Dead Water

by Ngaio Marsh

  ‘This might be something,’ he said and laid it out for Alleyn’s inspection.

  It was part of a sheet from the local paper from which a narrow strip had been cleanly excised. The remainder of a headline read: ‘ – to Well-known Beauty Spot’ and underneath: ‘The Natural Amenities Association. At a meeting held at Dunlowman on Wednesday it was resolved to lodge a protest at the threat to Hatcherds Common where it is proposed to build –’

  ‘That’s it, I’m sure,’ Alleyn said. ‘Same type. The original messages are in my desk, blast it, but one of them reads “Threat” (in these capitals) “to close You are warned”: a good enough indication that she was responsible. Any more?’

  ‘No. This was in the ash-bin. Fallen into the grate, most likely, when she burnt the lot. I don’t think there’s anything else but I’ll take another look by daylight. She’s got a bit of a darkroom rigged up out there. Quite well-equipped, too, by the look of it.’

  ‘Has she now? Like to take a slant at it, Thompson?’

  Thompson went out and presently returned to say it was indeed a handy little job of a place and he wouldn’t mind using it. ‘I’ve got that stuff we shot up at the Spring,’ he said. ‘How about it, sir?’

  ‘I don’t see why not. Away you go. Good. Fox, you might penetrate to the bedchamber. I can’t find her blasted diary anywhere.’

  Fox retired to the bedroom. Pender came back and said it was rougher than ever out of doors and he didn’t see himself getting back to the village. Would it be all right if he spent the rest of the night on Miss Cost’s bed? ‘When vacant, in a manner of speaking,’ he added, being aware of Fox’s activities. He emerged from a pitchpine wardrobe, obviously scandalized by Sergeant Pender’s unconventional approach, but Alleyn said he saw nothing against the suggestion and set Pender to tend the switchboard and help Thompson.

  He returned to his own job. The parlour was a sort of unfinished echo of the front shop. Rows of plastic ladies, awaiting coats of green, yellow and pink paint, smirked blankly from the shelves. There were stacks of rhyme-sheets and stationery and piles of jerkins, still to be sewn up the sides. Through the open door he could see the kitchen table with a jug and sugar-basin and a dirty cup with a sodden crust in its saucer. Miss Cost would have washed them up, no doubt, if she had returned from early service and not gone walking through the rain to her death.

  In a large envelope he came across a number of photographs. A group of village maidens, Cissy prominent among them, with their arms upraised in what was clearly intended for corybantic ecstasy. Wally, showing his hands. Wally with his mouth open. Miss Cost herself, in a looking-glass with her thumb on the camera trigger and smiling dreadfully. Several snapshots, obviously taken in the grounds of the nursing home, with Dr Maine caught in moments of reluctance shading into irritation. Views of the Spring and one of a dark foreign-looking lady with an intense expression.

  He heard Fox pull a heavy piece of furniture across the wooden floor and then give an ejaculation.

  ‘Anything?’ Alleyn asked.

  ‘Might be. Behind the bed-head. A locked cupboard. Solid, mortise job. Now, where’d she have stowed the key?’

  ‘Not in her bag. Where do spinsters hide keys?’

  ‘I’ll try the chest of drawers for a start,’ said Fox.

  ‘You jolly well do. A favourite cache. Association of ideas. Freud would have something to say about it.’

  Drawers were wrenched open, one after another.

  ‘By gum!’ Fox presently exclaimed. ‘You’re right, Mr Alleyn. Two keys. Here we are.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Wrapped up in her combs.’

  ‘In the absence of a chastity belt, no doubt.’

  ‘What’s that, Mr Alleyn?’

  ‘No matter. Either of them fit?’

  ‘Hold on. The thing’s down by the skirting board. Yes. Yes, I do believe – here we are.’

  A lock clicked.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘Two cash boxes, so far,’ Fox said, his voice strangely muffled.

  Alleyn walked into the bedroom and was confronted by his colleague’s stern, up-ended beneath an illuminated legend which read:

  ‘Jog on, jog on the footpath way And merrily hent the stile-a.’

  This was supported by a bookshelf on which the works of Algernon Blackwood and Dennis Wheatley predominated.

  Fox was on his knees with his head to the floor and his arm in a cupboard. He extracted two japanned boxes and put them on the unmade bed, across which lay a rumpled nightgown embroidered with lazy daisies.

  ‘The small key’s the job for both,’ he said. ‘There you are, sir.’

  The first box contained rolled bundles of bank notes and a well-filled cashbag; the second, a number of papers. Alleyn began to examine them. The top sheet was a carbon copy with a perforated edge. It showed, in type, a list of dates and times covering the past twelve months.

  The Spring. 15th August 8.15 p.m.

  21st ″ 8.20 ′

  29th ″ 8.30 ′

  There were twenty entries. Two, placed apart from the others, and dated the preceding year, were heavily underlined. ‘22nd July, 5 p.m.’ and ‘30th September, 8.45.’

  ‘From a duplicating book in her desk,’ Alleyn said, ‘a page has been cut out. It’ll be the top copy of this one.’

  ‘Typewritten,’ Fox commented.

  ‘There’s a decrepit machine in the parlour. We’ll check but I think this’ll be it.’

  ‘Do the dates mean anything to you, Mr Alleyn?’

  ‘The underlined item does. Year before last. July 22nd 5 p.m. That’s the date and time of the Wally’s Warts affair. Yesterday was the second anniversary.’

  ‘Would the others be notes of later cures? Was any record kept?’

  ‘Not to begin with. There is now. The book’s on view at Wally’s Cottage. We can check, but I don’t think that’s the answer. The dates are too closely bunched. They give – let’s see; they give three entries for August of last year, one for September, and then nothing until 27th April of this year. Then a regular sequence over the last three months up to – yes, by George! – up to a fortnight ago. What do you make of it, Br’er Fox? Any ideas?’

  ‘Only that they’re all within licensing hours. Very nice bitter, they serve up at The Boy-and-Lobster. It wouldn’t go down too badly. Warm in here, isn’t it?’

  Alleyn looked thoughtfully at him. ‘You’re perfectly right,’ he said. He went into the shop. ‘Pender,’ he called out, ‘who’s the bartender in the evenings at The Boy-and-Lobster?’

  ‘In the old days, sir, it were always the Major hisself. Since these yurr princely extensions, however, there be a barmaid in the main premises and the Major serves in a little wee fancy kind of a place behind the lounge.’

  ‘Always?’

  ‘When he’m capable,’ said Pender dryly, ‘which is pretty well always. He’m a masterpiece for holding his liquor.’

  Pender returned to the shop. ‘There’s one other thing,’ Alleyn said to Fox. ‘The actual times she’s got here grow later as the days grow longer.’

  ‘So they do,’ Fox said. ‘That’s right. So they do.’

  ‘Well: let it simmer. What’s next? Exhibit two.’

  It was an envelope containing an exposed piece of film and a single print. Alleyn was about to lay the print on Miss Cost’s pillow. This bore the impress of her head and a single grey hair. He looked at it briefly, turned aside, and dropped the print on her dressing-table. Fox joined him.

  It was a dull, indifferent snapshot: a tangle of bracken, a downward slope of broken ground and the top of a large boulder. In the foreground out of focus was the image of wire-netting.

  ‘Above the Spring,’ Alleyn said. ‘Taken from the hillside. Look here, Fox.’

  Fox adjusted his spectacles. ‘Feet,’ he said. ‘Two pairs. Courting couple.’

  ‘Very much so. Miss Cost’s anathema. I’m afraid Miss Cost begins to emerge as a progressively unattractive cha
racter.’

  ‘Shutter-peeping,’ said Fox. ‘You don’t get it so often among women.’

  Alleyn turned it over. Neatly written across the back was the current year and ‘17th June. 7.30 p.m.’

  ‘Last month,’ Alleyn said. ‘Bailey!’ he called out. ‘Here, a minute, would you?’ Bailey came in. ‘Take a look at this. Use a lens. I want you to tell me if you think the man’s shoes in this shot might tally with anything you saw at the Spring. It’s a tall order, I know.’

  Bailey put the snapshot under a lamp and bent over it. Presently he said: ‘Can I have a word with Thompson, sir?’ Sergeant Thompson was summoned from outer darkness. ‘How would this blow up?’ Bailey asked him.

  ‘Here’s the neg.’

  ‘It’s a shocking neg,’ Thompson said, and added grudgingly, ‘she’s got an enlarger.’

  Alleyn said: ‘On the face of it, do you think there’s any hope of a correspondence, Bailey?’

  Bailey, still using his lens said: ‘Can’t really say, sir. The casts are in my room at the pub.’

  ‘What about you, Thompson? Got your shots of the prints?’

  ‘They’re in the dish now.’

  ‘Well, take this out and see what you make of it. Have you found her camera?’

  ‘Yes. Lovely job,’ Thompson said. ‘You wouldn’t have expected it. Very fast.’ He named the make with reverence.

  ‘Pender,’ Alleyn said, re-entering the shop. ‘Do you know anything about Miss Cost’s camera?’

  Pender shook his head and then did what actors call a double-take. ‘Yes, I do, though,’ he said. ‘It was give her in gratitude by a foreign lady that was cured of a terrible bad rash. She was a patient up to hospital and Miss Cost talked her into the Spring.’

  ‘I see. Thompson, would it get results round about seven-thirty on a summer evening?’

  ‘Certainly would. Better than this affair, if properly handled.’

  ‘All right. See what you can do.’

  Bailey and Thompson went away and Alleyn rejoined Fox in the bedroom.

  ‘Fox,’ Alleyn said distastefully, ‘I don’t know whose feet the male pair may prove to be but I’m damn’ sure I’ve recognized the female’s.’

  ‘Really, Mr Alleyn?’

  ‘Yes. Very good buckskin shoes with very good buckles. She wore them to the Festival. I’m afraid it’s Mrs Barrimore.’

  ‘Fancy!’ said Fox, after a pause, and he added with his air of simplicity: ‘Well, then, it’s to be hoped the others turn out to be the Major’s.’

  III

  There were no other papers and no diary in either of the boxes.

  ‘Did you reach to the end of the cupboard?’ Alleyn asked Fox.

  ‘No, I didn’t. It’s uncommonly deep. Extends through the wall and under the counter in the shop,’ Fox grumbled.

  ‘Let me try.’

  Alleyn lay on the bedroom floor and reached his long arm into the cupboard. His fingers touched something – a book. ‘She must have used her brolly to fish it out,’ he grunted. ‘Hold on. There are two of them – no, three. Here they come: I think – yes. Yes. Br’er Fox. This is it.’

  They were large commercial diaries and were held together with a rubber band. He took them into the parlour and laid them out on Miss Cost’s desk. When he opened the first he found page after page covered in Miss Cost’s small skeleton handwriting. He read an entry at random:

  ‘…sweet spot, so quaint and unspoilt. Sure I shall like it. One feels the tug of earth and sea. The “pub” (!) is really genuine and goes back to smuggling days. Kept by a gentleman. Major B. I take my noggin “of an evening” in the taproom and listen to the wonderful “burr” in the talk of the fisherfolk. All v. friendly…Major B. kept looking at me. I know your sort, sez I. Nothing to object to, really. Just an awareness. The wife is rather peculiar: I am not altogether taken. A man’s woman in every sense of the word, I’m afraid. He doesn’t pay her v. much attention.’

  Alleyn read on for a minute or two. ‘It would take a day to get through it,’ he said. ‘This is her first visit to the Island. Two years ago.’

  ‘Interesting?’

  ‘Excruciating. Where’s that list of dates?’

  Fox put it on the desk.

  Alleyn turned the pages of the diary. References to Major B., later K., though veiled in unbelievable euphemisms, became more and more explicit. In this respect alone, Alleyn thought, the gallant Major had a lot to answer for. He turned back to the entry for the day after Wally’s cure. It was ecstatic.

  ‘I have always,’ wrote Miss Cost, ‘believed in fairies. The old magic of water and the spoken rune! The Green Lady! He saw her, this little lad saw her and obeyed her behest. Something led me to this Island.’ She ran on in this vein for the whole of the entry. Alleyn read it with a sensation of exasperated compassion. The entry itself was nothing to his purpose. But across it, heavily inked, Miss Cost on some later occasion had put down an enormous mark of interrogation and, beside this, had added a note: ‘30th Sept. 8.45.’

  This was the second of the two underlined dates on the paper. He turned it up in the diary.

  ‘I am shocked and horrified and sickened by what I have seen this evening. My hand shakes. I can hardly bring myself to write it down. I knew, from the moment I first set eyes on her, that she was unworthy of him. One always knows. Shall not tell K. It would serve him right if I did. All these months and he never guessed. But I won’t tell him. Not yet. Not unless – But I must write it. Only so can I rid myself of the horror. I was sitting on the hill below the Spring, thinking so happily of all my plans and so glad I have settled for the shop and ordered my lovely Green Ladies. I was feeling the magic of the water. (Blessed, blessed water. No asthma, now, for four weeks.) And then I heard them. Behind the boulder, laughing. I shrank down in the bracken. And then she came out from behind the boulder in her green dress and stood above the pool. She raised her arms. I could hear the man laughing still but I couldn’t see him. I knew. I knew. The wicked desecration of it! But I won’t believe it. I’ll put it out of my mind forever. She was mocking – pretending. I won’t think anything else. She went back to him. I waited. And then, suddenly, I couldn’t bear it any longer. I came back here…’

  Alleyn, looking increasingly grim, went over the entries for the whole list; throughout two summers, Miss Cost had hunted her evening quarry with obsessive devotion and had recorded the fruits of the chase as if in some antic game-book – time, place and circumstances. On each occasion that she spied upon her victims, she had found the enclosure padlocked and had taken up a point of vantage on the hillside. At no stage did she give the names of the lovers but their identity was inescapable. ‘Mrs Barrimore and Dr Maine,’ Alleyn said. ‘To hell with this case!’

  ‘Awkward,’ observed Fox.

  ‘My dear old Fox, it’s dynamite. And it fits,’ Alleyn said, staring disconsolately at his colleague. ‘The devil of it is, it fits.’

  He began to read the entries for the past month. Dr Maine, Miss Cost weirdly concluded, was not to blame. He was a victim, caught in the toils, unable to free himself and therefore unable to follow his nobler inclination towards Miss Cost herself. Interlarded with furious attacks upon Miss Emily and covert allusions to the anonymous messages, were notes on the Festival, a savage comment on Miss Emily’s visit to the shop and a distracted reference to the attack of asthma that followed it. ‘The dark forces of evil that emanate from this woman’ were held responsible. There followed a number of cryptic asides: –

  (‘Trehern agrees. It’s right. I know it’s right.’)

  ‘ “It is the Cause, it is the Cause, my soul”,’ Alleyn muttered, disconsolatedly. ‘The old, phoney argument.’

  Fox, who had been reading over his shoulder, said: ‘It’d be a peculiar thing if she’d worked Trehern up to doing the job and then got herself mistaken for the intended victim.’

  ‘It sounds very neat, Br’er Fox, but in point of fact, it’s lousy with loose ends. I can’t tak
e it. Just let’s go through the other statements now.’

  They did this and Fox sighed over the result. ‘I suppose so,’ he said and added, ‘I like things to be neat and they so seldom are.’

  ‘You’re a concealed classicist,’ Alleyn said. ‘We’d better go back to this ghastly diary. Read on.’

  They had arrived at the final week. Rehearsals for the Festival. Animadversions upon Miss Emily. The incident of the Green Lady on Miss Emily’s desk. ‘He did it. K. I’m certain. And I’m glad, glad. She no doubt, suspects me. I refused to go. She finds she can’t order me about. To sit in that room with her and the two she has ruined! Never.’

  Alleyn turned a page and there, facing them, was the last entry Miss Cost was to make in her journal.

  ‘Yesterday evening,’ Alleyn said. ‘After the debacle at the Spring.’

  The thunderstorm, he was not surprised to find, was treated as a judgment. Nemesis, in the person of one of Miss Cost’s ambiguous deities, had decided to touch-up the unbelievers with six of the cosmic best. Among these offenders Miss Emily was clearly included but it emerged that she was not the principal object of Miss Cost’s spleen. ‘Laugh at your peril,’ she ominously wrote, ‘at the Great Ones.’ And, as if stung by this observation she continued, in a splutter of disjointed venom, to threaten some unnamed persons. ‘At last,’ she wrote. ‘After the agony of months, the cruelty and now, the final insult, at last I shall speak. I shall face both of them with the facts. I shall tell her what was between us. And I shall show that other one how I know. He – both – all of them shall suffer. I’ll drag their names through the papers. Now. Tonight. I am determined. It is the end.’

  ‘And so it was,’ Fox said, looking up over his spectacles. ‘Poor thing. Very sad, really, these cases. Do you see your way through all this, Mr Alleyn?’

  ‘I think I do, Br’er Fox. I’m afraid I do. And I’ll tell you why.’

  He had scarcely begun, when Bailey, moving rather more quickly than he was wont, came through from the shop.