Dead Water

by Ngaio Marsh

  Jenny stayed for a minute or two, talking to Trehern who presently said something of which Alleyn only caught the tone of the voice. This was unmistakable. He turned quickly, saw that she was disconcerted and angry and called out: ‘How do you feel about tea and a bun? Wally: do you like ice-cream?’

  Wally at once took Jenny’s hand and began to drag her to a door marked Teas at the end of the room.

  There was nobody else in the tea-room. An elderly woman, whom Jenny addressed by name, took their order.

  ‘Was he being offensive, that type in there?’ Alleyn asked in French.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter in the least,’ Jenny said. ‘What sort of tea do you like? Strong?’

  ‘Weak and no milk.’ Alleyn contemplated Wally whose face was already daubed with ice-cream. He ate with passionate, almost trembling, concentration.

  ‘It was raining this morning, wasn’t it, Wally?’

  He nodded slightly.

  ‘Were you out in the rain?’

  Wally laughed and blew ice-cream across the table.

  ‘Wally, don’t,’ Jenny said. ‘Eat it properly, old boy. You were out in the rain, weren’t you? Your shoes are muddy.’

  ‘So I wor, then. I don’t mind the rain, do I?’

  ‘No,’ Jenny said and added rather sadly: ‘You’re a big boy now.’

  ‘I don’t suppose,’ Alleyn suggested, ‘there was anybody else out in that storm was there? I bet there wasn’t.’

  ‘Was there, Wally? Out in the rain?’

  ‘There wur! There wur!’ he shouted and banged the table.

  ‘All right. All right. Who was it?’

  Wally thrust his tongue into the cornet. ‘There wur,’ he said.

  ‘This is heavy work,’ Alleyn observed mildly.

  Jenny asked the same question and Wally at once said: ‘I seen ‘er. I seen the old b…Yah!’

  ‘Who do you mean? Who did you see?’

  He flourished his right arm: the gesture was as uncoordinated and wild as a puppet’s, but it was not to be mistaken. He made as if to throw something. Jenny caught back an exclamation.

  ‘Who did you see? Was it – ’ Jenny looked at Alleyn who nodded. ‘Was it Miss Pride?’

  ‘Pridey-Pridey bang on the bell

  Smash and bash ‘er and send ‘er to hell.’

  ‘Wally! who taught you that?’

  ‘The kids,’ he said promptly, and began again: ‘Pridey-Pridey –’

  ‘Stop. Don’t do that, Wally. Be quiet.’ She said to Alleyn: ‘It’s true, I heard them, yesterday evening.’

  Wally pushed the last of the cornet into his mouth. ‘I want another,’ he said indistinctly.

  Coombe had come in from the parlour. Wally’s back was towards him. Alleyn gave a warning signal and Coombe stayed where he was. Trehern loomed up behind him, smirking and curious. Coombe turned and jerked his thumb. Trehern hesitated and Coombe shut the door in his face.

  ‘More,’ said Wally.

  ‘You may have another,’ Alleyn said, before Jenny could protest. ‘Tell me what happened when you were out in the rain this morning.’

  He lowered his head and glowered. ‘Another one. More,’ he said.

  ‘Where was Miss Pride?’

  ‘Up along.’

  ‘By the gate?’

  ‘By the gate,’ he repeated like an echo.

  ‘Did you see her go away?’

  ‘She come back.’

  Jenny’s hand went to her lips.

  Alleyn said: ‘Did Miss Pride come back?’

  He nodded.

  ‘Along the path? When?’

  ‘She came back,’ Wally shouted irritably. ‘Back!’

  ‘A long time afterwards?’

  ‘Long time.’

  ‘And went into the Spring? She went through the gate and into the Spring? Is that right?’

  ‘It’s my Spring. She be’ant allowed up to my Spring.’

  He again made his wild throwing gesture. ‘Get out!’ he bawled.

  ‘Did you throw a rock at Miss Pride? Like that?’

  Wally turned his head from side to side. ‘You dunno what I done,’ he said. ‘I ain’t telling.’

  ‘Tell Miss Williams.’

  ‘No, I won’t, then.’

  ‘Did you throw stones, Wally?’ Jenny asked. ‘One evening? Did you?’

  He looked doubtfully at her and then said: ‘Where’s my dad?’

  ‘In there. Wally, tell me.’

  He leant his smeared face towards her and she stooped her head. Alleyn heard him whisper: ‘It’s a secret.’

  ‘What is?’

  ‘They stones. Like my dad said.’

  ‘Is the rock a secret, too?’

  He pulled back from her. ‘I dunno nothing about no rock,’ he said vacantly. ‘I want another.’

  ‘Was Miss Cost at the Spring?’ Alleyn asked.

  Wally scowled at him.

  ‘Wally,’ Jenny said, taking his hand, ‘did you see Miss Cost? In the rain? This morning? Was Miss Cost at the Spring?’

  ‘At the fustyvell.’

  ‘Yes, at the festival. Was she at the Spring this morning too? In the rain?’

  ‘This is getting positively fugal,’ Alleyn muttered.

  ‘This morning,’ Jenny repeated.

  ‘Not this morning. At the fustyvell,’ said Wally. ‘I want another one.’

  ‘In a minute,’ Alleyn said. ‘Soon. Did you see a man this morning in a motor-boat?’ And, by a sort of compulsion, he added: ‘In the rain?’

  ‘My dad’s got the biggest launch.’

  ‘Not your dad’s launch. Another man in another launch. Dr Maine. Do you know Dr Maine?’

  ‘Doctor,’ said Wally vacantly.

  ‘Yes. Did you see him?’

  ‘I dunno.’

  Alleyn said to Jenny: ‘Maine noticed him at about half past seven.’ He waited for a moment and then pressed on: ‘Wally: where were you when you saw the lady at the Spring? Where were you?’

  Wally pushed his forefinger round and round the table, leaving a greasy trail on the plastic surface. He did this with exaggerated violence and apparently no interest.

  ‘You couldn’t get in, could you?’ Alleyn suggested. ‘You couldn’t get through the gates.’

  With his left hand, Wally groped under his smock. He produced a number of entrance discs, let them fall on the table and shoved them about with violent jabs from his forefinger. They clattered to the floor.

  ‘Did you go into the Spring this morning?’

  He began to make a high whimpering sound.

  ‘It’s no good,’ Jenny said. ‘When he starts that it’s no good. He’ll get violent. He may have an attack. Really, you mustn’t. Really. I promise, you mustn’t.’

  ‘Very well,’ Alleyn said. ‘I’ll get him his ice-cream.’

  ‘Never mind, Wally, it’s all right,’ Jenny said. ‘It’s all right now. Isn’t it?’

  He looked at her doubtfully and then, with that too familiar gesture, reached his hands out towards her.

  ‘O don’t!’ Jenny whispered. ‘O Wally, don’t show me your hands.’

  II

  When Wally had absorbed his second ice-cream they left the tea-room by a door that, as it turned out, led into the back garden.

  Coombe said: ‘We’ve come the wrong way,’ but Alleyn was looking at a display of greyish undergarments hung out to dry. A woman of unkempt appearance was in the yard. She stared at them with bleared disfavour.

  ‘Private,’ she said and pointed to a dividing fence. ‘You’m trespassing.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Mrs Trehern,’ Jenny said. ‘We made a mistake.’

  Trehern had come out through a back door. ‘Get in, woman,’ he said. ‘Get in.’ He took his wife by her arm and shoved her back into the house. ‘There’s the gate,’ he said to Alleyn. ‘Over yon.’

  Alleyn had wandered to the clothes-line. A surplus length dangled from the pol
e. It had been recently cut.

  ‘I wonder,’ he said, ‘if you could spare me a yard of this. The bumper-bar on my car’s loose.’

  ‘Be’ant none to spare. Us needs it. Rotten anyways and no good to you. There’s the gate.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Alleyn said and they went out.

  ‘Was it the same as the trip-wire?’ he asked Coombe.

  ‘Certainly was: but I reckon they all use it.’

  ‘It’s old but it’s been newly cut. Have you kept the trip-wire?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How was it fastened?’

  ‘With iron pegs. They use them when they dry out their nets.’

  ‘Well, let’s move on, shall we?’

  Patrick was sitting in a dinghy alongside the jetty, looking aloof and disinterested. Wally made up to a new pair of sightseers.

  ‘That was very nice of you,’ Alleyn said to Jenny. ‘And I’m more than obliged.’

  ‘I hated it. Mr Alleyn, he really isn’t responsible. You can see what he’s like.’

  ‘Do you think he threw the stones at Miss Emily the other night?’

  She said, very unhappily: ‘Yes.’

  ‘So do I.’

  ‘But nothing else. I’m sure: nothing more than that.’

  ‘You may be right. I’d be very grateful, by the way, if you’d keep the whole affair under your hat. Will you do that?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said slowly. ‘All right. Yes, of course, if you say so.’

  ‘Thank you very much. One other thing. Have you any idea who the Green Lady could have been?’

  Jenny looked startled. ‘No, I haven’t. Somehow or another I’ve sort of forgotten to wonder. She may not have been real at all.’

  ‘What did he say about her?’

  ‘Only that she was very pretty and her hair shone in the sun. And that she said his warts would be all gone.’

  ‘Nothing else?’

  ‘No – nothing.’

  ‘Has he got that sort of imagination – to invent her?’

  Jenny said slowly: ‘I don’t think he has.’

  ‘I don’t think so either.’

  ‘Not only that,’ Jenny said. ‘He’s an extraordinarily truthful little boy. He never tells lies – never.’

  ‘That’s an extremely valuable piece of information,’ Alleyn said. ‘Now go and placate your young man.’

  ‘I’ll be blowed if I do. He can jolly well come off it,’ she rejoined but Alleyn thought she was not altogether displeased with Patrick. He watched her climb down into the dinghy. It ducked and bobbed towards the far point of the bay. She looked up and waved to him. Her tawny hair, shone in the bright sunshine.

  ‘That’s a pleasing young lady,’ said Coombe. ‘What did you make of the lad?’

  ‘We’re not much further on, are we?’

  ‘Aren’t we, though? He as good as said he threw the stones that evening and what’s more he has good as let on his dad had told him to keep his mouth shut.’

  ‘Yes. Yes, it looked like that, didn’t it?’

  ‘Well, then?’

  ‘He wouldn’t say anything about the rock. He says he saw Miss Pride leave and return. The figure that returned may have been Miss Cost.’

  ‘Ah!’ said Coombe with satisfaction.

  ‘Dr Maine, you remember, noticed Wally dodging about the road up to the Spring soon after half past seven. Miss Pride saw him at much the same time. Miss Pride got back to the pub at five to eight. She didn’t encounter Miss Cost. Say the seven o’clock service ended about ten to eight – we’ll have to find out about that – it would mean that Miss Cost would get to the causeway – when?’

  ‘About eight.’

  ‘Just after Miss Pride had gone indoors. And to the Spring?’

  ‘Say a quarter past.’

  ‘And I found her body at ten past nine.’

  Coombe said: ‘The kid would have had time between seven-thirty and eight-fifteen, to let himself into the enclosure and take cover behind that boulder. Before she came.’

  ‘Why should he do that? He thought Miss Pride had gone. He saw her go. Why should he anticipate her return?’

  ‘Just one of his silly notions.’

  ‘Yes,’ Alleyn said. ‘One of his silly notions. Put that boy in the witness-box and we’d look as silly as he does. If he’s at the end of this case, Coombe, we’ll only get a conviction on factual evidence, not on anything the poor little devil says. Unmistakable prints of his boots behind the boulder, for instance.’

  ‘You saw the ground. A mess.’ Coombe reddened. ‘I suppose I slipped up there. We were on the place before I thought.’

  ‘It’s so easy,’ Alleyn said, saving his face for him. ‘Happens to the best of us.’

  ‘It was all churned up, wasn’t it? Almost as if – ?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Now I come to think of it, almost as if, before the doctor and I went up, someone had kind of scuffled it.’

  ‘Yes. Behind the boulder and the trace of the rock. There was a flat bit of stone, did you notice, lying near the bank. Muddy edge. It might have been used to obliterate prints.’

  ‘I suppose,’ Coombe said, ‘in a quiet type of division like this, you get a bit rusty. I could kick myself. At my time of life!’

  ‘It may not amount to much. After all, we can isolate your prints and Dr Maine’s from the rest.’

  ‘Well, yes. Yes, you can do that, all right. But still!’

  Alleyn looked at his watch. It was just on noon. He suggested that they return to the mainland and call on the rectory. The tide was coming in and they crossed the channel by dinghy. There was Alleyn’s car by the jetty with his luggage in it. If things had gone according to plan, he would have been half-way to Troy by now.

  They left it where it stood. The rectory was a five minutes’ walk along the front. It stood between a small and charming Norman church and Dr Maine’s Convalescent Home: a pleasant late-Georgian house with the look, common to parsonages, of being exposed to more than its fair share of hard usage.

  ‘It was a poorish parish, this,’ Coombe said, ‘but with the turn things have taken over the last two years, it’s in better shape. The stipend’s gone up for one thing. A lot of people that reckon they’ve benefited by the Spring, make donations. It’d surprise you to know the amounts that are put into the restoration-fund boxes. I’m people’s warden,’ he added, ‘should have been there myself at ten-thirty for the family service. The Rector’ll be back home by now. It’s his busy day, of course.’

  They found Mrs Carstairs briskly weeding. She wore a green linen dress and her hair, faded yellow, made an energetic sort of halo round her head. Her church-going hat, plastic raincoat, gloves and prayer-book were scattered in a surrealistic arrangement along the border. When Alleyn was introduced she shook hands briskly and said she supposed he’d come about this dreadful business and wanted to see her husband who was, of course, appalled.

  ‘He’s in the study,’ she said to Coombe. ‘Those accounts from the dry-rot people are all wrong again, Mr Coombe, and the Mayor suggests a combined memorial service but we don’t quite think – however.’

  ‘I’d really like a word with you, if I may,’ Alleyn said. ‘We’re trying to trace Miss Cost’s movements early this morning.’

  ‘O dear! Yes. Well, of course.’

  She confirmed Dr Maine’s account. Miss Cost had attended the first celebration at seven o’clock and they had met at the gate. ‘She was in a great fuss, poor thing, because of my necklace.’

  ‘Your necklace?’

  ‘Yes. It’s really rather a nice old one. Pinchbeck and paste but long and quite good. I lent with reluctance but she was so keen to have it because of the glitter and then, of course, what must her great Cissy do but drop it at the first thunder-clap and in the stampede, nobody remembered. I said we’d retrieve it after church or why not let Cissy go? But no: she made a great to-do, poor Miss Cost (when one thinks) and insisted that she would go herself. She was rather an o
n-goer: conversationally, if you know what I mean: on and on and I wanted to go into church and say my prayers and it was pouring. So then she saw Dr Maine and she was curious to know if it was Mrs Trethaway’s twins, though of course in the event it wasn’t twins, (that was all nonsense) so I’m afraid I left her to tackle him as she clearly died to do. And after church I saw her streak off through the rain before anyone could offer. Isn’t it dreadful?’ Mrs Carstairs asked energetically. ‘Well, isn’t it? Adrian! Can you spare a moment, dear?’

  ‘Coming.’

  The Rector, wearing his cassock, emerged through french windows. He said how extraordinary it was that Alleyn should have been at Portcarrow, added that they were lucky to have him and then became doubtful and solemn. ‘One finds it hard to believe,’ he said. ‘One, is appalled.’

  Alleyn asked him when the first service ended and he said at about a quarter to eight. ‘I’d expected a large congregation. There are so many visitors. But the downpour, no doubt, kept a lot of folk away and there were only six communicants. The nine o’clock was crowded.’

  Alleyn wondered absently why clergymen were so prone to call people ‘folk’ and asked Mr Carstairs if he knew Miss Cost very well. He seemed disturbed and said: well, yes, in so far as she was a member of his congregation. He glanced at his wife and added: ‘Our friendship with Miss Cost was perhaps rather limited by our views on the Spring. I could not sympathize or, indeed, approve of her, as I thought, rather extravagant claims. I thought them woolly,’ said the Rector. ‘Woolly and vulgar.’ He expounded, carefully, his own attitude which, in its anxious compromise, declared, Alleyn thought, its orthodoxy.

  ‘And you saw her,’ he asked, ‘after the service?’

  They said simultaneously that they did.

  ‘I’m one of those parsons who come out to the porch and see folk off,’ the Rector explained. ‘But Miss Cost was on her way when I got there. Going down the path. Something about my wife’s necklace. Wasn’t it, Dulcie?’

  ‘Yes, dear. I told Mr Alleyn.’

  Coombe said: ‘The necklace has been recovered and will be returned in due course, Mrs Carstairs.’