To Love and Be Wise (19 page)

'Hullo.'

'Alan?' said Marta's voice. 'Is that you, Alan?'

'Yes, it's me. You're awake early aren't you?'

'Listen, Alan. Something has happened. You must come out straight away.'

'Out? To Salcott, you mean?'

'To the Mill House. Something has happened. It's very important or I wouldn't have called you so early.'

'But what has happened? Can't you——'

'You're on a hotel telephone, aren't you.'

'Yes.'

'I can't very well tell you, Alan. Something has turned up. Something that alters everything. Or rather, everything you—you believed in, so to speak.'

'Yes. All right. I'll come at once.'

'Have you had breakfast?'

'Not yet.'

'I'll have some ready for you.'

What a woman, he thought as he put back the receiver. He had always thought that the first requisite in a wife was intelligence, and now he was sure of it. There was no room in his life for Marta, and none in her life for him; but it was a pity, all the same. A woman who could announce a surprising development in a homicide case without babbling on the telephone was a prize, but one who could in the same breath ask if he had had breakfast and arrange to supply him with the one he had not had was above rubies.

He went to collect his car, full of speculation. What could Marta possibly have unearthed? Something that Searle had left the night he was there? Some piece of gossip that the milkman had brought?

One thing was certain: it was not a body. If it had been a body Marta, being Marta, would have conveyed as much, so that he could bring out with him all the necessary paraphernalia and personnel to deal with such a discovery.

It was a day of high wind and rainbows. The halcyon time of windless sunlight that comes each year to the English spring when the first dust lies on the roads was over. Spring was all of a sudden wild and robust. Glittering showers slanted across the landscape. Great clouds soared up over the horizon and swept in shrieking squalls across the sky. The trees cowered, and plumed themselves, and cowered again.

The countryside was deserted. Not because of the weather but because it was Sunday. Some of the cottages, he observed, still had their blinds drawn. People who got up at the crack of dawn during the week, and had no animals to get them up on Sunday, must be glad to sleep late. He had grumbled often when his police duties had broken into his private life (a luxury grumble, since he could have retired years ago when his aunt left him her money), but to spend one's life in bondage to the predilections of animals must be a sad waste of a free man's time.

As he brought the car up to the landward side of the Mill House, where the door was, Marta came out to greet him. Marta never 'dressed the part' in the country as so many of her colleagues did. She looked on the country rather as the country people themselves did, as a place to be lived in; not something that one put on specially bright and casual clothes for. If her hands were cold she wore gloves. She did not feel that she must look like a gypsy just because she happened to live in the Mill House at Salcott St Mary. She was therefore looking as chic and sophisticated this morning as though she were receiving him on the steps of Stanworth. But he thought she had a shocked look. Indeed she looked as though she had quite lately been very sick.

'Alan! You can't imagine how glad I was to hear your voice on the telephone. I was afraid that you might have gone to town, early as it was.'

'What is this that has turned up so unexpectedly?' he asked making for the door. But she led him round and down to the kitchen door at the side of the house.

'It was your follower, Tommy Thrupp, that found it. Tommy is mad on fishing. And he quite often goes out before breakfast to fish, because apparently that is a good time.' The 'apparently' was typically Marta, he thought. Marta had lived by the river for years and still had to take someone else's word about the proper time for fishing. 'On Sundays he usually takes something in his pocket and doesn't come back—something to eat, I mean—but this morning he came back inside an hour because he had—because he had caught something very odd.'

She opened the bright green door and led him into the kitchen. In the kitchen were Tommy Thrupp and his mother. Mrs Thrupp was huddled over the stove as if she also was feeling not too well, but Tommy came to meet them in sparkling form. There was nothing sickly about Tommy. Tommy was transfigured. He was translated. He was six feet high and crowned with lightning.

'Look, sir! Look what I fished up!' he said, before Marta could say anything, and drew Grant to the kitchen table. On the table, carefully placed on several thicknesses of newspaper so as to preserve the scrubbed perfection of the wood, was a man's shoe.

'I'll never be able to bake on that table again,' moaned Mrs Thrupp, not looking round.

Grant glanced at the shoe and remembered the police description of the missing man's clothes.

'It's Searle's, I take it,' he said.

'Yes,' Marta said.

It was a brown shoe, and instead of being laced it was tied with a buckle and strap across the instep. It was water-logged and very muddy.

'Where did you fish it up, Tommy?'

'Bout a hundred yards down-stream from the big bend.'

'I suppose you didn't think of marking the place?'

'A course I marked it!' Tommy said, hurt.

'Good for you. Presently you'll have to show me the place. Meanwhile wait here, will you. Don't go out and talk about this.'

'No, sir, I won't. No one's in on this but me and the police.'

A little brightened by this version of the situation, Grant went upstairs to the telephone in the living-room and called Inspector Rodgers. After some delay, since the station had to connect him to the Rodgers's home, he was put through to him, and broke the news that the river would have to be dragged again and why.

'Oh, lord!' groaned Rodgers. 'Did the Thrupp boy say where he fished it up?'

'About a hundred yards down from the big bend, if that conveys anything to you.'

'Yes. That's about two hundred yards down-stream from where they had their bivouac. We did that stretch with a small-tooth comb. You don't think that perhaps——? 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.'

'
Panaché!
' 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.

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 waterproof 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 drownèd 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 fill 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 shade 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.'