Then they were ushered away, to a table for six from which a reserved label had been moved. Some other party would have to wait. Masters in high humour ordered smoked trout, devilled kidneys and crêpes suzette. With a bottle of hock. He didn’t care for red wines, and drank white even when the blood followed the knife. He was more than scornful of drink know-alls who practised what they preached even against their own palates.
Green ate stewed oxtail. He said to Hill: ‘Good grub, this. Better than those terrine things and whatnot.’
‘If you can get anything off the bones.’
‘It’s as messy to eat as spaghetti,’ said Brant.
‘Quite right,’ said Masters, tackling the three flattened spheres of kidney spread across his plate. ‘To eat oxtail and spag bol properly, you’ve got to be stripped to the waist in a soundproof booth.’
Green said: ‘In that case they’re the right dishes for mixed parties.’ He pushed a cotton-bobbin bone to the edge of his plate. It fell off and dirtied the tablecloth. He swore under his breath, and made even more of a mess trying to retrieve it.
The dining-room was beginning to empty as they left the table. Green said: ‘Anybody for a snifter?’
‘Some’of us have work to do. Those lists,’ Hill said.
‘So’ve I,’ added Masters.
‘What?’
‘I want to look at your survey work.’
‘Oh, come on. Just for a snort.’
Masters knew that for all Green’s bounce, he would probably fight shy of going down alone to the Sundowner, to a room full of strangers whom he would probably regard—without knowing them—as the parasites of society. There was this sense of inadequacy in Green at all social gatherings not directly connected with his work. Masters decided the civil thing would be to go along with him. The two of them descended the stairs to the bar, but had difficulty in actually entering the room. They stood, peering over the heads of groups, wondering how to reach the bar or a vacant floor space, when above the din they heard a cry. Looking over to the corner where they had been sitting the previous evening, Masters saw Swaine. The little doctor was standing on the upholstered wall-bench in order to see above the intervening bodies. He was signalling them to join him.
They pushed through the crowd. Swaine said: ‘Thought you were never coming. You must have had your nosebags on for two hours. Looked in at the dining-room. There you were, champing away, and I thought that at the rate you were going you’d be out faster than colleague Bannister did his mile. Not a bit of it. I’ve been guarding this corner at risk of this an’ that for an hour or more.’ He looked round, and saw one of the waiters imported to help Shirl at a nearby table. ‘Hi! Sid. Two pints of Worthington and a strong ale twice.’ He turned to Masters. ‘Well, what news?’
‘Very little to give you. Something to ask you. The necks of the victims. No scratch marks?’
‘Nary a one. It nearly made a whore’s drawers of my investigation, I can tell you. I read it up, you know, just to make sure. And there should be scratches.’
‘Or bruises?’
‘In place of the scratches, yes. Of course there are the bruises caused by the strangler’s hands, just where I’d expect them to be, but none caused by the victims while struggling to release themselves.’
‘And they definitely weren’t dead when strangled?’ said Green.
‘Not a bit of it. I can assure you they were alive up to the time occlusion of the windpipe caused death.’
‘And they weren’t struck down or drugged?’
‘Definitely not.’
‘Nor their arms tied?’
‘Not a sign of a cord anywhere. As there would have been if they had been tied. Tight ropes would themselves have made marks, and looser bonds would have cut into the flesh of anybody struggling against them.’
‘It’s a real porridge,’ said Masters.
‘I’m delighted to hear you say so. Not because I don’t want you to succeed, but because I’ve been so bloody puzzled myself.’
‘Yet you didn’t mention this last night.’
‘Neither did you. I wanted to hear your unprompted reactions.’
Masters said: ‘Then how’s this? Pressure on the carotid arteries would stop the blood flow to the brain, wouldn’t it?’
‘Most certainly.’ He looked up as the waiter approached and paid him. ‘Thanks, Sid. Missus and kids over the flu yet?’
‘Going along nicely, Doctor, thank you.’
‘That’s the ticket. Take your wife a nip home with you. It’ll do her the world of good.’
The waiter promised to do so, and turned away to take more orders. Swaine said: ‘Cheers, gentlemen. Now where were we?’
‘Carotid arteries.’
‘Oh yes. Stop the flow and you’d knock them out in a dead faint all right.’
‘There you are, then,’ said Green.
‘No, you’re not there. I can’t tell you exactly how long the human brain can do without blood, because I’ve never experimented. And neither has anybody else. But I can tell you that the period will vary between different people.’
‘Within what bracket?’
‘I should say between twenty seconds in somebody old and frail and already suffering from partial cerebrovascular disease to as long as perhaps three minutes in a healthy person. And those women were good specimens. Most of us are, at forty, in spite of the beliefs of modern youth.’
‘So it might take longer to knock them out that way than to strangle them?’ Green asked.
‘It might, easily. But there are bigger snags than that. First of all the killer would have to find the carotids on both sides. Exactly, mind you. And that’s not easy. Then the depression would have left two bruises—one each side. And there weren’t any such bruises. And lastly, if he’d adopted that method there’d have been the same longitudinal scratching or bruising as for strangulation. The victim would try—with almost unlimited strength at such a time—to wrench away the killer’s hands. So I can assure you the carotids were not occluded.’
Green said ‘Thanks’ dryly, and picked up his tankard. Masters said: ‘Well, he managed it somehow, and we’ve got to find out how.’
Swaine raised his glass: ‘Good luck! You’ll need it.’
They talked together until time was called. Swaine left, and Masters with Green crossed the foyer. As they passed the card room, through the glass door, they caught a glimpse of Tintern playing an elderly man at chess. Masters paused for a moment. He said to Green: ‘Our friend’s winning.’
Green said, moving on: ‘I’ve never played chess.’
‘I get no time for it,’ said Masters. ‘All I ever do is the chess problems in the papers. Which is Hill’s room?’
Green led him to the room where the two sergeants, in shirt sleeves, were working at the lists of names. Papers in different scrawls covered the bed. Masters knew the answer before he asked the question: ‘Any luck?’
Hill said: ‘Not a skerrick. Sorry.’
‘Nothing at all?’
‘Well, they both know people called Smith—as you would expect. But not the same ones. And they both know a Harrison. But they’re not the same person either. One’s a male, one a female.’
‘Those five women must have had some common contacts,’ said Masters. ‘They’ve lived round here for forty years and moved in the same circles. Mrs Osborn and Mrs Burton went to the same school, didn’t they?’
‘Same school. Two years between them. And Osborn told me his missus had remarked before her own disappearance that she was acquainted with all the others,’ Green said.
‘That’s what I’d have thought.’
Brant said: ‘The only other overlap is among Christian names. There are about half a dozen Johns, three Marys, and several pairs of the more common monnikers.’
‘Bear them in mind. Computerize them in your old heads, and when we get the rest, we’ll see what you can come up with.’
Masters went alone to his own room. The large
scale map they had used in the morning was crumpled and folded against its original creases. He went down on his knees and spread it on the floor, smoothing it with his hands. It was a sorry mess. Bullimore’s original crosses, large and straggling, with the victims’ names written alongside, were overlapped by Green’s much neater, but profuse work. The original rays were drawn in, the bearing and distance lines, the new locations. All this on top of the features already printed on it made the area look like a child’s scribbling pad. Masters gazed at it for some minutes, seeking inspiration. Then, because his knees were sore, he got up and paced the room, filling his pipe, and frowning in thought. When the Warlock Flake was burning gently, he removed his jacket, slung it on the bed, and sat back in the armchair. His brain would not click over. He was trying to force it uphill to a peak which he knew was there but could not recognize. He felt if he could get over this hump he could freewheel down the other side. He tried logical thought. What was he looking for? He had to admit to himself he didn’t know. Was what he was attempting to do, useful? Did it matter that Bullimore had made a near guess at the locations of the graves? He had to admit that he’d never before known the need to pinpoint the location of a body to the nearest yard. These four made the corners of a four-sided box. An irregular box. Shaped a bit like a kite. But he remembered enough of his geometry to know that any four dots, made haphazardly on a piece of paper and then joined up, enclosed an irregular box. He got to his feet, and with his propelling pencil and the back of an envelope from his jacket pocket, experimented. No matter what he did, he got one of two or three shapes—rectangle, diamond or kite—all recognizably within each category, even though flattened or squashed or elongated.
He sat down again. A clock somewhere struck midnight, the chimes distorted by the wind which, in the stillness of the night, could still be heard gusting round the buildings.
Peeved by his lack of success, he picked up the map, and folded it yet again, flattening the new creases with his fine, slim fingers. Fingers which were so obviously the end product of generations of forbears who had never performed manual labour that they irritated Green. With just the relevant square foot or so of plan before him, Masters leaned back in his chair and gazed. No inspiration came. He cursed Bullimore for using a liquid pencil that couldn’t be rubbed out. Green at least had used pencil, and though his marks were no hair-lines, at least they could be rubbed out.
Rubbed out! Like those poor, unsuspecting women, who had gone. . . . He pulled himself together. His mind was wandering because of lack of sleep after a heavy day and through trying to cope with the problems of a new and difficult case before the previous one could be said to have been fairly completed. However, ‘rubbed out’ remained. He took the cap from the top of his propelling pencil. He used the small, red, cylindrical eraser on the lines drawn in by Green. Carefully. So as not to destroy the actual map spots of the graves. Fussily, he brushed away the dirty grey detritus, and again sat back to gaze at the plan. No inspiration.
He sat for ten minutes before getting up again to take the six-inch plastic ruler from his jacket pocket. The last time he had used this was for measuring the depth of a gunshot outlet wound. It had stirred clotted gore, and though well washed afterwards, he fancied he could still see dark brown stains remaining in the black measurement marks. Carefully, holding the pencil loosely so that it followed the ruler of its own free will, he stroked in faint new lines across the roughened surface. Green’s locations were marked by dots in little circles. He joined them up. Kite shape again. He decided he would join each one to every other one in turn. Then his tired brain realized that this would mean only two more lines—the diagonals which would represent the framework canes of the kite he’d had as a child. He completed his task. He was no further forward. He took up the rubber again and started to remove what he had done. The rubber was too small to allow him great sweeps across the map to obliterate his useless handiwork. He had to take it line by line, longitudinally. The lop-sided box first. With the edge of his little finger he brushed away the clinging crumbs of rubber, flicking the surface of the paper clean.
He stopped in mid stroke.
The diagonals remained. They made a perfect cross. Long stem and short stem, cutting exactly at right angles.
Something stirred in his mind. What was it? Just at one corner he hadn’t quite erased the box outline. It was there. A little dunce’s cap; an apex at the top of the long stem. An arrow-head.
His brain regathered a little energy. An arrow-head like those used for denoting north on a map. But this one pointed . . . where did it point? . . . he opened the sheet frenziedly to compare it with the printed north indicator . . . this one pointed east. Due east.
A cross pointing due east!
He remembered the head and foot markers in the four graves. Green had said the bodies had lain east and west. Heads to the east.
It must mean something. He peered closely at his work. The two stems of the cross intersected on the square, black blob of a bungalow. Then the idea came to him. The fifth body! Bullimore’s men had probed the open foreshore and dunes. Had they probed underneath these bungalows, each sitting above the ground on its bobbins of piles? Masters knew instinctively that they hadn’t. There were hundreds of bungalows. Many days’ work for many men. And the other bodies had been found in the open. No reason to search under bungalows.
But he now felt certain he knew where the fifth body was. Could pinpoint it. Symbolism . . . patterns . . . He pulled himself together. He was dropping off in the chair. With reluctant heaviness he moved over to the washbasin and swilled his face in cold water: cleaned his teeth against the foul taste of strong, stale tobacco: and undressed.
He slept this night without a vestige of a dream to trouble him.
*
At breakfast the next morning Green was grumbling. ‘Here we are. First down. Nobody else in the dining-room. All lying in except us.’
‘What about the waiters?’ said Hill.
Two rather bored young men and two rather older women were standing waiting to serve the host that hadn’t yet appeared. Every so often one of them looked across at the four policemen, not, apparently, to see if there was anything required on the table, but because they were the subject of the desultory conversation. Green, out of sheer cussedness waved a hand. When the waiter came Green said he didn’t like the chunks in Oxford marmalade, could he have some Golden Shred.
Brant said to Masters: ‘What’s the form this morning? Shall we go to the Osborns first and then on to one of the other three?’
‘No. We’ll do that this afternoon.’ He got no further with his explanation, because Tintern walked in and stopped at the door to complain that his morning tea had been late, and so he was late for breakfast. The conversation was audible in the quiet room. One of the waiters said: ‘It’s Sunday morning, Mr Tintern. An extra half hour in bed won’t do you any harm.’
‘I must be on time. I don’t like being late.’
‘Never mind, sir. It’s a day of rest. Now, how about a nice dish of ham and eggs to start you off properly?’
‘Ham and eggs to start me off? No. Grapefruit juice and toast only, please. And I’d like it straightaway or I shall be even later.’
Hill said quietly: ‘It’s just too bad about him.’
‘He looks a bit rough to me,’ said Brant.
‘Hectic game of chess last night. He’s exhausted,’ said Green. Masters was noticing that Tintern was again wearing the shirt with the ink-smudged collar and reflecting wryly that his Holmesian theory of the night before had been all wrong.
Tintern sat down a few tables away without a glance in their direction. The waiter hurried over to him with a glass of grapefruit juice and a rack of toast. ‘Here we are, sir. You get that down pretty nippy like, and you’ll find you’ve made up for lost time.’
‘I’ve lost my time maid,’ Tintern said.
The waiter stared for a moment and then laughed: ‘Oh, yes, sir. She didn’t come—t
he chambermaid—on time, did she? Pity that. I’ll have a word at the office, sir.’
Green said: ‘Some sense of humour! If I couldn’t crack a better joke than that, even at this time on a Sunday morning, I’d keep quiet. He’s lost his time maid, indeed. If she was anything like mine she needed losing.’
‘I’m in a bit of a hurry myself, so if you’d not mind pushing along . . .’ said Masters.
‘What’s up? Our interviewees won’t have opened their little eyes yet.’
‘We’re going to the dunes.’
‘Again? What the hell for?’
‘To dig up Mrs Barbara Severn.’
‘Oh no! The locals can do that. You’re not getting me digging up corpses a month . . .’ Green stopped, and stared at Masters: ‘You what? What did you say? Severn? Severn? She’s the one who hasn’t been found.’
‘She has now. I know where she is.’
Green looked sceptical, but he’d had enough experience of Masters to know that he never made claims such as this without justification. Of course, Green was thinking, he’ll slip up some day and I’ll have the laugh on him, but the bastard seems mighty sure of himself this time.
As if divining Green’s thoughts, Masters said: ‘The earlier we’re out there, the better. It’s Sunday, remember, and there may well be a rubbernecking crowd later on. I don’t want them there when we produce the body.’
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