Longshot (28 page)

“Right, sir,” Doone said, as I stood up out of the car, “we’ve done nothing here so far. Moved nothing. Please take us through your actions of Wednesday afternoon.”

Sam said crossly, “Asking for bloody trouble, coming here.”

“As it turned out,” Doone said placidly. “Go on, Mr. Kendall.”

“Harry said he was due to meet someone in the boathouse, so we went over there.” I walked where we’d gone, the others following. “We opened this main door. It wasn’t locked.”

“Never is,” Sam said.

I pushed open the door and we looked at the hole in the floor.

“We walked in,” I said. “Just talking.”

“What about?” Doone asked.

“About a great party Sam gave here once. Harry was saying there had been a bar here in the boathouse and a grotto below. He began to walk down to the windows and saw an envelope on the floor and when he bent to pick it up the floor creaked and gave way.”

Sam looked blank.

“Is that likely?” Doone asked him. “How long ago was the floor solid enough to hold a party on it?”

“A year last July,” Sam said flatly.

“Quick bit of rot,” Doone commented in his singsong voice.

Sam made no answer, in itself remarkable.

“Anyway,” I said, “I took off my boots and jacket and left them up here and I dropped into the water, because Harry hadn’t come up for air, like I told you.”

“Yes,” Doone said.

“You can see better from the lower door,” I remarked, turning to go down the path. “This door down here leads into the dock.”

Sam disgustedly fingered the splintered doorframe.

“Did you do this?” he demanded. “It wasn’t locked.”

“It was,” I said. “With no key in sight.”

“The key was in the keyhole on the inside.”

“Absolutely not,” I said.

Sam pulled the door open and we looked into the scene that was all too familiar to my eyes: an expanse of muddy water, the hole in the ceiling overhead and the curtain of iron mesh across the exit to the river; a dock big enough for a moderate-sized cabin cruiser or three or four smaller boats.

The water smelled dankly of mud and winter, which I hadn’t seemed to notice when I’d been in it.

“There’s a sort of walkway along this right-hand wall,” I told Doone. “You can’t see it now because of the flood-water.”

Sam nodded. “A mooring dock, with bollards.”

“If you care to walk along there,” I suggested, deadpan, “I’ll show you an interesting fact about that hole.”

They both stared at the water with reluctance stamped all over their faces, then Sam’s cleared as he thought of a more palatable solution.

“We’ll go and look in a boat.”

“How about the curtain?”

“Roll it up, of course.”

“Now, wait,” Doone said. “The boat can wait. Mr. Kendall, you came through the hole, found Mr. Goodhaven and brought him to the surface. You sat him on the dock, then dived out under the curtain and climbed onto the bank. Is that right?”

“Yes, except that while I was pulling Harry along to that far corner to give him better support, someone opened the main door above our heads, like I told you, and then went away without saying anything, and I heard a car drive off, which might have been Harry’s.”

“Did you hear any car
arriving
?” Doone asked.

“No.”

“Why didn’t you call out for help?”

“Harry had been enticed here ... It all felt like a trap. People who set traps come back to see what they’ve caught.”

Doone gave me another of his assessments.

Sam said, frowning, “You can’t have dived out under the curtain, it goes right down to the riverbed.”

“I sort of slithered under it.”

“You took a bloody risk.”

“So do you,” I said equably, “most days of the week. And I didn’t have much choice. If I hadn’t found a way out we’d both eventually have died of cold or drowning, or both. Certainly by now. Most likely Wednesday night.”

After a short thoughtful silence Doone said, “You’re out on the bank. What next?”

“I saw the car had gone. I went to collect my boots and jacket, but they’d gone too. I called to Harry to reassure him, then I went over to that big shed to find a telephone, but I couldn’t.”

Sam shook his head. “There isn’t one. When I’m here I use the portable phone from my car.”

“I couldn’t find any decent tools, either.”

Sam smiled. “I hide them.”

“So I used a rusty tire lever and a mallet, and I’m sorry about your woodwork.”

Sam shrugged.

“Then what?” Doone asked.

“Then I got Harry out here and put him in a dinghy and we ... er ... floated down to the lock.”

“My dinghy!” Sam exclaimed, looking at the imitation scrapyard. “It’s gone!”

“I’m sure it’s safe down at the lock,” I said. “I told the lockkeeper it was yours. He said he’d look after it.”

“It’ll sink,” Sam said. “It leaks.”

“It’s out on the bank.”

“You’ll never make a writer,” he said.

“Why not?”

“Too bloody sensible.”

He read my amusement and gave me a twisted grin.

I said, “What happens to the rubbish lying in the dock when you roll up the curtain?”

“Bloody sodding hell!”

“What are you talking about?” Doone asked us.

“The bed of this dock is mud, and it slopes downwards towards the river,” I said. “When the curtain’s rolled up, there’s nothing to stop things drifting out by gravity into the river and being moved downstream by the current. Bodies often float to the surface, but you of all people must know that those who drown in the Thames can disappear altogether and are probably taken by undercurrents down through London and out to sea.” Sometimes from my high Chiswick window I’d thought about horrors down below the surface, out of sight. Like hidden motives, running deadly, running deep.

“Everyone in the Thames Valley knows they disappear.” Doone nodded. “We lose a few holidaymakers every year. Very upsetting.”

“Harry’s leg was impaled on something,” I said mildly. “He was stuck underwater. He’d have been dead in a very few minutes. Next time Sam rolled the curtain up, Harry would have drifted quietly out of here, I should think, and no one would ever have known he’d been here. If his body were found anywhere downstream, well then, it could be suicide. If it wasn’t found, then he’d escaped justice.” I paused, and asked Sam directly, “How soon would you have rolled up the curtain?”

He answered at once. “Whenever I’d found the hole in the floor. I’d have gone to take a look from beneath. Like we’re going to now. But I hardly ever come over here. Only in summer.” He gave Doone a sly look. “In the summer I bring a mattress.”

“And Angela Brickell?” Doone asked.

Sam, silenced, stood with his mouth open. A bull’s-eye, I thought, for the detective chief inspector.

I asked Sam, “What’s under the water in the dock?”

“Huh?”

“What did Harry get stuck on?”

He brought his mind back from Angela Brickell and said vaguely, “Haven’t a clue.”

“If you raise the curtain,” I said, “we may never know.”

“Ah.” Doone stared judiciously at Sam, all three of us still clustered around the open door. “It’s a matter for grappling irons, then. Can we get a light inside there?”

“The main switch for here is over in the shed,” Sam said as if automatically, his mind’s attention elsewhere. “There’s nothing in the dock except maybe a couple of beer cans and a radio some clumsy bimbo dropped when she was teetering out of a punt in high heels. I ask you ...”

“Harry wasn’t impaled on a radio,” I said.

Sam turned away abruptly and walked along the path to his workshop. Doone made as if to go after him, then stopped indecisively and came back.

“This could have been an accident, sir,” he said uneasily.

I nodded. “A good trap never looks like one.”

“Are you quoting someone?”

“Yes. Me. I’ve written a good deal about traps. How to set them. How to catch game. The books are lying about all over the place in Shellerton. Everyone’s dipped into them. Follow the instructions and kill your man.”

“You’re not joking by any chance, are you, sir?”

I said regretfully, “No, I’m not.”

“I’ll have to see those books.”

“Yes.”

Sam came back frowning and, stretching inside without stepping into the water, pressed the three switches that had been unresponsive two days earlier. The lights in the ceiling came on without fuss and illuminated the ancient brick walls and the weathered old gray beams which crossed from side to side, holding up the planks of the floor above: holding up the planks, except where the hole was.

Doone looked in briefly and made some remark about returning with assistance. Sam looked longer and said to me challengingly, “Well?”

“There’s a bit of beam missing,” I said, “isn’t there?”

He nodded unwillingly. “Looks like it. But I didn’t know about it. How could I?”

Doone, in his quiet way a pouncer, said meaningfully, “You yourself, sir, have all the knowledge and the tools for tampering with your boathouse.”

“I didn’t.” Sam’s response was belligerence, not fear. “Everyone knows this place. Everyone’s been here. Everyone could cut out a beam that small, it’s child’s play.”

“Who, precisely?” Doone asked. “Besides you?”

“Well ... anybody. Perkin! He could. Nolan ... I mean, most people can use a saw, can’t they? Can’t you?”

Doone’s expression assented but he merely said, “I’ll take another look upstairs now, if you please, sir.”

We went in gingerly, but as far as one could tell the floor was solid except for the one strip over the missing bit of beam. The floorboards themselves were gray with age, and dusty, but not worm-eaten, not rotten.

Sam said, “The floorboards aren’t nailed down much. Just here and there. They fit tightly most of the time because of the damp, but when we have a hot dry summer they shrink and you can lift them up easily. You can check the beams for rot.”

“Why are they like that?” Doone asked.

“Ask the people who built it,” Sam said, shrugging. “It was like this when I bought it. The last time I took the floorboards up was for the party, installing colored spotlights and strobes in the ceiling underneath.”

“Who knew you took the floorboards up?” Doone asked.

Sam looked at him as if he were retarded. “How do I know?” he demanded. “Everyone who asked how I’d done the lighting, I told them.”

I went down on my knees and edged towards the hole. “Don’t do that,” Doone exclaimed.

“Just having a look.”

The way the floorboards had been laid, I saw, had meant that the doctored beam had been a main load-bearer. Several of the planks, including those that had given way under Harry’s weight, had without that beam’s support simply been hanging out in space, resting like a seesaw over the previous beam but otherwise supported only by the tight fit of each plank against the next. The floorboards hadn’t snapped, as I’d originally thought: they’d gone down into the dock with Harry.

I tested a few planks carefully with the weight of my hand, then retreated and stood up on safer ground.

“Well?” Doone said.

“It’s still lethal just each side of the hole.”

“Right.” He turned to Sam. “I’ll have to know, sir, when this tampering could have been carried out.”

Sam looked as if he’d had too much of the whole thing. With exasperation he said, “Since when? Since Christmas?”

Doone said stolidly, “Since ten days ago.”

Sam briefly gave it some thought. “A week last Wednesday I dropped off a load of wood here on my way to Windsor races. Thursday I raced at Towcester. Friday I spent some time here, half a day. Saturday I raced at Chepstow and had a fall and couldn’t ride again until Tuesday. So Sunday I spent nursing myself until you came knocking on my door, and Monday I spent here, pottering about. Tuesday I was back racing at Warwick. Wednesday I went to Ascot, yesterday Wincanton, today Newbury . . .” He paused. “I’ve never been here at nights.”

“What races did you ride in on Wednesday afternoon?” Doone asked. “At Ascot.”

“What races?”

“Yes.”

“The two-mile hurdle, novice hurdle, novice chase.”

I gathered from Doone’s face that it wasn’t the type of answer he’d expected, but he pulled out a notebook and wrote down the reply as given, checking that he’d got it right.

Sam, upon whom understanding had dawned, said, “I wasn’t here driving Harry’s bloody car away, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

“I’ll need to ascertain a good many people’s whereabouts on Wednesday afternoon,” Doone said placidly in a flourish of jargon. “But as for now, sir, we can proceed with our investigations without taking any more of the time of either of you two gentlemen, for the present.”

“Class dismissed?” Sam said with irony.

Doone, unruffled, said we would be hearing from him later.

Sam came with me to where I’d parked Tremayne’s car on stone-strewn grass. The natural jauntiness remained in his step but there was less confidence in his thoughts, it seemed.

“I like Harry,” he said, as we reached the Volvo.

“So do I.”

“Do you think I set that trap?”

“You certainly could have.”

“Sure,” he said. “Dead easy. But I didn’t.”

He looked up into my face, partly anxious, partly still full of his usual machismo.

“Unless you killed Angela Brickell,” I said, “you wouldn’t have tried to kill Harry. Wouldn’t make sense.”

“I didn’t do the silly little bimbo any harm.” He shook his head as if to free her from his memory. “She was too intense for me, if you want to know. I like a bit of a giggle, not remorse and tears afterwards. Old Angie took everything seriously, always going on about mortal sin, and I got bloody damned tired of it, and of her, tell the truth. She wanted me to marry her!” His voice was full of the enormity of such a thought. “I told her I’d got my sights set on a high-born heiress and she damned near scratched my eyes out. A bit of a hellcat, she could be, old Angie. And hungry for it! I mean, she’d whip her clothes off before you’d finished the question.”