-------? Does the shoe look as if it had been in the water
since Wednesday night?"
"It does indeed."
"Oh, well. I'll make arrangements. It would happen on a Sunday, wouldn't it?"
"Do it as quietly as you can, will you? We don't want more spectators than we can help."
As he hung up Marta came in with a tray and began to put his breakfast on the table.
"Mrs. Thrupp is still what she calls 'heaving,' so I judged it better to do your breakfast myself. How do you like your eggs? Sunny side up?"
"If you really want to know, I like them broken when they are half cooked and rummelled up with a fork."
"Panacher Marta said, delighted. "That is one I have not met before. We are growing intimate, aren't we! I am probably the only woman alive except your housekeeper who knows that you like your breakfast eggs streaky. Or—am I?"
"Well, there's a woman in a village near Amiens that I once confessed it to. But I doubt if she would remember."
"She is probably making a fortune out of the idea. Eggs à l'Anglaise probably has a totally new meaning in France nowadays. Brown bread or white?"
"Brown, please. I'm going to have to owe you for another trunk call." He picked up the telephone again and called Williams's home address in London. While he waited for the connection he called Trimmings and asked to speak to the housekeeper. When Mrs. Brett, a little breathless, arrived on the wire he asked who was in the habit of cleaning the shoes at Trimmings and was told that it was the kitchen girl, Polly.
"Could you find out from Polly whether Mr. Searle was in the habit of taking off his brown buckled shoes without unbuckling them, or if he always unbuckled them first?"
Yes, Mrs. Brett would do that, but wouldn't the Inspector like to speak to Polly himself?
"No, thank you. I'll confirm anything she says, later on, of course. But I think she is less likely to get flustered if you ask her a quite ordinary question than if she was brought to the telephone to be questioned by a stranger. I don't want her to be agitated into thinking about the question at all. I want her first natural reaction to the question. Were the shoes buckled or unbuckled when she cleaned them?"
Mrs. Brett understood, and would the Inspector hang on?
"No. I'm expecting an important call. But I shall call you back in a very short time.”
Then London came on the wire, and Williams's not-too-pleased voice could be heard telling the Exchange: "All right, all right, I've been ready any time this last five minutes."
"That you, Williams? This is Grant. Listen. I was coming up to town today to interview Leslie Searle's cousin. Yes, I found out where she lived. Her name is Searle. Miss Searle. And she lives at 9 Holly Pavement, in Hampstead. It's a sort of coagulation of artists. I talked to her last night on the telephone and I arranged to see her this afternoon about three. Now I can't. A boy has just fished a shoe belonging to Leslie Searle out of the river. Yes, all right, crow! So we have to start dragging all over again, and I have to be here. Are you free to go and see Miss Searle for me, or shall I get someone else from the Yard?"
"No, I’ll go, sir. What do you want me to ask her?"
"Get everything she knows about Leslie Searle. When she saw him last. What friends he had in England. Everything she can give you about him."
"Very good. What time shall I call you back?"
"Well, you ought to be there at a quarter to three, and leaving an hour clear—four o'clock, perhaps?"
"At the Wickham station?"
"Well, no, perhaps not. In view of the slowness of dragging, perhaps you had better call me at the Mill House at Salcott. It is Salcott 5."
It was only when he had hung up that he realised that he had not asked Williams how his mission to Benny Skoll had turned out.
Marta came in with his breakfast, and as she poured his coffee he talked to Trimmings again.
Mrs. Brett had talked to Polly, and Polly had no doubt about the matter at all. The straps on Mr. Searle's brown shoes had always been undone when he put them out for cleaning. She knew because she used to rebuckle them so as to keep the straps from banging about when she cleaned them. She buckled them to keep the straps still and unbuckled them when she had finished.
So that was that.
He began to eat his breakfast, and Marta poured out a cup of coffee for herself and sat sipping it. She looked cold and pale, but he could not resist the question:
"Did you notice anything odd about the shoe?"
"Yes. It hadn't been unfastened."
A marvellous woman. He supposed that she must have vices to counterbalance so many excellences but he couldn't imagine what they could be.
FIFTEEN
It was very cold by the river. The willows shivered, and the water was pewter colour, its surface alternately wrinkled by the wind and pitted by the passing showers. As the slow hours went by Rodgers's normally anxious face slipped into a settled melancholy, and the tip of his nose peering out from the turned-up collar of his water-proof was pink and sad. So far no intruders had come to share their vigil. The Mill House had been sworn to secrecy and had not found the secrecy any strain; Mrs. Thrupp had retired to bed, still "heaving"; and Tommy, as police ally, was part of the dragging party. The wide sweep of the river across the alluvial land was far from road or path and devoid of dwellings, so there were no passers-by to stop and stare, to pause for a little and then go on to spread the news.
They were in a world by themselves down there by the river. A timeless world, and comfortless.
Grant and Rodgers had exhausted professional post-mortems long ago, and had got no further. Now they were just two men alone in a meadow on a chilly spring day. They sat together on the stump of a fallen willow, Grant watching the slow sweep of the questing drag, Rodgers looking out across the wide flats of the valley floor.
"This is all flooded in winter," he said. "Looks quite lovely, too, if you could forget the damage it's doing."
" 'Swift beauty come to pass
Has drowned the blades that strove,' "
Grant said.
"What is that?"
"What an army friend of mine wrote about floods.
'Where once did wake and move
The slight and ardent grass,
Swift beauty come to pass
Has drowned the blades that strove.’"
"Nice," Rodgers said.
"Sadly old-fashioned," Grant said. "It sounds like poetry. A fatal defect, I understand." "Is it long?"
"Just two verses and the moral." "What is the moral?"
" 'O Final Beauty, found
In many a drowned place,
We love not less thy face
For lesser beauties drowned.'”
Rodgers thought it over. "That's good, that is," he said. "Your army friend knew what he was talking about. I was never one for reading poems in books—I mean collections, but magazines sometimes put verses in to nil up the space when a story doesn't come to the bottom of the page. You know?"
"I know."
"I read a lot of these, and every now and then one of them rings a bell. I remember one of them to this day. It wasn't poetry properly speaking, I mean it didn't rhyme, but it got me where I lived. It said:
'My lot is cast in inland places,
Far from sounding beach
And crying gull,
And I
Who knew the sea's voice from my babyhood
Must listen to a river purling
Through green fields,
And small birds gossiping
Among the leaves.'
"Now, you see, I was bred by the sea, over at Mere Harbour, and I've never quite got used to being away from it. You feel hedged in, suffocated. But I never found the words for it till I read that. I know exactly how that bloke felt. 'Small birds gossiping!' "
The scorn and exasperation in his voice amused Grant, but something amused him much more and he began to laugh.
"What's funny?" Rodgers asked, a sh
ade defensively.
"I was just thinking how shocked the writers of slick detective stories would be if they could witness two police inspectors sitting on a willow tree swapping poems."
"Oh, them!" Rodgers said, in the tone that in lower circles is followed by a spit. "Ever read any of these things?"
"Oh, yes. Now and then."
"My sergeant makes a hobby of it. Collects the howlers. His record so far is ninety-two to a book. In a thing called Gods to the Rescue by some woman or other." He stopped to watch something and added: "There's a woman coming now. Pushing a bike."
Grant took a look and said: "That's not a woman. It's a goddess to the rescue."
It was the unconquerable Marta, with vacuum flasks of hot coffee and sandwiches for all.
"The bicycle was the only way I could think of for carrying them," she explained, "but it is difficult because most of the gates don't open."
"How did you get through them, then?"
"I unloaded the bicycle, lifted the thing over, and loaded it again the other side."
"The spirit that made the Empire."
"That's as may be, but Tommy must come with me on the way back, and help me."
"Sure I will, Miss Hallard," Tommy said, his mouth full of sandwich.
The men came up from the river and were presented to Marta. It amused Grant to notice the camaraderie of those who quite patently had never heard of her, and the awed good manners of those who had.
"I think the news has leaked out," Marta said. "Toby rang me up and asked if it was true that the river was being dragged again."
"You didn't tell him why?"
"No. Oh, no," she said, her face going a little bleak again at the memory of the shoe.
By two o'clock in the afternoon they had a large attendance. And by three o'clock the place was like a fair, with the local constable making valiant efforts to preserve some kind of decency.
At half-past three, when they had dragged the river almost as far as Salcott itself and had still turned up nothing, Grant went back to the Mill House and found Walter Whitmore there.
"It was kind of you to send us the message, Inspector," he said. "I should have come to the river, but somehow I couldn't."
"There was not the slightest need for you to come."
"Marta said that you were coming back here at tea-time, so I waited here. Any—results?"
"Not so far."
"Why did you want to know about the shoe, this morning?’1
"Because it was fastened when found. I wanted to know if Searle normally pulled off those shoes without unbuckling them. Apparently he always unbuckled them."
"Then why—how could the shoe be fastened now?"
"Either it was sucked off by the current, or he kicked it off to make swimming easier."
"I see," Walter said, drearily.
He refused tea, and went away looking more disorientated than ever.
"I do wish I could be as sorry for him as I should be," Marta said. "China or Indian?"
Grant had had three large cups of scalding tea ("So bad for your inside!" Marta said) and was beginning to feel human again, when Williams rang to report.
The report, in spite of Williams's best endeavours, was meagre. Miss Searle didn't like her cousin and made no bones about it. She, too, was an American, but they had been born at opposite sides of the United States and had never met until they were grown up. They had fought at sight, apparently. He sometimes rang her up when he came to England, but not this time. She had not known that he was in England.
Williams had asked her if she was out a lot, and if she thought it possible that Searle could have called, or telephoned, and not found her. She said that she had been in the Highlands, painting, and that Searle might have called her many times without her knowledge. When she was away the studio was empty and there was no one to take telephone messages.
"Did you see the paintings?" Grant asked. "The ones of Scotland."
"Oh, yes. The place was full of them."
"What were they like?"
"Very like Scotland."
"Oh, orthodox."
"I wouldn't know. The west of Sutherland and Skye, mostly."
"And about his friends in this country?"
"She said she was surprised to hear that he had any friends anywhere."
"She didn't suggest to you that Searle was a wrong ♦un?"
"No, sir. Nothing like that."
"And she couldn't suggest any reason why he should suddenly disappear, or where he could disappear to?"
"No, she couldn't. He has no people, she did tell me that. Parents dead, apparently; and he was an only child. But about his friends she seemed to know nothing. What he said about having only a cousin in England was true, anyhow."
"Well, thank you very much, Williams. I quite forgot to ask you this morning if you found Benny?"
"Benny? Oh, yes. Quite easily."
"And did he cry?"
Grant heard Williams laugh.
"No. He pulled a new one this time. He pretended to faint."
"What did that get him?"
"It got him three free brandies and the sympathy of the multitude. We were in a pub. I need hardly say. After’ the second brandy he began to come to and moan about the way he was being persecuted, so they gave him a third. I was very unpopular."
Grant considered this a fine sample of understatement.
"Luckily it was a West End pub," Williams said. This, being translated, meant that there was no actual interference with his performance of his duty.
"Did he agree to go with you for questioning?"
"He said he would go if I let him telephone first. I said he knew quite well that he was free to telephone anyone at any hour of the day or night—that was a Post Office arrangement—but if his call was innocent I supposed he didn't mind my being the fly on the telephone-booth wall."
"And did he agree?"
"He practically dragged me into the box. And who do you think that little bastard was telephoning to?"
"His M.P.?"
"No. I think M.P.s are a bit shy of him nowadays. He overstayed his welcome last time. No, he rang up some bloke he knows who writes for the Watchman and told him the tale. Said he was no sooner 'out' than some policeman or other was on his tail wanting him to go to Scotland Yard for questioning, and how was a man to go straight if he was having an innocent drink with his friends who didn't know anything about him, and an obvious plain-clothes tec came up and wanted to speak to him, and so on and so on. Then he came with me, quite pleased with himself."
"Was he any help to the Yard?"
"No, but his girl was."
"Did she blab?"
"No, she was wearing Poppy's earrings. Poppy Plum tree’s."
"No!"
"If we didn't happen to be taking Benny out of circulation for a little, I think his girl would put him out of it for good. She's raving mad. He hasn't had her very long, and it seems she was thinking of leaving him, so Benny 'bought' her a pair of diamond earrings. The amount of intelligence Benny has wouldn't inconvenience a ladybird."
"Did you get the rest of Poppy's stuff?"
"Yes. Benny coughed up. He hadn't had time to get to a fence with them."
"Good work. What about the Watchman?"
"Well, I did want to let that Watchman bit of silliness stew in his own juice. But the Super wouldn't let me. Said it was no good having trouble that we could avoid even if we had the pleasure of seeing the Watchman making a fool of itself. So I had to ring him up and tell him."
"At least you must have got something back out of that."
"Oh, yes. Yes. I don't deny I got some kick out of that. I said: 'Mr. Ritter, I'm Detective-Sergeant Williams. I was present when Benny Skoll rang you up a few hours ago.” You were present?1 he said. 'But he was lodging a complaint against you!” Oh, yes,' I said. 'It's a free country you know.” I don't call it so free for some,' he said. 'You were dragging him away to be questioned at Scotland Yard.' I said I invited him
to accompany me, and he didn't have to if he didn't want to.
"Then he gave me the old spiel about hounding criminals, and Benny Skoll having paid his debt to Society, and that we had no right to hound him now that he was a free man again, and so forth. 'You have shamed him before his friends,' says Mr. Ritter, 'and pushed him back to hopelessness. How much -better is Scotland Yard for having badgered poor little Benny Skoll this afternoon?'
" 'Two thousand pounds worth,' I said.
" 'What?' he said. 'What are you talking about?'
" That is the amount of jewellery he stole from Poppy Plumtre's flat on Friday night.'
" 'How do you know it was Benny?' he asked.
"I said Benny had handed over the loot in person, with the exception of two large single diamond earrings which were gracing the ears of his current lady friend. Then I said: 'Goodnight, sir,' very sweet and low, the way they do in the Children's Hour, and hung up. You know, I think he had already written that letter about poor innocent Benny. He was so dashed. Writers must feel very flat when they've written something that no one can use."
"Wait till Mr. Ritter's flat is burgled," Grant said. "He'll come to us screaming for the criminal's blood."
"Yes, sir. Funny, isn't it? They're always the worst when it happens to themselves. Any word from San Francisco?"
"Not yet, but it may come any minute. It doesn't seem so important now."
"No. When I think of the whole notebook I filled interviewing bus conductors in Wickham! No good for anything but wastepaper basket."
"Never throw notes away, Williams."
"Keep them for seven, years and find a use for them?"
"Keep them for your autobiography, if you like, but keep them. I would like to have you back here, but at the moment the work doesn't warrant it. It is just a matter of standing about in the cold."
"Well, I hope something turns up before sunset, sir."
"I hope it does. Literally."
Grant hung up and went back to the river-bank. The crowd had thinned a little as people began to go home to their Sunday high-tea, but the solid core who would happily starve in order to see a man's dead body dragged from the river were still there. Grant looked at their blue moronic faces and speculated for the thousandth time since he became a policeman about what made them tick. One thing was certain; if we revived public executions tomorrow, the "gate" would be of cup-tie proportions.