by Joyce Cato
‘My idea, sir,’ Graves put in quietly. Obviously he was used to working on his own initiative, and was encouraged to do so, for Rycroft merely nodded.
‘Well, sir, we’ve found a chap – a fisherman – who says he saw the Swan going by, and noticed some man climbing down from the top balcony of the boat onto the bottom deck.’ The youngster paused, looking as pleased as punch to be able to deliver his next bit of news. ‘And he swears the figure was climbing down from the top at the rear end of the boat, sir. That would make it the victim’s room!’
ELEVEN
FOR A MOMENT Inspector Rycroft merely stared at the triumphant-faced constable, his funnily ugly face splendidly inscrutable. You could almost hear his brain working, so obviously was he mulling the information around. Then he grunted.
‘This fisherman,’ he began. ‘I hope you checked that he had the proper licences and permits?’
The constable’s jaw dropped. Whatever he’d expected, it most certainly hadn’t been that. Come to that, it wasn’t the first thing that had leapt to Jenny Starling’s mind either. But then, she wasn’t as pedantic as the inspector.
‘Well, no, sir. I mean, sir, it slipped my mind, sir,’ he mumbled. ‘I thought you should have his information urgently, sir,’ he rallied. For it had suddenly occurred to the youth that there was a distinct possibility that his superior officer was having a little joke at his expense. Jenny wasn’t so sure.
Whether he was a secret leg-puller or not, Rycroft merely grunted again at this explanation. But behind the somewhat laconic facade, Jenny could sense that his astute mind was still rapidly working away at this new information and what it could mean.
She herself was feeling just a bit distracted. The mere possibility that Rycroft might have a sense of humour was enough to boggle the cook’s mind.
‘You have this witness at the station?’ Rycroft asked, to which the constable nodded so energetically his helmet nearly fell off.
‘He’s made a full statement?’
The constable very ceremoniously withdrew a sheet of paper. Rycroft read it, his eyebrow going up.
When he spoke, however, it was to Tobias Lester. ‘I take it that there is only one man on board who fits the description of a male, between the ages of twenty to thirty, with thick black hair, and dressed in white work trousers and a white shirt?’
Tobias met the policeman’s eyes for a scant second, and then looked swiftly away again. He looked, Jenny thought, almost angry. ‘You know the answer to that as well as I do, Inspector,’ he finally said, somewhat grimly. ‘Brian O’Keefe is the only young and black-haired man aboard this boat.’
As he spoke he looked at David Leigh. But David, although brown haired, wore neither white trousers nor white shirt. Only an engineer traditionally wore white.
Rycroft nodded. He too had noticed the captain’s reaction, but was less surprised by it than Jenny. As a man who had charge of subordinates himself, he knew how easy it was to feel protective of them.
The crew and guests of the Stillwater Swan had gathered in the main salon/dining room ostensibly for dinner, but the inspector knew that it was really curiosity that had gathered them together so rapidly. From their various positions on the boat they must have heard the motorcycle and looked out to see the excited entrance of the constable. One and all, they’d come down quickly and congregated to see what all the fuss was about, and had been richly rewarded for their efforts.
Only Jenny, alone among them, looked not so much relieved as thoughtful by this latest news.
Nobody liked to have the charge of murder hanging over their heads, and if it had to be somebody, then everyone was secretly relieved that it should be Brian O’Keefe. Brian O’Keefe, after all, was the outsider. The hired help. Brian O’Keefe, it had to be said, was not one of them.
The inspector looked once again at Tobias who, to give him credit, was looking exceedingly unhappy, and said quietly, ‘I take it that the engineer is in the boiler room?’
The captain nodded reluctantly.
Sergeant Graves led the way to the door, then, as an afterthought, turned to wave one meaty paw at the assembly, silently indicating that he would like them to remain seated. This time, the policeman didn’t want an audience.
Jenny, though, had other ideas, and nodded at Francis. ‘The dinner is prepared and ready in the galley, Mr Grey,’ she said briskly, then turned on her heel and firmly followed the two officers out onto the deck.
Francis Grey thinned his lips at being spoken to like a servant by what he deemed to be nothing more than another servant, then glanced at his employer to see if he too had noticed the outrage. But Lucas, who had his own views on the enigmatic cook – which didn’t include getting on her bad side! – merely shrugged and said quietly, ‘Well, I for one, am hungry,’ and, like the good host that he was, ushered his guests to the table.
Francis took the hint with apparent magnanimity and quickly disappeared into the galley.
Out on the deck Jenny softly called Rycroft’s name. Since he was by now at the rear deck he had to pause and wait for her to catch up. The sun was just setting, casting a lovely red-orange glow over the river. The solid bulk of the sergeant cast a great shadow over the tiny man, but he appeared not to notice it.
‘Can I ask at what time this witness saw Mr O’Keefe climbing down onto the lower deck?’ she asked, as soon as she’d drawn level with them.
Rycroft quickly consulted the witness statement again, his eyes narrowing. He looked as if he might like to let rip with a curse, but refrained himself with an effort. Unfortunately, this self-restraint made his face quiver and his eyes bulge. To Jenny’s somewhat alarmed eye, he looked a bit like a frog made out of blancmange that she’d once created for a child’s birthday party.
Which gave her an excellent idea to recreate the design, this time as a birthday cake. The dons at the college where she worked often called upon her to bake a cake for their offspring.
‘It says here it was about a quarter past two,’ Rycroft admitted grimly, snapping the cook’s attention back to the matter in hand.
She sighed deeply. ‘I see.’
Graves’ great bulk shuddered, just once, as he too understood the full import of the timing. If the murder hadn’t been committed until between 4 and 4.15, then….
‘What the blazes was he up to?’ Sergeant Graves muttered more to himself than to anyone else.
‘I shouldn’t attach too much importance to this business, Inspector Rycroft, if I were you,’ Jenny said quietly. She was always reluctant to offer advice, mainly because people so seldom had the good sense to take heed of sound advice when it was offered. She did so now only because she was sure that Rycroft was the sort of man who could get very nasty if he was seen to be publicly embarrassed.
‘Oh?’ Rycroft said icily.
Jenny smiled. ‘I think you’ll find that O’Keefe was searching for the papers that Gabriel Olney was brandishing about yesterday afternoon, during the fight he had with Lucas. I think that he and probably the captain, got their heads together sometime yesterday evening and mapped out a plan of action.’
Rycroft thought for a second or so and, intrigued in spite of himself, said somewhat less coolly, ‘Carry on.’
‘I think they thought that if they could destroy whatever Olney was using to blackmail Mr Finch, then the plan to sell the Swan would fall through, and their jobs and homes would be safe.’
‘But surely Olney would have made copies?’ Graves pointed out with reasonable logic.
Jenny shrugged. ‘I imagine that occurred to them too. But it was worth a chance. After all, it wouldn’t be hard. During dinner, O’Keefe was always absent, so nobody would remark on it. He could take a good long hour to meticulously search the Olneys’ room. If he found the papers, well, all to the good. If it turned out that Olney could produce duplicates when the time came to hand over the deeds to the boat, well, what had they lost? I should think that to men of action like O’Keefe and Captain Lester, th
ey would consider it a chance well worth taking. And better by far than attempting to do nothing about it at all.’
Rycroft slowly stroked his chin. ‘So you don’t think it has anything to do with the murder itself?’
But on that, Jenny was too wily to be drawn. She merely shrugged and said that, at the moment, she couldn’t see how it could have.
Rycroft reluctantly agreed, but nevertheless proceeded to march straight into the boiler room like an invading fury.
Jenny, who’d never taken a really good look around inside the engine room before, took the opportunity to follow them in and have a good nose.
The room was more or less divided into two, with the wood and coal in one section of the room and the actual boiler and engine in the other. O’Keefe, who’d been sat on top of a fairly respectable woodpile, slowly stood up. His feet rustled a crumpled sheet of thick plastic that he’d cast aside and which now lay on the floor.
‘Yeah?’ he asked, not quite surly, not quite polite.
‘We would like to know what you were doing in Gabriel Olney’s room at two o’clock this afternoon,’ Rycroft said, not quite surly, not quite polite.
O’Keefe gave him a long, slow, measuring look. No doubt he was wondering what the policeman actually knew, and how much he had merely guessed.
Rycroft smiled. It was quite a nasty smile. ‘You were seen, O’Keefe,’ he said shortly. ‘So let’s not have any fun and games, hmm?’
Brian ran a dirty hand through his dark hair, then shrugged. ‘Oh. Right. Well, then, I suppose I’d better tell yer. I was looking for them papers of Olney’s.’
If he thought anyone would be surprised by his answer, he was thoroughly disappointed. Rycroft merely gave a what-did-I-tell-you-about-this-damned-cook look to his sergeant, and Graves gave a there’s-more-to-you-than-meets-the-eye look at Jenny Starling, and O’Keefe was left to wonder, in some frustration, just what it was that was going on.
‘Did you find them?’ Rycroft got on with it brusquely.
Reluctantly O’Keefe nodded.
Rycroft held out his hand.
O’Keefe stared at it for a moment, then shrugged, then smiled. It was a roguish smile. No doubt, Jenny thought with a wry twist of her lips, Jasmine would have found it very appealing, if she’d been present.
O’Keefe shook his head. ‘I ain’t got ’em on me. I hid ’em upstairs, in the lav.’
‘Go and get them,’ Rycroft ordered shortly.
O’Keefe nodded and moved forward. Just when he’d got to the door, Jenny, whose mind had wandered a little, suddenly snapped to, and said curiously, ‘Is this the wood we saw you bring on board yesterday?’ She nodded at the woodpile on which he’d been sitting.
The engineer, somewhat surprised by the cook’s presence, not to mention the copper’s tolerance of her, looked at her suspiciously. ‘What’s it to you then?’
‘Just answer her,’ Rycroft snapped, although he too wondered why the infuriatingly useful woman wanted to know. He also wondered just where she could possibly be headed with the seemingly irrelevant question.
‘Yeah, it is,’ O’Keefe said slowly.
‘Is it dry?’
‘Yeah, it is.’
Jenny nodded. ‘So why did you cover it with plastic?’
Rycroft, who’d been becoming impatient with the cook’s continued questions, suddenly began to look alert.
O’Keefe, too, stared at her. ‘I didn’t,’ he said at last. ‘I found it on the wood this afternoon. I was the one that took it off – it can make the wood sweat, see, in this kind of heat. Which is the last thing I need.’
‘What time this afternoon?’ Rycroft cut in, not because he thought the answer important, and not because he could see any significance in it. He just wanted to get the question in before the cook could.
But Brian shrugged. ‘I dunno. After lunch sometime. Before we started off. Just gone three, summat like that.’ He shrugged in obvious indifference. Or was he just faking it?
Jenny felt her heartbeat quicken. So, she was right! But knowing how a murder was done was not the same thing as knowing who had done it.
Rycroft, sensing that the cook was now way ahead of him, as usual, snarled at O’Keefe to get going, then stared at the woodpile and the sheet of innocuous plastic. But try as he might, he couldn’t see what wood, plastic and the engineer had to do with anything.
Jenny, rather wisely, chose that moment to excuse herself and check that her fruit tarts weren’t burning.
Rycroft made no move to stop her. Only when they were safely alone did he turn to Graves, one eyebrow lifted.
‘Well?’
But Graves couldn’t see what the cook had been getting at either. It left both men feeling rather frustrated, not to mention nervous. So far, no policeman had out-thought the cook. Both of them were anxious to be the first, and thus restore honour to the Oxfordshire constabulary. But they were beginning to lose their previous self-confidence.
Which went part of the way, at least, to explaining why they were so hard on Lucas Finch when they returned to the dining room some ten minutes later.
By then, the soup had been mostly consumed, and Jenny put two servings of the main course into the oven to keep hot, for the policemen to enjoy later. When they stepped back into the dining room, she was just emerging from the galley with a large, shortcrust pasty tart, filled with apricots, raspberries, blackcurrants and plums, in an apricot-brandy jelly. This she put onto the side table to come to room temperature, which is when it should be served to be at its best, and noticed the pinched and disapproving look on Rycroft’s face. Graves, she noticed, for once did look grave.
The parrot on Lucas’s shoulder dipped its head from side to side. ‘What’s up with you, shortarse?’ it asked, rather loudly.
Rycroft went beetroot.
Lucas, for once, could have throttled the bird. ‘Don’t mind him, Inspector,’ he said hastily. ‘It’s what I’m always saying to him. First thing in the morning, I open up his cage – he always sleeps in one at night – give him a raisin and say, “What’s up with you, shortarse?”’ He trailed off miserably as he became aware that his explanations and apologies were falling on deaf ears.
Rycroft, with the manner of a magician pulling a rabbit out of a hat, took a fairly thick wad of papers from out of his suit breast pocket and said grimly, ‘Do you recognize these, Mr Finch?’
It was immediately apparent, to Jenny at least, that Jasmine Olney certainly recognized them. She watched them pass across the table, from policeman to her host, her eyes widening.
She’d seen her husband reading them several times over the past week. If only she’d known that they were so important! Her look of vexation made Jenny wonder what else Jasmine Olney might have overlooked.
Lucas went white, then grey, then back to white again. He swallowed hard. ‘Yes, I recognize them,’ he croaked.
David Leigh glanced at Lucas, his solicitor’s instincts coming to the fore. His firm was courting Lucas Finch and his accounts assiduously. If he could leap into the breech now and come to the rescue, who could say how grateful Lucas might not be? But before he could open his mouth to reassure Lucas that he needn’t answer any of the inspector’s questions, Rycroft was steaming ahead.
‘Are they accurate?’
Lucas flinched. ‘They’re accurate,’ he agreed. ‘In as far as they go.’
Dorothy Leigh pushed her untouched plate of food away, and gave Lucas a sympathetic look. She touched her husband’s arm, silently urging him to step in.
But David had had time to think things through, and was, as a consequence, somewhat more cautious than he might have been just a few moments earlier. ‘Lucas, if you need legal representation, then you can hire me now, on the spot. At least then you’ll be covered by legal privilege if—’
But Lucas held up his hand. ‘I don’t need a solicitor, thanks, Dave. What the inspector has there are army records of an old court martial. A court martial in which I was cleared of any w
rong-doing. Isn’t that so, Inspector?’ Lucas raised his voice, and his chin.
Obviously, Rycroft thought, he intends to bluff it out. But then, what other course was left open to him, he mused, with an ugly sneer.
‘The military court hardly cleared you, Finch,’ Rycroft bit out. ‘It merely had to conclude that there was not enough evidence to convict you.’
Dorothy Leigh gasped, but Tobias Lester, Jenny saw, was not looking at all surprised.
No doubt O’Keefe and he had already read the document. Tobias had been present at the darts match, Jenny instantly surmised, knowing all the time that O’Keefe was searching Olney’s room. She wondered, idly, if maybe O’Keefe and the captain had planned to do a little blackmailing of their own, just to ensure that they kept their cottages, at least. And their jobs, too, if the Stillwater Swan had somehow stayed in Lucas’s possession.
Of course, since the court martial was a matter of record, whether or not Olney had kept copies was irrelevant. In which case, something more drastic would have to be done. And the obvious solution was to make sure that Olney didn’t live to wrest the boat away from Lucas. It could have happened that way, Jenny mused. Two strong men of action – what chance would Olney have had against the both of them?
But she was getting well into the realms of guesswork now, which was something that she didn’t like to do. It was far too easy to come up with beautifully crafted theories that fizzled out in the light of more solid proofs. Besides, it was far easier to concentrate on one thing at a time.
Which meant Lucas Finch and his court martial.
‘But what was the court martial about?’ she asked out loud, knowing that it was the thought on everyone’s mind.
Lucas gave her an Et tu Brute? look and the parrot blew a raspberry.
It was a very good raspberry, and it set Graves’ lips to twitching once more.
‘It appears that our friend Mr Finch here commandeered medical supplies during the Falklands war,’ Rycroft grated. ‘Medical supplies that proved to be very lucrative for certain suppliers of the street drugs trade. It must have made you a lot of money too, Finch,’ he finished disdainfully.