Last Respects iscm-10

by Catherine Aird

  “The wind doesn’t help,” said Dabbe, stroking an imaginary beard in the manner of Joshua Slocum. “You get a real funnel effect out there in mid-channel.”

  “I can see that you might,” agreed Sloan. “What with the cliffs to the north…”

  “And the headland above Marby to the south,” completed the doctor. “That’s the real villain of the piece.”

  Sloan was thinking about something else that wasn’t going to help either and that was the official report. It would have to note that the subject was relatively undamaged but not well preserved. It was the sort of incongruity that didn’t go down well with the superintendent; worse, it would undoubtedly have to be explained to him.

  By Sloan.

  “There’s the shingle bank, too,” said the doctor.

  “Billy’s Finger.” Sloan had looked at the map. “I’m going out there presently to have a look at the lie of the land…”

  “And the water,” interjected Detective Constable Crosby.

  Everyone else ignored this.

  “There’s always a fair bit of turbulence, too,” remarked the pathologist sagely, “where the river meets the tide.” It was Joshua Slocum who had sailed alone around the world but Dr. Dabbe contrived to sound every bit as experienced.

  Immutable was the word that always came into Sloan’s mind when people started to talk about tides. He might have been talking about tides at that moment, but it was the face of the superintendent which swam into his mental vision. He would be waiting for news.

  “Let’s get this straight, Doctor,” he said more brusquely than he meant. “This man—whoever he is—has been in the water for a fair time.”

  “That is so,” he agreed. “There is some evidence of adipocere being present,” supplemented the pathologist, “but not to any great degree.”

  “But,” said Sloan, “he hasn’t been out where the tides and currents and fish could get hold of him for all that long?”

  “That puts it very well,” said Dr. Dabbe.

  “And he didn’t meet his death in the water?”

  “I shall be conducting the customary routine test for the widespread distribution of diatoms found in true drowning in sea or river water,” said the pathologist obliquely, “but I shall be very surprised if I find any.”

  “Yes, Doctor,” said Sloan. He wasn’t absolutely sure what a diatom was—and now that the atom wasn’t the indivisible building block of nature any longer he was even less sure.

  Something in what the doctor had said must have caught the wayward attention of Detective Constable Crosby. He stirred and said, “You mean that that test wouldn’t have done for the Brides-in-the-Bath?”

  “I do,” said Dr. Dabbe. “There aren’t any planktons in bath water.”

  “And,” said Sloan, gamely keeping to the business in hand, “we don’t know who he is either…” He had just the one conviction about all things atomic—that the only really safe fast breeder was a rabbit.

  “No,” agreed Dabbe.

  “Of course,” said Sloan, “we could always try his fingerprints…”

  “You’ll be lucky,” said Detective Constable Crosby, taking a quick look at what was left of the swollen and distended skin of the unknown man. He caught sight of his superior officer’s face and added a belated “sir.”

  “We don’t even know,” carried on Sloan bitterly, “if he went into the river or the sea.”

  Unperturbed the doctor said, “I think we may be able to help you there, Sloan. Or, rather, Charley will.”

  “Or,” continued Sloan grandly, “whether it was an accident or murder.” He didn’t know who Charley was.

  “He didn’t walk after he fell,” said Dabbe. “I can tell you that for certain.”

  Sloan made a note. Facts were always welcome.

  “And, Sloan, my man Burns has something to say to you, too.” Dr. Dabbe waved an arm. “Haven’t you, Burns?”

  “Aye, Doctor.”

  “His clothes,” divined Sloan quickly. “Do they tell us anything about him?”

  “Mebbe, Inspector,” replied Burns. “Mebbe.”

  “That’s Gaelic for ‘yes and no,’ ” said Dr. Dabbe.

  “Well?”

  Burns didn’t answer and it was Dr. Dabbe who spoke. “There was something strange in one of his trouser pockets, wasn’t there, Burns?”

  “Yes, Doctor,” said Burns.

  “Something strange?” said Sloan alertly.

  “Show the inspector what you found, man.”

  His assistant reached for a tray. Placed on it was a lump of metal almost the size and shape of a bun. It was a faded green in colour.

  Detective Constable Crosby leaned over. “If that was ‘lost property’ we’d call it a clock pendulum.”

  “I’m not a metallurgist,” said Dr. Dabbe, “but I should say it’s solid copper.”

  “What is it, though?” asked Sloan, peering at it. There was a lip on one side of the bun shape.

  “I can’t tell you that, Sloan.”

  “It’s not heavy enough to have been to weight him down,” said Sloan, thinking aloud.

  “Agreed,” said Dr. Dabbe. He scratched the metal object with the edge of a surgical probe. “It’s old, Sloan. And if you ask me…”

  “Yes?”

  “I should say it’s been in the water a fair old time, too.”

  Police Constable Ridgeford of Edsway might have been green. He was also keen. He had noticed Horace Boiler take out his rowing boat on the River Calle for the third time that afternoon and kept a wary but unobtrusive eye open for his return. If it had been a fishing trip that Horace Boiler had been on then he had been unlucky because he had come back empty-handed for the second time that afternoon.

  Brian Ridgeford did not have a boat. He didn’t own a boat himself because he couldn’t afford one; and as his beat did not extend out into the sea a grateful country did not feel called upon to supply him with one in the way in which it issued him with a regulation bicycle. What he did have—as his sergeant never failed to remind him—was a perfectly good pair of legs. He decided to use them to walk upstream along the river bank to Collerton.

  As he remarked to his wife as he left the house, “You never know what’s there until you’ve been to see.”

  “Curiosity killed the cat” was what she said to that, but then she hadn’t been married very long and hadn’t quite mastered the role of perfect police wife yet. She was trying hard to do so though because she added, “It’s a casserole tonight, darling.”

  The only piece of good advice that the sergeant’s wife had given her was to cook everything in a pot that could stand on the stove or in the oven without spoiling.

  “Good.” He kissed her and got as far as the door. “I’ll be back soon,” forecast Brian Ridgeford unwisely.

  He, too, still had a lot to learn.

  The remark wasn’t exactly contrary to standing orders. It was just flying in the face of some sage advice given by one of the instructors at the Police Training School. “Never tell your wife when you’re going to be back, lads,” he’d said to the assembled class. “If you’ve told her to expect you at six o’clock, then by five minutes past six she’ll be standing at the window. At ten minutes past six she’ll have her worry coat on and be out in the street looking for you. By quarter past she’ll have asked the woman next door what to do next and by half past six she’ll be on the telephone to your sergeant.” The instructor had delivered his punch line with becoming solemnity. “And the tracker dogs’ll be out searching for you before you’ve had time to get your first pint down.”

  None of this potted wisdom so much as crossed Brian Ridgeford’s mind as he stepped out of the police house door. He was thinking about other things. All he did do was pause in the hall where the hydrographie map of the estuary hung. He had to stoop a little to look at it properly.

  It was a purely token obeisance.

  Depths in metres reduced to chart datum or approximately the level of lowest
astronomical tide meant very little to a landlubber like himself. He was, though, beginning to understand from sheer observation of the estuary something about drying heights. It was a form of local knowledge—almost inherited race memory, you might say—that seemed to have been born in the Boiler tribe. Constable Ridgeford was having to learn it.

  It was just as well that he had delayed his departure from the house for a moment or two. It meant that when the telephone bell rang a few minutes later he was not quite out of earshot. His wife came flying down the path after him—casserole forgotten.

  “Brian! Brian… Stop!”

  He halted.

  “You’re wanted, darling.”

  He turned.

  “They’ve found a dinghy,” called out Mrs. Ridgeford.

  “Ah…”

  “An empty one.”

  He retraced his steps in her direction.

  “On the shore,” she said.

  “That figures.” He absent-mindedly slipped an arm round her waist. “Whereabouts?”

  “Over at Marby.”

  “Right round there?” Constable Ridgeford frowned. The tiny fishing village of Marby juxta Mare was on the coast the other side of Edsway—to the south and west. It had never been the same, local legend ran, since a Danish invasion in the ninth century.

  “That’s what the man said,” answered Mrs. Ridgeford. “I told him you’d go straight over there. Was that right, Brian?”

  Since their marriage was still at the very early stage when it was unthinkable that she could have done anything that wasn’t right—the action being sanctified solely by virtue of its having been taken so to speak—this was a purely rhetorical question.

  “Of course it was, darling.” Brian Ridgeford nodded approvingly.

  “Or,” she added prettily, turning her face up towards his, “have I done the wrong thing?”

  This, too, was a purely token question.

  It got a purely token response in the form of a kiss.

  “Where did I leave my bicycle clips?” asked Police Constable Brian Ridgeford rather breathlessly.

  Marby juxta Mare was a village facing the sea. It was beyond the headland known as the Cat’s Back that protected Edsway from the full rigours of the sea. The road, though, did not follow the coast. It cut across below the headland and made Marby much nearer to Edsway by land than by sea.

  A man called Farebrother had taken charge of the dinghy. He was a lifeboatman and knew all about capsized dinghies.

  “She wasn’t upside down when we found her,” he said. “And not stove in or anything like that or she’d never have reached where she did on the shore.”

  “Has she been there long?” asked Ridgeford cautiously. Boats, he knew, always took the feminine—like the word “victim” in the French language—but he didn’t want to make a fool of himself by asking the wrong question.

  “Just the length of a tide,” said the lifeboatman without hesitation. “We reckon she’d have been gone again after the turn of the tide if we hadn’t hauled her up a bit.”

  Ridgeford nodded sagely. “That’s a help.”

  “No one’ll thank you for letting a dinghy get away.” Farebrother wrinkled his eyes. “It’s a danger to everyone else, too, is a dinghy on the loose. No riding lights on a dinghy. You could smash into it in the dark and then where would you be?”

  “Sunk,” said Ridgeford.

  “Depend on your size, that would,” said the lifeboatman, taking this literally, “and where she hit you.” He hitched his shoulder, and sniffed. “Anyways we put her where she can’t do any harm and,” he added, “where she can’t come to any more harm either.”

  “Any more harm?” said Ridgeford quickly. “But I thought you said she wasn’t damaged…”

  “So I did,” said Farebrother. “But she must have come to some harm to be out on the loose like she was, mustn’t she? That’s not right.”

  “I see what you mean,” said the constable. Put lost dinghies into the same category in your mind as lost children and things fell into place.

  “An insecure mooring is the least that can have happened.“ Farebrother picked up his oilskin jacket. He was a tall man with a thin, elongated face and high cheek-bones. From his appearance he might have descended directly from marauding Viking stock.

  “I don’t think that that’s what it was,” said the young policeman, mindful of the dead body that he’d helped to bring ashore that afternoon.

  “Anyways,” said the other man, “she’s safe enough now. She’s over this way… the other side of the lifeboat station… just follow me.”

  This was easier said than done. Farebrother set off at a cracking pace along the rocky sea-shore of Marby juxta Mare, so different from the fine estuary sands of Edsway, his sea-boots crunching on the stones. Constable Ridgeford stepped more cautiously after him, slipping and sliding as he tried to pick his way over the difficult terrain. Farebrother slackened his pace only once. That was when a small trawler suddenly emerged from the harbour mouth. He stopped and took a good look at it. Ridgeford stopped too.

  “Something wrong?” he asked.

  “She’s cutting it a bit fine, that’s all.”

  “Cutting what?” asked Ridgeford. He could read the name The Daisy Bell quite clearly on her prow.

  “The tide,‘ said Farebrother. “She’d have had a job to clear the harbour bar if the water was any lower.”

  “I didn’t think you went out on an ebb-tide,” said Ridgeford naïvely.

  “You don’t,” said Farebrother. “Not without you have a reason.” He resumed his fast pace over the shingle, adding, “Unless you’re dying, of course.”

  “Dying?”

  “Fishermen always go out with the tide. Didn’t you know that? They die at low water…”

  The dinghy that had been beached was old, weather-beaten and very waterlogged.

  “She’s still got her rowlocks with her though,” said the lifeboatman professionally. “Funny, that.”

  “But there’s no name on her,” noted the policeman with equal but different expertise. “She could have come from anywhere, I suppose?”

  “Not anywhere.” Farebrother looked the police constable up and down and evidently decided as a result of his appraisal to be helpful. “The tide brings everything down from the north hereabouts.”

  That hadn’t been quite what Ridgeford meant but he did not say so.

  “Not up from the south,” continued the lifeboatman. “You never find anything that’s come up from the south on this shore.”

  That, thought Ridgeford silently, tied in with a body floating in the estuary of the River Calle.

  “Especially with the wind in the west like it’s been these past few days,” added the other man. “It’s a south-east wind that’s nobody’s friend.”

  “Yes,” said Ridgeford. While Horace Boiler almost instinctively knew the state of the tide, so Farebrother would be equally aware of the quarter of the wind. You probably needed to be a farmer to consider the weather as a whole. It was a case of each man to his own trade. Stockbrokers doubtless knew the feel of the market—by the pricking of their thumbs or something—and equally the police… Ridgeford wasn’t sure what it was that a policeman needed to be constantly aware of… There must be something that told a policeman the state of play in the great match “Crime versus Law and Order.” The knocking off of helmets, perhaps.

  “Against the current that would be, too,” continued Farebrother, who was happily unaware of the constable’s train of thought.

  He made going against the current sound almost as improbable as flying in the face of nature. Had Farebrother been a carpenter, decided Ridgeford to himself, he would have said “against the grain.”

  Aloud he said to the lifeboatman, “What about this rope at the bow?”

  “The painter?” Farebrother looked at the end of the dinghy and the short length of line dangling from it. “She either slipped her mooring or she was untied on purpose.”

&nb
sp; “Not cut loose or anything like that, then?”

  Farebrother shook his head, while Brian Ridgeford limped over to the dinghy. He steadied himself against it as he felt about in his shoe for a stray piece of shingle that had made its way into it.

  “Someone’ll be along soon looking for it,” predicted the lifeboatman, indicating the beached dinghy.

  Ridgeford wasn’t so sure about that. He found the pebble and removed it.

  “With a red face,” added Farebrother.

  The face that sprang at once to the policeman’s mind was white. Dead white was the name that artists’ colourmen gave to paint that colour. The owner of that particular face wouldn’t be along Not this tide, nor any tide, as the poet had it, For what is sunk will hardly swim, Not with this wind blowing, and this tide.

  “Maybe he will,” was all he said to Farebrother though. Ridgeford turned his mind to practicalities, and immediately wished that he had his reference books with him. He wasn’t well up in the technicalities of the law yet. Was a dinghy washed up on the foreshore “flotsam” or “jetsam” or the forgotten third of that marine trio “lagan”? More importantly, was it “lost property” or “salvage”?

  “Anyways,” pronounced Farebrother, resolving that difficulty for him, “we’ll keep it here until the owner—whoever he is—turns up. And if he doesn’t, you’ll let the Receiver of Wrecks and the Department of Trade know, won’t you?”

  “Of course,” said Ridgeford hastily. So the dinghy was none of these things. It was officially a wreck. “I’ll get on to him.”

  “Department of Trade!” Farebrother spat expertly across the shore. “Huh! Trade! I don’t suppose anyone there knows the meaning of the word.”

  “Well…” Ridgeford temporised. He was a civil servant himself now and he was beginning to find out that civil servants did know what they were doing.

  “And why they couldn’t go on calling it the Board of Trade beats me.” Farebrother rolled his eyes. “At least everyone knew what you meant then. Department. Huh!”