Death on the Cherwell (British Library Crime Classics)

by Mavis Doriel Hay

  “A regular Proteus of a case!” remarked Braydon, getting in. “Well, what does it look like at the moment?”

  “Quite so, sir,” Wythe agreed, guessing that the Yard man referred to some difficult problem of the past, some City financial affair probably, that he—Wythe—could not recall. “I’ve been making a pretty thorough inquiry at all the boathouses on the river to try to ascertain what craft were on the Cherwell that afternoon. I hoped to get the survey completed before you arrived, but there is just one more place to visit, which may be the most important of all, St. Simeon’s College boathouse.”

  “Have you sent someone up there?” Braydon asked.

  “Well, no, sir; I wanted to see the boatman myself; I just had word that he’s to be found there now—”

  “And you want to get along and see him?” Braydon finished. “Quite right. Go ahead, super! You can take me with you and tell me the story on the way. Any suspects yet?”

  “I had a theory, sir—well, it’s hardly a theory, so to speak, that this might have been the result of some rag by those undergrads. That putting the body back into the canoe—it isn’t reasonable! And when we come across anything in Oxford that’s a bit funny, like putting crockery on the pinnacles of the Martyrs’ Memorial, we know we’ve got to look around among the undergrads.”

  “Without knowing all the details,” Braydon suggested mildly; “it strikes me that it might be highly reasonable to put the body back into the canoe. What better way of removing it from your premises?”

  “Well, there’s that about it, certainly. If it was on premises. But I’d better tell you what we’ve ascertained up to the present.”

  Wythe outlined the case and had hardly concluded his survey when they entered the drive that leads from Norham Gardens to St. Simeon’s College. Leaving the car, they walked across the quad to the right and through a vaulted, dark passage, they skirted a lawn and passed through a green gate in a high wall, beyond which a path led them to a backwater, where they found a stout, red-faced man pottering about with a can of varnish on the landing-stage which sloped from the boathouse to the water’s edge.

  “You carry on!” Braydon directed, and Wythe began to explain his errand to the boatman. Braydon strolled about, examined a newly varnished canoe which lay out on the landing-stage, bottom upwards, and contemplated another afloat and moored to a post. He strayed into the dark boathouse and inspected the names on the lockers above the two vacant places. Emerging, he observed that the canoe in the water was named Nippy.

  Braydon approached the two men, who were still in earnest conversation.

  “I’m telling Inspector Wythe, sir,” declared the fat boatman, who had evidently been informed of Braydon’s identity, “that I was here all Friday afternoon from the time it stopped raining until it was dark, having a job or two that I wanted to get on with, and none of the gentlemen could have taken any boat out without me knowing. They was all here in their places.”

  “Did you notice Miss Denning pass in her canoe on the river?” Braydon asked.

  The boatman pushed his broad, red face towards Braydon apologetically.

  “My hearing’s none so good,” he muttered.

  Braydon repeated the question loudly.

  The boatman shook his head mournfully. “It’s not as if we was on the open river here. Nice and quiet, of course, but I wouldn’t notice particular anyone passing on the river, not if I was set close to my work.”

  “If you were working inside the boathouse someone might come down the path quietly and slip into Nippy there and be away before you noticed anything?” Braydon suggested.

  The boatman shook his head knowingly. “Ah! You’re mistaken there, sir, if you’ll excuse me saying so. Nippy wasn’t in the water on Friday afternoon; she was up in the boathouse. There was no boat in the water on Friday. If she’d been there before I left on Friday, she wouldn’t be there now. They’re all high and dry and locked up at nights.”

  “So someone’s been out this morning?” asked Wythe.

  “I wouldn’t answer for that,” replied the boatman cautiously; “unless they was out earlier than the gentlemen usually takes boats out in winter. Seeing as it was a fineish day, which we don’t have too much of just now, I came down here to get on with that little job of varnishing, and there was Nippy in the water.”

  “So it seems that Mr. Coniston took her out yesterday evening after—what time was it that you went home?” Braydon asked.

  “You know all about it, seems,” said the boatman, rather surly. “That’s Mr. Coniston’s canoe all right, but he might lend her to anyone. She came out of that boathouse after four o’clock yesterday, I should judge, and the lady was done away with, so I hear, before four o’clock, so there’s no sort of connection between the one thing and the other. If you ask Mr. Coniston, he’d tell you all about his canoe, I’ll be bound. Proper gentleman, he is, though quiet-like.”

  “I wonder if he would tell us all about it,” Braydon mused as they strolled back to the car.

  “Anyone owning a boat there has a key to the boathouse,” Wythe commented, “and there is free access to the boathouse until nine o’clock, when the college gates are locked. After that this door”—they had reached the little gate set in the high wall—“is shut and anyone coming from the boathouse would have to go round to the main gate and knock up the porter.”

  “Why did he leave the canoe in the water, I wonder? A bit careless—or hurried. I don’t think we’ll call on Mr. Coniston just now. I want to have a word with the doctor. Is this the only boat you have traced as likely to have been out on this part of the river on Friday?”

  “That’s the only one. Several skiffs and fours out on the Isis, of course, but none of them is likely to have gone up the Cherwell, certainly not above the rollers. You’ve been looking at a map of the city, I think you said, sir?”

  “Yes; I’ve got a general idea of the lie of the land.”

  “These rollers are not far below Persephone Island; they are for the purpose of getting boats past the weir just there. No one goes on the lower part of the Cherwell for serious rowing; it’s too narrow and winding. There’s very little boating on the Cherwell at all at this time of year. The women, more than the men, take out a punt here and there on a fine day, but Friday doesn’t seem to have tempted them, from all we can hear. My men have inspected all craft in boathouses on the upper river and they report them every one dry as a bone. If there’s any question of a so-called rag by undergrads, then of course St. Simeon’s seems the most likely college, having this boathouse on the Cherwell not so far above Persephone, so I particularly wanted to take a look at that for myself.”

  “A rag usually produces a good deal of noise, I believe?” inquired Braydon.

  “Well, anything of this kind would, most probably. And to my thinking there would be several men in it. To get worked up to such high spirits that they’d drown someone, there’d have to be a party, egging each other on.”

  “It’s hardly the sort of thing that could be completely concealed. I feel that you would have lighted on some sort of evidence by now, if that were the solution. You’ve made a pretty thorough survey of the river and boathouses, I gather.”

  “That we have,” Wythe agreed. “This accident theory isn’t panning out too well, I’ll admit.” He was evidently reluctant to abandon it. “The other possibility is old Lond—that is, so far as I have been able to make it out, sir. He lives in lodgings at New Marston, a sort of little suburb on the road to Marston village—not half a mile from Ferry House. The old place is half ruinous and he can’t afford to pay the rates, or even to put it into good enough repair for his own needs. He is seen about the place from time to time, and there’s an old fellow who used to be gardener there who’s allowed to use the land for his own vegetables, and is supposed to keep the garden in some sort of order in return. Lond seems to have been hanging about there ever since Thursday, and that’s unusual. I’m not sure about Friday, to tell the truth. No
one seems to have seen him there, but he left his lodgings in the morning and won’t say where he was. He’s there to-day all right, and the gardener too, and we’re keeping a watch on them.”

  “What are they doing?” Braydon asked.

  “Gardener’s pottering about with a hoe. Lond’s doing a bit of pottering too, but he’s mostly in the house.”

  “You haven’t been in?”

  “To tell the truth, sir, I went up to the door to speak to Lond and thought I might get him to let me in without a fuss, but he was downright abusive; refused to answer anything and slammed the door in my face. I didn’t really think there’d be anything to find in the house. What I mean to say is, if there was any funny business there, how could that old man, or even the two of them, carry a body down to the river again? It’s a good step, and anyone might pass down the lane to the college and see them at it.”

  “What about the other man Miss Cordell named to you, the farmer?”

  “Lidgett? To tell the truth, sir, I can’t see anything to link him up with the affair, and I can’t see that he’d have anything to gain by it. Not that old Lond would either, but he’s crazy enough for anything. No; of course I’ve kept Lidgett in mind, but I haven’t followed up that line, so to speak. What bothers me much more than Lidgett is those young ladies at the college.”

  “You think they know more than they’ve told you?”

  “I do, sir. There’s something very fishy about them all meeting there by that boathouse at four o’clock and then this morning one of them, Miss Watson, comes across Lond’s garden by the footpath and slips between the yew trees and wanders off down to the bottom of the garden, by the ruined boathouse. She moons about there a bit, poking in the bushes—one of my men kept an eye on her—and then out she comes. Now, what does that mean? But here we are.”

  Inspector Wythe was a careful driver at any time, and perhaps his chief’s recent mishap had made him even more cautious. Certainly his mind was occupied with the mystery of Miss Denning’s death and watchful for any indication that the Yard man might think he had not been smart enough in following up what clues there were. So their progress through the centre of Oxford to the police station had been dignified rather than snappy.

  “Now, sir,” he announced proudly, as he led the way in; “we’ve got the canoe here for you to see, and all the information is tabulated, and I think Doctor Shuter and our own doctor, Odell, will be waiting for you. Yes, here they are.”

  Braydon listened carefully to the doctors’ report, throwing out a question now and again.

  “Then the gist of it is that she had a pretty hard thump on the back of the head from the well-known blunt instrument, which might knock her senseless but wouldn’t be fatal.”

  “But you’ll not be forgetting,” interposed Dr. Odell, “that your blunt instrument may not be an instrument at all in the usual sense. The woman might have hit her head on a post or any hard, blunt object.”

  “Yes, I see. And then she was drowned whilst she was unconscious—that wouldn’t take long, I suppose?”

  “A few minutes might be enough, in that condition.”

  “And you don’t think she was in the water very long; not more than long enough to drown her?”

  “Probably not. There were actually parts of her clothing, round the waist, which were hardly wet,” Dr. Shuter explained. “And moreover—” he launched into technical details.

  “Quite so. And the time when her wrist watch stopped, 2.37, is the probable time of her death?”

  Both the doctors hesitated. “My impression, when I first saw her, not more than a quarter of an hour after she had been taken out of the canoe,” Dr. Shuter explained cautiously, “was that she had been dead some hours. There were various points—When we noticed the time at which her watch had stopped, that seemed good enough. It fits. But I shouldn’t like to be cross-examined on it. It’s a very tricky thing to decide within an hour or two.” Dr. Odell seemed to agree.

  “I suppose it is established that the watch was stopped through being full of water, and hadn’t just run down?” asked Braydon.

  “Yes, sir,” Wythe confirmed, full of satisfaction. “I’ve known watches play funny tricks, and I’ve had a reliable man to look at it, who reports that it certainly wasn’t run down and seems to have been in good order. But whether the lady kept her watch fast or slow or even punctual, who’s to say?”

  “Moreover, you can’t be sure that it stopped dead at the moment when she fell into the water,” Braydon pointed out. “It might go for some time before the water stopped it. You might ask your man, Wythe, what he thinks likely, but I don’t suppose anyone can say with any accuracy how long it would continue to go after it was immersed. All that it indicates is that she fell into the water before 2.37,” Braydon decided. “What about bruises or other injuries, doctor?”

  “There’s nothing that you’d describe as signs of a struggle,” Odell reported. “Her clothing was dragged about a bit and her hair was down, but you’d expect that to happen if the body was hauled into a canoe. There was a good deal of rather blackish mud about on the body; that might just have been collected by dragging the body up a muddy bank, but it looked as if she had been drowned in a shallow, muddy spot, rather than in clear water.”

  “And whoever hauled her out would be bound to get pretty wet, at any rate about the legs and arms, and pretty muddy, I suppose? That’s hardly a medical matter; I was thinking aloud,” said Braydon.

  “It’s a matter of common sense,” said Odell rather severely. “I don’t see how anyone could haul her out of the water without getting into it, at any rate over the ankles, unless they had a punt.”

  “What about the weight?” Braydon asked. “Was she a heavy woman?”

  “Not particularly,” said Dr. Shuter. “I’ve heard her described as tall, but that impression was given by the fact that she was slim. She had rather a masculine figure, square-shouldered. I should say an average man could haul the body without much difficulty out of shallow water and into a canoe, if the canoe were securely moored by the bank.”

  “That is assuming that the bank was not a high one?” Braydon asked.

  “That would considerably increase the difficulty, of course. It might still be possible, if the water were sufficiently shallow for one to stand in it, but then, in hoisting the wet body up a steep bank, one would get wet up to the shoulders, I should judge.”

  “Yes; thank you. That was my idea,” said Braydon. “Well, the problem at the moment seems to be, if she was drowned before 2.37, where was her body between that time and 4.15 and why wasn’t it set adrift at once; or was it set adrift at once and did the canoe get jammed in bushes and free itself some time later? Now, Wythe, let’s take a look at the canoe.”

  On the way Braydon asked the inspector some questions about Miss Denning’s will.

  “That and other papers are ready for your inspection, sir. I’ve found nothing that seems to shed any light on the affair, to my way of thinking. She left everything to the niece; seemingly there was no one else to leave it to.”

  CHAPTER IX

  THE MAN WHO SAW BURSE

  OWEN VELLAWAY walked slowly back to St. Simeon’s College, thinking almost as much about Daphne’s bursar as about Dust. Perhaps for this reason he decided in the Parks to make a detour in order to walk along the river bank, although in the dusk and through the white strands of mist which hung about the Cherwell he was unlikely to notice any material clue, even if there should be one to find. When he came to the concrete footbridge which rises in a steep bow over the narrow river, he climbed the slippery path to its summit and stood there for some minutes, looking downstream towards Persephone College. A little below the bridge, on the far side of the river, lay Ferry House, completely concealed by the row of tall elms which edged the northern side of its garden and by the pollard willows which, with the appearance of heads of hair standing wildly on end, seemed to crouch over the water along the riverside boundary. It was impossible
to distinguish the New Lode, the narrow channel which branches off to the left and separates Ferry House from Persephone College.

  Owen wished he had listened more attentively to Daphne’s story, but he remembered that the girls had found the canoe at about a quarter past four—just about this time. The canoe must have floated down the main stream—not along the New Lode—to arrive at Persephone College boathouse, but that would be natural, for the New Lode was only a sluggish backwater. He looked up the river towards Sim’s. The Parks bank is fairly clear, but the other is encumbered with jutting bushes and clumps of reeds here and there. Surely a drifting canoe, even if it had escaped the observation of anyone in the Parks, would not travel far before it stuck in a bush or ran aground? Owen felt sure that whatever had happened to Daphne’s bursar must have happened in the secluded grounds of Ferry House. Old Lond’s derelict boathouse, which Daphne had mentioned and which, Owen remembered, was just above the point where the New Lode branches off, was now invisible, and would still be so from the bridge in broad daylight, he thought. Even if Draga Czernak’s visit to Sim’s on Friday afternoon had been connected with the bursar’s expedition; even if Draga and Matthew Coniston had, from Sim’s garden on the river bank, seen the bursar pass in her canoe; even if, incredibly, they had planned some rag to revenge the insult which Draga felt she had suffered, still, he felt sure, these things could have no connection with the corpse-laden canoe which had arrived at the river steps of Persephone College.

  But there was that penknife with the rather odd handle, which sounded like one Owen knew quite well as belonging to Coniston. Owen did not know when Draga left Sim’s. She might have had time to hurry back through the Parks, over this bridge and through the grounds of Ferry House to some point on the river bank in time to intercept the bursar’s canoe as it passed. But, dash it all, this was absurd. He wasn’t thinking about a Chicago gangster, but about a woman student of Persephone College, Oxford, who was foreign, and odd, but still—this wasn’t the place in which to think things over reasonably. The silence, the faint glimmer of the brown water through the mist, the melancholy trees, did not encourage a clear outlook upon hard facts. They were more conducive to poetry. Deliberately he switched his thoughts from mysterious deeds to the fascination of words, but “crawling water”—which struck him as a good phrase—inevitably suggested “slaughter,” and so his mind jerked back again to the bursar. It also occurred to him that he might find himself shut in the Parks for the night if he did not hurry.