And maybe they wouldn’t, I thought: but even the most hopeless questions have to be asked.
‘I’d like to look at the post,’ I said.
Keeble was agreeable, but Lynnie and Peter and their mother were horrified when they found where we were proposing to go, and said they would wait on the bank. In a row, with anxious faces, they stood guard over the punt, while Keeble neatly manoeuvred the Flying Linnet upstream a little way through the downcoming cruisers, and then drifted gently across towards the post. I, standing on the stern seat, caught hold of the crossbar with its emphatic warning and clung on to it while Keeble put the boat into reverse against the drag of the weir stream.
Once the engine was thrusting hard enough to hold its own, so that the tension on my arms slackened, I knelt down on the seat and tried to do what the girl had been doing, to pass a rope round the post from one hand to the other. The tendency of the two-ton Flying Linnet to drift away couldn’t have been much less to deal with than the weight of the punt, but even allowing also for the fact that my arms were longer and stronger, it was easy. I secured the rope and gave a thumbs up to Keeble, who stopped the engine. Then with one toe wedged and the narrow side of the boat under my pelvis, I shoved up the sleeves of the brown sweater and leaned down and over to inspect the scenery.
‘For God’s sake be careful,’ Keeble said, his voice sharp over the noise of the weir.
I turned my head and laughed at him.
‘We haven’t any more dry clothes,’ he pointed out, scowling. ‘None that you can get into. If you fall in again you’ll have to go home wet.’
Smiling, I turned back to the post. But feel and look how I might, there was nothing out of the ordinary about the square sturdy white-painted baulk of timber set rock-like up on end in the Thames’ bed.
Keeble shrugged and said, ‘I told you so,’ and steered his boat back to the bank.
‘How about fingerprinting the punt?’ I said.
‘You never let up.’
‘You should be glad of it.’
The long line of past occasions when not letting up had led to a useful harvest rose up between us, and I saw his conviction waver.
‘All right, Gene, if you’re sure.’
‘Get Raben to do it. He’s the best.’
‘All right. Tomorrow.’
‘How about the police?’
He pursed his lips. ‘It’s not our usual territory. More theirs I agree. But they’re not likely to take your theory seriously, or to act on it, unless we tell them what your job is... and impress them with it. No, I’m not in favour of that. We could just go along with this quietly on our own for a little while, I think.’
‘So that if nothing turns up, we won’t have made bloody fools of ourselves?’
All his facial muscles contracted for a second. ‘You are not paid to turn your perceptions on your boss.’
‘I probably am.’
‘That’s a point.’
The boat grounded gently against the bank, and I helped Joan and Lynnie back on board. Peter, on his father’s directions, stepped into the punt and handed him up the mooring rope, which Keeble fastened to the cleat on the Flying Linnet’s stern. Then, towing the punt, we took our turn into the lock, explained what we were doing to the lock-keeper, and cruised downstream to the pub and its next door boatyard.
A flustered middle-aged boatman there was trying to cope with returning family picnic parties and a bunch of youths and girls who wanted to fill in the half hour before the pub opened at seven o’clock. The late afternoon shone redly on his big sweating face and his freckled bald head, and we had to wait while he juggled his customers precariously in and out of skiffs and punts and took their money and warned the young couples that it was an offence to be on the river without lights after dark and that the boatyard closed at nine-thirty anyway.
When Keeble at last had a chance he asked the boatman if he had seen the girl with fair hair and the boy in a red-and-yellow check shirt who had hired a punt that morning.
‘Seen ’em? I suppose so, I’ve been here all day.’
‘I mean, do you remember them?’ Keeble said patiently.
‘Where are they then?’ The boatman looked round suspiciously.
‘They’ve gone,’ Keeble began.
‘Then who’s going to settle up?’ said the boatman belligerently, this last problem looking to be just one too many for his temper.
‘Oh, I will,’ said Keeble soothingly. He took his wallet out of his back pocket and unfolded it to show the usual thickish wad. Keeble didn’t have to live on Her Majesty’s pay and worked from conviction, not need; his beer money represented a week’s wage to me, and his boat a year’s.
‘How much do they owe you?’ He handed over what the boatman asked and offered a fiver on top. ‘I’d like to hire this punt for this evening and tomorrow,’ he said. ‘Is that all right?’
The boatman took the money without hesitation and made a few half-hearted efforts to appear cautious.
‘Where’ll you be taking it?’
‘Henley,’ Keeble said.
‘You won’t leave the cushions out if it rains?’
Keeble shook his head.
‘All right then.’ The boatman had already tucked the notes away. ‘And you’ll bring it back tomorrow?’
‘Tomorrow afternoon,’ Keeble agreed. ‘Now, about those young people who took it this morning...’
Unexpectedly the boatman suddenly leered. ‘I remember ’em,’ he said, ‘come to think of it, they was the two who had no business to be out together.’
‘What do you mean?’ Keeble asked.
‘Well, see, this girl, she said like, what if her old man had put detectives on her, what would they say if she went off all day with him in a punt, and how she’d said she’d only come out as long as it was nothing anyone could use in a divorce. And the fellow in the check shirt turned round and said old money bags, meaning her old man, see, would never find out where they’d been, he was in France on business wasn’t he, or somesuch, and then they took note that I was standing there hearing and they sort of nudged each other and shut up. But I reckon as they were off for a bit on the side see, and didn’t want no one to catch ‘em.’
‘Exactly,’ said Keeble to me with another touch of I-told-you-so.
‘And very nicely done,’ I agreed. ‘Artistic.’
‘You haven’t seen them since this morning, I suppose?’ Keeble said to the boatman. ‘Do you happen to know how they got here?’
‘Car,’ said the boatman, waving an arm. ‘They came from the car park back there.’
‘Which car, do you know?’
He gave Keeble a pitying stare. ‘Look, there’s cars in and out all day, what with the pub and us. And I’m looking at the river, see, with my hands full an’ all, and I couldn’t tell you no one who’s come and gone nor what they came in, but they must have come in a car, because they come in the morning, and there’s no buses along here on Sundays before half-two in the afternoon.’
‘Thank you anyway,’ said Keeble, sighing. ‘You’ve been very helpful.’ He added another pound to his overpayment and the boatman’s eyes swivelled rapidly from the pub to the clock over the boathouse door. Still ten minutes until the bar opened. I proceeded to fill them.
‘Did the young man, or the girl, or both of them, speak with any special type of accent?’ I asked.
Since he spoke broad Berkshire himself, the boatman’s hesitation was understandable. ‘They talked’, he said, considering, ‘like they do on the telly.’
‘Not much help,’ Keeble commented.