Moriarty Returns a Letter (22 page)

In the corner booth, a grizzled, seventyish fisherman, Sizemore apparently, had nearly finished his pint.

“Fish will eat stale cooked hamburger?” said Nigel, to the bar woman.

The man in the corner spoke up.

“Carp will. And sometimes flounder. If you’d been swimming along the bottom muck of the Thames your whole life, you’d be willing to eat them, too. Anyway, we don’t separate the meat. We roll the bun and burger up into little gooey balls with some grease, put a hook in ’em, and throw ’em in the water. I don’t know why it works, and I don’t care.”

The bar woman nodded, and she said to Nigel, “You can have one if you want.”

“I’m no longer hungry,” said Nigel. “But do you mind if I take one of the wrappers?”

She raised an eyebrow.

“Whatever floats your boat,” she said.

Nigel took one of the wrappers and looked more closely.

It was red and white, and it had the name of the Marylebone Grand Hotel on it, and the date of their special exhibit.

So much for Darla Rennie’s alibi. There was no proof now that she went into the hotel that day at all. She could have been in the pub, happened to pick up a couple of these, taken them home, and still been in town to kill the fisherman.

So she was as potentially murderous as ever.

Nigel had one photo of Darla Rennie in the file from Scotland Yard. It was her original booking photo, from her first arrest at Scotland Yard for the Black Cab murders. That made it not quite current, but it would have to do. He took it out and showed it to the bar woman.

“Have you seen this woman in the pub recently?”

The bar woman looked at the photo and whistled softly.

“Can’t say that I’ve seen her,” she said. “But you might come back and ask one of the young lads later. I’m sure they’d have noticed.”

The grizzled fisherman came over now.

“Let me have a look,” he said.

The bar woman whispered to Nigel, “Go ahead, show him. No one’s called Sizemore a lad in forty years, but I’m sure he still thinks he is.”

The man shot a suspicious glance toward the bar woman, and then he looked at the photo. He nodded.

“I’ve seen her,” he said. “She wasn’t dressed like that. But it was her, just like I told the bloke that was here before.”

“Someone else was asking? Police?”

“Didn’t say,” said the man, shaking his head. “Might have been. But maybe not. Too well dressed. Tall man, gray suit.”

“When?”

The man cleared his throat and sat down on a stool at the bar.

“Bring us a couple of pints, please?” said Nigel to the bar woman. She began to pour them.

“A couple of nights ago, I think,” said the man to Nigel.

“And when did you last see this woman? Was she here at the pub, during the day?”

“Can’t say that I saw her in the pub,” said the man, picking up his fresh pint. “I’m usually out on the water during the day, and that’s where I saw her. A couple of months ago. Just once. Cheeverton sent her below right quick, but I got a look. You don’t forget a chippy like that.”

“So where you saw her was on Cheeverton’s boat?”

The man nodded and took a long draught of the beer.

“Nowhere else?”

The man shook his head. “Just in the photos. The one the other bloke showed me was a little blurry, in some big hotel lobby or the like, and she was wearing a wig or something, but it was her all right. You can’t mistake those eyes, know what I mean?”

“You mean blurry like a surveillance photo?” said Nigel. “From a security camera?”

“How would I know? All I know is, she’s the one I saw on the boat.”

Sizemore turned away now and went back to his booth.

Nigel took several of the hamburger wrappers, paid for the beers, and headed for the door.

He exited the pub, got to the footpath, again faced his original choice—boat or house—and this time he walked to the marina.

Nigel didn’t know much about boats; generally speaking, he appreciated them more from a distance. And as he approached the marina, he tried to convince himself that there was no reason to look at this one.

But he couldn’t. He reached the dock and began walking between the rows of shining watercraft.

He found Cheeverton’s—and as little as he knew about boats, he knew immediately that this one had seen better days.

It wasn’t as sleek in form or nearly as new as most of the other boats in the marina. Its brass fittings were tarnished, and thick layers of heavy oil-based marine enamel had built up over the edges, from many years of repainting.

That’s what you would do, thought Nigel, if you knew the boat was your livelihood, but you couldn’t afford any higher degree of maintenance.

The access point from the dock onto Cheeverton’s boat was marked out with two parallel rows of yellow police tape.

The tape warned anyone who happened by to stay out, but it didn’t provide much of an actual physical barrier. All one had to do was push down on one line of tape, push up on the other, and step over and under onto the boat.

Nigel did that.

He put one foot tentatively from the dock onto the boat, and immediately he was reminded why he was not very familiar with these things.

His queasy stomach told him. He didn’t even have to be out on the water; just the hint of it was enough. The residual fumes from boat motors and odors of fish bait were enough.

Nigel took a couple of deep breaths, told his body to pay no attention to the surface that was about to move under its feet, and stepped fully onto the deck of the boat.

The boat rocked. Nigel put one hand on the top of the cabin to steady himself, and he looked toward the stern.

He saw two compartments. The smaller of them would be the bait tank. That one didn’t matter, and he wasn’t going to look in it.

The larger compartment, some six feet in length and two wide, was for the day’s catch.

Nigel walked uneasily back toward it, knelt to keep his balance, and opened the hatch door.

He looked inside. He saw melting ice in the steel-sided compartment.

Then he took out his mobile and rang Inspector O’Shea of Forensics.

“Heath? You’re in town?” she said.

“I’m at Cheeverton’s boat,” said Nigel. “Had no trouble getting onto it—I mean, no more than usual for me. It’s been taped off, but I got by it easily enough. And it looks to me like someone might have pushed the tape around before me.”

“Any obvious mischief?” said O’Shea.

“Not that I can see, so far,” said Nigel.

“Well, if you do see something broken in, notify the locals. We completed our investigation there in any case. The boat wasn’t the crime scene. Cheeverton was killed at his house. So what’s on your mind, Heath?”

“I see there’s an ice tank,” said Nigel.

“Of course there is,” said O’Shea. “It’s a fishing boat.”

“The tank is big enough for a body,” said Nigel. “Even a fully grown adult male like Cheeverton, if you pushed on it enough. Now, I don’t see any blood on the ice, but that could have been replaced. So what I’m wondering is—”

“Please,” said O’Shea. “Give me a little credit. We checked the boat thoroughly for human blood, and it was no easy thing, with all the biological substances you find on the deck of a fishing boat. And we looked in the tank; we tested the ice; we tested his clothes; we accounted for the possibility that the body might have been wrapped in something, stored in the icy catch hold, and then transported to the house and dumped there. It didn’t happen that way, Heath. He wasn’t killed on the boat.”

“I see,” said Nigel. “So you have no doubts at all about the time of death?”

“No. Why?”

“Because I’ve got some doubts about Darla Rennie’s alibi,” said Nigel.

“Don’t blame me for that one,” said O’Shea. “It was your brother and Laura Rankin came up with it.”

“Everyone keeps saying that,” said Nigel. “But I don’t see what else they were to do, once they’d realized it. But let’s assume it’s true, for the moment. If Darla Rennie didn’t kill the fisherman, someone else did. So do you have any other suspects?”

“That’s Wembley’s arena, not mine. But I think the problem is motive. Who’d want to kill him?”

“Perhaps he was just in the way. Perhaps the real target was the person living with him—Darla Rennie herself.”

“Uh-huh. Well, I know of a lot of people who didn’t think highly of Darla Rennie. One of them is a close relative of yours. Problem is, when the murder was committed, none of those people knew that she was even alive, much less that she was living with this fisherman in Canvey. So do you have anything else for me, Heath, or can I get back to my regular duties?”

“You’re at the mental health facility?”

“Yes, and no, not as a patient.”

“Anything there that will help me find Rennie?”

“Her evaluating psychologist was bashed over the head with a blunt object in the storage room and died from severe head trauma. Does that help?”

“No. What exactly was he bashed with?”

“A hammer, probably, but we haven’t found the murder weapon yet. And we haven’t found her fingerprints.”

“Anything else?”

“This is probably not important,” said O’Shea, causing Nigel’s pulse to quicken just a little, “but I thought one thing was interesting. The staff here say Dr. Miner was very particular about the reading material he allowed in his waiting room. He’d have your typically out-of-date magazines on various topics, and at least one current daily paper, and he liked to draw conclusions about his patients according to what they would choose to look at. And so between one patient and the next, he would always go back into the room and put all the reading choices back in their original, neutral positions. Now, Darla Rennie was his last patient, and of course he wasn’t able to come back and put her selection back in position after he got bashed on the head.”

“I get it,” said Nigel. “So what was Darla Rennie reading before she made her escape?”

“
The Daily Sun,
” said O’Shea. “She had it open to the celebrity column. Which is interesting, because—”

“Because Darla Rennie clipped an earlier column with Reggie and Laura’s original itinerary and concealed it under the floorboards in the house.”

“Yes,” said O’Shea. “Of course, the doctor wasn’t foolish enough to give her scissors. So she didn’t clip this one. But she did have it open to the same columnist again, just on a different day. The blurb is short. Shall I read it?”

“Please,” said Nigel.

O’Shea read it, with some exaggeration, in what Nigel realized after a moment was intended by O’Shea to be a gossip columnist’s voice:

“‘Laura Rankin Changes It Up: Not happy with her original engagement trip itinerary, the actress has enlisted none other than the manager of the entire Marylebone Grand Hotel chain to plan a new one for her. Details? Very hush-hush. But we’re sure she’ll still end up at the castle on Sunday (else tongues will begin to wag).’”

“So Darla Rennie read that column on the day she broke out?” said Nigel.

“It would appear so,” said O’Shea.

“Good to know,” said Nigel. “Thank you.”

Nigel got off the phone and moved from the ice tank at the stern to the cabin entrance at the center of the boat.

The cabin door had been sealed earlier with the police warning tape.

The door was still shut—but the tape was broken.

Nigel opened the door and went inside.

If the boat had been ransacked, the upper portion of the cabin interior didn’t show it. It wasn’t sparkling, but it wasn’t trashed. The radio was still in place, and it was the only thing both valuable and portable, so if someone had broken in for theft, they hadn’t gotten much.

Nigel steadied himself again, reminded himself that he was only on a little boat in a marina, not at sea, and he went down the several narrow steps to the tiny sleeping quarters belowdecks.

He saw a cot. No blanket. There was a small, stainless-steel sink, and then a narrow entrance to the onboard loo.

Nothing remarkable.

And then, as Nigel turned to leave, he opened the cabin door again, and this time the incoming daylight revealed an irregularity on the surface of the cabin floor.

The flooring was made of heavily varnished, polished wood slats. Ordinary gray dust—even though it was only the slightest accumulation, about as much as might have settled in the three days since the fisherman had been killed—was immediately apparent where the sunlight struck it now at an angle. And that slight dust was everywhere, distributed evenly on the floor.

Except on one specific slat.

Nigel knelt down. He took a credit card from his wallet, inserted the edge of it into the narrow crack between two adjoining wood slats, and carefully gave it just the slightest levered pressure.

The slat moved. Nigel lifted it out.

There was unvarnished, solid wood underneath the top slats. There was no hidden compartment, not a planned built-in one, anyway. There was very little space to conceal much of anything, at least nothing that was much thicker than a sheet of paper.

But it would have been a foolish place to put something so thin and light when the boat was still in use. It would have migrated, and could have slid anywhere underneath the floor.

Unless it was fixed in place with something. Nigel put his face down almost nose to the floor to look.

Yes. A tiny hole in the rough wood base underneath the slats. Just one. From a thumbtack, or something like it.

Someone had concealed something—probably a document—within the last week or so, and then someone had come back for it, even more recently, after the murder.

Nigel stood. The little boat rocked dizzily back and forth.

But it was all right. He knew everything now that he needed to know from Canvey.

He could leave the boat, return to London, and get on a nice, stable train.

25

In the Dartmoor National Park, rain was pouring down. The pathetically scruffy-looking man still stood at the side of the road, motionless in the mud, rainwater running down from the sleeves of his overcoat and from the hood that concealed his face.

“We have to at least see if he is in trouble,” said Laura.