He said formally, ‘I would like you to be present at the boatyard tomorrow morning.’
‘What do you think of the place?’ I asked.
‘I’ve taken statements from Mr and Mrs Goodhaven and others,’ he said stiffly. ‘I haven’t been to the boatyard yet. It has, however, been cordoned off. Mr Yaeger is meeting me there tomorrow at nine a.m. I would have preferred this afternoon but it seems he is riding in three races at Wincanton.’
I nodded. Tremayne had gone there, also Nolan. Another clash of the Titans.
‘You know,’ Doone said slowly, ‘I had indeed started to question others besides Mr Goodhaven.’
I nodded. ‘Sam Yaeger for one. He told us. Everyone knew you’d begun casting wider.’
‘The lass had been indiscriminate,’ he said regretfully.
Tremayne lent me his Volvo to go to the boatyard in the morning, reminding me before I set off that it was the day of the awards dinner at which he was to be honoured.
I’d seen the invitation pinned up prominently by Dee-Dee in the office: most of the racing world, it seemed, would be there to applaud. For Tremayne, though he made a few self-deprecating jokes about it, the event gave proof of the substance of his life, much like the biography.
Sam and Doone were already in the boatyard by the time I’d found my way there, neither of them radiating joy, Sam’s multicoloured jacket only emphasising the personality clash with grey plain clothes. They’d been waiting for me, it seemed, in a mutual absence of civility.
‘Right, sir,’ Doone said, as I stood up out of the car, ‘we’ve done nothing here so far. Moved nothing. Please take us through your actions of Wednesday afternoon.’
Sam said crossly, ‘Asking for sodding trouble, coming here.’
‘As it turned out,’ Doone said placidly. ‘Go on, Mr Kendall.’
‘Harry said he was due to meet someone in the boathouse, so we went over there.’ I walked where we’d gone, the others following. ‘We opened this main door. It wasn’t locked.’
‘Never is,’ Sam said.
I pushed open the door and we looked at the hole in the floor.
‘We walked in,’ I said. ‘Just talking.’
‘What about?’ Doone asked.
‘About a great party Sam gave here once. Harry was saying there had been a bar here in the boathouse and a grotto below. He began to walk down to the windows and saw an envelope on the floor and when he bent to pick it up, the floor creaked and gave way.’
Sam looked blank.
‘Is that likely?’ Doone asked him. ‘How long ago was the floor solid enough to hold a party on it?’
‘A year last July,’ Sam said flatly.
‘Quick bit of rot,’ Doone commented, in his sing-song voice.
Sam made no answer, in itself remarkable.
‘Anyway,’ I said, ‘I took off my boots and jacket and left them up here and I dropped into the water, because Harry hadn’t come up for air, like I told you.’
‘Yes,’ Doone said.
‘You can see better from the lower door,’ I remarked, turning to go down the path. ‘This door down here leads into the dock.’
Sam disgustedly fingered the splintered door frame.
‘Did you sodding do this?’ he demanded. ‘It wasn’t locked.’
‘It was,’ I said. ‘With no key in sight.’
‘The key was in the keyhole on the inside.’
‘Absolutely not,’ I said.
Sam pulled the door open and we looked into the scene that was all too familiar to my eyes; an expanse of muddy water, the hole in the ceiling overhead and the curtain of iron mesh across the exit to the river; a dock big enough for a moderate-sized cabin cruiser or three or four smaller boats.
The water smelled dankly of mud and winter, which I hadn’t seemed to notice when I’d been in it.
‘There’s a sort of walkway along this right-hand wall,’ I told Doone. ‘You can’t see it now because of the floodwater.’
Sam nodded. ‘A mooring dock, with bollards.’
‘If you care to walk along there,’ I suggested, deadpan, ‘I’ll show you an interesting fact about that hole.’
They both stared at the water with reluctance stamped all over their faces, then Sam’s cleared as he thought of a more palatable solution.
‘We’ll go and look in a boat.’
‘How about the curtain?’
‘Roll it up, of course.’
‘Now, wait,’ Doone said. ‘The boat can wait. Mr Kendall, you came through the hole, found Mr Goodhaven and brought him to the surface. You sat him on the dock, then dived out under the curtain and climbed onto the bank. Is that right?’
‘Yes, except that while I was pulling Harry along to that far corner to give him better support, someone opened the main door above our heads, like I told you, and then went away without saying anything, and I heard a car drive off, which might have been Harry’s.’
‘Did you hear any car arriving?’ Doone asked.
‘No.’
‘Why didn’t you call out for help?’
‘Harry had been enticed here... It all felt like a trap. People who set traps come back to see what they’ve caught.’
Doone gave me another of his assessments.
Sam said, frowning, ‘You can’t have dived out under the curtain, it goes right down to the river bed.’
‘I sort of slithered under it.’
‘You took a sodding risk.’
‘So do you,’ I said equably, ‘most days of the week. And I didn’t have much choice. If I hadn’t found a way out we’d both eventually have died of cold or drowning, or both. Certainly by now. Most likely Wednesday night.’
After a short thoughtful silence Doone said, ‘You’re out on the bank. What next?’
‘I saw the car had gone. I went to collect my boots and jacket, but they’d gone too. I called to Harry to reassure him, then I went over to that big shed to find a telephone, but I couldn’t.’
Sam shook his head. ‘There isn’t one. When I’m here I use the portable phone from my car.’
‘I couldn’t find any decent tools, either.’
Sam smiled. ‘I hide them.’
‘So I used a rusty tyre lever and a mallet, and I’m sorry about your woodwork.’
Sam shrugged.
‘Then what?’ Doone asked.
‘Then I got Harry out here and put him in a dinghy and we... er... floated down to the lock.’
‘My sodding dinghy!’ Sam exclaimed, looking at the imitation scrapyard. ‘It’s gone!’
‘I’m sure it’s safe down at the lock,’ I said. ‘I told the lock-keeper it was yours. He said he’d look after it.’
‘It’ll sink,’ Sam said. ‘It leaks.’
‘It’s out on the bank.’
‘You’ll never make a writer,’ he said.
‘Why not?’
‘Too sodding sensible.’
He read my amusement and gave me a twisted grin.
I said, ‘What happens to the rubbish lying in the dock when you roll up the curtain?’
‘Sodding hell!’
‘What are you talking about?’ Doone asked us.
‘The bed of this dock is mud, and it slopes downwards towards the river,’ I said. ‘When the curtain’s rolled up, there’s nothing to stop things drifting out by gravity into the river and being moved downstream by the current. Bodies often float to the surface, but you of all people must know that those who drown in the Thames can disappear altogether and are probably taken by undercurrents down through London and out to sea.’ Sometimes from my high Chiswick window I’d thought about horrors down below the surface, out of sight. Like hidden motives, running deadly, running deep.