by Dick Francis
Chapter Three
The punt had the name of the owner screwed on to the stern on a small metal plate. The lock-keeper, consulted, said that it came from a boatyard about a mile down the river, next to a pub; you couldn’t miss it.
‘That,’ I murmured to Keeble, ‘is where we had our drinks this morning.’
His eyelids flickered. He said to the lock-keeper, ‘I suppose a lot of punts from there come up through your lock?’
‘They sure do, on a fine Sunday like this,’ he agreed.
‘Did you happen to notice this one, with a girl and a young man in it? The girl had long fair hair, white trousers, and a pink shirt, and the boy was wearing tight pale blue jeans and a red-and-yellow check shirt.’
‘I should say they came up before my dinner break. I can’t remember anyone like that this afternoon.’
The lock-keeper eased the white-topped hat back on his head and eyed the boats lining up to go into the lock. He was a youngish man with an air of longsuffering patience, the occupational result, no doubt, of a life spent watching an endless procession of incompetence. People, he had said matter-of-factly, fell into his lock every day of the week. Near-drownings, however, were of no special interest to him: he too often had to deal with the unsaved.
‘Would you know them again?’ Keeble asked.
The lock-keeper shook his head decisively. ‘Not a chance. And if I don’t get back to my lock there’ll be a lot of bad tempers coming through the gates and as like as not we’ll be fishing out another one …’
He gave me a sketchy farewell salute as one of the few who had gone down his weir and walked away, and strolled unhurriedly back to deal with his Sunday going home traffic problem.
‘We may as well tow the punt back to the boatyard,’ Keeble said thoughtfully. ‘We’ve got to go down past there anyway, and they won’t be able to spare anyone to come and fetch it on a busy day like this. And maybe they’ll know where the boy and girl came from …’
And maybe they wouldn’t, I thought: but even the most hopeless questions have to be asked.
‘I’d like to look at the post,’ I said.
Keeble was agreeable, but Lynnie and Peter and their mother were horrified when they found where we were proposing to go, and said they would wait on the bank. In a row, with anxious faces, they stood guard over the punt, while Keeble neatly manoeuvred the Flying Linnet upstream a little way through the downcoming cruisers, and then drifted gently across towards the post. I, standing on the stern seat, caught hold of the crossbar with its emphatic warning and clung on to it while Keeble put the boat into reverse against the drag of the weir stream.
Once the engine was thrusting hard enough to hold its own, so that the tension on my arms slackened, I knelt down on the seat and tried to do what the girl had been doing, to pass a rope round the post from one hand to the other. The tendency of the two-ton Flying Linnet to drift away couldn’t have been much less to deal with than the weight of the punt, but even allowing also for the fact that my arms were longer and stronger, it was easy. I secured the rope and gave a thumbs up to Keeble, who stopped the engine. Then with one toe wedged and the narrow side of the boat under my pelvis, I shoved up the sleeves of the brown sweater and leaned down and over to inspect the scenery.
‘For God’s sake be careful,’ Keeble said, his voice sharp over the noise of the weir.
I turned my head and laughed at him.
‘We haven’t any more dry clothes,’ he pointed out, scowling. ‘None that you can get into. If you fall in again you’ll have to go home wet.’
Smiling, I turned back to the post. But feel and look how I might, there was nothing out of the ordinary about the square sturdy white-painted baulk of timber set rock-like up on end in the Thames’ bed.
Keeble shrugged and said, ‘I told you so,’ and steered his boat back to the bank.
‘How about fingerprinting the punt?’ I said.
‘You never let up.’
‘You should be glad of it.’
The long line of past occasions when not letting up had led to a useful harvest rose up between us, and I saw his conviction waver.
‘All right, Gene, if you’re sure.’
‘Get Raben to do it. He’s the best.’
‘All right. Tomorrow.’
‘How about the police?’
He pursed his lips. ‘It’s not our usual territory. More theirs I agree. But they’re not likely to take your theory seriously, or to act on it, unless we tell them what your job is … and impress them with it. No, I’m not in favour of that. We could just go along with this quietly on our own for a little while, I think.’
‘So that if nothing turns up, we won’t have made bloody fools of ourselves?’
All his facial muscles contracted for a second. ‘You are not paid to turn your perceptions on your boss.’
‘I probably am.’
‘That’s a point.’
The boat grounded gently against the bank, and I helped Joan and Lynnie back on board. Peter, on his father’s directions, stepped into the punt and handed him up the mooring rope, which Keeble fastened to the cleat on the Flying Linnet’s stern. Then, towing the punt, we took our turn into the lock, explained what we were doing to the lock-keeper, and cruised downstream to the pub and its next door boatyard.
A flustered middle-aged boatman there was trying to cope with returning family picnic parties and a bunch of youths and girls who wanted to fill in the half hour before the pub opened at seven o’clock. The late afternoon shone redly on his big sweating face and his freckled bald head, and we had to wait while he juggled his customers precariously in and out of skiffs and punts and took their money and warned the young couples that it was an offence to be on the river without lights after dark and that the boatyard closed at nine-thirty anyway.
When Keeble at last had a chance he asked the boatman if he had seen the girl with fair hair and the boy in a red-and-yellow check shirt who had hired a punt that morning.
‘Seen ’em? I suppose so, I’ve been here all day.’
‘I mean, do you remember them?’ Keeble said patiently.
‘Where are they then?’ The boatman looked round suspiciously.
‘They’ve gone,’ Keeble began.
‘Then who’s going to settle up?’ said the boatman belligerently, this last problem looking to be just one too many for his temper.
‘Oh, I will,’ said Keeble soothingly. He took his wallet out of his back pocket and unfolded it to show the usual thickish wad. Keeble didn’t have to live on Her Majesty’s pay and worked from conviction, not need; his beer money represented a week’s wage to me, and his boat a year’s.
‘How much do they owe you?’ He handed over what the boatman asked and offered a fiver on top. ‘I’d like to hire this punt for this evening and tomorrow,’ he said. ‘Is that all right?’
The boatman took the money without hesitation and made a few half-hearted efforts to appear cautious.
‘Where’ll you be taking it?’
‘Henley,’ Keeble said.
‘You won’t leave the cushions out if it rains?’
Keeble shook his head.
‘All right then.’ The boatman had already tucked the notes away. ‘And you’ll bring it back tomorrow?’
‘Tomorrow afternoon,’ Keeble agreed. ‘Now, about those young people who took it this morning …’
Unexpectedly the boatman suddenly leered. ‘I remember ’em,’ he said, ‘come to think of it, they was the two who had no business to be out together.’
‘What do you mean?’ Keeble asked.
‘Well, see, this girl, she said like, what if her old man had put detectives on her, what would they say if she went off all day with him in a punt, and how she’d said she’d only come out as long as it was nothing anyone could use in a divorce. And the fellow in the check shirt turned round and said old money bags, meaning her old man, see, would never find out where they’d been, he was in France on business wasn’t he
, or somesuch, and then they took note that I was standing there hearing and they sort of nudged each other and shut up. But I reckon as they were off for a bit on the side see, and didn’t want no one to catch ‘em.’
‘Exactly,’ said Keeble to me with another touch of I-told-you-so.
‘And very nicely done,’ I agreed. ‘Artistic.’
‘You haven’t seen them since this morning, I suppose?’ Keeble said to the boatman. ‘Do you happen to know how they got here?’
‘Car,’ said the boatman, waving an arm. ‘They came from the car park back there.’
‘Which car, do you know?’
He gave Keeble a pitying stare. ‘Look, there’s cars in and out all day, what with the pub and us. And I’m looking at the river, see, with my hands full an’ all, and I couldn’t tell you no one who’s come and gone nor what they came in, but they must have come in a car, because they come in the morning, and there’s no buses along here on Sundays before half-two in the afternoon.’
‘Thank you anyway,’ said Keeble, sighing. ‘You’ve been very helpful.’ He added another pound to his overpayment and the boatman’s eyes swivelled rapidly from the pub to the clock over the boathouse door. Still ten minutes until the bar opened. I proceeded to fill them.
‘Did the young man, or the girl, or both of them, speak with any special type of accent?’ I asked.
Since he spoke broad Berkshire himself, the boatman’s hesitation was understandable. ‘They talked’, he said, considering, ‘like they do on the telly.’
‘Not much help,’ Keeble commented.
‘How do you lash the end of your punts’ mooring ropes?’ I asked.
‘Eh?’ said the boatman, puzzled.
‘Do you lash the end of the ropes to stop them unravelling?’
‘Oh, I get you. No, we splice ’em. Turn the ends back and sort of weave them in. Lashing’s no good as it comes undone too easily.’
I unwound the punt’s mooring rope from the Flying Linnet’s stern cleat. ‘This one is coming undone, though.’
‘Let’s see that,’ he said suspiciously, and I gave it to him. He twisted the frayed unravelling strands in his strong dirty fingers and hovered in what I guessed to be a fairly usual mixture of fury and resignation.
‘These bleeding vandals … excuse me, ma’am,’ he apologized to Joan. ‘These so and sos, they tie up to a tree, see, or something, and come they want to push on, they can’t undo the knots if the rope’s wet, and they just don’t bother, they cut through the rope and off they go.’
‘Does that often happen?’
‘Every summer, we has this trouble now and then.’ He pulled the rope up straight, measuring its length with his eye. ‘There’s a good four or five feet gone off this one, I shouldn’t wonder. We’ve been talking of switching to chains, but they can get into holy terrors of knots, chains can. Here,’ he added to Keeble, ‘you’d better have another punt, one with a better rope.’
‘This one will be fine,’ Keeble said, fastening it on again. ‘We’ll see you tomorrow.’
He towed the punt down to Henley and right into the garage-like boathouse which kept the English summer off the Flying Linnet. The punt was secured alongside by Peter and his father and everyone disembarked along a narrow boardwalk carrying things like the remains from lunch, newspapers, bathing towels, and in my case, wet clothes and a loaded jacket, out through the boathouse and into Keeble’s Rover, which was parked on a neat square of grass at the back.
Peter’s main care was for his precious camera, again hanging round his neck on its cord.
‘I suppose,’ I said idly, ‘you didn’t happen to take a photograph up there by the weir? You didn’t happen to get a shot of those people in the punt?’
He shook his head, blinking like his father.
‘Gosh, no, I didn’t. I don’t suppose actually I would have thought of taking one, not when everything was happening, do you think? I mean, it would have looked a bit off if you and Mr Teller had been drowning and I was just standing there taking pictures and so on.’
‘You’ll never be a newspaperman,’ I said, grinning at him.
‘Wouldn’t you have minded, then?’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘But, anyway,’ he said mournfully, ‘I couldn’t, you see, because I finished the film at lunch-time and I didn’t have another one, so even if there had been a fire or something I couldn’t have taken it.’ He looked at his camera thoughtfully. ‘I won’t finish up any more films in the middle of the day, just in case.’
‘A fire,’ I agreed seriously, ‘would anyway make a much better picture than just people drowning, which they mostly do out of sight.’
Peter nodded, considering me. ‘You know, you’re quite sensible, aren’t you?’
‘Peter!’ exclaimed his mother in unnecessary apology. ‘That’s not the way to talk.’ And she wasn’t much pleased when I said as far as I was concerned he could say what he liked.
Keeble drove round to the station car park, where Lynnie and I transferred to the Austin.
‘I’ll ring in the morning,’ Keeble said, standing half out of his respectable car.
‘Right.’
‘Take care of Lynnie.’
‘I’ll do that.’
Lynnie kissed her parents goodbye, but her father more warmly, and made a face at Peter as the Rover rolled away out of the gate. Then she climbed into the Austin, waited until I was sitting beside her, and stretched out her hand to the ignition.
She was trembling again.
‘Shall I drive?’ I said mildly, making it absolutely her own choice.
She put both her hands in her lap and looked straight out through the windscreen. Her face was pale above the orange dress.
‘I thought you were both dead.’
‘I know.’
‘I still feel churned up. It’s silly.’
‘It’s not silly. And I expect you’re fond of Dave Teller.’
‘He’s sent us presents and things, since we were little.’
‘A nice man.’
‘Yes.’ She sighed deeply and after a pause said calmly, ‘I think it would be better, if you really don’t mind, if you drive back.’
‘Of course I will.’
We changed places, and went back to London with more cars passing us than we passed. At Chiswick roundabout I said I would drive her to her flat and go home by taxi, but with a sideways laughing glance she said no taxi would stop for me in her father’s clothes, and that she was feeling better and could quite easily do the last lap herself: so I rolled round the few corners to Putney and stopped outside my own front door.
Summer dusk filled the quiet streets. No one about. Lynnie looked out of her window upwards at the tall house, and shivered.
‘You’re cold,’ I said, concerned for her bare arms.
‘No … I have a cardigan in the back … I was just thinking about your flat.’
‘What about it?’
‘It’s so … empty.’ She gave a half laugh, shrugging it off. ‘Well, I hope you won’t have nightmares, after today.’
‘No …’ I collected my things and got out of the car, and she moved over into the driver’s seat.
‘Will they have saved any dinner for you at the hostel?’ I asked.
‘Not a hope,’ she said cheerfully. ‘But I expect there’ll be some cake and milk about, there usually is.’
‘Would you care to eat with me? Not up there,’ I added hastily, seeing the beginnings of well-brought-up suspicion. ‘In a restaurant, I mean.’
‘I’ve my mother to thank for my beastly mind,’ she said unexpectedly. ‘I really am rather hungry, and I don’t see at all why I shouldn’t have supper in your flat, if you’ve got any food.’ And without more ado she got out of the car and locked it, and stood expectantly beside me on the pavement.
‘There are some tins,’ I said, reflecting. ‘Wait here just a second, would you. I just want to have a look round the back.’
�
�Round the back?’
‘For burglars,’ I said sardonically. But I went to look, as usual, at the powder-coated bottom flight of the fire escape. No one had been up or down all day.
Lynnie climbed the stairs to the fourth floor as easily as before, and having checked via a well-placed paper clip that my door hadn’t been opened since I had shut it that morning, I put the key in the lock and let us in.
The green plastic lampshade in my sitting room scattered its uncosy glare over the tidy room, switching the soft grey light outside into sudden black, and evoking the forlornness of institution buildings on winter afternoons. It wouldn’t be much trouble, I thought, to go out and buy myself a red shade in the morning, and see if it propagated rosy thoughts instead.
‘Sit down,’ I suggested. ‘Are you warm enough? Switch the electric fire on if you’d like it. I think I’ll go and change, and then we can decide about going out.’
Lynnie nodded, but took things into her own hands. When I came out of the bedroom she had already investigated my meagre store cupboard and had lined up a packet of soup, some eggs, and a tin of anchovies.
‘Soup, and anchovies on scrambled eggs,’ she said.
‘If you’d really like that,’ I said doubtfully.
‘I can’t cook much else.’
I laughed. ‘All right. I’ll do the coffee.’
There were burnt specks in the eggs when she had finished, which harmonized nicely with the scraped off over-done toast and the brown anchovy strips, and there had been a slight over-emphasis on pepper.
‘No one’, she sighed, ‘is going to marry me for my cordon bleu.’
There were plenty of other reasons why she’d be fending off suitors knee-deep in a year or two: a curvy figure, delicate neck, baby skin; the touch-me-not expression, the awakening social courage, the quick compassion. No one was going to care if she couldn’t cook. But she wasn’t secure enough to be told so at that moment.
‘When were you seventeen?’ I asked.
‘The week before last.’
‘You didn’t waste much time passing the driving test.’
‘I’ve been able to drive since I was eight. Peter can, too.’ She finished her eggs and stirred two heaped teaspoonfuls of sugar into her coffee. ‘I was hungry. Funny, that.’