Death on the Cherwell (British Library Crime Classics)

by Mavis Doriel Hay

  “That’s what I mean to say,” Lidgett retorted. “I’m used to seeing ’em and I don’t take much account of ’em.”

  “But you do take account of one canoer who lands in your fields? You can tell me when and where Miss Denning landed on Friday afternoon?” Wythe shot the questions at him quickly and watched carefully for the result.

  Lidgett’s swift grin again showed a flash of white teeth, but there was also a quick contraction of the brows and a new expression—dismay? or perhaps only surprise—which flickered in his eyes for a moment, like a face appearing dimly at the window of a dark room. “She landed, you say?” he asked, after a pause.

  “It’s obvious that she landed somewhere,” Wythe pointed out, “since she passed under the footbridge alive, paddling her canoe, and was taken out of that canoe, lying dead in the bottom of it under the thwarts, at Persephone boathouse.”

  “Well, that’s a bit of a conjuring trick, I’ll admit,” said Lidgett cheerfully.

  “Are you sure you can’t tell me any more?” Wythe persisted. “How far did you go along the bank that afternoon?”

  “As far as my south boundary.”

  “That’s the lane along the north wall of Ferry House, I believe?”

  “That’s so. I turned into the lane and came home by the footpath across the fields.” Lidgett looked down at his knees and scratched his head. Then he looked up at Wythe, a little uneasily, the latter thought. “Look here, Inspector, I’m always on the side of the law. It doesn’t pay a man to be anything else. If I knew anything about this, I’d tell you, but take my word, you’re on the wrong tack.”

  “Look here,” Wythe suggested. “Will you come with me now across the fields, the way you went on Friday, and then down the bank and show me exactly the place where you saw Mr. Bayes. That may at least help to fix the time.”

  Lidgett glanced at the rain-washed window. “In this weather?” he inquired.

  “We can’t afford to notice the weather in a case of this kind,” said Wythe heroically. “At least it will keep the sight-seers away!”

  “Sightseers, d’you say?” asked Lidgett sharply, rising to his feet. “Clumping about my banks and breaking my hedges? I’ll sightsee ’em! Come on!”

  Wythe fetched a waterproof from the car and envied the leather leggings which appeared beneath the farmer’s ancient but effective mackintosh. They crossed the farmyard and entered the fields by a gateway where cattle had trodden the ground into an unpleasant morass. Wythe suspected that they might have joined the field path by another route and that Lidgett chose this one maliciously, but since Wythe had insisted that they should follow the route taken on Friday afternoon he could not make any protest. At his suggestion Lidgett led the way, at his own pace. Wythe noted the time when they started and they plodded through the rain towards the river. In ten minutes they reached the river bank opposite Rhea Island, a few hundred yards above Sim’s Here they turned and worked their way slowly down the river, Lidgett pausing to poke the bank with his stick, examine the willows and the bushes, and now and then to pace distances. Few words passed between them. Wythe caught a sardonic grin on Lidgett’s face now and again and guessed that the farmer was enjoying himself. This did not mitigate the inspector’s discomfort, as he stamped his numbed feet in the mud and contemplated the dreary, rain-washed fields. Occasionally they left the river bank to cross by a gateway from one field to the next.

  “You see, Inspector,” said Lidgett on one of these occasions, “it’s more than likely that that there canoe slipped by when I was off the bank, going through one of these gates. There was a hinge gone off one of them and I spent a bit of time at it.”

  “What was that?” asked Wythe sharply.

  “The next one. It was mended yesterday.”

  They had passed Sim’s and Lady Margaret Hall and were now opposite the Parks. Lidgett paused.

  “About here it would be that the young feller with the terrier came along, across this field, you see, from the gate over there.”

  Wythe consulted his watch. It had been ten minutes to the river and for twenty-five dreary minutes they had squelched about on the banks.

  “Do you think it was much after two when you started from the farm on Friday?” he asked.

  “Might’ve been five minutes or so after the hour,” Lidgett told him.

  “And how long did Mr. Bayes stand talking to you?”

  “We didn’t have a long chat,” said Lidgett pleasantly. “I told him he’d better clear out of my fields if he couldn’t keep his dog under proper control.”

  “Wasn’t something said about barbed wire?” Wythe asked.

  “If you say so, I expect you’re right,” Lidgett agreed. “I won’t deny I had barbed wire in my mind, to keep those blasted canoers from landing here in the summer. There’s no right-of-way here; the path from the footbridge goes straight ahead, inland as you might say, and comes down to the riverside again higher up. If they want to go in a canoe, I say, let ’em stick to it, and not come messing about on private property.”

  “Quite so,” said Wythe grimly. “And I reckon you took some minutes to say all that to Mr. Bayes?”

  “Likely I did,” Lidgett agreed.

  “Just wait here a minute, will you, while I walk to the bridge,” said Wythe.

  There was one more hedge and a narrow backwater, little more than a muddy ditch, which necessitated a detour away from the river to a stile. Walking briskly, Wythe reached the middle of the footbridge in four minutes from leaving the farmer by the river. He added up the times.

  “Say he left the farm at 2.5, ten minutes to the river; twenty-five minutes down the bank, three minutes talk and four minutes more to the bridge. That would bring Bayes here at 2.47. Even allowing for a little extra time spent by Lidgett on his way down, it looks as if Bayes crossed the bridge before three. But then Lidgett may be wrong, deliberately or accidentally. In fact,” said Wythe to himself gloomily, “he’s more likely to be wrong, than right, so far as I can see.”

  He looked downstream from the bridge and observed several helmeted figures in dripping mackintosh capes moving slowly about the banks, their heads bent, apparently in deep dejection. The sight of his subordinates carrying out his instructions and perhaps having an even more unpleasant time than himself, slightly cheered Inspector Wythe. He returned to where he had left Lidgett and, as he passed through the gate, reflected that it seemed quite likely that Lidgett himself had been crossing from one field to the next just at the moment when Miss Denning’s canoe passed down the river.

  Wythe considered the muddy ditch which ran alongside the hedge. You couldn’t paddle a canoe up it, but if Miss Denning had drawn the canoe up to the bank of the river and disembarked, it would be easy to drag the canoe a little way along the ditch, where it would rest steadily, ready to receive a body. But the ditch was above the footbridge, and she had certainly passed down under the bridge, according to Bayes. Of course if Lidgett, as soon as Bayes was out of sight, had run down the bank, he might have overtaken the canoe, called to Miss Denning and got her to come ashore on some pretext. Having quarrelled with her and knocked her into the river, he could pull the canoe back along the bank, or possibly paddle it back, to the ditch. But what about the body? No, the ditch was tempting, but didn’t seem to fit.

  He rejoined Lidgett.

  “I suppose you don’t remember noticing the time at about this spot on Friday?” he asked. “You should have heard Sim’s chimes.”

  “I must have heard them, sure enough, but I’m hearing them all day and don’t pay any particular attention.”

  “You can’t remember whether it was before three or after three that you saw Mr. Bayes? According to our times to-day, it would have been just after a quarter to three.”

  “You can take it that’s near enough,” said Lidgett ambiguously.

  “And now we’ll continue to follow your stroll on that afternoon,” Wythe informed him. “I believe you went a little quicker after this?”
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  “Then you know more about it than I do,” Lidgett remarked. “I had just as much to see to below the bridge as above. If you know so much about it, suppose you set the pace?”

  “Never mind,” said Wythe crossly. “Go on just as you say you did on Friday.”

  They plodded on to the ditch, turned along it and crossed it by the turfed bridge at the gate. There they came in sight of the constables moving heavily about on the bank.

  “What’s all this?” asked Lidgett sharply. “Is this some kind of a trap? What are those cops doing there?”

  “Collecting information,” said Wythe evenly. “As I told you, Miss Denning must have landed somewhere on these banks; I want to know where.”

  “If she landed here,” exclaimed Lidgett in rising anger, “she’d no right to and no call to, that I can see. I know nothing about her and I didn’t see her, and you won’t find any information about her in my fields unless you put it there yourself. I’ve heard tell of such things, when you cops haven’t the sense to get on the track of a criminal, and you’ve got to find something to show for your trouble, you’ll frame up a case of some kind and not care whether a man’s innocent or not!” The pleasant amenableness, with the hint of a sneer in, with which Lidgett had formerly met Wythe’s questions had turned to fury, which was heightened by the outlet of the man’s smothered annoyance at the trouble he had been put to.

  “You’re talking rubbish, and you know it,” Wythe said severely. “You know best whether there’s anything here for us to find, and if there isn’t there’s no cause for you to object to our search. Come on now, we’re following your walk on Friday.” But he realized that now he could rely on Lidgett even less than before to reproduce his movements and time schedule accurately.

  “It’s foolery!” Lidgett declared. “I can tell you that I carried on from here all the way along the bank to the lane, which you can see, just as I did higher up. I didn’t see the woman. If you say she passed me back there, she’d’ve gone right on ahead, paddling as she did, and’d be pretty well out of sight by the time I got here by the bridge.”

  “So you know just how she paddled?” queried Wythe quickly.

  “Oh, I’ve read the papers,” Lidgett replied, after a pause.

  “Very interesting! I don’t remember that any of them described just how Miss Denning was paddling.”

  “Folks talk. If I didn’t read it, I heard it.”

  As they approached the nearest of the slowly moving, hunched policemen, Wythe saw that he was the sergeant and hurried ahead to speak to him. Lidgett followed at a deliberate pace, passed them and went on.

  “Very well,” Wythe instructed the man. “Don’t stop at the bridge but carry on as far as the ditch that runs up from the river; examine the ditch carefully, and after that you can knock off. Report to me at once.”

  Wythe overtook the farmer. “I must ask you to come with me to the police station to make a statement about your movements on Friday afternoon,” he said.

  “If you think I can tell you anything more, you’re making a big mistake. I’ve wasted half the morning already over this play-acting.”

  “Your daughter told me that you would be in bed till dinner-time, so I assume that I’m not keeping you from any very urgent business,” Wythe reminded him.

  Lidgett smiled grimly, but made no reply.

  “When you have time to think it over, you may remember something further,” Wythe continued. “But even if you cannot tell me any more, the information may be important, and I want to have it in writing and make sure that I have it down accurately. We’ll go back to your house, where I left my car. I suppose the shortest way is down the bank to the lane and then back by the footpath, the way you went on Friday?”

  They followed this route without further conversation, and buzzed back to Blue Boar Street. Wythe remembered to stop on the way at Lond’s lodgings in New Marston.

  A boy came running round from the back of the house when he knocked on the door and handed him a folded sheet of ruled paper, torn from an exercise book and inscribed: the inspector.

  “Mummy had to go out and she left this for you,” gasped the child, and sped away to the back of the house again.

  Wythe unfolded it.

  “Dear sir, mister Lond went to the Free Libery on the friday aftnoon and he sais the gent there knows him. Yours truly, Alice Marley.”

  At the police station he took Lidgett to his own office and left him alone for a moment while he gave instructions to another officer, first to bring Bayes, if he could be found, to the station at once and then to identify and visit the official who was on duty in the Free Library reading-room on Friday afternoon and discover if he could remember seeing old Lond there.

  CHAPTER XIII

  BRAYDON VISITS SIM’S

  IT was not yet the hour of church services when Braydon sauntered forth on that Sunday morning, and the Corn and the Broad were deserted. He entered the Parks by the gate at the end of South Parks Road and veered to the right to follow the path along the river bank. As Owen Vellaway had done, he went to the summit of the steep footbridge and looked up and down the river. A few of the more inquisitive of the citizens of Oxford were already hanging over the railings of the bridge and gaping about on the river banks, as if hoping to witness a repetition of the tragedy which, they knew vaguely, had been enacted on Friday on or near the upper Cherwell. Wythe’s squad of searchers had not yet arrived.

  The wind blew coldly and the aimless loiterers, Braydon noted with malicious pleasure, looked chilled and miserable. A few large drops of rain fell, and he turned up the collar of his raincoat and set off briskly towards St. Simeon’s College. In ten minutes he had gained the shelter of the great gateway and was asking the porter if Mr. Mort was in.

  “Do you happen to have been on duty here on Friday night?” Braydon inquired as the man led him round the left side of the quad, skirting the walls to gain some shelter from the rain which now drove down.

  “That’s right, sir,” the man replied.

  They entered an arched passage and Braydon paused. “Can you tell me who came in late that night, after nine? You would have to open the gate to anyone entering college after that, I think?”

  “That’s right, sir. Let’s see; there was Mr. Peters and Mr. Anderson came in together, not very late they weren’t. Then there was Mr. Coniston; I remember him well because he only just made it; nigh on twelve it was. Unusual for him to run it so fine.”

  “Any others?” Braydon asked indifferently.

  The porter mentioned a few more names. “Nothing wrong I hope, sir? I understood, sir, that the—accident—happened in the afternoon.”

  “That’s quite right. In these cases, you know, one often has to trace the movements of a great many people who have only the slightest connection with the affair. You needn’t mention that I have made these inquiries; starts gossip, you know, and probably no one need ever hear of it.”

  “I quite understand, sir. There’s a good many things that we find it better not to mention. Now if you go straight across the garden, sir, and through that gate in the wall, you’ll see the house. Mr. Mort hasn’t been out this morning, not this way, but there’s another way round by the road, though he don’t often use it.”

  Braydon, hunching his shoulders against the rain, crossed the well-kept garden by a wide path, opened the gate in the wall and found himself in another garden through which a pergola led up to the door of a small, irregularly built house.

  The room into which he was shown by the middle-aged woman who opened the door was a pleasant one, with windows at the far end looking on to the rain-drenched garden. Most of the wall space was filled with bookcases. The furniture was old-fashioned and shabby. Braydon walked over to a desk which stood in front of the window and glanced down at the photograph of a girl which stood on its right-hand corner. Pre-war, he decided, on the evidence of the shirt-blouse and tie. It had been taken out-of-doors, and her hair, which looked very fair, was blown in
wisps across her face. She was slim and pretty, with nothing very distinctive about her face except her widely set eyes. Braydon studied the photograph very attentively, and if anyone had asked him why, he might have remarked that a man does not keep a photograph of a girl, who is neither his wife nor daughter, on his desk for twenty years for nothing.

  When Denis Mort entered the room his visitor seemed to be rapt in contemplation of the garden.

  “Pleasant little country house you’ve got here,” he said, turning round in response to a greeting which held a questioning note. “I must apologize for this early call. My name’s Braydon—Detective-Inspector Braydon of Scotland Yard. I think you may be able to help us.”

  Denis Mort looked worried. He was a slim, wiry-looking man, not so tall as Braydon, apparently in the early forties. He was fair and rather bald, with grey eyes and deeply scored lines between his brows.

  “Please sit down. I don’t know—” he began uncertainly.

  “It’s about this drowning affair—the bursar of Persephone College—you have read of it, I suppose?”

  “Yes, indeed; Miss Denning. But why do you come to me?”

  “We find some difficulty in tracing her movements on that afternoon and in fixing the time of her death. Her body was found—you may not know—by four students of Persephone College, drifting in her own canoe. One of them— Miss Watson—told me that she had just come from a coaching with you. I therefore suppose that you may have walked from here to Persephone College shortly before three on Friday afternoon. There don’t seem to have been many people about by that stretch of the river, and anyone who was in the neighbourhood at the relevant time may be able to tell us something helpful.”

  Braydon paused expectantly. Denis Mort sat gazing into the fire, apparently regardless of what had been said. But he seemed to realize that it was his turn to take part in the conversation. He ran a hand up over his forehead and through his hair.