The Floating Admiral (Detection Club)

by Christie, Agatha; Detection Club, by Members of the

  “Ah, so you heard about the murder in the Shades this morning, did you, Mrs. Davis?” suggested the Inspector.

  “Why! that’s just what I was going to tell you about!” exclaimed Mrs. Davis, in a slightly hurt tone. “But you gentlemen in the police are all the same. You’re so short with your questions that a body can hardly get a word in edgeways. As I was going to say, I was in there this morning when Billy the barman was taking down the shutters, and as soon as he unlocked the door in walked a couple of chaps with ambulance badges on. I asked them if there had been an accident, and they told me how Mr. Ware of Lingham had found the Admiral’s body in the Vicar’s boat, which was floating about, with no one in sight.”

  At this moment, as though in answer to Inspector Rudge’s inward prayer, an agitated-looking cook appeared from the back regions and muttered something in Mrs. Davis’s ear. “Why, there now! if it hadn’t altogether slipped my memory,” she exclaimed. “I’ve been so interested hearing you talk, Inspector, that I’ve never ordered the joint for lunch. You’ll excuse me if I run off and see to it, won’t you, Mr. Rudge?”

  The Inspector waited till Mrs. Davis had disappeared, then, when he was satisfied that she was out of hearing, rang a bell marked “Porter.” In a few minutes a bald-headed individual hustled into the entrance hall, still struggling with the short jacket which he had hastily thrust on over his rolled-up shirt sleeves. From his appearance he seemed to have been interrupted in the act of stoking the central heating system. He looked at Inspector Rudge enquiringly. “Yessir,” he remarked.

  “I’m Inspector Rudge, and I came here to make certain enquiries. You knew Admiral Penistone, I believe?”

  The man scratched his head. “Well, sir, I can’t rightly say as I knew him,” he replied. “I’ve only seen him once in my life, and that was last night. Came in here, he did, and asked for Mr. Holland.”

  The Inspector nodded. “So I believe. Now, I’m particularly anxious to know how he was looking then. Did he seem worried, or anxious, or anything like that?”

  “I couldn’t very well say, sir. You see, it was gone eleven, and I was just going to shut up the house. Mrs. Davis is always telling me to be careful of the gas, and there was only one light burning. The Admiral came just inside the door, and stood where you might be standing now, sir. ‘Is Mr. Holland in?’ he asks, sharp like. And almost before I had time to say he was in bed, he said that it didn’t matter and that he couldn’t wait, as he had a train to catch. He wasn’t here no more than a few seconds, sir. He seemed in a hurry, but I couldn’t properly see his face. I wouldn’t have known who it was if he hadn’t told me.”

  Again the Inspector nodded. “You’d recognise him again if you saw him, I suppose?” he asked.

  “Well, sir, I might and I mightn’t. I never got a proper sight of him, as you might say.”

  “Oh, well, it doesn’t matter,” said the Inspector carelessly. “Was Mr. Holland in when Admiral Penistone called?”

  “I’m pretty sure he was, sir, leastways, his boots was outside his door. I saw them when I went up to bed soon after. And he didn’t come in later, I know that for a fact.”

  “How can you be sure of that?”

  “Why, sir, because I locked the door as I always do round about half-past eleven. If anybody wants to get in after that, they presses the bell, which rings in my room, and I comes down and lets them in. And the bell didn’t ring last night, sir.”

  “I see. And when is the door opened again?”

  “I unbolts it first thing, when I comes down in the morning, sir, round about six, that is.”

  “What do you do after you unlock the door?”

  “Why, sir, I lights the kitchen fire and puts on the kettle for a cup of tea.”

  “Did you happen to see Mr. Holland this morning?”

  “I was in the hall when he went out after breakfast, sir. About nine o’clock that would have been. And he hasn’t come back since, at least not that I know of.”

  The sound of Mrs. Davis’s voice, rapidly growing in intensity as she returned from the back regions, caused Rudge to beat a hasty retreat. He slipped out of the hotel, and began to walk towards the police station, reviewing the scraps of information which he had picked up at the Lord Marshall, and congratulating himself upon having had the idea of interviewing Mrs. Davis. Gossip though she might be, her freely-expressed opinions of people were based upon a certain native shrewdness. The Inspector felt that he had already gained a valuable side-light upon Sir Wilfrid Denny, and that even the revelation of that curious episode in the Vicar’s past might prove instructive. As to Holland, Mrs. Davis’s conviction that he was not the murderer was certainly well-grounded if he had spent the night in the hotel.

  But of course, the most interesting thing he had learnt was the alleged visit of Admiral Penistone shortly after eleven last night. Unfortunately it was impossible to decide whether the caller had been the Admiral or not. The porter’s identification of him was obviously worthless. He did not know the Admiral by sight, he could not even undertake to recognise the caller again. Where, in fact, had been the Admiral? He had last been seen shortly after ten, by the boat-house. That would have given him an hour to get to Whynmouth. Hardly time to have walked the distance, and yet he was hardly likely to have taken the car out. Had he done so, somebody would have been sure to have heard him. Could he have come down in his boat? Possibly, if the tide had been flowing the right way.

  Inspector Rudge frowned. He was no seaman, and he had begun to regard the vagaries of this infernal River Whyn as a personal affront to him. His idea of a self-respecting river was a placid stream which knew its own mind and flowed always in the same direction, like, say, the Thames at Maidenhead. But the Whyn was mad, subject, like a lunatic, to the influence of the moon, and changing the direction of its flow in obedience to some law which was past the Inspector’s comprehension. He decided that he would have to consult some expert on that point. For the present, he imagined that if the tide had been flowing down the river, there was no reason why the Admiral should not have called at the Lord Marshall at the time stated.

  But on the other hand, his behaviour there had been quite contrary to what the Inspector had gathered of his character. He seemed to have been of a peremptory and determined nature. Rudge could not have imagined him walking into the place, with the intention of seeing Holland, and then suddenly changing his mind on the score that he had barely time to catch his train. It would have been more like him to have stamped about the hall till Holland had been dragged from his bed.

  Unless—yes—that was a possibility. Suppose his visit to the hotel had been merely to assure himself that Holland had arrived? From the fact that the porter had offered to go and see if he was in, he would have known that he was staying in the house. Perhaps, having ascertained this, his object had been accomplished, and the excuse about the train had been trumped up on the spur of the moment, to account for his exit. He might not have wanted to see Holland just then.

  On the other hand, if the visitor had not been the Admiral, why had he given his name? To make it appear that the Admiral had been in Whynmouth at that particular time? This opened up a wide field for speculation, in which one central fact was apparent. The visitor must have known something of Admiral Penistone’s movements that evening. And therefore every effort must be made to trace him.

  And what about Holland himself? The Inspector was not at all satisfied on the subject of that impulsive gentleman. Mrs. Davis may have been right in her conjecture that Miss Fitzgerald was not eager to marry him, but he was by no means certain that she was equally right in her opinion that he was not the murderer. There was no means of verifying his statement that he had spent the night in the hotel. He could easily have slipped out during the confusion that appeared to have reigned before eleven, and returned just after six in the morning, when the door was unlocked and the porter was busy with the kitchen fire. Had he done so, and met the Admiral in Whynmouth or elsewhere? The more he c
onsidered the matter, the wider the field of speculation seemed to extend before Rudge’s vision.

  His original intention had been to drive out and see Sir Wilfrid Denny at West End, after he had finished with Mrs. Davis. But the possible light which that loquacious lady had thrown upon the Admiral’s movements decided him to defer the visit. He had formed the rudiments of a theory as to the time and place of the murder, but the possibility of this theory depended upon the tides in the River Whyn, and upon this subject he must seek expert advice. Why not have another chat with Neddy Ware? He knew the tides as no one else did, his hobby had rendered a study of them absolutely necessary to him. And besides, there was always the chance that he might have observed some detail which he had not recollected in the first excitement of his discovery.

  Inspector Rudge turned his car towards Lingham once more, and very soon reached Ware’s cottage. The old man was at home, smoking his pipe contemplatively after his midday meal. He greeted the Inspector hospitably, and the two sat down in a room decorated with models of ships and faded photographs of the vessels in which Ware had served.

  “You want to know about the tides in the river?” he replied, in answer to the Inspector’s explanation of the cause of his visit. “Why, they’re simple enough, so long as you remember that it’s high water, Full and Change, at Whynmouth at seven o’clock.”

  Rudge laughed. “I haven’t a doubt it’s simple enough to you,” he said. “Personally, I haven’t the foggiest idea what you’re talking about. What on earth do you mean by high water, Full and Change?”

  “Why, merely that it’s high water at Whynmouth at seven o’clock nearabouts, on the days when the moon is full or new,” replied Ware. “Now, take this morning’s tide, for instance. To-day’s Wednesday, the 10th. It was new moon on Monday, that’s to say it was high water at Whynmouth at seven on Monday evening. It would be about eight yesterday evening and half-past this morning. You can allow six hours between high and low water, making it low water at half-past two this morning. The tide up here begins to flow half to three-quarters of an hour after low water at Whynmouth, or say soon after three. And that’s when I went out fishing.”

  “After three!” exclaimed Rudge. “But I thought you said the church clock struck four not long before you saw the boat?”

  “The clock!” replied Ware, in a voice of supreme contempt. “You don’t expect the tide to fall in with the children’s games you play with the clock in summer, do you? You play a game of make-believe with the time, just because you haven’t the courage to face the prospects of getting up an hour earlier than usual. It may be all very well for landsmen, but it won’t do for sailors. To them, time’s time, and you can’t alter it.”

  “I see. Then, by summer-time the tide began to flow this morning up here, soon after four. From what you tell me, then, I gather that it began to ebb about ten last night?”

  “That’s right, ten or a little before,” agreed Ware. “As I say, the moon was new two days ago, which means that it was pretty well the top of the springs last night. I reckon the ebb must have run down the river nigh on three knots for the first couple of hours or so. After that it would have slacked off a bit, as it always does.”

  “So that a man leaving here between ten and eleven would have had no difficulty in getting to Whynmouth by boat?” suggested Inspector Rudge.

  “He’d have drifted there and likely enough gone straight out to sea,” replied Ware. “That is, if he didn’t use his oars. If he did, he could have got to Whynmouth in under the hour, easy.”

  The old sailor had glanced shrewdly at the Inspector as he spoke. Rudge saw what was in his mind, and smiled. “You can guess what I’m getting at,” he said. “I thought it possible that Admiral Penistone might have taken his boat down to Whynmouth last night. But if he did, the boat cannot have come back by itself. Somebody must have rowed it back and put it into the boat-house.”

  He paused, half expecting some comment from Ware, but the old man merely nodded, and continued puffing at his pipe in silence. Rudge tried a new tack. “Why was the painter of the Vicar’s boat cut, and not untied, Ware?” he asked abruptly.

  Ware smiled. “Because it couldn’t have been anything else, as the Vicar’s boys could tell you, if you asked them,” he replied. “It’s no business of mine, this murder, but naturally my mind’s been on it all the morning.”

  “I’d very much like to hear the conclusions you’ve come to,” said Inspector Rudge quietly. “Why do you say that the painter of the Vicar’s boat couldn’t have been untied, for instance?”

  “I haven’t come to any conclusions,” replied Ware impassively. “That is, I don’t know who killed the Admiral, if that’s what you mean. But it isn’t difficult to understand how the boats came to be found as they were.”

  “Not for you, perhaps,” remarked the Inspector, “but it would be a great help to me if you’d explain.”

  “Aye, that I will. Now take the Vicar’s boat first. She’s not kept in the boat-house while the boys are at home, but out in the stream, tied to a post. Sometimes the lads remember to take the oars and crutches out of her when they come ashore, mostly they don’t. I’ve seen them left in her dozens of times.

  “Now, suppose they’d been out in her yesterday evening, and tied her up when the tide was high, or well up, as it would have been any time between seven and ten. You’ll find, in any tidal river, that the greater part of the rise happens during the first three hours of the flood, and the greater part of the fall during the first three hours of the ebb. Right. They come in when the tide’s well up, and what do they do? One of them stands up in the bow, and makes the painter fast to the post. They’re both well-grown lads, and they’d naturally make fast about four or five feet above the water. Then they’d pole the stern round, till it touched the bank and they could jump ashore. Maybe they were afraid of being late for dinner, and forgot the oars and crutches in their hurry.”

  Inspector Rudge nodded. This did not seem to take him any further than he had got already.

  “Now, take the Admiral’s boat,” continued Ware. “From what I hear, she was seen either in, or alongside, the Rundel Croft boat-house soon after ten. Now this I’m pretty sure of. If anybody took her out between ten and one this morning, they didn’t row far up the river. You don’t make much headway with a heavy boat like that against a three-knot tide. You take it from me, if she went out at all, she went down-stream, and not up.

  “After one this morning—I’m talking in shore time now, not real time—things would be different. There’d be only a gentle stream running down till four, perhaps a knot at the most. Anyone could row against that; it wouldn’t take them more than a couple of hours to come up from Whynmouth, say, taking it easy. That’s clear enough, isn’t it?”

  “Perfectly clear,” replied Rudge. “It comes to this. If the Admiral was murdered in his own boat, it must have been somewhere below Rundel Croft, anywhere as far down as Whynmouth, in fact?”

  “That’s right. Now I suppose whoever murdered him brought the boat back with the body in it. Suppose they got back round about slack water. The chap, whoever he was, sees the Vicar’s boat moored to the post in the stream, and hits upon the idea of putting the body in it. He goes alongside, lifts the body in, and then what does he do next? How is he going to cast off the Vicar’s boat? Tell me that?”

  “I don’t exactly see the difficulty,” replied the Inspector. “It wasn’t made fast with a chain and padlock.”

  “You didn’t see what I was getting at just now,” said Ware, with a touch of impatience. “Why, when he got back, it was dead low water, and the river had fallen three or four feet since the boat had been made fast. Don’t you see? Unless he was a very tall man, he wouldn’t be able to reach the knot unless he swarmed up the post. There was only one thing for him to do, and that was to cut the painter. And there’s one thing about that you may not have noticed. That painter is a nearly new piece of inch-and-a-half manilla.”

  �
��I noticed that it looked fairly new. But I can’t see for the moment what that’s got to do with it.”

  “Ever tried to cut new manilla with an ordinary pocket knife? No, I suppose not. But you can take it from me that you’d find it a pretty tough job. And when you’d finished you’d have left a frayed edge. But this rope was cut clean through, like as though it had been cut with one stroke of a very sharp knife. Anyway, cut it was, and the boat left to drift.”

  Ware tapped out his pipe, and began slowly to refill it. He drew from his pocket the end of a cake of tobacco, which he shaved carefully into the palm of his hand. “This knife is pretty sharp,” he remarked. “I keep it so on purpose to cut up my baccy. But I wouldn’t reckon to cut through that painter with it at one stroke. No, it was a sharper and stronger knife than this that did the job, I’ll be bound.”

  While he proceeded to fill and light his pipe, Inspector Rudge’s thoughts were busy. The possibility that Admiral Penistone had taken his boat out again and rowed down the river seemed to be greatly strengthened. In that case, he had probably been murdered somewhere near Whynmouth, and his body had reached the spot where it was found much as Ware had supposed. But was there any way of verifying this?

  In the first place, what time had he started? The doctor had given it as his opinion that he had been killed before midnight. Again, if he had indeed been the visitor to the Lord Marshall, he had reached Whynmouth soon after eleven. His departure from Rundel Croft could not have been very long deferred; his impatience to leave the Vicarage seemed to point to a desire to start as soon as possible. His excuse to his niece for not going up to the house with her, that he wished to smoke a cigar before going in, was probably mainly to get her out of the way. He had probably intended to start as soon as she was out of sight and hearing.