Then, on noisy, ton-up motorcycles, helmeted, black-jacketed, witless, destructive and ruthless, came the Bank Holiday gangs for a short orgy of window-smashing, drunkenness and terrorisation, the modern equivalent of shooting up the town. More frequent nuisances were the local gangs which grew up to combat the invaders and soon infested the back streets. They had their own territories, jealously guarded, which included a favourite pub and a favourite disco, and to enliven life further they made sporadic war on one another, combining only when the motorbike invaders arrived.
However, the town had been free from any major disturbances since the police had had to make a number of arrests on the May Day bank holiday following a bout of shop-window-smashing and insulting behaviour on the part of the invaders, so it was with some surprise that the Superintendent received a report that the stabbed body of a skinhead youth had been found on the foreshore which bordered the busy road to the ferry.
“Must be some sort of gang vengeance,” he said to his uniformed inspector. “We’ve had no trouble for weeks with the local lads. Take a recce and see what you can pick up. Have a comb-out of the pubs these kids use. This kind of thing is usually the result of youngsters having too much to drink.”
The body had been found by two men digging for lug-worms at low tide. When they reported their find they said that the body was a good way further up the shore from where they were looking for bait and they had not noticed it. Later, when they were ready to depart, they did see it and thought at first that it was a heap of flotsam brought in on the tide and left stranded when the tide went out.
However, as it appeared to be neither seaweed nor driftwood, they decided to examine it and were alarmed to find themselves confronted by a very dead youth. It was early in the morning, for they had decided upon a full day’s fishing, so the police got to the spot before any sightseers came along. Spectators were unlikely, anyway, for the foreshore of the inland bay was muddy and uninviting. The beach proper lay on the other side of the road, for the way to the ferry ran along a very narrow peninsula which, on the northern side, had plenty of clean sand, beach huts, a promenade and the waters of the English Channel to attract the visitors. Except to yachtsmen, there was nothing attractive on the other side of the road except the view.
Cars along the road were frequent, for the ferry was always busy, and although pedestrians were few except for those like the two fishermen whose only concern was to dig for bait, the road itself was seldom completely deserted.
“Nasty case in the local rag,” said Jonathan, handing the paper to his aunt. “Boy of about eighteen found dead on the sea-shore. Been stabbed.”
“Yes, I read the account before breakfast,” said Dame Beatrice, laying the paper aside. “I wonder why that boy who bought the expensive rapier from Mrs Wells comes unbidden into my mind? It seems such an unnecessary proceeding to spend a great deal of money on something which was to be used merely as a stage property. That cannot be the reason it was purchased.”
“Oh, I don’t know. Marcus Lynn did the same thing. Those swords and daggers he brought along for our play must have cost a tidy sum.”
“Yes, but Marcus Lynn is a collector. He did not buy the weapons so that they could figure in the play.”
“What, exactly, is on your mind?”
“I do not like the way this youth’s death has followed so closely on the visit Conway and I paid to Mrs Wells’s shop.”
“You connect this boy’s death with that visit, do you? But the kid was a skinhead. Either one of his mates or a member of a rival gang bumped him off. These stabbing affairs are a feature of gang warfare. Mrs Wells said that her customer was a respectable boy with collar-length hair.”
“The head had been completely shaved. Is that a feature of gang warfare? I know that some of these youths have their hair very closely cropped, but could not this one have been assaulted and his head shaved before he was killed?”
“Oh, I think it’s only girls who get their heads shaved as a badge of shame. This chap probably wanted to emulate Kojak or Yul Brynner.”
“I thought that kind of hero-worship was confined to younger boys than this one. Besides, there were other things in the newspaper account which struck me as being significant. One was the description of the hands and feet of the dead boy.”
“I don’t see why that type of boy should not take care of his extremities. Some youths are very vain and go to all sorts of lengths to give themselves the means of making a good impression on the opposite sex. In any case, this lad had been rolled about in the ocean, I expect, for long enough to ensure that his whole body had had a scouring, don’t you think?”
“I accept your argument with becoming meekness, but with certain reservations. I share a bump of caution with Dr Jeanne-Marie Fitzroy-Delahague.”
“In what particular?”
“She, I have been told, was not content to treat Mr Rinkley’s collapse at the last night of the play as a simple bilious attack consequent on the injudicious ingesting of mussels washed down by whisky. She sent him to hospital in case he had poisoned himself with something other than alcohol.”
“There is no chance that this lad poisoned himself, is there? The report says that he died of a stab-wound.”
“Which could have been administered as a coup de grâce if his killer decided to put him out of his agony if he was already dying from poison.”
“You really think he may have been poisoned? But Dr Jeanne-Marie was mistaken about the—what did she call it?—in Rinkley’s case.”
“Myelotoxin, but had I been consulted I should have insisted upon further tests if I had suspected any form of poisoning at all.”
“What sort of tests?”
“A combination of shellfish and whisky could have accounted for Rinkley’s illness, of course, but Dr Jeanne-Marie suspected poisoning. She thought of myelotoxin, but I should also have had the hospital make tests for arsenic.”
“Arsenic? Good Lord, why?”
“A non-lethal dose of arsenic added to the whisky could have produced the symptoms of which we have heard. The more I think about it, the more convinced I am that Rinkley was deliberately removed from the scene in which a dagger was to be used. Whether he removed himself, or whether somebody else removed him, is not yet clear. Neither do we know whether Rinkley knew who was to be his understudy.”
“You could ask him that, I suppose.”
“I doubt whether I could place much confidence in his answer. It might be truthful or it might not. You see, if somebody had intended that Bourton should die in the way he did, it was essential that he should play Pyramus. That involved removing Rinkley from the scene. I do not say that arsenic had been put into the whisky he drank, but the symptoms, to my mind, were definitely suggestive, and when the tests for myelotoxin proved negative, tests for arsenic should have been made. I have no doubt that, if Rinkley had died, they would have been made.”
“But what makes you think of arsenic in the case of this dead boy?”
“The fact that his head was not closely cropped, but was completely shaved and that his hands and feet appear to have received painstaking attention. Arsenic persists for a very long time in the hair and nails.”
“You mean his murderer shaved his head and trimmed up his hands and feet before chucking him into the harbour?”
“Stranger things have happened. It would be interesting to know the truth of the matter. None of it sounds like gang warfare to me.”
“You think this is the boy who bought the rapier, don’t you?”
“His death has followed strangely closely on my visit to Mrs Wells with Detective-Inspector Conway, that is all. As I say, had Mr Rinkley died, I have no doubt that the hospital would have carried out further tests, but he made a complete recovery, so no further action was taken. If somebody had given him arsenic—as I would have thought his symptoms suggested—the quantity was infinitesimal. The object must have been to render him hors de combat and the poison may even have been self-administered. We shall never get him to admit it, if such was the case.”