Hatch’s frown deepened. “Never mind what they call them. You’ve made the appointment; that’s all I want to know at the moment.”
Amis recognised the symptom of danger that his employer’s irritation might turn to real anger: the tightening and turning nearly white of a little area round each corner of his mouth and the pulsation there of an irregular tic. He decided to keep to himself for the time being his considered opinion that calling in a firm of efficiency consultants was like inviting household economy hints from a notorious free-loader.
“I’m going over to the estate office at Brocklestone,” Hatch announced. “I don’t know when I’ll be back, but there are a couple of things I want you to do. Look up a man called Baxter. He’s a director of Sucro-wip and lives in Buckinghamshire somewhere. When you’ve found his full name and address, send him an account for £25 on a Floradora billhead.”
“Charged for what?”
“Entertainment—just put entertainment. Oh, and send him a Club souvenir ball-point at the same time. That one with the bit of poetry on it.”
Amis fished a pen out of his own pocket and read off: “ ‘I got Thee flowers to strew Thy way.’ Right?”
“That’s it,” said Hatch. For an instant, he seemed about to smile.
“Anything else?”
“Aye. I want you to make some discreet inquiries at a couple of garages. Try Brindle’s and the South Circuit first. Blossom’s the bloke to see at the South Circuit. I want to know if anybody has had special high-power lamps fitted to his car in the last few days. And if so, who.”
Amis cocked his head on one side dubiously, as if awaiting explanation.
Hatch shrugged, flapped one hand. “It’s an idea I have, that’s all. Nothing important. I’ll tell you about it later. When you’ve found out what I want to know.”
Chapter Eight
On the broad stretch of river held by the lock just above Henderson’s Mill, there was taking place what appeared to be some kind of migratory assembly. Men wearing white, high-necked sweaters busied themselves with ropes and mooring pins or groped into engines or lurched along the towpath lugging water canisters and drums of fuel. Their wives, suddenly and, in some cases, astonishingly expanded into the more liberal lineaments of leisure, swilled decks and polished paint. Some of the men wore nautical-looking caps at which they tugged whenever one hand could be spared for the purpose. Cheerful, neighbourly calls echoed along the reach from mooring to mooring and between boats that already were under way and making slow, experimental circles in mid-stream. Their white hulls were twinned by water images bright as new enamel. Freshly laundered pennants hung limply at their staffs, awaiting a breeze to reveal the blue and white and black cipher of the Flaxborough Motor Cruiser Club.
It was a warm, windless Sunday morning in May: the day of the Commodore’s Muster.
The Muster was the first event of the Flaxborough boating season. It was meant to be an informal, non-competitive affair that would serve as a limbering-up exercise and a trial of how successfully the boats had survived the winter.
The programme, such as it was, simply required members to take their craft up river one by one in a long spaced procession, to pass through Pennick Lock and continue a couple of miles more to a rendezvous at Borley Cross. There they would pledge the Commodore’s health—by tradition at his expense—in the waterside garden of the Ferryman’s Arms inn, and return in like order to Flaxborough.
This year’s Commodore was Councillor Henry Crispin, owner and master of the cabin cruiser Lively Lady. He was accompanied by Mrs Millicent Spain, housekeeper and first mate, in celebration of whose talents below deck (or so Mrs Hatch declared) the boat had been named.
Lively Lady was reputed to have cost £18,000. Its two cabins would accommodate in reasonable comfort a party of eight people. There was a small bathroom, with shower. Television was available. The compact bar had a refrigerated locker. On the underside of the reversible mess table in the after cabin was a film projector. High fidelity stereophonic equipment was installed somewhere, but Crispin had forgotten where the controls were concealed.
There was only one other vessel on the river which was comparable in size, power and appointments. That was Arnold Hatch’s Daffodil.
This Sunday morning, Daffodil had already cast off from the Club landing stage and was cruising very slowly up and down against the opposite shore, her twin diesels throttled so far back that they made no more noise than the blowing of smoke rings in a boardroom.
Hatch sat high in the cockpit amidships, cradled at a relaxed angle in a seat like a dentist’s chair. He wore white ducks and a blazer with the Club emblem on its breast pocket. His yachting cap was white as cake icing. On a ledge beside the controls, and within equally easy reach of his hand, was a tall glass of whisky and ginger ale, its outside beady with condensation. Every now and again, Hatch sipped from the glass—gravely, like a priest—while his left hand lingered over a lever or made judicious selection amongst the switches and dials.
A boy in a dinghy ventured carelessly close to Daffodil’s bow. Hatch touched a button. It produced a bolt of sound so imperious that the boy nearly fell in the river in his haste to pull clear of what he must have supposed an ocean liner.
Mrs Hatch smiled at the boy and wagged a finger in friendly reproof. She was leaning graciously against the rail on the fore deck, from which vantage point she had been making her personal equivalent of a naval review. The results were not without interest.
“You would think, wouldn’t you,” she was later to say to her husband, “that the Maddoxes could have run to something better than that thing he was trying to start this morning.” Mr Dampier-Small had the same little home-made motor boat as last year; no wonder he never brought his family on the river. Dr Bruce was still messing about in an old tub of a converted lifeboat, while Ted Beach—for all he was a bank manager—could only boast a three-berth, outboard motor affair. Most delicious of all, though, was Mrs Hatch’s discovery that Vera Scorpe and her lawyer husband were now the possessors—presumably the ignorant possessors—of a boat that once had belonged to the perpetrator of Flaxborough’s notorious “black mass” murder of poor Mr Persimmon, the supermarket manager. 2 She thought she recalled some mention at the time of the trial, of “debts all over the place” and enjoyed for the next few minutes a daydream in which Vera and her husband were forcibly and in public sight dispossessed of the vessel by agents of a hire purchase company.
2 Reported in Broomsticks Over Flaxborough
Her reverie was interrupted by a burst of cheering. Hooters sounded. The owner of a venerable steam launch now bank-bound by age clanged its big brass bell. Lively Lady emerged slowly from the cluster of boats at the Club’s landing stage and slid out into mid stream.
Hatch immediately put Daffodil about, bringing her over into the centre channel about three hundred yards in the wake of Lively Lady.