“There’s a spade there with blood on it,” agreed Sloan.
“But not fingerprints, I suppose,” said Leeyes.
“I doubt it, sir,” said Sloan, “though the dabs boys are on their way over now.”
“Fingerprints would be too much to ask for these days.”
Sloan was inclined to agree with him. Besides there was a pair of gardening gloves sitting handy on the shelf beside the spade. Sloan thought that the gloves had a mocking touch about them—as if the murderer had just tossed them back onto the shelf where he had found them.
“When did it happen?” snapped Leeyes.
“He’s quite cold,” said Sloan obliquely, “and the blood has dried…”
Congealed was the right word for the bloody mess that had been the back of the man’s head but he did not use it.
A red little, dead little head…
“Yesterday, then,” concluded Leeyes.
“That’s what Dr. Tebot says,” said Sloan, “and Dr. Dabbe’s on his way.” Too many things had happened yesterday for Sloan’s liking.
“Yes, yes,” said Leeyes testily. “I know he’ll tell us for sure but you must make up your own mind about some things, Sloan.”
He had.
“And don’t forget to get on to the photographers, Sloan, will you?”
“I won’t forget,” said Sloan astringently.
“Who is he?” asked the superintendent. “Or don’t you know that either?”
But Sloan did know that. “He’s lying on his face, sir, and we haven’t moved him, of course.”
“Of course.”
“But I think I know.”
Leeyes grunted. “You’ll have to do better than that before you’ve done, Sloan.”
“Yes, sir.” Truth’s ox team had been Do Well, Do Better and Do Best. Sloan decided that he hadn’t even Done Well let alone Better or Best.
“I think I’ve seen those clothes before, sir.” And the body did look just like a bundle of old clothes. You wouldn’t have thought that there was a man inside them at first at all…
“Ha!”
“Yesterday afternoon.” said Sloan.
“That’s something, I suppose.”
“I think it’s the man who found the body.” Strictly speaking he supposed he should have said “the first body” now.
“The fisherman?”
“Horace Boiler,” said Sloan.
“The man in the boat,” said Leeyes.
“The doctor here thinks it’s him too, sir.” Last seen, Sloan reminded himself, with Basil Jensen on board.
“So there’s a link,” said Leeyes.
“There’s a link all right,” responded Sloan vigorously. “He’s got a barbary head in his pocket too.”
“What!” bellowed Leeyes.
Sloan winced. They said even a rose recoiled when shouted at let alone a full-blown detective inspector.
“At least,” declared Leeyes, “that means we’re not looking at a psychological case.”
“I suppose it does, sir.” There was nothing the police feared so much as a pathological killer. When there was neither rhyme nor reason to murder, then logic didn’t help find the murderer. You needed luck then. Sloan felt he could have done with some luck now.
“Have you,” growled Leeyes, “missed something that he found, Sloan?”
“I hope not,” said Sloan. But he had to admit that it had been his own first thought too.
“If he was killed because he knew something, Sloan,” persisted Leeyes, “then you can find out what it was too.”
“I’m sure I hope so, sir.”
“He’d have known about The Clarembald being found,” said Leeyes. “A fisherman like him…”
“He’d have known all the village gossip for sure, too, sir, a man like that.”
“Dirty work at the crossroads there,” said Leeyes, even though he meant the sea.
It had been highwaymen who waited at the crossroads to double their chances of getting a victim. They used to hang felons at the crossroads too in the bad old days. Perhaps the dirty work had sometimes come from hanging the wrong man. A police officer had an equal duty to the innocent and the guilty.
Then and now.
“Don’t tell me either,” said Leeyes tartly, “that men explore valuable wrecks for the fun of it.”
Sloan wasn’t so sure about that but he was concentrating on the bird in the police bush, so to speak.
“Boiler wasn’t a very attractive man,” he said slowly. “Ridgeford said you had to watch him.”
“Are you trying to suggest something, Sloan?”
“If he knew something that we didn’t know he might have been—er—trying to put the pressure on a bit.”
“Blackmail by any other name,” trumpeted Leeyes, “smells just as nasty.”
“And it’s always dangerous.” The blow that had killed Boiler had been bloody, bold and resolute. Even peering over the apple boxes Sloan could see that. That’s when he had seen the bulge in the man’s pocket that had been the barbary head. Boiler’s own head hadn’t been a pretty sight. Wet red—the poet’s name for blood—it had been covered in.
“Was he destined for a watery grave, too, Sloan?”
“I’m sure I don’t know that, sir. All I do know is that it was merest chance that he was found. The girl—Elizabeth Busby, that is—said that she only had that step-ladder out once in a blue moon. She was going to clean the hall and that’s high, of course. Otherwise…”
“Otherwise,” interrupted Leeyes tartly, “in a couple of months’ time we’d have had an unidentified body on our hands, wouldn’t we? Another unidentified body, that is.”
“I think someone would have reported this man as missing,” said Sloan. Ridgeford had mentioned that Horace Boiler had a son with them on their first trip. He cleared his throat. “That means whoever killed him was pretty desperate.”
“The blackmailed usually are, Sloan,” said Leeyes with unusual insight. “Because they’ve always got the two things to worry about they stop thinking straight.”
“What they’ve done and what someone’s doing to them,” agreed Sloan.
“Did he get there by water?” asked Leeyes.
“What—oh, I hadn’t thought about that, sir. We’ll have to see.” There were so many things to see to now…
“We don’t want two dinghies on the loose, do we?”
When Sloan got outside again Constable Crosby was standing on guard outside the shed door talking to a worried Frank Mundill.
“What is going on, Inspector?” said the architect wildly. “Why should this house be picked on for all these things?”
“The real reason,” said Sloan, “is probably because it’s big enough to have a shed and a boathouse that don’t get used very often.”
“That’s very little consolation, I must say.” He shuddered “Ought you to search everywhere else?”
“No, sir, I don’t think that will be necessary, thank you.” Sloan had got some straight edges of his jigsaw on the board already. The death of Horace Boiler—no, the killing of Horace Boiler—was another piece. It might even prove to be one of the four most important pieces of all the puzzle—a cornerpiece.
Mundill ran a finger round inside the collar of his white turtleneck sweater. “It’s an unnerving business, isn’t it?”
“Nobody likes it, sir,” agreed Sloan. He was glad about that. Sophisticated fraud sometimes wrung unwilling admiration from investigating officers, but murder was a primitive crime and nobody liked it. The killing of a member of a tribe by another member of the same tribe was an offence against society. And it meant that no one in that society was safe. Perhaps that was the real reason why the murder charge accused the arrested person not so much of a killing but of an offence against the Queen’s Peace because that was what it was…
“That poor chap in there,” said Mundill worriedly.