Palgrave walked to his car, put his luggage in the boot and took the driver’s seat. He fastened his seat-belt and decided to drive westwards along the coast road. There was nobody about. Morag, if she was out walking, must have gone in the opposite direction, he supposed, or else she was out on the marshes or among the dunes. Possibly she, too, had gone for a swim.
There was no sign of Camilla, either, but this was not surprising. Both the dunes and the pebble-ridge would hide her from his seat in the low-slung car, whether she was still in the water or not. He did not suppose she was still swimming. The tide had been nearly at the full. Either it was slack water by this time, or else the tide was on the turn. She surely would be out of the water by now. He half thought of leaving the car and going down to the beach to make certain of this, but just as he was about to unfasten his seat-belt, he saw what he took to be Morag. She had been wearing white trousers and a white cardigan at the farewell party, and it was a white form which appeared in the distance flitting over the marshes.
‘Must be a will o’ the wisp,’ he thought, ‘Gases rise over marshes. I shall have to put Morag out of my mind. Curse young Camilla and her sexy urges!’ He let in the clutch and drove in the moonlight towards Stack Ferry.
CHAPTER 5
THE DEAD
‘In your deep floods
Drown all my faults and fears.’
Phineas Fletcher
« ^ »
He drove west and then south, found, in the early morning, a lorry-drivers’ café, breakfasted on delicious ham and eggs and execrable coffee, and then set course north and east for Stack Ferry. His chosen inn, The Stadholder, had its own courtyard. He drove in under an archway, locked the car and went off to kill time before presenting himself at the reception desk to ask whether he might move in straight away instead of waiting until Saturday.
The marshes of Stack Ferry stretched away north of the town itself, and both east and west of the estuary. Those to the west had been drained and grass-sown, for they were freshwater marshes, and were now turned into a public park and a caravan site. Palgrave explored them, but found them uninteresting. Beyond the park, however, the marshes were as Nature had intended them to be.
Those on the east side were sea-marshes, but, unlike the stretches at Saltacres, these at Stack Ferry were boggy and so much intersected by ditches, channels and little creeks and inlets as to be impassable except to wild-fowlers in punts. Palgrave walked a couple of miles back along the road towards Saltacres and then took a path which led seawards, but at the end of a mile or so the path petered out and he found his way blocked by a creek which meandered through the marshes and was too wide to jump across.
At half past eleven he presented himself at the inn and was told that he could settle in and that his room would be ready for him after lunch. He spent the day quietly, thinking about his book, and on the following morning he was in the bar finishing his first pint when Adrian walked in. Palgrave had told him where he would be staying and had been expecting that he and Miranda would at least telephone him before they returned to London, but he had not thought to see either of them because they had no transport. Adrian, however, had not come merely to see him, but to make a pertinent enquiry.
‘I’m not really worried,’ he said, ‘but it seems an extraordinary thing for even Camilla to do, don’t you think?’
‘What does?’
‘To sling her hook without a word to Miranda or me. She hasn’t by any chance thrown in her lot with you, I suppose? I’ve walked all the way over to ask you. Is she here?’
‘Good gracious, no! I should soon give her the bird if she showed any signs of trying to team up. Surely you know that! What, exactly, has happened?’
‘That’s what we don’t know. We heard her go out the night before last and assumed she’d gone for a swim. She was a great one for moonlight bathing.’
‘I know. As a matter of fact, I went bathing with her the night I left Saltacres. Oh, not by arrangement. I was intending to spend the night in my car, but I was cramped and cold, so I got out to stretch my legs and do a few exercises to warm myself up a bit, when along comes the wretched girl and suggests this moonlight swim.’
‘You went down to the sands with her?’
‘I did, and into the water. I didn’t stay in long and I left her there. That is the last I’ve seen of her.’
‘Did she mention anything about her plans? It’s quite a long walk to the sea across the marshes. You must have talked as you walked from your car to the beach.’
‘I suppose we chatted, but I can’t remember what we talked about. Certainly no mention was made of any plans. I didn’t even tell her mine.’
‘All Miranda and I could think was that Camilla felt Cupar and his wife had turned you out, and that she was resentful about it. But you say she has made no attempt to join you here. We thought at first that she had slipped out early yesterday morning, but we’ve seen nothing of her at all.’
‘The last I saw of her, I tell you, was in the water. I soon had enough of moonlight bathing, so I left her to it, and that’s all I know. I shouldn’t worry about her, if I were you. I expect you’re right and she’s taken a scunner at the other two. I’ll tell you, Adrian, why I oiled out. It’s because I was once engaged to Morag and that made too much of an awkwardness if we were under the same roof, particularly as it was I who broke the engagement.’
‘If I may ask, why did you? She seems a charming woman, very pretty, too.’
‘Yes. I was a fool. I knew I’d been a fool when I met her again the other day. I thought marriage would interfere with my writing and that I’d be tied to schoolmastering all my life just to support a wife and family. That’s why I turned her down. I bitterly regret it now.’
‘Oh, but I quite understand. One’s work must come first. But, Colin, what are we to do about that girl?’
‘Are you sure that Camilla really has left the cottage? She isn’t just out on the spree again?’
‘We don’t think so. She’s taken her suitcase and all her clothes have gone.’
‘Yes, that does look a bit final. Now, let me buy you a drink, and then I’ll give you a lift back to the cottage. Not to worry about her. She knows how to look after herself,’ said Palgrave.
That afternoon he sat on the bed in his little room, writing pad on knee, and made more notes for the book which at last showed signs of life. The notes were copious and his pose uncomfortable, but something was definitely taking shape and by tea-time, when he went in search of a café (The Stadholder did not serve teas) he was well content with the progress he had made and decided to let the yeast work for the next couple of days before he began the actual writing of the book.
During the next two days he explored the countryside by car and tried to put Morag out of his mind. He found the magnificent ruins of William d’Albini’s massive Norman keep, and, later, the beautiful, impressive remains of a Cluniac priory. These things would go into the book, he decided.
On the Friday, with no very definite plans for the day, he breakfasted later than usual and then strolled out to buy a newspaper. There was an item of news in it which affected him so deeply that he read it three times before he could believe that it was there.
He put the paper down and stared at the wall without being conscious of seeing it. What he saw was a wild-haired girl in a sweater which looked much too roomy and long for her, washed-out blue jeans which came halfway down her sun-browned calves, her bright, eager young face, vivacious but not really pretty, her muddy shoes, and then he heard a clear voice which had come to him on an off-shore breeze and which had cheerfully called out, ‘Hi!’