The Mudflats of the Dead (Mrs. Bradley) Page 5

  “We can surely fix up something for a day or two,” said her husband.

  “No, honestly, it’s all right. I’ve already settled for a room in a pub at Stack Ferry. I was over there today and liked the place. Besides, now that my basic theme is settled, I need to be on my own to get the book finished.”

  “But what about tonight?” asked Miranda.

  “Not to worry. I shall be all right. Why don’t we all go to the pub and get matily bottled? The drinks are on me. We’ll have a farewell party.”

  But, the impromptu party over, and himself uncomfortably settled with a rug on the back seat of his car, he wished he had not been quite so precipitate in refusing the offer of the second bed in Camilla’s room. If she had shown an embarrassing desire for his company, well, he had dealt drastically enough with that situation twice before, so he supposed he could have dealt with it again—“if she dared to try it on, the little tramp,” he told himself, pulling the car rug around him and trying, for perhaps the twentieth time, a slightly rearranged position on the back seat.

  With an attempt to fill his mind with something other than his own bodily discomfort, he began to think about Morag, but found neither ease nor pleasure in his thoughts. What right, he asked himself, had she to marry somebody other than himself and then to look so happy and relaxed about it? What right had she to look so much prettier, her dark hair silkier and more shining, her eyes deeper and more lustrous, her mouth more tender and alluring than ever he could remember any of these disturbing things? She had not been like this when she was supposed to be in love with him. In fact, he had often been discomfited by her tough, uncompromising outlook.

  His thoughts became intolerable. He cast the inadequate car rug aside, put his shoes on, opened the car door and got out on to the road. The moon was up, the sky was clear, there was a night wind blowing across the marshes. He remembered Camilla’s urge to swim by moonlight. “Right on the broad lovely track of it, and I could swim for ever and ever,” she had said to him once. “Moonlight on the sea makes me crazy. I could die for the sheer, crazy joy of being drowned in it.”

  As though the memory of the girl’s wild words had conjured up the girl herself, there she was, actually walking towards him along the deserted road.

  “I guessed what you were going to do when Adrian told me you had taken them for a farewell party,” she said, coming up. “Guess what I’m going to do.”

  Palgrave laughed.

  “Ill met by moonlight, proud Titania,” he said. “I suppose you’re going swimming.”

  “Come with me, do! It’s warmer in the sea than out of it, once the sun goes in.”

  “Oh, all right,” he said. “It will help to get through a bit of the night. It’s damned uncomfortable and draughty in the car. One has to leave a window open to let some air in, and I’ve nothing to cover me up except one small rug that’s only meant to go over my passenger’s knees.”

  “Well, poor old Colin had the chance of something better, I expect, and turned it down,” she said mockingly. “Afraid for his precious virtue, was he?”

  “No. He just doesn’t go to bed with schoolgirls, as I’ve told you before.” By this time they were on the causeway which led across the marshes. The moonlight made everything unreal. The dunes, in the distance, were black and silver; the creek was full of stranger and lovelier light than the sun’s rays ever discovered; the distant sea, which, to Palgrave, had seemed almost silent by day, had now found an eerie voice and, as they approached it, a luminosity apart from the flooding moonlight, for every creaming little wave was tipped with silver as the incoming tide lazily tossed it on to the shore and then gently but inexorably pulled it back again.

  Camilla slipped off her jeans and sweater and ran across the sand. Palgrave undressed more slowly, shivering as the night wind made its first impact upon his naked body. Then he too ran across the strip of muddy beach and splashed his way to water deep enough for swimming. As he warmed up, he began to enjoy himself.

  “Swim with me!” Camilla called out. “You be the dolphin and I’ll be the boy on your back.”

  He swam over to her, put his hand on her head and thrust her under. When she surfaced, laughing and pushing the hair out of her eyes, he asked, coming behind her, taking her by the elbows and towing her along on her back:

  “Is that the game you were playing with the boyfriend the other morning?”

  “What other morning?”

  “No, it couldn’t have been. You were paddling and skylarking, not swimming. The tide was going out.”

  “How do you know anything about it?”

  “‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings.’”

  “Oh, don’t come the little schoolmaster over me! Catch me if you can!” She freed herself from him by suddenly sitting up, for he was not so much grasping her elbows as supporting them. As he was about to retort, for he felt the implied contempt in her remark, he went under and came up choking. He soon recovered and after another short, fast burst out to sea, he splashed ashore, dried himself on his shirt, put on the rest of his clothes and floundered his way across the marshes, leaving the girl still in the water.

  When he reached the road the thought of spending the rest of the night in the car, cramped, uncomfortable and cold—for now he lacked even his shirt, which was too damp to put on—made him think longingly of that other bed in Camilla’s room. In any case, his suitcase was still in the cottage. It would supply him with a dry shirt. He would have plenty of time to nip indoors and put on the clean shirt, whether, in the end, he slept in the bed or not.

  Miranda had given him a key to the front door of the cottage and, a Londoner and so accustomed to take such precautions, he had always locked the front door before he went to bed. He assumed that the newcomers would do the same. He had the key in his trousers pocket, so he entered as noiselessly as he could and groped for his suitcase, but it had been moved to make room for the luggage of the new tenants and it took him a few moments to find out where it had been placed.

  He located it stealthily at last, picked it up and crept up the stairs and into Camilla’s room. Here he took off and packed the things he was wearing and put on a suit and a smarter pair of shoes. To do all this he had to put on the light and he was wryly amused to note that Camilla, in what he supposed had been a hopeful spirit, must have pulled the two single beds close together so that they looked like a double.

  The temptation to get into one of the beds and sleep was strong. He even reached the stage of pulling the beds apart and flinging back the covers of the one nearer the door, but recognising immediately the compromising nature of this policy if he intended to keep the persistent nymph out of his arms, he put the temptation aside, took a look at himself in the fly-blown mirror over the dressing-table and decided that he needed a shave and that there might be no other opportunity for this before he presented himself at the hotel in Stack Ferry and asked whether he might take up his option earlier than had been arranged.

  He crept down the steep stairs and went into the kitchen. Here he heated some water, took off his jacket, shaved, patted on some aftershave lotion, repacked the suitcase whose contents he had had to disarrange and then, picking up the suitcase once more, he stole into the sitting-room and went towards the front door.

  This time he saw that a shaft of moonlight had fallen across the studio couch. It picked out a man’s bare arm lying outside the coverlet and across a stubbled cheek and stiff red hair.

  “Must be a sound sleeper, especially for a doctor,” thought Palgrave. “Surely my groping around for my suitcase when I first came in ought to have woken him up?” Of Morag there was no sign. Palgrave supposed that she was taking a moonlight stroll. The moon had always fascinated her, he remembered, and during the months of their engagement he had remonstrated with her more than once about her moonlit walks and the possible danger of taking them alone. She had never given way, he remembered.

  Palgrave stood looking down on the sleeping man, the man who now s
lept nightly with Palgrave’s woman. Turbulent thoughts and crazy fantasies passed through the watcher’s mind. Suppose that Cupar died? Suppose there was a rail crash or a street accident? Suppose a gang of murderous young thugs set upon him and killed him? If Cupar ceased to exist, perhaps Morag would turn to Palgrave for comfort and from comfort to love and from love to marriage. His wild thoughts ran away with him.

  “And there’s my book!” Palgrave suddenly said aloud. “I didn’t intend to write a thriller, and I shan’t. This will be a psychological novel of sex and violent death. Eureka! I really believe I have it!”

  Because he had said the words aloud, he disturbed the sleeping man. Cupar snorted, rolled over and opened his eyes. Palgrave retreated into the shadows and waited for the other to settle down again. Then he made for the door and, baggage in hand, sneaked out without actually latching the door behind him. Morag and Camilla would be returning sooner or later, he supposed. He half wondered whether he would meet Morag on the road, for he had given up all intention of trying to sleep in his car. The road, however, was deserted and there was nothing moving on the marshes except the tall plants along the shores of the creek. They were swaying and whispering in the moonlight and seemed to be dancing to the soundless music of a gentle but persistent off-shore wind.

  Palgrave walked to his car, put his luggage in the boot and took the driver’s seat. He fastened his seat-belt and decided to drive westwards along the coast road. There was nobody about. Morag, if she was out walking, must have gone in the opposite direction, he supposed, or else she was out on the marshes or among the dunes. Possibly she, too, had gone for a swim.

  There was no sign of Camilla, either, but this was not surprising. Both the dunes and the pebble-ridge would hide her from his seat in the low-slung car, whether she was still in the water or not. He did not suppose she was still swimming. The tide had been nearly at the full. Either it was slack water by this time, or else the tide was on the turn. She surely would be out of the water by now. He half thought of leaving the car and going down to the beach to make certain of this, but just as he was about to unfasten his seat-belt, he saw what he took to be Morag. She had been wearing white trousers and a white cardigan at the farewell party, and it was a white form which appeared in the distance flitting over the marshes.

  “Must be a will o’ the wisp,” he thought. “Gases rise over marshes. I shall have to put Morag out of my mind. Curse young Camilla and her sexy urges!” He let in the clutch and drove in the moonlight towards Stack Ferry.

  CHAPTER 5

  THE DEAD

  “In your deep floods

  Drown all my faults and fears.”

  Phineas Fletcher

  He drove west and then south, found, in the early morning, a lorry-drivers’ café, breakfasted on delicious ham and eggs and execrable coffee, and then set course north and east for Stack Ferry. His chosen inn, The Stadholder, had its own courtyard. He drove in under an archway, locked the car, and went off to kill time before presenting himself at the reception desk to ask whether he might move in straight away instead of waiting until Saturday.

  The marshes of Stack Ferry stretched away north of the town itself, and both east and west of the estuary. Those to the west had been drained and grass-sown, for they were freshwater marshes, and were now turned into a public park and a caravan site. Palgrave explored them, but found them uninteresting. Beyond the park, however, the marshes were as Nature had intended them to be.

  Those on the east side were sea-marshes, but, unlike the stretches at Saltacres, these at Stack Ferry were boggy and so much intersected by ditches, channels and little creeks and inlets as to be impassable except to wild-fowlers in punts. Palgrave walked a couple of miles back along the road towards Saltacres and then took a path which led seawards, but at the end of a mile or so the path petered out and he found his way blocked by a creek which meandered through the marshes and was too wide to jump across.

  At half past eleven he presented himself at the inn and was told that he could settle in and that his room would be ready for him after lunch. He spent the day quietly, thinking about his book, and on the following morning he was in the bar finishing his first pint when Adrian walked in. Palgrave had told him where he would be staying and had been expecting that he and Miranda would at least telephone him before they returned to London, but he had not thought to see either of them because they had no transport. Adrian, however, had not come merely to see him, but to make a pertinent enquiry.

  “I’m not really worried,” he said, “but it seems an extraordinary thing for even Camilla to do, don’t you think?”

  “What does?”

  “To sling her hook without a word to Miranda or me. She hasn’t by any chance thrown in her lot with you, I suppose? I’ve walked all the way over to ask you. Is she here?”

  “Good gracious, no! I should soon give her the bird if she showed any signs of trying to team up. Surely you know that! What, exactly, has happened?”

  “That’s what we don’t know. We heard her go out the night before last and assumed she’d gone for a swim. She was a great one for moonlight bathing.”

  “I know. As a matter of fact, I went bathing with her the night I left Saltacres. Oh, not by arrangement. I was intending to spend the night in my car, but I was cramped and cold, so I got out to stretch my legs and do a few exercises to warm myself up a bit, when along comes the wretched girl and suggests this moonlight swim.”

  “You went down to the sands with her?”

  “I did, and into the water. I didn’t stay in long and I left her there. That is the last I’ve seen of her.”

  “Did she mention anything about her plans? It’s quite a long walk to the sea across the marshes. You must have talked as you walked from your car to the beach.”

  “I suppose we chatted, but I can’t remember what we talked about. Certainly no mention was made of any plans. I didn’t even tell her mine.”

  “All Miranda and I could think was that Camilla felt Cupar and his wife had turned you out, and that she was resentful about it. But you say she has made no attempt to join you here. We thought at first that she had slipped out early yesterday morning, but we’ve seen nothing of her at all.”

  “The last I saw of her, I tell you, was in the water. I soon had enough of moonlight bathing, so I left her to it, and that’s all I know. I shouldn’t worry about her, if I were you. I expect you’re right and she’s taken a scunner at the other two. I’ll tell you, Adrian, why I oiled out. It’s because I was once engaged to Morag and that made too much of an awkwardness if we were under the same roof, particularly as it was I who broke the engagement.”

  “If I may ask, why did you? She seems a charming woman, very pretty, too.”

  “Yes. I was a fool. I knew I’d been a fool when I met her again the other day. I thought marriage would interfere with my writing and that I’d be tied to schoolmastering all my life just to support a wife and family. That’s why I turned her down. I bitterly regret it now.”

  “Oh, but I quite understand. One’s work must come first. But, Colin, what are we to do about that girl?”

  “Are you sure that Camilla really has left the cottage? She isn’t just out on the spree again?”

  “We don’t think so. She’s taken her suitcase and all her clothes have gone.”

  “Yes, that does look a bit final. Now, let me buy you a drink, and then I’ll give you a lift back to the cottage. Not to worry about her. She knows how to look after herself,” said Palgrave.

  That afternoon he sat on the bed in his little room, writing pad on knee, and made more notes for the book which at last showed signs of life. The notes were copious and his pose uncomfortable, but something was definitely taking shape and by tea-time, when he went in search of a café (the Stadholder did not serve teas), he was well content with the progress he had made and decided to let the yeast work for the next couple of days before he began the actual writing of the book.

  During
the next two days he explored the countryside by car and tried to put Morag out of his mind. He found the magnificent ruins of William d’Albini’s massive Norman keep, and, later, the beautiful, impressive remains of a Cluniac priory. These things would go into the book, he decided.

  On the Friday, with no very definite plans for the day, he breakfasted later than usual and then strolled out to buy a newspaper. There was an item of news in it which affected him so deeply that he read it three times before he could believe that it was there.

  He put the paper down and stared at the wall without being conscious of seeing it. What he saw was a wild-haired girl in a sweater which looked much too roomy and long for her, washed-out blue jeans which came halfway down her sun-browned calves, her bright, eager young face, vivacious but not really pretty, her muddy shoes, and then he heard a clear voice which had come to him on an off-shore breeze and which had cheerfully called out, “Hi!”

  The newspaper report was short, but it was at the bottom of the front page, otherwise (for he was not a man to read a paper assiduously) he might have missed it. It stated that a body washed up on the shore near the village of Saltacres had been identified as that of Miss Camilla Hoveton St. John, a summer visitor from London. Foul play was not suspected.

  When he had assimilated this laconic information, Palgrave went out to get a copy of the local paper. This had a longer and more detailed account. Camilla, it stated, was thought to have bathed on an outgoing tide and drowned in a vain effort to reach the shore. Bathing along that part of the coast was safe enough when the tide was right and Miss St. John was said to have been a capable swimmer, but she liked to bathe at night and must have mistaken the state of the tide or trusted too much in her own strength and skill. Fatalities had occurred before in that neighbourhood, but visitors were usually warned by local boatmen, or other residents, of the dangers of a powerful undertow, and there was evidence that this had been done in the present case. By day a swimmer in difficulties might be able to attract attention from a passing yacht or somebody on shore, but at night this was unlikely, nor would the hoisting of a danger cone or other warning device have been effective under the circumstances. Few people bathed alone on that part of the coast, even by daylight. To bathe alone at night was asking for trouble. Moreover, there was more than a mile to walk from the village to the sea. However, Miss St. John was accustomed to bathe alone, but, most unfortunately, had done so once too often.