search for Searle had failed.
"I tidy up some ends here in Salcott tomorrow morning," he said, "and then I go back to London to report to my chief." •
"And what happens then?"
"There is a conference to decide what action, if any, is to be taken."
"I understand. Well, when you have got things straightened out ring me up and tell me, won't you. And then we can arrange a night when Sergeant Williams is free."
How admirable, he thought as he drove away; how truly admirable. No questions, no hints, no little feminine probings. In her acceptance of a situation she was extraordinarily masculine. Perhaps it was this lack of dependence that men found intimidating.
He went back to the White Hart, called the police station to know if there were any messages, picked the menu off the dining-room sideboard to verify Marta's oromostication as to supper (she had forgotten the stewed rhubarb and custard, he must tell her) and for the last time went to bed in the little room under the roof. The text was no promise tonight. The Hour Cometh, indeed. What a lot of leisure women seemed to have had once. Now they had everything in cans and had no leisure at all.
But no, it wasn't that, of course. It was that they didn't spend their leisure making texts in coloured wools any more. They went to see Danny Minsky and laughed themselves sick for one-and-tuppence, and if you asked him it was a better way of recovering from the day's work than making meaningless patterns in purple cross-stitch. He glared at the text, tilted the lamp until the shadow blotted out his vision of it, and took his notebooks to bed with him.
In the morning he paid his bill, and pretended not to see the landlord's surprise. Everyone knew that the river-dragging had been unsuccessful, and everyone knew that a piece of clothing recovered from the river had caused that dragging (there were various accounts of which particular piece of clothing), so the landlord hardly expected Scotland Yard to be taking its departure at this juncture. Unless there was a clue that no one knew about?
"Coming back, sir?"
"Not immediately," Grant said, reading his mind like a book and not particularly liking the stigma of failure that was being tacked on to his name at this moment.
And he headed for Trimmings.
The morning had an air of bland apology. It was smiling wetly and the wind had died. The leaves glittered and the roads steamed in the sun. "Just my fun, dears," the English spring was saying to the soaked and shivering mortals who had trusted her.
As the car purred along the slope, towards Trimmings, he looked down at Salcott St. Mary in the valley, and thought how odd it was that three days ago it was just a name that Marta used occasionally in conversation. Now it was part of his mind.
And God send it wasn't going to be a burr stuck there for good!
At Trimmings he was received by the refayned Edith, who broke down enough to look humanly scared for a moment when she saw him, and asked to see Walter. She showed him into the fireless library; from which Walter rescued him.
"Come into the drawing-room," he said. "We use it as a living-room and there is a fire there"; and Grant caught himself wondering ungratefully whether it was his own comfort that Walter was considering or his guest's. Walter did affect one that way, he observed.
"I am going back to town this morning," Grant said, "and there are one or two small points I want to clear up before I make my report to my superiors."
"Yes?" Walter was nervous and looked as if he had not slept.
"When I asked you about your journey down the Rushmere, you said that you had picked up mail at arranged post-offices."
"Yes." 4
"On Monday there would have been nothing to pick up, but on Tuesday and Wednesday you presumably picked up what there was. Did Searle have any letters on either of those two days, can you remember?"
"There's no difficulty in remembering, Inspector. Searle never had any mail."
"Never? You mean Searle had no letters at all while he was at Trimmings?"
"None that I ever knew about. But Liz would tell you. She deals with the post when it comes in."
How had he missed this small item of information, he wondered.
"Not even forwarded from his hotel or bank?"
"Not that I know of. He may have been letting it mount up. Some people are constitutionally indifferent to letters."
That was true; and Grant left it there.
"Then about this daily telephoning," he said. "You telephoned from Tunstall on Sunday night, from Capel on Monday night, from Friday Street on Tuesday, and from where on Wednesday?"
"There's a call-box at Pett's Hatch. We had meant to camp actually at Pett's Hatch, but that ruined mill looked dreary somehow, and I remembered the sheltered bit farther on where the river turns south, so we went on to there."
"And you told Trimmings about this proposed camp."
"Yes, I told you already that we did."
"I know you did. I don't mean to badger you. What I want to know now is who talked to whom during that call from Pett's Hatch?"
Walter thought for a moment. "Well, I talked to Miss Fitch first because she was always waiting for the call, then Searle talked to her. Then Aunt Em came— Mrs. Garrowby—and talked to Searle for a little and then I finished up by talking to Mrs. Garrowby myself. Liz hadn't come in from an errand in the village, so neither of us talked to her on Wednesday."
"I see. Thank you." Grant waited, and then said: "I suppose you don't feel able yet to tell me what the subject of your—disagreement was on Wednesday night?" And as Walter hesitated: "Is it because it was about Miss Garrowby that you are reluctant to discuss it?"
"I don't want her dragged into this," Walter said, and Grant could not help feeling that this cliché was less the result of emotion than of a conviction that it was thus an Englishman behaved in the circumstances.
"I ask, as I said before, more as a way of obtaining enlightenment on the subject of Leslie Searle than of pinning you down to anything. Was there anything in that conversation, apart from Miss Garrowby's entry into it, that you would rather I didn't know?"
"No, of course not. It was just about Liz—about Miss Garrowby. It was an extremely silly conversation."
Grant smiled heartlessly. "Mr. Whitmore, a policeman has experienced the absolute in silliness before he has finished his third year 'in the force. If you are merely reluctant to put silliness on record, take heart. To me it will probably sound like something near wisdom."
"There was no wisdom about it. Searle had been in a very odd mood all the evening."
"Odd? Depressed?" Surely, thought Grant, we aren't going to have to consider suicide at this late stage.
"No. He seemed to be invaded by an unwonted levity. And on the way from the river he began to twit me about—well, about my not being good enough for Liz. For my fiancée. I tried to change the subject, but he kept at it. Until I grew annoyed. He began enumerating all the things he knew about her that I didn't. He would trot out something and say: 1 bet you didn't know that about her.' "
"Nice things?"
"Oh, yes," Walter said instantly. "Yes, of course. Charming things. But it was all so needless and so provocative."
"Did he suggest that he would be more appreciative in your place?"
"He did more. He said quite frankly that if he put his mind to it he could c
ut me out. He could cut me out in a fortnight, he said."
"He didn't offer to bet on it, I suppose?" Grant couldn't help asking.
"No," Walter said, looking a little surprised.
Grant thought that some day he must tell Marta that she had slipped up in one particular.
"It was when he said that," Walter said, "about cutting me out, that I felt I couldn't stand him any more that night. It wasn't the suggestion of my not being his equal that I resented, I hope you understand, Inspector; it was the implied reflection on Liz. On Miss Garrowby. The implication that she would succumb to anyone who used his charms on her."
"I understand," said Grant gravely. "Thank you very much for telling me. Do you think, then, that Searle was deliberately provoking a quarrel?"
"I hadn't thought of it. I just thought he was in a provocative mood. That he was a little above himself."
"I see. Thank you. Could I speak to Miss Fitch for just one moment? I won't keep her."
Walter took him to the morning-room where Miss Fitch, with a yellow and a red pencil stuck in her ginger bird's-nest and another in her mouth, was prowling up and down like an enraged kitten. She relaxed when she saw Grant, and looked tired and a little sad.
"Have you come with news, Inspector?" she asked, and Grant, looking past her, saw the fright in Liz's eyes.
"No, “I’ve come to ask you one question, Miss Fitch, and then I shan't bother you again. I apologise for bothering you as it is. On Wednesday night you were waiting for the evening call from your nephew with an account of their progress."
"Yes."
"So that you talked to him first. I mean first of the people at Trimmings. Will you go on from there?"
"Tell you what we talked about, you mean?"
"No; who talked to whom."
"Oh. Well, they were at Pett's Hatch—I suppose you know—and I talked to Walter and then to Leslie. They were both very happy."
Her voiced wavered. "Then I called Emma—my sister—and she spoke to them both."
To Love and Be Wise Page 16