‘He’d been standing there most of the way, seeing to the bow rope.’
‘The boy and girl couldn’t know that.’
‘He was certainly standing there when we approached the punt.’
‘And,’ Keeble said in a demolishing voice, ‘no one would deliberately put themselves into so much danger just to bait a trap.’
I dried my legs and wondered what to do about my underpants.
Keeble sighed down his nose and fluttered his fingers. ‘No one except you.’
He reached into a locker and produced a bundle of clothes.
‘Emergency falling-in kit,’ he explained, giving them to me. ‘I don’t suppose anything will fit.’
As there was a mixture of his own cast-offs, which were too wide, and Lynnie’s, which were too narrow, he was right. Everything, besides, was too short.
‘In addition,’ he went on, ‘how did the boy and girl know we were on the river at all and would be coming down through Harbour Lock? How long did you expect them to wait there clinging to the post? How did they know exactly which boat to hail, and how did they avoid being rescued by any other boat?’
‘The best accidents always look as if they couldn’t possibly be anything else.’
‘I grant you that,’ he said, nodding. ‘I just think that this one literally couldn’t be set up.’
‘Yes, it could. With a safe getout, in that if it didn’t work according to plan, if for instance Peter had been on the bows instead of Dave, they had no need to go into the act of yelling for help, because of course they wanted to make sure it was us before they started.’
‘They were in danger,’ Keeble protested.
‘Maybe. I’d like to take a closer look at that post.’
‘And there might have been other boats around, helping. Or watching.’
‘If Dave never came within range of the punt pole they lost nothing but an opportunity. If other boats had been watching there would simply have been more people to cry accident. The girl was screaming and splashing and dramatically dropping her rope when the boy hit Dave. We were all watching her, not him. Any sized audience would have been doing the same.’
‘And how could the boy and girl have known where Dave would be this Sunday, in the first place? And why on God’s earth should anyone want to kill him?’
I stepped into some aged grey trousers of Keeble’s and found them a foot too generous round the waist. My boss wordlessly held out a short striped elastic schoolboy belt, which took care of the problem by gripping like a tourniquet.
‘It was a simple accident, Gene. It had to be.’
The trousers ended four inches above my ankles, and the socks I slowly fumbled my way into made no effort to bridge the gap.
‘Gene!’ said Keeble, exasperated.
I sighed. ‘You’ll agree I’m a sort of specialist in arranging accidents?’
‘Not usually fatal ones,’ he protested.
‘Not often.’ And no more, if I could wriggle out of it. ‘Just a general stage managing of events, so the victim believes that what has happened to him is the merest mischance.’
Keeble smiled. ‘You’ve sprung more hares that way...’
‘So,’ I said reasonably, ‘I’m apt to spot a rig-up when I see one.’
The smile half faded and changed into speculation.
‘And no,’ I said, ‘I was not concussed in the recent boating party and I haven’t got water on the brain.’
‘Keep your telepathy to yourself,’ he said uncomfortably. ‘I just think you are mistaken.’
‘OK, then I’ll spend my holiday in Putney.’
He said ‘No,’ so vehemently, so explosively, that there was no subtlety left in the situation. From his naked alarm I saw unmistakably how much he understood of my depressed mental state and how convinced he was that I wouldn’t survive three weeks of my own company. Shocked, I realized that his relief when I answered his telephone call had not been at finding me at home, but at finding me alive. He had dug me out on to the river to keep an eye on me and was prepared to send me off on any old wild goose chase so long as it kept me occupied. Then maybe, I supposed, he thought I would snap out of it.
‘The blues’, I said gently, ‘have been with me for a long time.’
‘Not like this.’
I had no answer.
After a pause he said persuasively, ‘Three world class stallions disappearing... isn’t that also the sort of accident you don’t believe in?’
‘Yes, it is. Especially when someone tries to get rid of the man who bought two of them.’
He opened his mouth and shut it again. I almost smiled.
‘It was a craftsman’s accident,’ I said. ‘It could hardly have been done better. All they didn’t bargain for was interference from someone like me.’
He still didn’t believe it, but as he was now happy that I should, since it meant that I would go to the States, he raised no more objections. With a shrug and a rueful smile he tossed me a darned brown sweater, which hung round me like a tent; and I picked up my own wet clothes and followed him out into the sunshine.
Peter and Lynnie both giggled at my baggy appearance, the nervous shock still sharp in their voices, especially Lynnie’s. I grinned at her and ruffled her hair, and made as if to kick Peter overboard, and some of the tension loosened in their eyes. In another half hour they would have reached the compulsive talking stage and an hour after that they would be back to normal. Nice, ordinary kids, with nice, ordinary reactions.
I climbed wearily up on to the cabin roof and spread out my clothes to dry. My shoes were still there where I had stepped out of them, and absentmindedly I put them on. Then, standing up, I looked across to the weir, and back to the hefty post with its notice; DANGER, and at the innocent empty punt tied up behind the Flying Linnet: and I found myself thinking about the legend of the Sirens, the sea nymphs who sat on a rock near a whirlpool and with their pretty voices drew passing sailors towards them, to lure them to their death.
Chapter Three
The punt had the name of the owner screwed on to the stern on a small metal plate. The lock-keeper, consulted, said that it came from a boatyard about a mile down the river, next to a pub; you couldn’t miss it.
‘That,’ I murmured to Keeble, ‘is where we had our drinks this morning.’
His eyelids flickered. He said to the lock-keeper, ‘I suppose a lot of punts from there come up through your lock?’
‘They sure do, on a fine Sunday like this,’ he agreed.
‘Did you happen to notice this one, with a girl and a young man in it? The girl had long fair hair, white trousers, and a pink shirt, and the boy was wearing tight pale blue jeans and a red-and-yellow check shirt.’
‘I should say they came up before my dinner break. I can’t remember anyone like that this afternoon.’
The lock-keeper eased the white-topped hat back on his head and eyed the boats lining up to go into the lock. He was a youngish man with an air of long-suffering patience, the occupational result, no doubt, of a life spent watching an endless procession of incompetence. People, he had said matter-of-factly, fell into his lock every day of the week. Near-drownings, however, were of no special interest to him: he too often had to deal with the unsaved.
‘Would you know them again?’ Keeble asked.
The lock-keeper shook his head decisively. ‘Not a chance. And if I don’t get back to my lock there’ll be a lot of bad tempers coming through the gates and as like as not we’ll be fishing out another one...’
He gave me a sketchy farewell salute as one of the few who had gone down his weir and walked away, and strolled unhurriedly back to deal with his Sunday going home traffic problem.
‘We may as well tow the punt back to the boatyard,’ Keeble said thoughtfully. ‘We’ve got to go down past there anyway, and they won’t be able to spare anyone to come and fetch it on a busy day like this. And maybe they’ll know where the boy and girl came from...’