A couple of muscles relaxed in his forearm and he inhaled deeply. ‘She gave you a drink... I hope?’
‘Sure. And a swim. And I stayed to dinner.’
He looked at me directly for some time without speaking. Then he said merely, ‘A good one?’
‘Very, thank you. And I saw your horses. Chub Lodovski showed me round.’
He talked much more naturally about the horses: no problems there.
‘I hear you’re moving to California,’ I said, after a while.
The tenseness instantly came back; the small giveaway tightening of eye, neck, and respiratory muscles that I looked for every day in my job, and couldn’t be blind to in my friends.
‘Yes,’ he said, tapping off ash. ‘Eunice loves the ocean, and in Kentucky we’re as far from it as can be... and of course, the horse breeding business in California is every bit as profitable. We will do very well out there, I’ve no doubt.’
Eunice would take her problems right along with her, I thought: though with a bit of luck they would recede for a year or two. Perhaps Teller considered the upheaval worth it.
‘What’s the new place like?’ I asked.
‘It’s good land, pretty well irrigated. And the stable and general layout are as good as Midway. Better even, in some respects. It’s Davis L. Davis’s old place.’
I looked blank, and he explained. ‘Made his money out of roadside hamburger stands. Well, he died early this year, and last month they held a dispersal sale of his brood mares and stallions, to divide up his estate for inheritance. I put in a bid for the farm to his executors before I came over here this time, and they wrote me a week or so back to say they’re accepting it. The contracts are in hand right now, but I don’t foresee any difficulties. I’m sure glad to have got it settled at last.’
‘At last?’
‘Been looking for a farm in southern California for over a year now, but there were too many snags to most of them. Eunice and I took a trip over in March of this year, and we saw the Davis farm then, and liked it. So...’ He waggled his fingers to finish the sentence.
The door opened and Keeble came in, mild spectacles reflecting the pallid light from the window, eyes blinking rapidly, and the usual patch of bristle growing grey where he had short-sightedly missed with the razor. He said hellos all round and settled himself comfortably into the spare armchair.
‘Well, how’s it with the States?’ he said: and I told them everything Walt had told me. They thought it over for a while in silence.
‘So what do you think now?’ Keeble said.
I glanced doubtfully at Teller, but he tapped ash off his cigarette and remarked simply, ‘Sim says you were convinced I was pushed into the river on purpose. I guess what he’s asking you is, have you changed your mind?’
‘No, I haven’t.’
Keeble and Teller looked at each other. Then Teller said, sighing, ‘We’ve come up with one or two things which makes it almost certain you are right.’
Keeble nodded. ‘I went to Dave’s hotel in London to collect his luggage and pay his bill, and explained where he was if anyone wanted him. The young man at the reception desk asked me if the lady journalist from Stud and Stable had found Dave all right on Saturday. She had, he said, been most insistent, owing to a deadline on the magazine, and he had given her my address and telephone number, which Dave had left with him in case he was wanted hurriedly in connection with Chrysalis.’
‘And that’, I remarked, ‘is how boy and girl knew where to find you.’
‘Quite,’ Keeble agreed. ‘From the house to the river was no doubt a simple piece of following. Incidentally, I checked with Stud and Stable. They didn’t want Dave, and their deadline is the first day of each month.’
‘Nice,’ I said.
Keeble took an envelope from his pocket and fished out some three by three inch black-and-white photographs. ‘There are Peter’s snaps,’ he said. ‘Take a look.’
I took them from him and looked. The ducks had come out splendidly; better than one of Lynnie, who had been moving. The picnic lunch was there, and the Flying Linnet in Marsh Lock, and one of Dave Teller standing on the bows, and a rather grim one of myself staring down into the water. There was one of the four men fallen in a heap in the punt at the hotel where we’d had our morning drinks, and another, taken with the photographer’s back to the river, of Keeble, Joan, Dave, Lynnie, and myself sitting round the little table under the sun umbrella, with glasses in our hands.
Keeble waited without blinking. With this in mind I started through the pile again, and found what he had seen. I looked up at him. He nodded, and from an inside pocket produced a magnifying lens, which he threw over to me. With the help of that, the two figures were clear. A girl with long hair and white trousers, a young man with pale trousers and a check shirt, standing side by side in the background of the photograph of us all drinking at the pub.
‘It’s them,’ I nodded.
‘Yes,’ Keeble agreed. ‘They were there in the morning. So I’ll grant you they could have followed us by car from Henley... you can see the river from several places along that road... and also that they saw Dave standing on the bows when we left Henley and when we left the pub. And possibly also when we arrived at the pub, and at Marsh Lock. They would know there was a good chance of him being there again when we came back through Harbour.’
I smiled. ‘And the five feet which was missing from the punt’s mooring rope had been used to tie it securely to the Danger post while they waited for us.’
‘I agree,’ Keeble said. ‘We took that punt right out of the water after you’d gone on Monday, and we found that the cleat for the stern rope had been unscrewed from the stern, and screwed on again under the water line at the bow end.’
‘So both mooring points were at one end,’ Teller said. ‘The safe rope was under water all the time, hidden by the punt itself and the girl’s body and arms. And, of course, we weren’t looking for anything like that at the time, so we’d never have seen it.’
Keeble finished it. ‘Once they’d got the visible rope safely in Joan’s hands, and we were all looking anxiously for you and Dave to surface, the girl had only to pull some sort of quick release knot, and the punt was free. So I’ll agree, Gene, that that was an accident which could be staged, and was staged, and you were right and I was wrong. Which, I seem to remember vaguely, has happened once or twice before.’
He smiled at me with irony, and I reflected that there were few superior officers who would say that sort of thing so utterly ungrudgingly.
A nurse clattered in with Teller’s lunch, which proved to be chicken salad and tinned mandarin oranges. The patient poured the oranges on to the salad and ate the combined course with resignation.
‘The food is lousy,’ he said mildly. ‘I’ve forgotten what a good steak looks like.’
We watched him eat without envy, and I asked Keeble if he’d had any results with the handkerchief.
‘Only negative ones. None of the Yogi Bear concessionists in this country imported it. They say, from the material and the sort of paint used for the bear, that it was probably made in Japan. And some of them had doubts it was done by the Hanna-Barbera artists. Not well enough drawn, they said.’
‘I’ll take it back to the States and try there,’ I said. ‘After all, boy and girl were almost certainly American.’
Teller raised his eyebrows with his mouth full.
‘The boy shouted “Can you help us, sir,” and that “sir” comes a great deal more commonly from Americans, than from the English. Also, the boatman said their accent was “same as on the telly” and there’s as much American as English on our television.’