Beginner's Luck

by Paul Somers

  I took off my shoes and socks and rolled up my trousers and stepped down into the river. The water was cold, but not too cold. I started to wade out, but the sides shelved too sharply. The channel in the middle must be eight or ten feet deep. If I was going to investigate, I should have to swim.

  I climbed out and considered the situation. There was undoubtedly something under the water that was leaking petrol. It might be a not-quite-empty tin that someone had thrown in. It certainly didn’t have to be Snipe. On the other hand, it could be. If it was, it would round off my day’s work splendidly, and I should have the find to myself. It wouldn’t take more than a moment or two to make sure, and I could dry off in the sun. I took a quick look round. Except for a small clump of trees just ahead of me there were open fields on all sides, and there was no one about. I stripped off my clothes and slid into the water.

  Half a dozen strokes brought me to the middle of the river, and I dived cautiously. The water was remarkably clear. I looked ahead, and almost at once I saw a large object sitting on the river bed. It was the boat! It was almost upright, and the top of the cabin was about four feet under water. I surfaced for air and then swam down again and made a circuit of the boat. It had a brown hull, and it was about twenty feet long. As I rounded the stern I saw that one of the planks had come away from its fastenings. The woodwork was badly smashed, and not by accident, for there were deep round marks as though it had been hit with some heavy instrument like a hammer head. It was pretty clear that Snipe had been scuttled.

  I surfaced again, and climbed on to the cabin top, and stood up with the top half of me out of the water. As I emerged I heard a sharp cry from the bank and turned quickly. It was Mollie. She’d just come out from the trees, and she was gazing at me in utter astonishment.

  “What on earth are you standing on?” she said.

  It was much too late to pretend I was treading water. I said, “Father, I cannot tell a lie. I’m standing on someone’s old boat.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, mainly because I’ve nothing on. Nudity without reciprocity always strikes me as rather undignified.”

  She smiled, but only for a moment. Her glance switched to a patch of oil that was just drifting away.

  “It can’t be a very old boat,” she said. “Is it Snipe?”

  “You surely don’t expect me to give you a carbon copy of my story?” I said.

  “You might at least tell me if it’s Snipe.”

  I grinned. “I don’t seem to remember anything in your professional code about an armistice. War to the knife, you said—nothing about flags of truce.”

  “I think you’re being most objectionable.”

  “Oh, I’m not insisting on my rights—I don’t mind putting you in the picture. The fact is, I’ve found an old Norwegian burial ship. It’s about fifty feet long, and it’s full of treasure. Quite a discovery!”

  “I suppose I’ll have to come and look,” she said coldly, and turned towards the wood.

  I called after her. “Don’t be silly—I don’t mind telling you. Always ready to help a colleague in trouble!”

  “Thanks, but I don’t think I want my news second-hand, after all. How do I know you’d tell me the truth?”

  “Just as you like,” I said. “In that case I’ll see you in the water—I hope!”

  I rested a bit longer, and then dived in again. I wanted to have a look in the cabin if I could, but the doors were shut and by the time I’d got them open I needed air again. I reached the surface just in time to see Mollie approaching from up-stream at a fast crawl. I caught the flash of a gleaming shoulder, and then she dived. I waited a moment, and went in after her. She was just disappearing round the stern. I turned in the opposite direction and she swam past me, a yard away, white and graceful. She looked much more attractive than any mermaid. I went on till I was over the cockpit and swam down and peered through the cabin doors. I don’t know what I’d expected to find there, but there was nothing of any obvious interest. Perhaps I just wasn’t concentrating. I surfaced for the last time and swam back to my clothes. I dried off as well as I could with a pocket handkerchief, and dressed damply. Mollie was already on her way back upstream to the wood.

  She emerged a few minutes later, combed and lip-sticked, though hardly her usual soignée self. She gave me an amused smile.

  “Well,” she said, “satisfied?”

  “I wouldn’t say that.”

  “The things I do for my paper!”

  “You owed it to them,” I said. I wanted to ask her if she’d noticed the broken plank, but I didn’t, in case she hadn’t.

  “Well, we’d better be getting back,” she said. “If we phone our stories first, and tell the police about it afterwards, there’s a chance we’ll beat the others to the first editions.”

  It was after seven when we reached the Castle Arms. I decided to try dictating my addition without writing it, as it was a simple descriptive piece, and I got through it quite well. I reported the new development to Blair, who grunted happily and said, “Splendid, Curtis!” Then, as I left the box, I ran into Lawson. He’d just checked in at the reception desk.

  “Hallo, old boy!” he said affably. “I say, I hope you don’t mind me butting in like this?”

  “Of course not,” I lied.

  “Personally,” he said, with equal insincerity, “I’d have left you to handle it on your own as you were doing so well, but you know what an old woman Blair is. Anyway, it’ll probably take both of us to exploit the thing properly.”

  I nodded; and he looked relieved. “Let’s go and have a drink, then,” he said, “and you can fill me in on what’s happened.” He grinned. “You certainly did run slap into this story, didn’t you? Quite a break!”

  “Just beginner’s luck,” I said modestly.

  Chapter Seven

  I had all the papers sent up to my room next morning, and for the first time I had the exquisite pleasure of seeing myself in print and my name over a story. The Record had really done me very well. What I’d sent had been subbed down to about half its original length, but I’d made the front page, and my first-person descriptions of finding the body and the boat were more or less intact.

  I read Mollie’s story next—and once again I had a slight feeling of chagrin. She’d done a first-person account, too, but with a difference. I’d described how “I and another reporter” had found the body. She’d just said “I,” and she’d conveyed to her readers an impression of great resource and efficiency in dealing with a peculiarly horrible situation. There was no doubt that Mollie had a flair for getting her personality across in her pieces—which I supposed was what she was paid for. She’d managed to get more atmosphere in, too, which made her story very effective, and of course she’d had the advantage of being able to follow up her own piece of the previous day.

  Still, when I looked at my story again—and I did it at pretty frequent intervals during the next few hours—I decided that I’d no cause for dissatisfaction. If Mollie had the edge on me, I certainly had more than the edge on everybody else. Thanks to her delaying tactics, none of the other reporters had had time to check up on the boat.

  I met her in the lobby on my way down to breakfast. She was wearing a thin tweed suit that I hadn’t seen before and she looked very smart. To my male eye, at any rate, her beautifully waving hair bore little trace of the soaking it had had in the river. She looked, I thought, more like a photographer’s model than a working reporter.

  I said, “Morning, Mollie!”

  “Morning!” she said brightly.

  “I’ve just been reading your story. I thought that was a pretty good effort of yours, dealing with the body single-handed. Some women would have been too upset!”

  For once, it seemed to me that her self-possession faltered. In fact, I believed I detected a very faint blush.

  “I didn’t write it like that,” she said. “The subs. altered it.”

  I grinned. “I believe you,” I said, “but
millions wouldn’t.”

  “Cross my heart!”

  “Well, it read very nicely, anyway. I don’t know how you do it.”

  “Your piece was good, too,” she said graciously. “The trouble with you is that you’re too modest—you’ve got to put yourself over in this game, it’s like show business. ‘I’ did this, and ‘I’ did that—I’m the great reporter offering you this wonderful story—that is, of course, when the story will stand it. Blow yourself up! Present yourself! Give the impression you’re some sort of superman!”

  “I’d feel damn’ silly.”

  “Why? There’s no need to take the nonsense seriously. You don’t suppose I really care whether two million people think I found a body or not. It’s just part of the racket.”

  “You baffle me,” I said.

  “What’s baffling about me?”

  “You look such a nice girl!”

  “God!” she said, and went in to breakfast.

  The dining-room was packed with reporters. Lawson was there, reading the papers over his coffee. He congratulated me warmly on my story, but he seemed a bit puzzled. “Are you and Mollie Bourne running some sort of co-operative society?” he asked.

  “On the contrary,” I said, “we’re at each other’s throats.”

  “I just wondered. It’s odd she should have noticed that petrol on the water, too. Pretty chancy thing to happen.”

  “She’s a very observant girl,” I said.

  “She certainly is—she even spotted the smashed hull.” He was silent a moment. “She must have been swimming around with nothing on, too. Wish I’d been there.”

  “I bet you do!” I said.

  He still looked faintly suspicious, but he didn’t pursue the subject. I poured some coffee, and asked him what the orders were for the day. He said we couldn’t do much until we got the basic facts from the police, and that for the moment the best thing was to stick around with him. About ten we went off along the river bank to watch them raising Snipe. They’d brought some experts along, and the whole job only took about an hour. They brought her to the bank to dry out, and after they’d had a preliminary look round we were allowed aboard one at a time, with instructions not to touch. Actually, there was nothing very interesting there. The cabin, in spite of its soaking, bore all the marks of occupation by a methodical, boat-proud owner. The sleeping-bag was carefully rolled, the stove had obviously been kept spotlessly clean. There was a fishing-rod and a portable radio and a paper-backed novel or two—everything to suggest a pleasant, carefree holiday, nothing to hint at violence. It didn’t look as though the boat itself had played any part in the murder—except to carry the unfortunate victim nearer to the scene.

  When Cobley left, just before twelve, we went along with him to his headquarters and more or less camped out there until well into the afternoon, collecting scraps of information as they appeared. For the first time I had a chance of seeing Lawson at work, and it was quite an education. He undoubtedly had a way with him where policemen were concerned, which was probably why he was a Crime Reporter. I don’t quite know how he did it, but he seemed able to insinuate himself into their confidence with enviable ease. It wasn’t just that his name was known to them, because that applied to a lot of the other reporters as well. Perhaps it was his “old boy” approach and his total lack of “side” that won them over. Anyway, he was soon on excellent terms with Cobley’s sergeant and with most of the other plain-clothes men, and though he didn’t actually prise away any facts that our rivals didn’t get, I could well imagine him doing so.

  There was very little for me to do. Figgis called at the station just before lunch and I had a few words with him, but he still didn’t know anything. Afterwards I saw Lawson in smiling conversation with him. Lawson, it seemed, could get on with anyone.

  About three that afternoon we had an informal press conference with Cobley and he told us what the police had discovered so far. It didn’t amount to a great deal. Hoad had been killed, it appeared, by two savage blows from some blunt instrument, possibly a cosh. If something heavier had been used, it had probably been wrapped up in a cloth of some kind, because though the skull had been fractured the skin had scarcely been broken and there had been almost no blood. The murder had been committed two nights ago. Hoad had been noticed by a farmer, cruising up river about four miles below the castle, at around six in the evening, which was the last time anyone but the murderer had seen him alive. At that time, the stone shot had been in place; by nine next morning it had disappeared. The official view seemed to be that Hoad had probably continued on his way to the castle, tied up near there for the night, and been killed somewhere close by. The wire that had been used to make the stone fast to him might well have been aboard the boat, though that was speculation. The murderer, having disposed of the body, had then brought the boat downstream where the water was deeper and scuttled it, presumably in the hope that when both Hoad and Snipe were reported missing it would be supposed that he had put out to sea again and met with some accident there.

  The only indication of motive—and this came as a surprise—was that something like twenty pounds in notes was missing from Hoad’s wallet. According to his bank, he’d drawn that amount for his week’s holiday, and it seemed very unlikely that he could have spent more than a fraction of it. The case might therefore be a comparatively simple one of robbery with lethal violence, unplanned and fortuitous. There was no other known reason why anyone should have wanted to kill Hoad. As far as could be gathered, he had been a worthy citizen in every way—a conscientious worker, a kind husband and father, a man with many friends and no enemies. At the same time, Cobley admitted, there was no present explanation of how a casual murderer could have got into the castle, and the police were still looking into this. If the murder hadn’t been casual, but premeditated, then it was possible that the theft of the castle key four years earlier might have something to do with it. And that, for the moment, was all. Questions, Cobley said, would have to be postponed until later.

  It wasn’t a very satisfying statement, but it gave us a certain amount of copy to be going on with. We drove quickly back to the pub, and Lawson phoned half a column off the cuff. Then he joined me in the lounge. I’d been thinking quite a bit about what Cobley had told us, and the more I thought about it the more snags I could see.

  I said, “What do you think about this casual murder idea?”

  He grinned. “Not much, old boy. And I’d lay long odds that Cobley doesn’t, either.”

  “He made quite a point of it.”

  “Oh, he wants it published, all right—but that doesn’t mean he believes it. He may be trying to lull the real murderer. False sense of security, that sort of thing. Or he may just be covering up in advance in case he can’t find a better explanation.”

  “Do the police do that?”

  “You bet they do! There’s nothing like having a passing tramp to put the blame on if no one else turns up.… But in this case, of course, it’s just nonsense. You could hardly have anything less casual than the way that body and boat were disposed of.”

  “That’s what I thought,” I said. “All the same, I suppose some thug might have done the job on the spur of the moment and then realised it would be safer to get rid of the traces?”

  “Don’t you believe it, old boy. He’d have left the body where it fell and cleared off with the twenty quid—he wouldn’t have hung about for hours fooling with boats. Why should he, if he had no connection with Hoad? Whoever went to all that trouble must have had a damned good reason—and if you ask me, it was because he knew that if the murder was uncovered it would be linked with him.”

  “Where do you think the twenty pounds comes in?”

  Lawson shrugged. “Maybe the murderer took the money as a blind.… It’s an old dodge. Or perhaps it was an afterthought—why pass up twenty quid when it’s there for the taking …? Mind you, it’s just possible he knew Hoad had the money on him and did the whole thing for that—but someh
ow I can’t see it. I’d say it was a carefully planned job by someone who badly wanted to get rid of him.”

  I nodded. So far we were seeing eye to eye. “All right,” I said, “let’s suppose the murderer had a personal motive. Let’s suppose the whole thing was premeditated. Where does that get us? It seems wildly unlikely to me that someone stole the castle key four years ago with the intention of bumping Hoad off on the premises four years later. And if it wasn’t stolen for that reason, why was it stolen? And if the murderer didn’t use the stolen key, how did he get in?”

  Lawson said, “What do you think I am, old boy, an electronic brain …? Still, I don’t mind having a bash. In the first place, how do we know a key was stolen?”

  I stared at him. “Well, surely …?”

  “Figgis says it was, but we’ve only got his word for it.”

  Oddly enough, I’d never thought of that. After a moment, I said, “Well, can’t it be checked? He must have reported it to the castle people at the time.”

  “He didn’t, old boy. I asked him this morning.”

  “Really …? Did he say why not?”

  “He said he had another key so it didn’t seem worth making a fuss about.”

  “Well, that could be true, I suppose.”

  “It could—and it could be untrue. In our game, you can’t be too suspicious.”

  I said, “Do you mean you suspect Figgis of the murder?”

  “Between you and me and the gatepost, old boy, I’d say it was a possibility. Who’s the man who’d be linked at once with any murder at the castle? Figgis! And who had the opportunity to commit the murder? Figgis! He had a key, he could have slipped out of his house at night, knowing that Hoad’s boat was already moored near the castle, he could have done the job. And as far as we know, no one else could. He’d realise that, too. So what would he do? Invent a stolen key story to provide an alternative. I think it all fits rather well.”

  I suddenly remembered my talk with Mrs. Figgis. I said, “But his wife told me about the key. She gave me a most circumstantial account of how it came to be lost.”