very sorry indeed to disturb you, Inspector, but I’d like something from the Chief’s files. It’s rather urgent.”
Permission given, he came in.
“This coast’s lively in the season, sir,” he said, as he ran through the files. “Positively continental. Here’s the chef at the Marine—it’s just outside the town, so it’s our affair—the chef at the Marine’s stabbed a waiter because he had dandruff, it seems. The waiter, I mean, sir. Chef on the way to prison and waiter on the way to hospital. They think may be his lung’s touched. Well, thank you, sir. Sorry to disturb you.”
Grant eyed Tisdall, who was achieving the knot in his tie with a melancholy abstraction. Tisdall caught the look, appeared puzzled by it, and then, comprehension dawning, leaped into action.
“I say, Sergeant, have they a fellow to take the waiter’s place, do you know?”
“That they haven’t. Mr. Toselli—he’s the manager—he’s tearing his hair.”
“Have you finished with me?” he asked Grant.
“For today,” Grant said. “Good luck.”
5
“No. No arrest,” said Grant to Superintendent Barker over the telephone in the early evening. “But I don’t think there’s any doubt about its being murder. The surgeon’s sure of it. The button in her hair might be accident—although if you saw it you’d be convinced it wasn’t—but her fingernails were broken with clawing at something. What was under the nails has gone to the analyst, but there wasn’t much after an hour’s immersion in salt water. . . . ’M? . . . Well, indications point one way certainly, but they cancel each other out, somehow. Going to be difficult, I think. I’m leaving Williams here on routine enquiry, and coming back to town tonight. I want to see her lawyer—Erskine. He arrived just in time for the inquest, and afterwards I had Tisdall on my hands so I missed him. Would you find out for me when I can talk to him tonight. They’ve fixed the funeral for Monday. Golders Green. Yes, cremation. I’d like to be there, I think. I’d like to look over the intimates. Yes, I may look in for a drink, but it depends how late I am. Thanks.”
Grant hung up and went to join Williams for a high tea, it being too early for dinner and Williams having a passion for bacon and eggs garnished with large pieces of fried bread.
“Tomorrow being Sunday may hold up the button enquiries,” Grant said as they sat down. “Well, what did Mrs. Pitts say?”
“She says she couldn’t say whether he was wearing a coat or not. All she saw was the top of his head over her hedge as he went past. But whether he wore it or not doesn’t much matter, because she says the coat habitually lay in the back of the car along with that coat that Miss Clay wore. She doesn’t remember when she saw Tisdall’s dark coat last. He wore it a fair amount, it seems. Mornings and evenings. He was a ‘chilly mortal,’ she said. Owing to his having come back from foreign parts, she thought. She hasn’t much of an opinion of him.”
“You mean she thinks he’s a wrong ’un?”
“No. Just no account. You know, sir, has it occurred to you that it was a clever man who did this job?”
“Why?”
“Well, but for that button coming off no one would ever have suspected anything. She’d have been found drowned after going to bathe in the early morning—all quite natural. No footsteps, no weapon, no signs of violence. Very neat.”
“Yes. It’s neat.”
“You don’t sound very enthusiastic about it.”
“It’s the coat. If you were going to drown a woman in the sea, would you wear an overcoat to do it?”
“I don’t know. ’Pends how I meant to drown her.”
“How would you drown her?”
“Go swimming with her and keep her head under.”
“You’d have scratches that way, ten to one. Evidence.”
“Not me. I’d catch her by the heels in shallow water and upend her. Just stand there and hold her till she drowned.”
“Williams! What resource. And what ferocity.”
“Well, how would you do it, sir?”
“I hadn’t thought of aquatic methods. I mightn’t be able to swim, or I mightn’t like early-morning dips, or I might want to make a quick get-away from a stretch of water containing a body. No, I think I’d stand on a rock in deep water, wait till she came to talk to me, grip her head and keep it under. The only part of me that she could scratch that way would be my hands. And I’d wear leather gloves. It takes only a few seconds before she is unconscious.”
“Very nice, sir. But you couldn’t use that method anywhere within miles of the Gap.”
“Why not?”
“There aren’t any rocks.”
“No. Good man. But there are the equivalent. There are stone groynes.”
“Yes. Yes, so there are! Think that was how it was done, sir?”
“Who knows? It’s a theory. But the coat still worries me.”
“I don’t see why it need, sir. It was a misty morning, a bit chilly at six. Anyone might have worn a coat.”
“Y-es,” Grant said doubtfully, and let the matter drop, this being one of those unreasonable things which occasionally worried his otherwise logical mind (and had more than once been the means of bringing success to his efforts when his logic failed).
He gave Williams instructions for his further enquiries, when he himself should be in town. “I’ve just had another few minutes with Tisdall,” he finished. “He has got himself a waiter’s job at the Marine. I don’t think he’ll bolt, but you’d better plant a man. Sanger will do. That’s Tisdall’s car route on Thursday morning, according to himself.” He handed a paper to the sergeant. “Check up on it. It was very early but someone may remember him. Did he wear a coat or not? That’s the main thing. I think, myself, there’s no doubt of his taking the car as he said. Though not for the reason he gave.”
“I thought it a silly reason myself, when I read that statement. I just thought: ‘Well, he might have made up a better one!’ What’s you’re theory, sir?”
“I think that when he had drowned her his one idea was to get away. With a car he could be at the other end of England, or out of the country, before they found her body! He drove away. And then something made him realise what a fool he was. Perhaps he missed the button from his cuff. Anyhow, he realised that he had only to stay where he was and look innocent. He got rid of the tell-tale coat—even if he hadn’t missed the button the sleeve almost up to the elbow must have been soaking with salt water—came back to replace the car, found that the body had been discovered thanks to an incoming tide, and put on a very good act on the beach. It wouldn’t
