by Vernon Loder
“Yes, sir, that seems true. I am inclined to think that it may lie among the débris a few yards up the slope below the cliffs. Or it might have been flung among the trees and bushes below the bridge.”
“And there’s a mass of bush and brambles at the back of that old quarry, where Mrs. Hayes said he parked her car, sir,” added the Superintendent.
They separated after that; a warrant was applied for and made out, and Inspector Parfitt journeyed next morning to the hotel, and asked to see Mrs. Hayes.
“If she doesn’t mind coming in my sidecar, I can drive her to Cwyll,” he told Miss Pole, the hotel secretary. “Mr. Rigby wants to see her.”
Mrs. Hayes came to him presently in the office. She saw something grim and grave in his face that told her the nature of his errand, but she looked as composed as usual, and merely shrugged when he gave her the usual warning, and showed his warrant, before charging her formally with the murder of her husband.
“It’s quite absurd, of course, Inspector,” she said, when he had finished. “But, of course, I will come with you. Do I hold out my hands for the handcuffs?” she added, with a wintry smile.
“That will not be necessary, madam,” he replied. “If you care to get some things to take with you, I will wait for you here.”
“I suppose they could be sent after me?”
“If you leave a note for Miss Pole, madam, she will see to lt. We can get away without any fuss If you do that.”
Mrs. Hayes assented, sat down at Miss Pole’s desk, took up a pen, and wrote a few lines, which she put in an envelope, and laid on the desk.
“I suppose you haven’t found the gaff yet, Inspector?” she said, as she got up.
“No, madam, not yet.”
She had come down with her hat on, and they went out at once to the sidecar, unobserved by anyone but the Boots, who was at the gate of the hotel-yard, and Miss Pole, who was anxiously surveying the scene from the window of a passage on the first-floor.
“I am sure you realise that this is not a very pleasant duty for me, madam,” said Parfitt, when they had started. He was strangely impressed by her calm.
“I am quite sure it is not, Inspector,” she replied, with a smile. “But I hope you won’t distress yourself about it. I feel confident that no one can prove me guilty of a crime I didn’t commit.”
“I hope so, indeed, madam,” he said. “I’d sooner be wrong than right in a case like this.”
* * *
If Miss Pole was discreet, the Boots was too full of what he considered sensational news to keep the departure of Mrs. Hayes in company with the Detective-Inspector a secret.
Hoad came in for his car a minute after Parfitt had gone and the Boots told him excitedly that Mrs. Hayes had been taken off by the police. Hoad abandoned the little ride he had in mind, and hastened to impart the news to Bow, whom he met coming down the stairs in the hotel. Bow dashed to the garage for his car, and left hurriedly for Cwyll.
Harry Wint and Joan Powis returned from a walk a few minutes later, and Hoad held them up to tell them what had happened.
Wint listened with amazement; Joan, after the first few sentences, hurried in to ask Miss Pole what had happened.
“I wonder if she did do it?” said Hoad earnestly. “I don’t blame her if she did kill the brute.”
“Oh, shut up!” cried Wint, turning away. “Don’t be a fool! It’s just about as likely that you killed Hayes, if it comes to that.”
Hoad stared at him, and his mouth dropped open. But he did not reply. Instead, he turned back into the hotel, leaving Wint staring after him.
Chapter XXI
The Water Hunt
“IT’S quite true, Harry!” Joan cried, as she hurried out from the hotel, a horrified expression on her face. Miss Pole says the Inspector only said he wanted her to ask some questions, but she left a note asking for some clothes to be sent on to Cwyll.”
“How did she go?” asked Wint. “In the sidecar with Parfitt?”
“Yes. Parfitt looked very serious, Miss Pole says. And I am sure it must be an arrest.”
“We ought to find Bow, and tell him.”
“Mr. Bow heard, and rushed off in his car a few minutes ago. I expect he has gone to Cwyll after her, though I don’t see what good he can do.”
“Oh he may want to get a solicitor to represent her. As the inquest’s over, they will bring her before the magistrates, I expect.”
“How ghastly!” Joan cried. “I am quite sure she never did it. How I wish we could help her.”
“Help her!” said Wint ruefully. “I am afraid we have done for her, telling Parfitt what she—I mean about her knowing Bow before, and so on.”
Joan bit her lip. She felt sorry now that she had spoken, though at the time she had believed herself to be right in helping the police. But the case was altered now, from her point of view. She had suspected Mrs. Hayes at first; since then she had become convinced that Hayes’s wife had had nothing to do with his death.
“I wonder if Parfitt got some fresh evidence?” she asked.
“He must have done. I hear he saw Davis last. We’ll go to see Davis after lunch, shall we? He may tell us something that will give us a hint.”
She agreed. “We must. But could Davis have seen her that night, and kept it dark till now?”
“I don’t think so. That would make him an accessory of a kind, and they would arrest him too.”
Lunch was a pandemonium. All the people at the hotel ate little and talked much. Tables exchanged views with tables. Six new people had turned up that day, attracted by the notoriety, or unaware of the crime until they reached Pengellert. They wanted to know all about it, and Joan and Wint were glad to cut a course, and start for Davis’s cottage, to get away from the medley.
As they passed a point of the road where the river was visible across fifty yards of pasture, they saw Davis. He was fishing a pool, and his rather listless casting suggested to Wint that the man was fishing rather to forget his cares than for any pleasure in the game.
“We’ll cut across and see him,” he said, and he and Joan walked quickly across the field, and greeted Davis.
He reeled in his line slowly, put his rod on the bank, and looked at them gloomily. The death of Blodwen Tysin had evidently affected him deeply. His face looked lined and old, his eyes were dull and lacked lustre.
“The police have arrested Mrs. Hayes,” said Joan, while Wint still hesitated to open the bail. “Had you heard?”
“No, Miss,” said Davis. “I hadn’t, indeed. What did they arrest her for?”
“Killing her husband.”
Davis laughed sardonically. “Well, well. They’re going to make fools of themselves, Miss. I don’t believe that lady had any hand in it. What would she know about gaffs, and where would she find one at night, not knowing the river? You’d think gaffs hung on every bush, the way the police talk.”
Wint nodded. “We were coming over to see you when we caught sight of you here. It struck us that Parfitt must have got some new evidence, and I believe he saw you last.”
“I saw two of them yesterday; him and the constable,” said Davis. “They wanted to know how I lost my old gaff, and I told them.”
“Did you lose one, and when?” asked Wint, staring at the man with new interest.
Davis explained. “Though how that muddles up the lady in it, I don’t know,” he added. “But I suppose the police must look busy, even if they aren’t. I shouldn’t worry about the lady, if I were you, miss. How can they prove anything?”
“I don’t suppose they can,” said Joan, with some relief in her voice. “But how strange that you should have lost a gaff. Do the police think Mrs. Hayes must have found it, and killed her husband with it?”
“Looks as if they did, the fools! But that gaff was sunk in the water. Mrs. Hayes must have gone in for it, in the dark, and fished it up out of the Churn whirlpool!” Davis added ironically. “Nice place to swim.”
Wint reflected. “W
ait a moment, Davis. I suppose a lot of people have fished with bait in the Churn since you lost your gaff?”
“Someone every night, I should say, and perhaps two.”
“Well, with a leaded line and a hook wandering about in the whirlpool, surely some of them would have got stuck into your gaff, or in the log, as you did?”
“That’s true,” said Davis, thoughtfully. “Gaff-hook, three-foot wood handle, and a log, all together, ought to catch someone up. But I never heard that they did.”
“Then it may have been recovered by someone who did not tell you about it.”
“Maybe,” said Davis. “More likely, if it isn’t in the churn, under some rock now, it went down with a flood. But there are a rare lot of rocks at the bottom of the churn, and if the current took the log out from under the fall, and wedged it in a crack, no one would touch it. We only fish where the white water is, under the fall. With worm that is.”
“And fishing fly, in other parts of the pool, you would not hook the log.”
“No, sir, indeed we would not, the fly being on top.”
Joan had an idea, and explained it eagerly. “Don’t you think it would be a good idea to make sure if your gaff is still there, Mr. Davis?”
“We can’t!” said Wint. “You heard what kind of pool it was.”
“Oh, I don’t know that, sir,” remarked Davis. “I have a twenty-foot old salmon-rod at home I never use. It’s grandfather’s, and as heavy as lead. We could rig up a few big hooks on top of it, and poke round the churn.”
“Please do, then,” said Joan. “I hate to think of Mrs. Hayes being in gaol, even for a few days. She has suffered enough as it is, poor woman.”
Davis agreed to try. He asked Wint to take Joan down to the Churn pool, while he returned to his cottage, to put on his waders, and get the gargantuan salmon-rod which had belonged to his grandfather.
“That was a brain-wave of yours, Joan,” Wint said admiringly, as they walked downstream. “Jove! If it happens that the lost gaff got wedged under a rock, out of the way of the worm-fishers’ hooks, and is still there, they can’t say Mrs. Hayes found and used it. It’s obvious that the police only moved when they heard Davis had lost his. There was no talk of arresting her before that.”
Arrived at the Churn pool, they found it to be a pool about ten feet deep under the ledge from which a miniature cataract descended five feet from the river level above. It was of a round shape, but tapered at the lower end, like the bulb of an electric lamp, and ended in a narrow and fierce rapid.
Wint pointed to the seething and boiling white water under the lip of the fall.
“That’s where they fish the worm, Joan. You’ll notice there is a bit of calm oily water in the lee of that sunken rock in the middle. That is the sort of place where the log might settle when it had spun round in the current. There are plenty of fissures in the bottom here. You can see the sewin come swimming out of them towards dusk, if it has been a sunny day.”
“Can Davis wade any of it?” she asked.
He pointed below them. “There he can. You see, there is a ledge about two feet under water on this side. It’s true it isn’t wide, but Davis knows this river by night and day. He’ll make no bones about it.”
It was obvious to Joan that Davis could reach any part of the pool under the fall, if he was able to wade out on the ledge Wint showed her. Beyond the ledge, the water was deep, but the locals thought nothing of standing on foot-wide ledges, which would have frightened a stranger.
Wint smoked a cigarette and talked to Joan, until Davis came up, with the huge old rod over his shoulder. To the tip of the powerful green-heart he had rigged a sort of grapnel, composed of a bunch of two-inch salmon hooks, taken from old flies, and a lead sinker just above the bunch completed his equipment.
“If I get this into it, I’ll have him out,” he told them, surveying the upper end of the pool. “I’ll make a start.”
As Wint had thought, he waded in from the lower end of the pool, just above the rapid, and came carefully stepping along the slippery under-water ledge.
When the water was almost lapping the tops of his waders, and he could not go any further with safety, he began to poke about carefully under the white boil of the fall, working the long rod in a manner that showed him as familiar with the bottom of the pool as with the surface features of the river itself.
“I bet he’s done a bit of poaching with a gaff before now,” Wint said to himself, as he watched. “He knows his job.”
Joan, too, watched eagerly, following every movement of the man, her eyes occasionally switching to his keen, absorbed face, hoping every moment to see the slow sweep of the rod arrested, and hear a cry from Davis that he had struck what he was searching for.
But five minutes passed, then ten, and nothing happened. Going over the ground inch by inch, Davis had completely covered the area in a quarter of an hour, and thoughtfully raised the rod top above the water.
“It is not here whatever,” he said, staring back at the two on the bank. “No, it is no use looking any more.”
“And we can’t rake the whole pass over in that way, even if there was a chance of finding it,” said Wint. “It would take weeks.”
Davis began to take the rod down. “It isn’t here anyway. It was as well to try, sir, but that finishes it.”
They agreed, though without enthusiasm. “Thank you very much for trying,” said Joan to the man. “I am sure we gave you a lot of trouble for nothing.”
“Yes, it was very decent of you,” said Wint. “Well, Joan, I think that ends that for the moment. Shall we get back?”
Joan nodded. “Good-bye, Mr. Davis,” she said. “I expect you will want to get back to your fishing?”
“I haven’t the heart for it really, Miss,” said Davis.
“Well, good-bye, now.”
“Another dud show,” commented Wint as they went back to the road. “I did hope we might come on the thing stuck in the rocks there.”
Before they reached the hotel, they met Hoad. He was pelting along the road at a great pace, his head bent down, so absorbed in his own gloomy thoughts that he did not notice them till he was past. He turned his head then for a moment, and Joan, looking back, saw that he looked more haggard and nervous than ever.
“What is the matter with him?” she asked her companion. “He seems to me in blacker despair now than he was this morning.”
Wint could not tell. He shrugged his shoulders helplessly.
“It’s odd. Surely it can’t merely be that girl’s death that’s worrying him now? He was much brighter a little while ago.”
“Perhaps it’s Mrs. Hayes’s arrest.”
“If so, then why should it affect him so much, unless he did the job himself? No, old girl, I am afraid I was rather tactless a little while ago. I was irritated by a silly remark of his, and told him he was just as likely to have killed Hayes as Mrs. Hayes was. I meant that neither of them were, of course, but in his state of mind, he probably took it up wrongly.”
They dropped the subject, as they approached the hotel, and agreed that it might be wise to telephone to Inspector Parfitt at Cwyll, telling them of the experiment, and the failure to find the gaff in the Churn pool.
Wint went in to ring up the police, and Joan was at the door of her bedroom, when she saw Miss Pole beckoning to her from a door further on. She joined the girl, and asked her what had happened.
“I’m worried about Mr. Hoad,” said the girl, and indeed she looked harassed and unhappy. “He is in an awful way, and says he would be better dead, and so on. You don’t think he would commit suicide, do you? He’s gone off towards the river, muttering to himself.”
“Frankly, I don’t think he has the pluck,” said Joan. “I am sure he was cut up because Miss Mason left. He was rather running after her, wasn’t he?”
“Followed her about like a spaniel,” said Miss Pole, looking a little relieved. “I don’t think she treated him very well, Miss Powis, I don’t indee
d.”
Joan frowned. “I can hardly blame her. He has been so stupid and silly lately.”
“But why did she blame him for Miss Tysin’s death?” asked Miss Pole.
Joan started. “Did she? How do you know?”
She had not told Miss Mason about the anonymous letter. Had anyone done so? Had it leaked out through some policeman’s incautious gossip? But it didn’t matter very much, if it had been told Hoad, who had tattled.
Miss Pole nodded. “It was this way. Mr. Hoad came into my office about twenty minutes ago on some excuse, and I could see he was bursting to say something. True enough he did. He began about Blodwen Tysin, and said wasn’t it dreadful her drowning herself. And I said it was, but no one could be blamed except Mr. Hayes, who ought to have known better. But he said everyone didn’t talk like that, and looked ready to cry.”
“Who did?”
“Mr. Hoad. He said he was miserable, and he understood people being so much in love they drowned themselves. And I said he was not to talk so silly.”
“Quite right. But I am sure he wouldn’t kill himself.”
“I hope you’re right, Miss Powis. I asked him what made Miss Mason talk like that, seeing that he didn’t know the girl, and he said it was some letter he had written, and someone had told her about it. It was a letter he said about Mr. Hayes’s carrying on, and it brought down Mrs. Hayes, and then the girl drowned herself. Was that the anonymous letter the police had?”
Joan assented. “It was. But don’t let it go any further. Mrs. Hayes would have come down in any case; for she had other information. I expect Mr. Hoad is nervous, and then Miss Mason turning upon him like that made things worse.”
“He’s an extraordinary young man,” said Miss Pole. “Doesn’t seem to have any backbone, or anything. But I’m glad to hear you don’t think he will do anything to himself—we’ve had enough of that lately.”
Her face cleared as she spoke. Evidently Hoad’s confessions had worried and frightened her. She left Joan, as she saw Wint come up the stairs, and look along the passage in their direction.