Deep Waters
Page 32
‘Not exactly that. Imagine the two of them, walking around the gardens. Your uncle is a new man; he has this dishonest rascal cornered, and is showing grim satisfaction in the fact. He says roundly that he’ll have Truebody prosecuted and gaoled. And, at that, Truebody simply hits out at him. He’s a powerful fellow; and, for the moment at least, your uncle is knocked unconscious. It has all happened beside one of those small ponds with the tropical fish. So it is now that Truebody sees—or thinks he sees—his chance. He will stage some sort of accident, he tells himself. In a moment he has shoved your uncle into the pool. And there he holds him down until he drowns. So far, so good—or bad. But the accident looks a damned unlikely one, all the same. And then he remembers something.’
‘Biathanatos, and all that.’
‘Precisely so—and something more. Truebody has had plenty of opportunity, during business visits to Pentallon, to poke about among your uncle’s papers. He remembers that batch of elegant farewells by a Charles Vandervell about to depart this life by his own hand—’
‘But nobody would drown himself in a shallow fish-pond. It simply couldn’t be done.’
‘Exactly so, Fabian. And as soon as Truebody had slipped into the empty house and secured that batch of letters, he heaved your uncle’s body into his car, and drove hard for the sea. And there, let us just say, he further did his stuff.’
‘And later posted that letter to Litter. After which he had nothing to do but lie low—and get busy, no doubt, covering up on the financial side.’
‘He didn’t quite lie low. Rashly again, he took the initiative in holding rather an odd conversation with me. He thought it clever himself to advance one or two considerations which were bound to be in my head anyway.’
‘And now he’s under lock and key.’ Fabian Vandervell frowned. ‘Good Lord! I’m forgetting I still haven’t the faintest notion how you tumbled to it all.’
‘That was the shubunkin.’
‘What the devil is that?’
‘Small tropical fish—decidedly not found in the sea off Cornwall. A shubunkin deftly made its way into your uncle’s breast-pocket while Truebody was holding him prone in that pool.’
‘Well I’m damned! But it doesn’t sound much on which to secure a conviction for murder.’
‘It’s not quite all, Fabian. In your uncle’s lungs there was still quite a bit of the water he drowned in. Full of minute freshwater-pond life.’