Dead Water (14 page)

‘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
on-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.’

‘O, dear!’ she said. ‘Will it? I – I don’t think –’

‘Never mind, dear,’ said her husband.

Alleyn asked if anybody from the Island had been at the first service. Nobody, it appeared. There were several at the nine o’clock.

‘The Barrimores, for instance?’

No, not the Barrimores.

There was a silence through which the non-attendance of the Barrimores was somehow established as a normal state-of-affairs.

‘Although,’ Mrs Carstairs said, in extenuation of a criticism that no one had voiced, ‘Margaret used to come
quite
regularly at one time, Adrian. Before Wally’s Warts, you remember?’

‘Not that there’s any connection, Dulcie.’

‘Of course not, dear. And Patrick and
nice
Jenny Williams have been to evensong, we must remember.’

‘So we must,’ her husband agreed.

‘Poor things. They’ll all be terribly upset no doubt,’ Mrs Carstairs said to Alleyn. ‘Such a shock for everyone.’

Alleyn said carefully: ‘Appalling. And apart from everything else a great worry for Barrimore, one imagines. After all, it won’t do his business any good, this sort of catastrophe.’

They looked uncomfortable and faintly shocked. ‘Well – ’ they both said and stopped short.

‘At least,’ Alleyn said casually, ‘I suppose The Boy-and-Lobster
is
his affair, isn’t it?’

‘It’s the property of the estate,’ Coombe said. ‘Miss Pride’s the landlord. But I have heard they put everything they’d got into it.’

‘She
did,’ Mrs Carstairs said firmly. ‘It was Margaret Barrimore’s money, wasn’t it, Adrian?’

‘My dear, I don’t know. In any case –’

‘Yes, dear. Of course,’ said Mrs Carstairs, turning pink. She glanced distractedly at the knees of her linen dress. ‘O, look!’ she said. ‘Now, I shall have to change. It was that henbane that did it. What a disgrace I am. Sunday and everything.’

‘You melt into your background, my dear,’ the Rector observed. ‘Like a wood-nymph,’ he added, with an air of recklessness.

‘Adrian, you are awful,’ said Mrs Carstairs automatically. It was clear that he was in love with her.

Alleyn said: ‘So there would be a gap of about an hour and a quarter between the first and second services?’

‘This morning, yes,’ said the Rector. ‘Because of the rain, you see, and the small attendance at seven.’

‘How do you manage?’ Alleyn asked Mrs Carstairs. ‘Breakfast must be quite a problem.’

‘Oh, there’s usually time to boil an egg before nine. This morning, as you see, we had over an hour. At least,’ she corrected herself.
‘You
didn’t, did you, dear? Adrian had to make a visit: poor old Mr Thomas,’ she said to Coombe. ‘Going, I’m afraid.’

‘So you were alone after all. When did you hear of the tragedy, Mrs Carstairs?’

‘Before matins. Half past ten. Several people had seen the – well, the ambulance and the stretcher, you know. And Adrian met Sergeant Pender and – and there it was.’

‘Is it true?’ the Rector asked abruptly. ‘Was it – deliberate? Pender said – I mean?’

‘I’m afraid so.’

‘How very dreadful,’ he said. ‘How appallingly dreadful.’

‘I know,’ Alleyn agreed. ‘A woman, it appears, with no enemies. It’s incomprehensible.’

Coombe cleared his throat. The Carstairses glanced at each other quickly and as quickly looked away.

‘Unless, I suppose,’ Alleyn said, ‘you count Miss Pride?’

‘There, I’m afraid,’ the Rector said, and Alleyn wondered if he’d caught an overtone of relief, ‘there, it was all on Miss Cost’s side, poor soul.’

‘You might say,’ his wife added, ‘that Miss Pride had the whip-hand.’

‘Dulcie!’

‘Well, Adrian, you know what I mean.’

‘It’s quite beside the point,’ said the Rector with authority.

A telephone rang in the house. He excused himself and went indoors.

‘There was nothing, I suppose, in her day-to-day life to make people dislike her,’ Alleyn said. ‘She seems, as far as I can make out, to have been a perfectly harmless obsessive.’

Mrs Carstairs began to pick up her scattered belongings, rather as if she was giving herself time to consider. When she straightened up, with her arms full, she was quite red in the face.

‘She wasn’t always perfectly kind,’ she said.

‘Ah! Which of us is?’

‘Yes, I know. You’re quite right. Of course,’ she agreed in a hurry.

‘Did she make mischief?’ he asked lightly.

‘She tried. My husband – Naturally, we paid no attention. My husband feels very strongly about that sort of thing. He calls it a cardinal sin. He preaches
very
strongly against.
Always,’
Mrs Carstairs looked squarely at Alleyn. ‘I’m offending, myself, to tell you this. I can’t think what came over me. You must have a – have a talent for catching people off guard.’

He said wryly: ‘You make my job sound very unappetizing. Mrs Carstairs, I won’t bother you much longer. One more question and we’re off. Have you any idea who played those ugly tricks on Miss Pride? If you have, I do hope you will tell me.’

She seemed, he thought, to be relieved. She said at once: ‘I’ve always considered she was behind them. Miss Cost.’

‘Behind them? You thought she encouraged someone else to take the active part?’

‘Yes.’

‘Wally Trehern?’

‘Perhaps.’

‘And was that what you were thinking of when you said Miss Cost was not always kind?’

‘O no!’ she ejaculated and stopped short. ‘Please don’t ask me any more questions, Mr Alleyn. I shall not answer them, if you do.’

‘Very well,’ he said. He thanked her and went away, followed, uncomfortably, by Coombe.

They lunched at the village pub. The whole place was alive with trippers. The sun glared down, the air was degraded by transistors and the ground by litter. Groups of sightseers in holiday garments crowded the foreshore, eating, drinking and pointing out the Island to each other. The tide was full. The hotel launch and a number of dinghies plied to and fro and their occupants stared up at the enclosure. It was obvious that the murder of Miss Cost was now common knowledge.

The enclosure itself was not fully visible from the village, being masked by an arm of Fisherman’s Bay, but two constables could be seen on the upper pathway. Visitors returning from the Island told each other and anybody that cared to listen, that you couldn’t get
anywhere near the Spring. ‘There’s nothing to see,’ they said. ‘The coppers have got it locked up. You wouldn’t know.’

When they had eaten a flaccid lunch they called on the nearest JP and picked up a search-warrant for Wally’s Cottage. They went on to the station where Alleyn collected a short piece of the trip-wire. It was agreed that he would return to The Boy-and-Lobster. Coombe was to remain at the station, relieving his one spare constable, until the Yard men arrived. He would then telephone Alleyn at The Boy-and-Lobster. Pender would remain on duty at Miss Cost’s shop.

Coombe said: ‘It’s an unusual business, this. You finding the body and then this gap before your chaps come in.’

‘I hope you’ll still be on tap, but I do realize it’s taking more time than you can spare.’

‘Well, you know how it is.’ He waited for a moment and then said: ‘I appreciate your reluctance to form a theory too soon. I mean, it’s what we all know. You can’t. But as I’m pulling out I can’t help saying it looks a sure thing to me. Here’s this dopey kid as good as letting on he pitched in with the stones. There’s more than a hint that his old man was behind it and a damn’ good indication that he set the trip-wire. The kid says Miss Pride came back and there’s every likelihood he mistook Miss Cost for her. I reckon he’d let himself into the enclosure and was up by the boulder. He looked down and saw the umbrella below and let fly at it. I mean: well, it hangs together, doesn’t it?’

‘Who do you think planted the figurine in Miss Pride’s sitting-room and sent her the anonymous message and rang her up?’

‘Well,
she
reckons Miss Cost.’

‘So Miss Cost’s death was the end product of the whole series? Laid on, you might say, by herself?’

‘In a sense. Yes.’

‘Has it struck you at all,’ Alleyn asked, ‘that there’s one feature of the whole story about which nobody seems to show the slightest curiosity?’

‘I can’t say it has.’

Alleyn took from his pocket the figurine that he had wrapped in paper and in his handkerchief. He opened it up and, holding it very gingerly, stood it on Coombe’s desk. The single word, Death, gummed to a sheet of paper, was still fixed in position.

‘Nobody,’ Alleyn said, ‘as far as I can gather, has ever asked themselves who was the original Green Lady.’

‘That piece of paper,’ Alleyn said, ‘is not the kind used for the original messages. It’s the same make as this other piece which is a bit of The Boy-and-Lobster letter paper. The word ‘Death’ is not in a type that is used in your local rag. I can’t be sure but I think it’s from a London sporting paper called
The Racing Supplement.
The printer’s ink, as you see, is a bluish black and the type’s distinctive. Was Miss Cost a racing fan?’

‘Her?’ Coombe said. ‘Don’t be funny.’

‘The Major is. He takes
The Racing Supplement.’

‘Does he, by gum!’

‘Yes. Have you got a dabs-kit handy?’

‘Nothing very flash, but, yes: we’ve got the doings.’

Alleyn produced his box of cigars. He opened this up.

‘There ought to be good impressions inside the lid. Bailey can give it the full works, if necessary, but we’ll take a fly at it, shall we?’

Coombe got out his insufflator and a lens. They developed a good set of prints on the lid and turned to the paper impaled over the figurine’s head.

After a minute or two Alleyn gave a satisfied grunt.

‘Fair enough,’ he said. ‘The index and thumb prints are as good as you’d ask. I think I’ll call on the gallant Major.’

He left Coombe still poring lovingly over the exhibits, walked down to his car, collected his suitcases and crossed by the hotel launch to the Island. Trehern was in charge. His manner unattractively combined truculence with servility.