XIV
The Man in the Punt
Leyland did not come back till early on Monday morning; and when he came out to the Gudgeon he found Angela already returned. He was plainly despondent.
“There’s simply nothing right about this case,” he explained. “Nothing ever seems to work out according to schedule. What could be easier, in an ordinary way, than to trace the movements of a man who’s gone up river in a punt? He must pass through the locks; he must go up the main stream—you couldn’t take a punt up the Windrush, for example; he can’t leave it about anywhere, at this time of the year, without its being noticed. And yet I’ve lost all trace of him.”
“Poor Mr. Leyland,” said Angela. “Did you start from Oxford, or where?”
“Yes, naturally I went round the boat places on the Upper River; that didn’t take long. I found the man who’d hired the punt to him—the same man, as a matter of fact, from whom the Burtells got their canoe. It was a big punt, with awnings for sleeping out, and the man seems to have come on board with a great crowd of tins and things as if he meant to do his own cooking. He paid a deposit, and hired the punt for a fortnight—gave his name as Luke Wallace, and an address somewhere in Cricklewood. I got through to Cricklewood at once—there are advantages about being a policeman—and the station there, after making inquiries, found that no such name was known anywhere in the neighbourhood. A false address sounds promising, thought I; we aren’t on the track of some common holidaymaker. I found out the date when the man hired the punt; it seems that he had already spent two nights on the river when he reached Shipcote. That’s natural enough; he wasn’t hurrying. I tried the locks between this and Oxford, to see if they could give me any information about the man; they only seemed to remember the circumstance of his passing; one of them showed me, with great pride, the counterfoil of his lock ticket, F.N.2—as if that did any good.”
“Better than nothing,” suggested Bredon. “By an outside chance you might find it lying about somewhere.”
“Yes, but who bothers about a lock ticket? He wasn’t coming back. Probably just pitched it into the water then and there. However, I got the number. And of course we know his number at Shipcote, because it was the one just before the Burtells’. At the inns, so far, they’d seen nothing of him.”
“Poor man, he must have been using condensed milk,” said Angela with a shudder.
“Well, above Shipcote Lock he seems to have changed his method entirely. At Millington Bridge, for example—I can’t think why the landlady didn’t tell us about it—he went in and had an early luncheon. How early? (I asked). Oh, about half-past eleven it would be. Now, notice—this man was clear of Shipcote Lock before nine. The distance he did before lunch was only the distance the Burtells had covered between their breakfast and nine o’clock. Of course, there’s the difference between a canoe going downstream and a punt going upstream. I suppose the distance will be about two miles—rather less, if anything. There’s no reason why our friend in the punt should have been feeling energetic on a hot morning; but it naturally occurs to the mind that he may have been hanging about Shipcote Lock at the very time when the murder was committed. Which makes me all the more anxious to meet him.”
“Did he show any interest in the movements of the Burtells?” asked Bredon.
“That’s the extraordinary thing. Hitherto he hadn’t touched at a hotel, or asked a single question at the locks. But from now onwards he seems to have blazed his trail like a—like an elephant on a lawn-tennis court. At Millington Bridge, for example, he asked all sorts of questions about the Burtells—how long they stayed and whether they saw much of each other and so on. It was the maid he asked, not the landlady; I suppose otherwise she’d have been certain to mention it. He even asked whether they’d been seen about together much. All this, of course, was before any news of Burtell’s disappearance had come through. Then he went off, upstream.”
“Are you sure he went upstream?” objected Bredon. “That pub at Millington Bridge stands well away from the river; they can’t have seen him from there.”
“No, but there’s a boat place at the bridge, and the man in charge there saw him going upstream. He remembered it afterwards, of course, because the Burtell news came through, and everybody on the river began to remember everything that had happened that day, and a good many things which hadn’t. I asked him why on earth he didn’t mention the man in the punt before—why he never told the police about him. He said it never occurred to him, because the accident had happened so far down that it was impossible for a man punting upstream to have been anywhere near the scene of the accident, and yet reach Millington Bridge by half-past eleven. That was true, of course; he had no reason, you see, to suppose that there’d been anything fishy happening at the lock. Anyhow, he was positive of the fact because he remembered discussing the matter with old Mr. So-and-so, and I could ask old Mr. So-and-so if I didn’t believe him. I didn’t worry; the information seemed good enough. I walked up by the river to the next lock; on the way I passed a rather derelict sort of inn, and made inquiries there just for luck. The Blue Cow, I think, it was called.”
“I remember it,” said Bredon. “That was where the Burtells had dinner, the same evening on which they reached Millington Bridge. You remember it, don’t you, Angela?”
“Yes; we speculated, if you remember, what they could possibly have got to eat there, at such an hour.”
“Did the man in the punt call there?” asked Bredon.
“He did, and he actually called for letters. There were no letters here, only a telegram, which he read. It was addressed to somebody of the name of Wallace—that was the same name he’d given to the people who hired him the punt at Oxford. An alias, I imagine. As soon as he had read the telegram, he asked for a railway guide and a bus timetable. He had tea, and during tea he started asking the same set of questions about the Burtells—did they dine together? Did they go off together? and so on. After tea he got into the punt and started off downstream.”
“So you came down again?”
“No, I went up to the next lock to make sure. The man there was quite positive that no punt had come up at the time mentioned. The news of Burtell’s disappearance had been telegraphed through by that time, and he came downstream himself to help in the search. His wife, who looked after the lock in his absence, never had to open it all the time he was away. And, what’s more, he didn’t pass any punt of the type described on his way down to Shipcote. Burgess is equally clear that the punt never came back through Shipcote; that is easy to determine; for, if it had, the man would have shown his ticket. So, you see, the man in the punt seems to have vanished between Shipcote and the next lock above it, and taken his punt with him.”
“Folds his punt like the Arabs, and silently fades away,” suggested Angela. “But you looked for it, I suppose?”
“Very much so. I hired a boat and a waterman, and we rowed all the way down to Shipcote. We looked under the trees where they overhung the river; we went through all the craft at Millington Bridge; we did everything to find the beastly punt except dive for it. One thing’s quite certain—I’m going to have that upper reach dragged, even if I lose the last shred of my reputation for sanity.”
“What about the man’s looks?” suggested Bredon. “Did anybody give you a decent description of him?”
“They were pretty clear about that. All agreed that he looked a very muscular man; that he was clean-shaven, and had rather shiny hair, black; that he was rather above the average height—nothing much that was positive (there never is) but enough to rule out plenty of candidates. Naturally, I also made a point of finding out for certain whether he was alone—did he travel, for example, with the awnings of the punt up, so that there might have been a second person concealed in it? All my authorities seemed to agree, as far as they remembered the circumstances, that he was alone; Burgess, indeed, is quite positive about that.”
“Well, for heaven’s sake let’s try to get the crazy thing reconstructed. Angela, we’ve been making some advances in our business since you left, so you mustn’t interrupt us.”
“I will be as silent as a mouse. By the way, when you’ve finished, remind me to tell you what John said about the perambulator; it was really rather smart. But for the present, have it your own silly way.”
“Well, then,” said Leyland, “we’d better start by assuming that Nigel and the unknown—let’s call him Wallace, as it’s the name he seems to travel by—that Nigel and Wallace were in collusion. On Monday morning, after occupying two rooms and paying his bill as if he were two people, Nigel leaves the inn at Millington Bridge. Somewhere he picks up his cousin, who is by that time probably dead, or at least drugged. He paddles down to Shipcote Lock, and just above the lock he passes, no doubt without pretending to recognize, his accomplice.”
“Steady one moment,” said Bredon. “Had they arranged to meet just there, or was it accidental?”
“I think it must have been by arrangement. Nigel obviously had the nine-fourteen train in view, so there’s no reason why they should not have arranged a definite time of meeting. And, from what followed, it seems as if they knew their ground all right. Nigel, as we know, left the lock for the station, probably giving the canoe a shove before he left, so as to push it out into the fairway. Here, for the time being, his job ended. Wallace, meanwhile, had tied his punt up somewhere, just above the lock, and came down along the bank to intercept the drifting canoe. Now, which bank did he take? The western bank, surely, on the side away from the weir. That would save him swimming the weir stream. Not much danger in passing Burgess’ house, while Burgess was busy working the lock.”
“Yes, but if he did that, why were the footprints at the island side of the bridge? Why not on the mainland side? That’s where he’d want to climb up, if your account is right.
“You forget—he had to have his base on the island, so as to dispose of the body. He came down the western bank, crossed the iron bridge, and then behaved precisely as we made Nigel behave. He took off his clothes, climbed the bridge with his feet wet from the grass, took a photograph (Number Five) of his own footprints by mistake; took another photograph, Number Six, of Derek’s body floating in the canoe—on purpose. Then he climbed down, put the camera on board, pushed the canoe into the island bank, and got back into his clothes again. He lifted the body out of the canoe, well on to the bank; then he dragged it through the bracken up to the top of the island, and left it dumped on that clay surface. He’s made no mistakes, has he, so far?”
“Yes, one, and a very bad one. In lifting the body out of the canoe, he allowed that purse to slip out of the pocket. That—with the photograph of the footprints on the bridge—put us on to the idea that there had been dirty work at the island. They meant us to think that the whole business had happened much lower down.”
“That’s true enough. And yet they dropped the films just opposite the middle of the island. Surely that must have been done on purpose?”
“Yes, but did they mean those films to mark the spot? I think they were meant to look as if they’d been dropped accidentally just anywhere, by a man making his way along the towpath.”
“Yes, that’s better. Wallace, then, joins the canoe, paddles it down, scuttles it, and makes off. He must have walked pretty hard to get back to his punt. Then he fools about asking questions till the hue and cry starts. That is his signal: late at night, when the hue and cry makes the river full of traffic to cover his movements, he gets a second canoe, paddles up to the island, on the weir-stream side of it, embarks the body, with or without Nigel, on the canoe, ferries it up to the weir, drags over the weir, and finally deposits the body somewhere above Shipcote. Two points remain obscure—what did he do with his punt? And where or how did he get hold of the second canoe? The answer to Number One may be found by searching the river bed. The answer to Number Two isn’t really difficult—there are lots of canoes here, and most of them were out that night, when the body was missing. It would be easy for Nigel to get one of them, and hand it over to his accomplice. That’s one of the things which makes me pretty certain that Nigel was in it all.”
“I should go steady over that, though. Old Quirk has got a quite different story about it.” And Bredon detailed the American’s speculations of the previous morning. “We haven’t yet found anything that makes it quite certain Nigel was in it. We can’t prove that Derek Burtell was already helpless when he passed through Shipcote Lock, though it looks very much as if he was. We can’t prove that there was a prearranged rendezvous with Wallace at the lock; he might, as Quirk suggests, have seen Nigel get off at that point, and seen that it would be an excellent opportunity for carrying off his design. We still don’t know why he took the photograph; it’s difficult to see what Wallace, or any stranger, could have gained by its existence. But we haven’t got the noose round Nigel yet, even if we succeed in finding him. Meanwhile, at the risk of being wearisome, I must insist that there are two things we haven’t accounted for.”
“I know one, sir,” broke in Angela, waving her hand over her head after the manner of an impetuous schoolboy in class. “The second notecase—how did it come to exist, and how did it come to fall into the river just there?”
“Second part doesn’t matter,” replied her husband. “If he had a second notecase, it might have been lying in the canoe, and fallen out when the canoe swamped. Or it might have been thrown in there as a blind. But we still don’t know why he had two.”
“And the other difficulty?” asked Leyland.
“We still don’t know who passed through Spinnaker Farm a little before a quarter-past nine that morning. Not Nigel, for it was out of his way. Not Derek, for he was dead. Not Wallace, for he couldn’t have got there in the time. That still worries me a good deal.”
“You’d better ask Mr. Quirk about it,” suggested Angela.