‘He sounds an interesting and enterprising character. So you think, Mr Sleach, that if the dead girl’s clothes had been left on the shore, this man will have found and kept them? Maybe he has sold them by now.’
‘Too fly for that, I reckon, ma’am. That wait until all the fuss die down. If he hev the poor young mawther’s clo’es, they’re still in his shack.’
‘Then I must ask him to produce them.’
‘We’ll come with you,’ said Billington.
‘No. My thanks for the chivalrous thought, but that will be quite unnecessary. I see that my man has followed me up with the car. He will escort me and I have no doubt, Mr Sleach, that your aunt will be good enough to point out where this man lives. I am most grateful for your assistance, both of you.’
‘A pleasure,’ said Billington. ‘Come on, then, Sleach. I can do with another pint and so can you.’ He walked over to the car with Dame Beatrice and added, ‘I can see you don’t want to involve Sleach any further. Will you let me know how you get on with the Old Mole?’
‘It is the least I can do, although I expect nothing to come of my visit to him.’
‘Would it help your enquiry if it does turn out that he picked up the girl’s clothes?’
‘To a certain extent, I think it would, particularly if he is willing to tell me which day he found them. She does not appear to have returned to her cottage on the night of the moonlight bathe she took with a friend, so the inference is that that is the night on which she was drowned, but, so far, that has not been proved.’
‘Ah, yes, the medical evidence was more than a bit sketchy regarding the actual time of death, I remember. But if the Old Mole does have the clothes, isn’t that going to be a bit awkward for the – for her fellow bather?’
‘He is already under some supicion.’
She got into the car and gave George directions to take her back to the Old Quay.
CHAPTER 11
THE OLD MOLE
‘Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril.’
Oscar Wilde
« ^ »
Digging out the Old Mole proved to be a matter of no difficulty. Dame Beatrice reintroduced herself to Sleach’s aunt. The beggarman’s domicile, the least disreputable of the rotting warehouses, was pointed out with the warning that it was probably infested with rats, undoubtedly stank and, in any case, was no place for a lady.
Dame Beatrice enquired whether the old man had ever engaged the interest of the police, and was reassured.
‘That’s harmless. Fossick about on the shore, after the tide go out, for bits of wood, and room the doons for bottles and old tins. Like a jackdaw, that is, for anything that shine. What he do with the things nobody know for certain, but, with a bit of mumping, that live.’
Without being asked, but with a set, masculine expression on his face, George accompanied his employer to the building which had been pointed out. He was carrying a heavy spanner wrapped in a piece of brown paper to conceal its real nature and appearance. His alternative means of persuasion was in the form of a couple of tall cans of beer which he carried in the long pockets of the overalls he had assumed when Dame Beatrice had indicated the scope of their enterprise.
Knowing him, she deduced the nature of his precautions and observing merely that the carrot often produced better results than the bludgeon, and that she anticipated ‘none of what Mrs. Gavin would call the rough stuff, George,’ she kicked with a firmly shod foot at the rickety door. It flew open and disclosed the interior of the warehouse.
The bursting in of the door had caused the two sets of shutters, one on the north, the other on the east side, to fly open as well, so there was sufficient light to disclose the contents of the big shack. These included an elderly man wearing frayed trousers and what had been an Army greatcoat over a sweater. He came forward leaning on a crook-handled, white-painted stick.
He was unkempt, but not filthy, and although the building gave forth an odour of closeness and human occupation, to say that it stank would have been an exaggeration, Dame Beatrice thought. He said,
‘If it be you boys, go away. You know I can’t see you, so stop tormenting of me.’
‘Mr Mole, I presume,’ said Dame Beatrice.
‘That’s a lady’s voice. I don’t want no soup kitchens. I manage all right on my own. Salvation Army, is it?’
‘You know very well that it is not. Where are my granddaughter’s clothes?’
The old man put what to him was a pertinent query.
‘I ent in trouble with police?’
‘Answer my question, please.’
‘You ent no right.’
‘I have every right.’
‘Come clean. It will be the better for you,’ said George, in a deep, histrionic growl.
‘I don’t know nothing about no clothes.’
‘Think again,’ Dame Beatrice advised him. ‘My granddaughter went swimming and left her things on the beach. I have reason to think you found them. Will you hand them over, or do you want the police to come for them?’
‘Make your mind up, chummie,’ said George, to the great admiration of his employer. ‘Stealing by finding is an offence under the law.’
‘I ent stole nothing. What’s left on beach is mine.’
‘That may be true of flotsam and jetsam,’ said Dame Beatrice. ‘It is not true of property left on the beach by persons who have every intention of returning to claim it.’
‘What if they’m buried it, then? What about that? That’s buried treasure, that’s what that is.’
‘Buried it?’
‘Ah, that’s right. They buried it in the sand.’
‘In the dunes?’
‘That’s right. So I digs her up, see, and now she’s mine.’
‘Oh, no, she isn’t, not if she belonged to madam’s relative,’ said George. ‘I reckon, if she buried it, it was to hide it away from people like you. So come on, matie. Hand over.’
‘I don’t want trouble.’
‘Of course you don’t, so stop being an Artful Dodger,’ said Dame Beatrice.
‘And keep your nose clean,’ said George, ‘or my superiors will be taking an interest in your doings.’
‘I reckon to sell what I find.’
‘Yes, but not what you steal,’ said Dame Beatrice. ‘You are not a native of these parts, I think.’ She now realised what, to Sleach, ‘talk foreign’ meant.
‘Why you figure that out?’ the beachcomber enquired.
‘Because the local people are honest.’
‘Will you gimme something for my trouble? I been taking good care of that there bit of luggage till I find out who it belong to.’
‘Produce it,’ said Dame Beatrice, scarcely believing that she had heard him pronounce the word luggage, ‘and then we will talk of rewards.’
‘All right, then. I don’t want no trouble.’ He limped to the back of the shack where there was an opening which, judging from the configuration of the building seen from outside, led, Dame Beatrice thought, to a much more extensive part of the old warehouse. He emerged carrying a suitcase. ‘Buried, her was,’ he said, in a beggar’s whine. ‘How were I to know as somebody wanted her back?’ He dumped it down in front of them and waited. Dame Beatrice fished out a pound note and gave it to him. George disembarrassed himself of the cans of beer and put them down in the doorway before he picked up the suitcase and followed Dame Beatrice to what remained of the sea wall of the quay.
‘An outrageous and unkind bluff, George,’ she said, as he set the suitcase on the coping. ‘It is a dreadful thing to take advantage of the old and indigent.’