of their enquiries, however, his agitation was intense. The police took a statement, then went on to the bank. No one had heard of or seen Brenda since she left the previous evening, but there had been a couple of attempts to get her on the telephone earlier that morning, apart from Mrs Sorby’s, that was.
By lunch-time, the police were taking things very seriously. Jack Sorby had created a diversion by going round to the Wheatsheaf Garage and attempting to assault Tommy who by this time was too miserable and demoralized to defend himself. Fortunately, the police arrived almost simultaneously and established peace. Tommy wasn’t up to much except repeating his story mechanically but at least they solved the mystery of the other phone calls. He had made them, he admitted. When asked why, he said with a brief flash of his customary liveliness, ‘To get her to back up my fucking story about the drink, of course.’
This made sense to Pascoe, who since the two stranglings had been told by Dalziel to keep an eye on all female attacks or disappearances. While it didn’t actually confirm Tommy’s version of the evening, it helped a lot; or it meant he was ten times more cunning than he looked.
What finally took Tommy off the hook was the last thing anybody wanted – the discovery of the body. It was not pleasant. Right through the heart of the city, a straight line alongside the shallow and meandering river, ran the old canal, a relict of the last century and little used since the war until the holiday companies began to sell the delights of inland cruising in the ’sixties and commercial interests began to react to soaring fuel costs in the ’seventies. It was a barge that quite literally brought Brenda’s body to light. Riding low with a cargo of castings, the barge was holding the centre of the channel when a careless cruiser forced it over towards the bank. The bargee swore with proverbial force as the bottom bumped and the propeller stuttered, thinking he’d caught some sizeable bit of rubbish dumped in the murky waters.
Switching off the engine he hurried to the stern and peered over. At first he was just aware that the dark brown water was imbued with a richer stain. Then as he saw what came drifting slowly to the surface, he began to swear again but this time as a kind of pious defence.
The pathologist was able to confirm that all the mutilations on the body were caused by the action of the propeller and had nothing to do with the girl’s death. She had been strangled but had not been dead, though possibly moribund, when she entered the water. Asked when death occurred, he refused to be more definite than not less than twelve, not more than twenty hours. Pressed, he became irritable and talked about special circumstances such as the high temperature of the canal water and the opening up of the chest and lungs by the propeller. Pascoe, long used to the imprecisions of science, had looked for other evidence of timing.
Twenty hours took him back to six-thirty P.M. on the Thursday. He was able to move forward to eight P.M. because that was when Brenda and Tommy had met. Their rendezous had been at the Bay Tree Inn, a half-timbered former coaching inn not far from the city centre which had fallen into the hands of a large brewery group renowned for the acuteness of their commercial instincts and the awfulness of their keg beer. Now the Bay Tree’s history attracted the tourist set, its twin restaurants (one expensive, one extortionate) attracted the dining set, and its cellar disco attracted the young set. Thus it was always packed. The meeting had been witnessed by Ron Ludlam, a workmate of Tommy’s and one of the friends of whom Mr Sorby so fervently disapproved. He had been drinking with Tommy while he waited for Brenda. Brenda had not wanted to stay at the Bay Tree. Ron Ludlam who had accompanied the distraught Tommy home after the news of Brenda’s death, said she seemed more interested in having a serious talk with her fiancé about marital matters. Alone. They had gone off in the noisy, multicoloured mini.
According to Tommy they had spent the evening just driving around. Without stopping? Of course they had stopped, just parked out in the country to have a fag and a talk. Was that all? They might have played around a bit but nothing serious.
‘Nothing serious’ was confirmed by the pathologist. Brenda was virgo intacta.
The canal was flanked on the one side by warehouses. Access could be obtained to the waterfront, but only by dint of climbing over security gates. In addition, from eleven P.M. on, there had been great police activity in Sunnybank, the canyon-like road which serviced the warehouses, for it was in one of these that the night watchman, whose injuries had kept the doctor from sampling Tommy Maggs’s blood, had been attacked.
On the other side of the canal, the side where the body had been found, was a grassy isthmus planted with willows and birches to screen the industrial terrace from the view of those taking the air in the pleasant open spaces of Charter Park. This air on the night in question was filled with music and merriment. The city’s fortnight-long High Fair was coming to the end of its first week there. The City Fathers in a fit of almost continental abandon permitted the municipal Boating Station to stay open until midnight during the fair and those who tired of the roundabouts and sideshows could hire rowboats to take them across to the isthmus where the trees were strung with fairy lights and a couple of hot-dog stands provided the wherewithal for a picnic. This area was far too well populated for a body to have been dumped in the canal until eleven-thirty when the clouds which had slowly been building up in the south suddenly came rolling northwards, ate up the moon and the stars, and spat rich, heavy raindrops into the sultry night. Within twenty minutes the isthmus was vacated by laughing holiday-makers and cursing hot-dog men alike, while on the canal the pleasure cruisers had either puttered off to more congenial moorings downstream or battened down for the night.
Now a regiment of corpses could have been deposited without drawing much attention.
But by now, Tommy Maggs was already in deep conversation with the police and was to continue in their company until dropped at his door at one-thirty A.M. His father, watching a late western on the telly, confirmed his arrival. So unless he later stole from the house and, carless, contrived to re-encounter Brenda, lure her to the canal bank some five miles away and there murder her, he was in the clear.
But what had happened to Brenda after she left her boy-friend by his broken-down mini, no one could say. Except one person.
At six o’clock on Friday the news editor of the Evening Post picked up his phone.
‘I must be cruel, only to be kind,’ said a voice.
The line went dead.
The news editor yelled for his secretary.
Ellie Pascoe was not enjoying the rich rewarding experience of pregnancy.
At roughly the halfway point she was still suffering the morning sickness which should have died away a month earlier and was already experiencing the backache and heartburn which might decently have waited till a month later.
‘For Christ’s sake don’t make soothing noises,’ she said as she returned pale-faced to the breakfast table. ‘I’m having a baby, not turning into one.’
Pascoe, warned, returned to his cornflakes and said lightly, ‘You shouldn’t have bought the ticket if you didn’t want the trip.’
‘I didn’t know it meant the end of civilization as I know it,’ she said grimly.
‘At least you don’t have to go to work,’ said Pascoe.
They were well into July and the long vacation had begun at the college where Ellie lectured.
‘It’s the students who get the holiday, not us,’ she retorted. This was an ancient tract of disputed land, full
