The Riddle of the River

‘Well, Vanessa,’ cried an eager voice in my ear. ‘Who do you think she might be, then? Any ideas?’

I straightened up abruptly from the scone upon which I had been engaged in spreading a thick layer of clotted cream, preparatory to inserting a small portion of it into little Cedric’s expectantly open mouth.

‘Pat!’ I exclaimed. ‘How you startled me, coming up the garden path so quietly.’

‘I wasn’t particularly quiet,’ he retorted. ‘It’s you who were concentrating so deeply you didn’t hear anything. It happens every single time I come here, you know. I don’t think I’ve ever seen you glance up like a normal person!’ He laughed comfortably, then reverted with typical single-mindedness to his original topic.

‘So – do you have any ideas about our newest mystery?’

‘Oh, Patrick,’ I sighed. ‘I’m sure you mean that you’ve written some exciting article lately that I ought to have read. I’m really sorry to say that I haven’t seen it. I don’t have time to look at the newspaper as regularly as I should, I’m afraid. I just don’t know where the hours and the minutes go, day after day.’

‘Didn’t see it?’ he said in a slightly theatrical tone of amazed disappointment. ‘And here I wrote it specially with you in mind. What a pity! If I’d thought for a moment you
hadn’t seen it, I’d have brought a copy with me.’

‘That’s probably all right,’ I told him. ‘Arthur takes the
Cambridge Evening News
; it comes here every day. It must be lying around somewhere inside. Which day was it – yesterday? Goodness, you
are
impatient! Here, then, I’ll go and look for it now.’

I recklessly abandoned the whole of the scone and cream into Cedric’s chubby hands. The unexpected boon occupied his attention fully, allowing me to hasten indoors and rummage amongst Arthur’s newspapers for two entire minutes.

‘Here it is,’ I said, finding yesterday’s copy, snatching it up, and returning quickly outside in the hopes that no serious domestic disaster had yet occurred, to find Pat actively encouraging Cedric while discreetly and hastily removing cream from them both with the corner of a napkin. ‘What page should I look at? What is it all about?’

‘Murder!’ he said gleefully. ‘It’s on the front page, what do you think? A scoop for me again – but it could be even greater, if you’d help me!’

I read the article aloud, startled by his words.

‘Well?’ Pat interrogated me eagerly. ‘Are you willing to take it on?’

‘What, the case? Of course not, Pat. I am not the police – I’m just an amateur detective! I only take on cases when I am hired to do so. Nobody has hired me yet, as far as I know.’

‘Oh, I didn’t mean take on the murder case,’ he said quickly. ‘I realise that is too big a job.’

I knew he was only trying to make me indignant and rejected the bait with a shake of my head and a smile.

‘What I meant was that you could try to identify the lady,’ he continued quickly. ‘If anyone could manage to find out who she was and what she was doing in Cambridge – it really doesn’t seem possible that she actually lived here – I’m sure you are that person. Then I would get an even bigger scoop, and the police would be better able to get on with their work of finding the murderer.’

‘Is it clear that there really
is
a murderer?’ I asked doubtfully. ‘Perhaps this poor young lady came from somewhere else to make away with herself, on account of some personal unhappiness.’

‘Oh, no,’ he said seriously. ‘She was murdered, I do know that. My brother-in-law’s on the case; you remember Fred Doherty. The full post-mortem report came in last night, and he showed it to me, though I’m not to publish anything of it yet. She had a problem, that is true enough – she was expecting a baby, Vanessa.’ He blushed slightly and glanced around the perfectly empty garden, as though someone might hear him speaking of scandalous things to ladies. ‘And she wore no wedding ring,’ he went on. ‘Yet she didn’t kill herself. The post-mortem was clear. She was killed; strangled, if you like, by pressure applied to the throat.
It’s a very quick death,’ he added as I paled.

I paused, thinking. The girl was dead; how could I help her now? Pat had succeeded in intriguing me, yet one could not simply take up a case directly from the newspaper because it was intriguing. And even if I did wish to help identify her, it was difficult to see how to begin.

Pat put on his most persuasive and wheedling Irish expression, and began again.

‘My editor will hire you, up at the paper, if I ask him to,’ he said. ‘They couldn’t offer any big fee, of course, but just for the identification – they’d be interested in that, I’m certain. News makes sales, Vanessa.’

‘What a vulture you are,’ I remarked. ‘Listen, the thing is that even if I wanted to, I simply don’t see how I should go about it. Why don’t you simply put an advertisement in the paper?’

‘We did,’ he said. ‘That article of mine is an advertisement. It hasn’t received a single answer so far. I don’t think the girl can have been from here. But listen! Don’t say no. Just give it a chance; come with me this evening, to have a talk with my brother-in-law. Let him give you the details. Perhaps there will be something that can start you off.’

‘Well,’ I hesitated, ‘I suppose I will, if Inspector Doherty is willing. I can’t see anything wrong with that. Let me not agree to do anything until we have met with him, and I hear what he is willing to tell me, and think it over.’

‘Oh, he’ll be willing!’ he exclaimed as joyfully as if he had just been offered a gift. ‘He needs any help he can get on this! It’s smooth as a marble sphere for the moment; no handle anywhere. I’ll come by and pick you up tonight after supper, then, shall I?’

We did not go, as I expected, to Inspector Doherty’s home on George Street, not far from where I had lived as a young teacher before my marriage. Instead, Pat directed me to the too-familiar police station on St. Andrew’s Street.

‘Fred is on duty tonight,’ he explained, ‘and it’s just as well.’

‘Does he know I am coming? He might not be pleased,’ I said quickly. The visit to the police station made my involvement seem so much more official, more formal than a simple house call. I wasn’t at all sure that was what I wanted.

‘Fred will be delighted,’ said Pat. ‘He knows all about you, you know that. And even though it seems probable that Scotland Yard will soon be called into the case, especially if it turns out that the girl came up from London, he would be pleased to have something concrete to show them when they come, if that could be managed. Remember,’ he added slyly, ‘we are talking about identification here. Only identification.’

He was not mistaken. A smiling Inspector Doherty welcomed us into his small office, which was littered with a medley of interesting items of all descriptions, and lit by three or four small lamps placed on different articles of furniture, giving the little room an odd, contradictory glow: bright here, dim there. Like Pat, Inspector Doherty was a British Irishman; he had perhaps never set foot in the Emerald Isle in his life, but it was all reflected in his bright blue eyes, his snub nose which insisted on remaining boyish in spite of a hairy growth underneath it intended to increase its dignity, and in the sheen of his dark hair. A different model from red-headed Patrick, yet equally typical. Our Irish contingent.

‘Hullo, hullo,’ he greeted us warmly. ‘Once again, I have the honour to meet the famous Mrs Weatherburn. A pleasure.
Pat has told me that you are most interested in the case of the drowned girl he wrote about.’

‘Oh?’ I said. It had seemed to me, rather, that it was
Pat
who was interested. I am not a sensation-monger. I opened my mouth to say something of the kind, but suddenly realising that I actually
was
, by now, most interested in the case, I changed my mind, and said,

‘It seems nobody has the slightest idea who she is.’

‘No. And no missing person of her description has been reported since the death,’ he said, plunging without hesitation into the facts. ‘Of course, we looked into the records of missing persons from well back, as we thought she may have gone missing some time ago, and now the result makes things difficult the other way. Far too many blonde girls have gone missing in the last few years. Run away, I should think, most of them, but you never know. It’ll all have to be verified.’

‘How do you do that?’ I asked.

‘We start with physical particularities,’ he said. ‘The girl had a small, heart-shaped birthmark on her left elbow. For that matter, her nose had a rather special shape, too. There was a little wave in it, seen from the profile. Those pieces of information eliminated all the girls from the families we’ve been able to interrogate up to now.’

‘If you found a girl that seemed to correspond, what would you do?’ asked Pat.

‘Family members would have to come and have a look,’ responded his brother-in-law. ‘Somewhat uncomfortable, in a case like this. The body has undergone post-mortem. And it had already spent some hours in the water. It is…it is not very presentable, you know. Not too presentable, but we show only small morsels at a time, avoiding the cut areas.
It’s not nice,’ he added, making a face.

‘Oh,’ said Pat. ‘Is she that bad? Can’t one make out what she looked like?

‘Oh yes,’ he said. ‘I meant it is not nice for the families in general. This particular case is not so dreadful, apart from evidence of the post-mortem. Long periods of immersion in water cause swelling and wrinkling, but in this case the body cannot have been there for more than three or four hours. And one or two of the photographs taken before the
post-mortem
would be quite usable in case of positive response to the preliminary questions.’

‘Photographs? Let’s see them,’ said Pat with authority.

The inspector shuffled about in a drawer and extracted two or three large photos, which he handed to us. I looked at them, studying each one for some time, with Pat staring and breathing over my shoulder. They showed the dead girl lying on a stretcher on the bank, after having been removed from the water. Her hair, though still wet and matted, had lifted into heavy waves. Her features were small and delicate. She looked very dead. One of the photographs was a portrait, showing only her face. I gazed, fascinated, at the slight shadow of her eyelashes, the curve of her cheek, the drops of water clinging to the hair at her temple. The powerful, inexplicable difference between life and death arose from the photograph like a vapour. ‘She is wearing an unusual dress,’ I said, trying to make out the details from a full-length photograph in which the body lay stretched on the bank, and pointing to the lace collar around her neck.

‘Yes,’ he assented, touching a box on the floor at his feet. ‘Her effects are all here.’

‘You’ve got more photographs in there, haven’t you?’ asked Pat, indicating the drawer with his chin.

‘Er, yes,’ replied the inspector. He opened it again, with some reluctance, then finally resigned himself to withdrawing the whole sheaf of pictures. He sighed. I waited.

‘Some of these are not so easy to look at,’ he told me. ‘Here she’s still in the water; we haven’t touched her yet,’ and he handed me the first one.

‘Ophelia,’ I said, astonished. I had unconsciously braced myself for a scene evoking murder; instead, the image in front of me was one of sublime and peaceful beauty quite incompatible with that notion. The grass and flowers, all the little life that flourishes on the edge of a stream, formed a frame for the figure of the floating girl. She lay face down in the water, caught in the rushes near the edge, her hair fanning out like algae, and her white dress forming a poetic, ghostly shape as the lines of those parts of it which floated under the water were deformed into waves. The back of her head emerged from the stream, and the wet hair floated, echoing the ripples of the Cam itself. My river – my river contained this mermaid. She was murdered.

‘I don’t like to show these others to a lady,’ said Inspector Doherty uncomfortably. ‘Photographs of the corpse as we took it out. I don’t think you would learn much from them, actually. It’s not that it’s as horrible as many other murders I’ve encountered in my career. But there’s something weird, ghostly about these images.’

‘Oh, be a good fellow,’ said Pat, exactly as I was about to say that I didn’t want to see them. Shrugging, the inspector handed them over, obviously not wanting to seem superior or to put obstacles in the way of help. Pat spread them out. I
took one look, and shuddered. There was no horror, nothing spectacular, nothing overtly revolting, yet they emanated death. My eyes were held by an image of a hand, a dead, limp hand, hanging down as they lifted her onto the bank, white against the dark background. I turned away, and picked up the portrait photo again. It was the only one whose image spoke more of the living girl than of her miserable demise.

‘May I see her things?’ I said after staring at it for a while.

He took the photographs back and stuffed them into his desk drawer with some relief, I thought, then lifted the box onto his desk.