‘Ah, you’ve been in touch with Adrian and Miranda Kirby. But surely they’ve got a bee in their bonnet?’
‘That remains to be seen. However, the death of a young girl is always more of a tragedy than one can contemplate unmoved, and no doubt the Kirbys were fond of the child.’
‘I don’t think Adrian was,’ said Morag, ‘if you ask my opinion.’
‘Well, at any rate, I received a most interesting letter from him. Whether he has convinced me that the girl’s death was no accident is another matter entirely.’
‘I don’t see how any further enquiry can help clear things up,’ said Lowson. ‘The verdict at the inquest was clear enough.’
‘I know you saw little of the girl while she was with you, but what impression did you form of her?’
‘The same impression as I formed when we had her in my hospital about eighteen months ago. She had had a bit of a knock from a car – nothing very serious – and we took her in for observation, so I had a look at her as a matter of course. She tried to get on my list when I was taken into partnership by my father after I’d qualified, but I wasn’t having any. I knew she’d be everlastingly in the surgery if I took her on. I told her I had got my full quota of N.H. patients and that I didn’t take private cases. Both stories were lies, but I made her swallow them. I had a job to convince her. She was a very persistent young lassie. No doubt the Greeks had a word for her.’
‘She was the complete man-chaser,’ said Morag. ‘Miranda told me about her.’
‘But hardly a man-trap,’ said her husband, grinning. ‘A skinny, leggy, untidy little creature, I thought her.’
‘She was a menace,’ said Morag.
‘She only needed some fellow who’d stand no nonsense. If such had married her, the lassie would have been well enough. He’d have made her eat regular meals, for one thing, and filled her out a bit.’
‘It would be interesting to find out what happened to her suitcase,’ said Dame Beatrice. ‘According to something Mr Kirby mentioned in his letter to me, the police are interested in it and it seems doubtful whether Miss St John herself took it out of the cottage while the rest of you were at the public house, or whether Mr Palgrave took it. Mr Palgrave, again according to Mr Kirby, suffered some harassment from the police on this score, but they seem to have satisfied themselves that it was not in his possession. However, I shall make my own enquiries. I understand he stayed at The Stadholder in Stack Ferry.’
Dame Beatrice approved of The Stadholder – Adrian had mentioned in his letter that Palgrave had stayed there. She asked whether they could let her have a room and one for her chauffeur. As it happened, they had received a cancellation that very morning. Dame Beatrice mentioned that a young acquaintance of hers, a Mr Palgrave, had stayed at the hotel recently.
‘Ah, yes, Mr Palgrave vacated his room a few days ago. Your man could have that, if agreeable to you.’
Dame Beatrice inspected the room, looked at the very narrow bed and the Spartan furnishings and made her opening gambit.
‘Mr Palgrave did not have his wife with him, then,’ she observed. She learned (not at all to her surprise!) that Mr Palgrave had been alone during his stay except for two men who had merely joined him in the bar. They had never set eyes on either of them before. One had slumped down as though he was very tired and from the dust on his shoes (the sharp-eyed receptionist observed) they concluded that he had walked a considerable distance. He certainly had not come by car.
As the way to the room which was now allotted to her chauffeur was reached by way of the public bar, and as, to get to the bar, the cash customers had to pass the receptionist’s counter, Dame Beatrice was certain that, wherever Camilla might have gone, it was not to join Palgrave at The Stadholder. She was shown her own room, a pleasant apartment on the first floor, and reflected that the next part of her task was likely to present difficulties. It would need to be carried out in Saltacres village and the problem would be to find somebody, preferably a native of the place, who would have something to report and who would be willing to talk to her. From what she knew of the oyster-like impenetrability of the inhabitants of this particular county, especially of this northern part of it, she thought that all further proceedings would be slow ones.
For a start she spent an hour or so during the afternoon in wandering around by the Stack Ferry quay. When she returned to the hotel it was to find her chauffeur seated sedately in the entrance vestibule reading a newspaper and waiting for orders. He rose.
‘George,’ she said, ‘could you get into conversation with a fisherman or a yachtsman and find out how the tides run on these coasts? I am wondering what happens to drowned bodies, but that need not be mentioned, although flotsam and jetsam of non-human origin would be in order as a subject of conversation. The stretch of coast I have in mind is from the bathing beach of this town round to the village of Saltacres.’
George came back with the report she had been expecting. From the Stack Ferry beach, which was to the west of the town, the tides set slantwise, coming in slightly from the west. The outgoing tide at Stack Ferry would carry flotsam round towards a village called Hallings, where the coast dipped southwards. It was impossible for anything put into the sea at Stack Ferry to fetch up at Saltacres. If it fetched up anywhere, it would be round Hallings way, and was unlikely to be washed offshore again, the outgoing tide being sluggish in those parts.
At Saltacres whatever went in on an outgoing tide was apt to come back again on the turn. There was the story of a small yacht which had slipped its moorings and which returned to them on the next tide. Whether the tale was apocryphal or not, Dame Beatrice did not know, but it indicated that Camilla Hoveton St John probably had been drowned at Saltacres and certainly not at Stack Ferry. There remained the question of when she had drowned, since between a yacht which must have remained afloat and a body which, for some time, would have been submerged, there was a difference, Dame Beatrice supposed.
In his letter, however, Adrian Kirby had referred to the visit he and Camilla had made in Palgrave’s car to Stack Ferry. There, in his eagerness to follow his own pursuits, he had lost track of the girl, and he had admitted that while she had been about her own devices she had most probably picked up an acquaintance who might have contacted her again at Saltacres, probably by arrangement rather than by chance.
‘I think we would have known about a man at Saltacres, though,’ Adrian had written, a statement which, from what she had been told about the girl, Dame Beatrice thought unduly optimistic unless some busybody had made a report which Adrian had not mentioned.
The more she thought about it, the more Dame Beatrice realised the kind of task which confronted her. If Camilla had drowned on the night when she swam with Palgrave, either her death was as accidental as the verdict at the inquest had claimed, or else Palgrave might be implicated, and very seriously implicated. That was a fact which had to be faced.
The tide-tables which she studied were not of much help, since it was not known exactly when Palgrave had given up his moonlight bathe and left Camilla still (presumably) enjoying hers. Even so little as half an hour, since they must have been swimming near enough to full tide, could have made all the difference between safe and dangerous bathing on that apparently treacherous coast.
Supposing, however, that Camilla, having removed her suitcase from the cottage while the rest of her party were enjoying Palgrave’s hospitality at the inn, had met some so far unidentified acquaintance and had gone off with him, she could have been drowned, either by accident or design, at an entirely different time from that which had been supposed.