Death by the Gaff_Black Heath Classic Crime

by Vernon Loder

“So that, unless someone had picked it up, the gaff is in the river still?”

  “Yes, indeed, it will be.”

  “So that if we could find it, we might help to get her off?”

  Wint shrugged. “I say, old girl, how could we search the river for three or four miles? I suppose it would sink in the mud of the estuary, Davis?”

  “Yes, sir, it would. The mud’s deep in parts.”

  “But has there been enough water since you lost the gaff to take it as far down as that?” asked Joan.

  “In the end of May there was, Miss, and there was a run of water three—no, four weeks ago.”

  “That’s our trouble,” Wint observed gloomily.

  But Joan was not beaten yet. “Look here,” she exclaimed, the gaff would hardly be carried down so far without the log, would it?”

  Davis scratched his head. “Why now?” he remarked. “It got stuck cross-wise in that log, and might be hung up somewhere.”

  “By jove, yes!” Wint cried excitedly. “I never thought of that. If it got jammed in one of the narrow passages among the rocks, under the white water, you couldn’t see it.” He paused for a moment, then added: “But I forgot that one of you fellows, who fish in the boil under the falls with worm, would hook it.”

  “But suppose it wasn’t actually as far as the boil under a fall?” Joan asked. “You don’t fish the rapids with worm, but with fly. And then there are places above the falls between the rocks where you don’t fish at all, because the salmon and sewin don’t stay there, only run up through to places where they can rest.”

  “I don’t see myself diving into those spots to look for a gaff!” said Wint.

  But Davis appeared to have caught some of Joan’s enthusiasm.

  “Wait now! The lady’s right. The police won’t mind any trouble if they can find what they want, and if they can be got to see my gaff may be in one of those sort of places, why they’ll look.”

  They discussed the matter a little further, and then Davis left. Joan and Wint assured him that they would do their best to get the matter taken up by the police, even if they had to go to Cwyll next day to see the Chief Constable personally.

  “And that really will be our best plan, I think,” said Wint, when they re-entered the hotel. “We’ll go to Cwyll by the morning bus, and have a chat with Rigby. The police take endless trouble in other murder cases, and I don’t see why they shouldn’t in this. If they refuse, I am inclined to get one of the papers to take it up.”

  “Oh, I expect they will see reason,” she replied. “Parfitt told us he welcomed any hints. The only thing he didn’t like was premature disclosure.”

  “Then we had better keep this theory to ourselves, Joan. How splendid it would be if we could prove the gaff was still in the river, and in a place where Mrs. Hayes could not have reached it.”

  When they reached Cwyll next morning, they found that Mr. Rigby was absent on business connected with the case, and would not be back until half-past one. Neither of them had seen the little town and its harbour properly, so they decided to lunch there, and return to see the Chief Constable later in the day.

  Cwyll is situated on a tiny indentation in the bay of the same name. The long and winding estuary of the river, passing at last under a railway bridge, and deepening below, serves in its junction with the sea as a tiny harbour. There is also, on one side, a stone breakwater, which serves as a quay at which small colliers tie up.

  They soon exhausted the resources of the little town, and after lunch in a café strolled down to see the steamers unloading.

  “About as much fun as watching shunting,” Wint observed, when they had spent ten minutes looking at grimy buckets bringing up coal from the depths of dusty holds. “Cwyll isn’t much of a seaside resort, is it?”

  Joan laughed. “What’s the old scow doing out there?” she asked. “Not a dredger, is she?”

  “No,” said Wint, turning his gaze to a barge-like craft in the estuary farther out. “What’s that boat doing out there?” he asked a longshoreman who was sitting near them on a bollard.

  The man removed his pipe, and explained volubly, as if he had been accumulating conversation all the morning, in readiness for a question like this.

  It seemed that a sewage pipe was carried along the bed of the estuary at this point, and a vessel had fouled it with its anchor, in spite of warning notices, and caused a leak. The local authorities had procured a diver from a nearby port, and he was now busy discovering the extent of the damage, with a view to its repair. The longshoreman was beginning an account of the diver’s heritage, paternity, history, and exploits under water, when Wint shut him up with the price of a drink, and moved off with Joan in search of further amusement elsewhere.

  But there was little further to be seen there, and they decided to go to Mr. Rigby’s office, and wait for him, if he had not yet returned. Fortunately he had arrived a few moments before, and at once granted them an interview.

  He remembered, of course, seeing Wint at the court investigation the previous day, and smiled faintly when the latter explained that they had come to see him, to give him some information which might help the police in connection with the Pengellert murder case.

  “Information, Mr. Wint, or theories?” he asked dryly.

  “Well, it is a theory,” said Wint.

  “People have been worrying me on the telephone, by letter, and by calling since yesterday,” said Rigby. “If theory could solve our difficulties, they are already solved.”

  “We do not intend to worry you,” said Wint, rather impatiently. “If you can spare us five minutes——”

  “Five it is,” said the other, glancing at his watch in a business-like way. “Now then, Mr. Wint!”

  Wint explained as clearly as he could. As he went on, Mr. Rigby’s expression became more interested, and when he had finished, he nodded qualified assent.

  “I admit that my ideas ran on somewhat similar tones,” he said, when Joan turned her most charming smile on him. “While finding of the gaff lost by Davis in the river would not necessarily exonerate Mrs. Hayes—since she had a car and time to remove the weapon to some distance—if it is found in an unapproachable spot, it would certainly tend to show that she did not use it. To find it at night she would have had practically to walk on it, or trip over it.”

  “That’s what I think,” cried Joan.

  Mr. Rigby smiled at her. “Mr. Wint, of course, is quite right in suggesting that the difficulties of dragging the river, while great, will not prevent us from attempting it, if we see good cause. Our police have some defects, but lack of thoroughness is not one of them. Let me see. While a salmon, making off with a gaff, might go upstream, a log certainly would not! Where was the gaff lost? The Churn Pool, wasn’t it?”

  As Wint assured him that it was, he rose and took from a drawer a large-scale map of the district, which he spread out on the table before him.

  “Here we are. This is the Churn. It lies above the pool where Mr. Hayes was found dead—some hundreds of yards higher up, in fact. So if we decide to make an intensive search of the river bed, we must start there, and take as our province all the water below, as far as the estuary. That will be a considerable operation, Mr. Wint.”

  “But you’ll have a shot at it?”

  “I think so. On the other hand, I don’t think you have properly estimated the difficulty of the task. Dragging in such rapid water, infested with rocks and stones, is impossible; and as for exploring some of the nooks and crannies under the rapids, or between the deep pools, why that’s a beast of a job!”

  Wint’s face grew gloomy again. He had had a very fair idea of the magnitude of the task, but in his anxiety to make Rigby move in the matter he had spoken more optimistically than he felt.

  “You could use the sort of jointed rods a sweep uses for a chimney,” he said after a moment’s thought. “With a grapnel attached to one end, it might be done.”

  “One theorist demanded that we should use a magnet
drawn along the bed of the river,” said Rigby. “But there is something in what you say. Sweep and drag the open reaches, and try your dodge where there are crevices between the rocks. We’ll do it!”

  He rang a bell, and while Harry Wint and Joan were exchanging congratulatory glances, the door opened and Parfitt came in.

  The matter was explained to him, and he assented at once.

  “An excellent idea, sir,” he said. “I shall borrow a couple of sets of canes from the sewer department, and get men on to the job at once. Perhaps, sir, you would telephone to Pengellert, and see that Griffiths takes six men off the search, and has them by the river for me when I arrive.”

  Chapter XXV

  The First Attempt

  BY dashing off at once, Joan and Wint were able to catch the early bus back to Pengellert. Rigby and Parfitt were to follow in the police car, when they had obtained the necessary tackle from the sanitary department at Cwyll.

  Joan was tremendously enthusiastic about Wint’s idea, since the jointed canes, used to carry a sweep’s brush, or clear drains, are very flexible, and can be used in twisting passages. If the gaff lost by Davis was stuck among the rocks, she was sure that they would soon find it, and so immensely reinforce Mrs. Hayes’s defence.

  Parfitt had heard from London that Bow was in residence at his club; he gave the address to Wint, at the latter’s request, and the two wired to the club the moment they reached Pengellert, asking Bow to return at once as the case had taken a new turn.

  “I only hope we’re right, and it has!” said Wint when they left the post-office. “Bow is up there to arrange for her defence, and he won’t thank us if we’ve dragged him back for nothing.”

  Joan shook her head. “I’m sure we haven’t. I bet they find the thing.”

  Constable Griffiths had taken some little time to collect six members of the police engaged on the search inland. Joan and her companion joined him and his band of helpers as they passed the hotel on their way to the Churn Pool.

  Griffiths halted the men, and looked at them in a rather embarrassed fashion.

  “I don’t know if the Inspector would like anyone with us, sir,” he said. “Not official-like, sir, anyway.”

  Wint laughed. “Why, we got this new show going, constable. We saw Mr. Rigby this morning, and you will find he doesn’t mind.”

  “Very well, sir,” said Griffiths, and roughly told some other prospective followers to go back, and mind their own business. “If he says you can come, all right.”

  They reached the banks of the Churn Pool presently, and Wint explained what the Chief Constable had promised them should be done, much to the edification of Griffiths, who had merely been told to collect some men, and take them down to the river.

  “I suppose we’d better wait then, sir. But if the log floated down from here, then it must have got further down. Only we was to meet Mr. Rigby here; so here we stay.”

  A quarter of an hour later Mr. Rigby, with Parfitt, and a couple of policemen, carrying the tackle, arrived on the bank. Four of the constables were given drags, and told to sweep the pools, the others rigged up the jointed canes, and Parfitt attached a grapnel of small size firmly to the end of each.

  “We’d better start groping the deep, narrow channel at the head of the next pool, Sir,” he said. “The rocks are undercut on the left bank. The gaff might have stuck up under there.”

  When the men set to work, Parfitt consulted with the Chief Constable, and a constable was sent to fetch Davis.

  “He knows more about the river than anyone else,” he told his superior. “He’s fished it night and day for years.”

  Davis turned up very soon, and threw himself with energy into the business of directing the searchers. But the lower end of the Churn Pool, and the rapid below, proved blank, and they moved down to the next obstruction, a heap of boulders of various shapes and sizes that lay in the bed of the stream, and at one point constricted the actual water channel to a bare three feet of width.

  Here the force of the current was tremendous, and added to the difficulty of working the canes, which bent under the push of the stream. But that was not the worst of the place. The under-water grottoes, formed by the boiling stream, and cut by the stones and pebbles whirled round in time of flood, caught and held the grapnels at the end of the rods, making it almost impossible to move them about. After five minutes they lost a grapnel, which had become irretrievably jammed in a crack, and fastening on another more securely, began again.

  “I’m not so proud of my notion as I was,” Wint remarked to Joan, as presently they saw the men with the canes begin to pull and twist again. “It’s going to be the dickens of a job!”

  “I believe they’ve got it stuck again,” said Joan. “I don’t see how Davis’s gaff could have got further than this.”

  He shook his head. “They’re poking to one side of the channel. The log with the gaff in it might carry on with the current down the middle.”

  “I’m afraid that’s done it, sir,” said Davis, as the men pulled and twisted without result.

  “Looks like it, certainly,” Mr. Rigby replied ruefully. “Hi, you fellows! Wait a moment. You’ll snap that off too, and we haven’t any more here. You any idea, Parfitt?”

  Parfitt stared down. “Let Davis have a go at it,” he suggested. “I think he can do better than they.”

  Davis took off his coat, inspected the situation from every angle, then took over the rods, and began cunningly to work them gently this way and that. After two minutes he extricated the grapnel-head, and the work went on again, this time under his direction.

  But the gaff was not there, and they worked down another pool, and started anew at a gulley full of potholes, obstructed further by an old tree-trunk, which had come down in a flood, and become wedged with its butt and roots in a fissure between two boulders.

  This was just the sort of thing which might entangle a gaff, and presently it was decided to send for a saw, fix a rope to the portion of the trunk which showed above water and try to float the log down to the calmer water below. Where it was fixed it made impossible the use of the grapnel.

  “They’re setting about the job thoroughly enough, Harry,” Joan murmured, as a constable came back with a saw, and was lowered down on to a rock ledge, where he could saw the trunk fairly low down. “But ought he not to have a rope round his waist?”

  That, after all, was what was intended. The policeman was secured with the bight of a rope under his arms, and got down still further, until he stood on a lower ledge, up to the knees in water. Meanwhile, Davis had climbed to another rock, and lassoed the top of the tree with a rope loop. The free end was then taken down stream a few yards, and made fast to a boulder. It was hoped that this side pull would slew the tree trunk into a backwater, when it was freed from the roots that anchored it in the fissure.

  Sawing was a long and laborious job, and Joan and Wint sat down on the rocks and smoked, while the constable laboured till he was weary and sweating, and another policeman took his place. But presently the log was cut through, and swung round into the rush of water, heading down-stream. The pull of the boulder anchor brought it round further down, but there was no sign of the gaff having become fixed in it, and the cane grapnel was once more brought into use.

  Mr. Rigby had sent up to the hotel for more food, and at half-past one they knocked off for lunch.

  “This will be done by the Greek Kalends, Parfitt,” he said, as he munched a sandwich. “And can we swear even now that we miss nothing in those holes under the water? But I suppose we must carry on, and do our best. A dam’ nuisance your losing that gaff, Davis!”

  Davis shrugged. “What with all these traps sir, I don’t see it can have gone down very far,” he replied. “If it was on the log, the two would hang up easy; and if it was clear of the log, the hook would catch on something.”

  “I hope you’re right,” said Wint. “I hope, too, that you won’t give up trying as long as there is a chance of get
ting evidence to save Mrs. Hayes.”

  Parfitt looked round. “We’ll do the job, sir.”

  Lunch over, and a hasty smoke, and they resumed their labours, working down gradually to the pool, at the tail of which Mr. Hayes’s body had been found. While the men worked the canes, other men dragged the deep pools and quiet runs between one rock obstruction and another.

  “Now we are at the very place,” said Rigby presently. “Go easy with that grapnel now! This looks a tricky bit.”

  He had hardly warned the men when the grapnel caught once more. But it was extricated at last, and one of the prongs brought up a transfixed piece of sodden wood.

  Wint gave an involuntary cheer, and all crowded close to look at the fragment precariously poised on the sharp tine.

  “Bit of pine,” said Rigby. “Anything like the snag that carried your gaff away?”

  Davis examined it carefully. “I didn’t see it close enough, or worry about the kind of wood, sir; but I do believe it was a bit of pine. Yes, yes, it looks like it.”

  He spoke in tones of suppressed excitement, and Joan’s eyes began to sparkle. Suppose the gaff was down there, and they were going to bring it up! The grapnel was lowered once more, and worked cautiously sideways, to try to get a grip on the log from which the splinter had come. Presently it seemed to take a hold, and Davis was deputed to tackle the job.

  He twisted and screwed the jointed canes this way and that, then began to draw them up as if something heavy was at the end. Then suddenly, whatever it was that he had hooked became detached, and half an hour’s fishing produced no results.

  “Do you think it was that bit of wood you hooked?”

  Davis looked round and mopped his brow. “I do, sir. I am sure I had it hooked, but it slipped off and went down.”

  Parfitt made a suggestion. “This is the very hole we found Mr. Hayes stuck in, sir. If that bit of wood is free, we should drag the pool below at once, for it will be caught by the current.”

  “Yes, indeed, it’s true,” said Davis. “Come down, and I’ll show you where everything casts up below. There’s an eddy brings all in under the lee of the bank.”