“We don’t want Pop to see us,” she said in a stage whisper.
“I should jolly well think not. He told you to go and change at once. What have you been up to?”
“Just finishing a game, that’s all,” she replied demurely.
“You’ll both catch your death of cold. Look at yourself! You’re still dripping with water.”
Mary tittered. “I don’t care where the water goes if it doesn’t get into the wine,” she said cryptically and scampered off to collect her brother. A moment later both of the children had disappeared round the corner of the house.
“That one’s the divil altogether,” observed the sergeant with an indulgent grin as he climbed heavily into the car beside Duffy. “I wonder what she meant by that?”
On the way down the avenue, through the wood and up the hill, they exchanged news. From members of the staff at Moore Court, O’Callaghan had learned that Lua Kennedy and Peregrine Walton held an unassailable position as the neighbourhood’s most celebrated swimmers, though notorious would perhaps have been a more truly descriptive word in the context. The good young women employed by Mrs. O’Brien Moore did not think it “nice” that a middle-aged gentleman and his secretary should go swimming alone together; on the more delicate ground of Peregrine’s domestic arrangements the young women did not venture to tread. They made it plain, however, that they considered undue proficiency at swimming to be in itself unbecoming to a lady–Miss Walton, now; she did the breast-stroke in a dignified manner and always held her head very high out of the water–she knew what was expected of her. As for Miss Mary, she was only a child, and there was plenty of time for her to forget about the crawl and skin-diving and such other unladylike pursuits, which her father had no business to encourage. A question as to the possible prowess as a swimmer of James Flynn, tire estate agent, had drawn the reply that the leisure activity of the townspeople was a matter about which the staff at Moore Court was neither interested nor informed.
At the top of tire hill Duffy twisted round in his seat for the sake of the panoramic view of the valley and of the bay; almost at once he gave an exclamation of surprise.
“Stop for a minute, Myles,” he called to the driver. “What in the world are those reporters up to now?”
They could see the cutter almost directly below them; it was heading slowly into the narrowest part of the bay that led to nowhere but Peregrine Walton’s house. The proper way to the village and dry clothes lay round the island, but the island was now dead astern of the cutter’s course. A gentle westerly breeze had sprung up with the tide but it carried no sound of a boat’s engine. Duffy exclaimed again; at the same moment, however, the motor backfired loudly a couple of times and recommenced effective life. As she gathered steerage-way the cutter gradually came round into what must be assumed to have been her original course, heading towards the island and the open bay. For a few seconds the steady chug-chug was clearly audible, then the engine faltered, coughed apologetically and again fell silent. The luckless newspapermen once more were drifting with the tide.
“So that’s what she meant by it,” said Duffy.
“Meant by what, sir?”
“ ‘I don’t care where the water goes if it doesn’t get into the wine.’ For wine read petrol. She must have put water in their fuel-tank. A few drops would be enough to keep them out there all night.”
“Well, would you believe it? Ah, she’s the right minx, that one.” Sergeant O’Callaghan’s tone was eloquent of admiration; he chuckled. “The fellas down there must be beginning to feel the cold. That’ll teach them to go harrying decent people in their homes.”
“They have their work to do the same as we have.” Duffy spoke with an austerity that he hoped concealed his amusement. “And sabotaging a few shillings’ worth of petrol might come under the heading of damage to property.”
“ ’Twould be hard to prove that she did it,” observed the sergeant judicially. “She’d make sure there were no eye-witnesses.”
“I hope no one tries. We can send out a boat from Newtown Moore to pick them up. Hallo! They’re off again. For how long though?”
Once more the engine had coughed its way into life, slowly the cutter came round to point her bows towards Friar’s Island, slowly she began to make headway against the tide, then the struggle proved too much. The engine misfired and died.
“That’s funny,” O’Callaghan exclaimed. “I thought she’d stopped.”
“So she has. See! She’s drifting right back towards those little islets off the point down there. What you hear is another boat.”
A steadier throb was coming from somewhere on the bay, obviously originating from an engine that had been started during the last brief spell of activity of the cutter’s motor. As in the case of all sounds coming over water, it was difficult to estimate its direction and distance; that its source was moving could only be assumed.
“I’m prepared to bet that it’s Dominick O’B.M. coming out to pick them up,” said Duffy. “I hope so anyhow. He couldn’t fail to have heard that engine spluttering.”
“ ’Twould be the decentest ending for the thing,” the sergeant agreed. “I hope he won’t skelp Mary for it though.”
Duffy grinned. “Not that small female Machiavelli, he won’t,” he said.
He waited until a boat, recognisable as Dominick’s even at that distance, came in sight round the end of the Moore Court peninsula then gave orders for the continuance of his own journey. He had decided to visit Peregrine Walton’s house on the way, or rather–as his map informed him–by going a couple of miles out of the direct way to Newtown Moore. It seemed only fair to let the writer know as soon as possible about the strange goings-on at his sister’s cottage; there might even be something to be learnt from Peregrine’s reception of the news. The short detour meant skirting the water for the greater part of the run and afforded views that were considerably more agreeable than anything that was to be seen from the main road. Not only was the shore-line fringed with woodland but this part of the bay was dotted with tiny islets each crowned with flowering shrubs and an occasional tree. It was unlike any other part of the west coast that Duffy knew in that no rock was visible at or near water-level; as far as the eye could see the rising tide lapped against mud. Above the slight noise of their own car the detectives could hear the constant pulsing of one boat’s engine relieved by intermittent coughs, spurts and back-fires from another; the manœuvres at sea were evidently still in progress.
According to the map, the road, or laneway–it was indeed little more than a bohereen–passed between Peregrine’s house and the innermost point of the bay; a couple of hundred yards farther on the way forked, one branch turning up-hill to the main road, the other meandering on to its end beyond the stone pier by Cynthia Walton’s cottage. Only for a sudden dramatic interruption to his journey, however, Duffy might well have passed by his destination without noticing it, in spite of the map, so high and so unkept was Peregrine Walton’s hedge.
It was from a gap in this hedge that a girl in a white bikini came dashing out onto the roadway at imminent danger to her life, only to jump back with a scream just as Duffy’s driver jerked the police car to a halt a bare few inches from her knees.
The girl was Lua Kennedy, as was only to be expected; and very attractive she looked, too, with her golden skin and red-gold hair, though her eyes seemed more troubled even than the immediate circumstances warranted. Close behind her came someone whose presence and attire were alike surprising; James Flynn, the estate agent, was wearing a pair of business-like dark grey trousers, braces, unlaced black shoes and no other discernible garment. His wild pale eyes glittered from behind strands of wet hair that were plastered to his forehead. He carried a pair of frog-flippers and a schnorkel-tube.
Lua Kennedy cut short Duffy’s apologies. “Thank heaven you’re here, Superintendent,” she said. “I’m afraid something dreadful’s happened.”
“What can we do?” asked Duffy. He was alrea
dy out of the car.
“He says––” She waved a slim golden arm to indicate Flynn; she seemed to have forgotten his name. “He says Perry was asleep and fell off his thingumajig.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“He says he didn’t come up. I was working–I didn’t see.”
It was not really difficult to guess what had happened; the girl’s urgency and her bikini and Flynn’s wetness had already given the clue. Duffy saw no point in wasting time on inessential details.
“Where? When?” he asked.
“Down by the boat-house. We always take out the dinghy to dive from.”
Since they had not passed any boat-house on the way and none was in sight, Duffy assumed that it must be on the road ahead. “Hop into the car,” he said.
Sergeant O’Callaghan, who had got out of his seat at the time of the sudden stop, reinserted himself beside the driver in order to leave more room at the back, where Lua’s golden presence gave to the short run something of the air of a picnic. The girl was far from being in a festive mood, however, as she battled against belief in a dreaded possibility. While she gripped the back of the front seat and stared over the driver’s shoulder, Flynn filled in the details of his part in the affair. He had come out to inspect a cottage that was being prepared for a summer tenancy, he explained; intrigued by the noises made by a motor-boat somewhere in the vicinity, he had got out of his car to get a better view of the water. Though he was certain that there were no less than two boats near at hand, he could not see them and he noticed that their engines had been perversely shut off just as he got out to locate them. In fact he could hear nothing at all, and there was nothing to be seen on the surface of the bay except a sea-bird and Dr. Walton. The writer was sunning himself, floating on an inflatable rubber mattress; he might have been asleep. Flynn was going back to his car when one of the motor-boats started rip again with a regular fusillade of burps and backfires; turning again to the water the agent was just in time to see Peregrine Walton slip from his rubber raft and disappear beneath the water. Flynn had stripped, waded in through the mud and dived again and again, but without success. He had then run for help. His car was facing the wrong way, and there was no suitable place for turning for the best part of a mile.
“What happened to the rubber affair?” Duffy asked.
“I think it must have sunk–I didn’t see it again. The stopper must have come out.”
“Well, that’s hopeful anyhow. If he’d just slipped off into the water, one would suspect a heart attack, but, if the rubber mattress was deflated, it’s a different matter.” Duffy spoke with more optimism than he felt. “He may have landed on one of the little islands. He’d probably have swallowed enough sea-water to make him feel sick for a bit.”
Lua was indignant. “Oh, there’s no question of a heart attack. Perry has nothing wrong with him. He’s as strong as a horse. He––” She bit off the remainder of what she had started to say. There was no further time for talk; they had arrived at the boat-house.
The building, little more than a shed, stood on the landward side of the road; facing it, a concrete slipway led down to the water. From a ring set in the upper part of the slip’s lee side trailed a long mooring rope to the farther end of which was attached a small dinghy. The tide had carried it as far as it was free to go in the direction of Peregrine’s house. Although the water was inviting enough, the place looked neither safe nor particularly attractive for bathing; the sloping mud banks put diving out of the question and must make landing, anywhere, except at the slip, both difficult and dangerous. It was not hard to understand why Lua preferred to undertake the journey to the golden sands of Friar’s Island when she had an afternoon to give to swimming and sunbathing. Of Peregrine’s inflatable rubber mattress there was no sign. Duffy began to haul in on the dinghy’s mooring rope.
“Have you got your swimming trunks in the car, O’Callaghan?” he asked, remembering the sergeant’s ponderous proficiency in the water.
“They’re in the boot with your own, sir.”
“Then we’ll leave Myles to take charge of the boat. Keep counting heads while we’re in the water, Myles,” he told his driver. “We don’t want to have another accident. Now, Mr. Flynn–show us the exact spot.”
By the time that the two detectives had thrown off their clothes and donned their swimming trunks in the boat-house, a matter of seconds, Lua and Flynn were already in the water. Although the boat, swinging in a wide arc at the end of its rope, had gravitated to the bank, Peregrine Walton had apparently been sunning himself some fifty yards out at a point where there was less mud and a reasonable depth of water even at half-tide. It was in an area surrounding this approximately fixed point that diving operations were at first concentrated; since it was obvious, however, that a submerged body could only be a dead one, the search soon spread to the adjacent mud-banks and any of the tiny scrub-covered islets that lay within a handicapped swimmer’s reach. While Lua–arrayed for skin-diving and wearing frog-flippers–covered the originally designated area in ever widening circles and with an anxiety that had begun to border on panic, Duffy strove to organise the remainder of his force more methodically. Backed by the slight westerly breeze, the tide still flowed into the bay; there was consequently a very appreciable surface-drift in the direction of Walton’s house. To balance this and to take the stream that came down from the higher ground behind the house an under-tow probably worked in the opposite direction, towards the centre of the bay and the open sea; nevertheless the better chance of finding the missing man alive seemed to lie above the point at which he had last been seen. It was by acting on this theory that Duffy made his first discovery.
Between the level of the tide and the high-water mark there was still a sufficiently wide rim of glistening mud to make it possible to tell at a glance whether anyone had or had not clambered up onto the bank at any point other than the slipway. The belt of trees and scrub between road and water was so thin that it seemed a foregone conclusion that Walton could not have climbed ashore on the mainland without having been seen, or having made himself heard, during the police car’s run to the boat-house; it was in the mud immediately below a curve of the road, however, that Duffy found tell-tale marks. He had been investigating a little island when, automatically turning his eyes to the shore, he saw that the glassy surface of the mud under an overhanging tree-branch had been broken by something heavier and more bulky than a water fowl; a dog perhaps, he thought, and therefore decided to say nothing about the discovery until he had examined it more closely. A glance told him that Lua, watched over by Myles from the boat and Sergeant O’Callaghan from the water, was still frenziedly searching in the original area; somehow she would have to be made to rest before she exhausted herself completely. Hoping against hope that he would have some good news for her, Duffy swam over to the shore.
There could be no doubt about it; only a human being could have made those marks in the mud. Very recently someone had climbed out of the water, using the overhanging branches for a hand-hold and setting feet and knees in the sticky mud. Duffy called out in a low voice but got no answer. It was an instinctive professional caution that made him decide on a spot a few yards away from that chosen by his predecessor to haul himself up onto the bank. It proved a less difficult job than he had anticipated, the mud lacking a quicksand quality and providing a relatively solid footing under its ice-creamlike top layer. It was on completely firm ground that an unpleasant surprise awaited him–or perhaps merely a confirmation of his instinctive doubt; no unconscious figure lay within fifty yards in either direction of the marks in the mud. Duffy’s own wet feet left clear enough prints in the dust of the untarred road, so that there could be no question of Peregrine’s having recovered and simply walked off to his home, nor could this be the spot where Flynn had left the water; the agent possessed wings no more than the writer, and he had stopped to get his trousers–presumably from his car which was parked on the farther side of the slipway. Never
theless it was indisputable that someone had preceded Duffy in climbing up the bank within the previous half an hour or thereabouts; the marks of muddy hands were still wet on the drooping branches and muddy feet had left their trail through the scrub to the edge of the road, and there presumably Peregrine, if it was he, had taken wing–or a car. There were signs that a car had been standing fairly recently with its near-side wheels on the rank grass at the edge of the road; the muddy tracks ended beside the marks of the parked car. More than that, tufts of grass and leaves pasted together with mud were scattered about as if they had been discarded after use as a towel. The indications seemed sufficiently clear. Duffy trotted down the road towards the slipway with his news. He scarcely knew whether he felt relieved or not; his mind had certainly not been set at rest.
The superintendent was not the only one to have made a discovery. When he again got an uninterrupted view of the water he saw the dinghy approaching the slip; Lua sat in the stern with something that looked like a rug across her knees while Flynn and O’Callaghan, each with a hand on the gunwale, were being towed towards the shore. As soon as she saw Duffy the girl called out something indistinguishable and held up the object that she had been nursing on her lap; it was a deflated rubber mattress. A moment later Myles brought the dinghy alongside the slip.
“He got out,” Lua said breathlessly. “He got out on an island–but he didn’t stay there.” The struggle between hope and fear was obviously still going on but now, irrationally perhaps, she seemed to have allowed fear to gain the ascendancy. She looked ten years older and she was shivering. “Nothing could have happened to him between the island and the shore–could it? I mean he must have known I’d come for him, so he wouldn’t have tried the swim if he wasn’t all right. He couldn’t–not just between the island and here–he couldn’t––”
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