The Riddle of the River (8 page)

‘Is that so?’ said Arthur. ‘I don’t remember studying ether in the
Opticks
. But then again, I haven’t opened it since I was an undergraduate.’

‘And even then, you probably skipped that part, you mathematician,’ said Ernest. ‘Give me your copy, and I’ll show you.’

Arthur abandoned his dinner long enough to fetch the book from his study, and Ernest neglected his to read us out a passage or two, with the result that my plate was empty while theirs were both still well-garnished. I helped myself to more carrots and listened to Ernest:

‘There, you see? That would explain Michelson-Morley, that right there. And now, listen to this.’

He clapped the book closed.

‘There you have it,’ he said, ‘from a Cambridge man if there ever was one. We ether supporters are not beaten yet! Professor Lodge believes that ether is the main medium of contact, of transmission, in the universe,’ he went on quickly. ‘He believes it explains every contact of every kind that occurs. Including that between ourselves and the – ah, the afterlife.’ He glanced at us both quickly, with a tinge of aggression in his eyes.

‘The universe is still an utterly mysterious place,’ observed Arthur evenly.

‘This is all fascinating,’ I said warmly. ‘I really should like to hear more.’

The pudding had come and gone during this discussion, which had allowed Ernest to recover his usual animation and colour. I smiled at him, and rose to leave the gentlemen a moment alone with their drinks.

‘We won’t be long,’ said Arthur, already hunting about for a decanter in the sideboard, as I moved out of the dining room by myself. ‘Let’s see, Ernest, what can I offer you? A little drop of liqueur? Or brandy, perhaps?’

I betook myself dutifully away from the alcoholic regions, and busied myself arranging the drawing room until they should emerge, but I was interrupted quite soon by a sharp rat-tat upon the front door, accompanied by an anxious ringing of the bell. I opened it at once. Pat, whom I had entirely forgotten for once, stood upon the doorstep, shaking his shoes and wiping off the drops of a misty drizzle from his forehead, where it appeared to have caught him unawares.

‘Oh, Pat, come in,’ I said quickly, ushering him forward to the detriment of the floor. ‘Have you got news?’

‘Yes, I have. We have her name,’ said Pat. ‘And I have a lot to tell you.’ He took off his hat and dropped it over the umbrella stand, while I helped him to divest himself of his dampened overcoat.

‘Who was she?’ I urged him.

‘She turns out to have been an actress in some kind of roving theatre company no one ever heard of,’ he began.

I closed my eyes for a moment, then opened them and looked at him.

‘Ivy Elliott,’ I said.

He stared at me for a moment as though I were a magician or a mind-reader, gaping. Then he nodded slowly.

‘Still waters run deep,’ he said reproachfully. ‘You knew it all along, even while you sent me off on that ridiculous chase. You knew it – why, you even told me you thought the girl might have been an actress! What a lot of trouble you could have saved us. Why didn’t you say?’

‘I couldn’t,’ I said. ‘It was just a wild guess. I never had time to find any proof.’

At that precise moment, the door of the dining room flew open, and Arthur and Ernest emerged. Arthur was his usual sober self, but Ernest had an odd gleam in his eye.

‘Oh, hello, Pat,’ said Arthur. ‘Vanessa, guess what? Ernest went to see
A Midsummer Night’s Dream,
and he says the Titania we saw simply isn’t the same actress as the one he meant. She’s a replacement.’

‘The very idea,’ added Ernest, ‘of imagining that I can’t tell if a woman is large or small, or wearing a wig.’

‘And Ernest says she had to be replaced suddenly, because she seems to have disappeared,’ went on Arthur.

‘She’s absolutely gone,’ added Ernest bitterly. ‘They say she’s ill, up at the theatre, but I’ve asked around all my acting acquaintances, and something fishy is going on. No one knows where she is. She was all set to play Titania last Monday, and never turned up. They gave the role to her understudy, who was herself booked to play the First Fairy.’ He glanced at me, and paused suddenly, becoming aware of something. I glanced at Pat, and saw that he had grasped the situation. He looked seriously at Ernest.

‘Are you talking about a missing actress?’ he said with unusual gentleness.

‘Yes,’ replied Ernest. ‘Missing since last Monday, and no one seems to know where she has gone.’

‘What was her name?’ was the next, inevitable question.

‘Ivy Elliott,’ he replied, the little glint intensifying in his eye. I felt Pat grow tense next to me, bracing himself. Ernest’s passionate feelings were quite manifest, and they reared up like a massive wall, preventing us from speaking
openly and naturally about the dead girl.

‘Why, what is going on?’ said Ernest suddenly, growing both defensive and aggressive. ‘Why are you all silent?’ He looked from me to Arthur accusingly. ‘Do you know something that I don’t?’

‘Not me,’ said Arthur. ‘Do you, Vanessa? Obviously you do. Perhaps you had better tell it as it is.’

‘A young woman was found drowned, here in Cambridge, last week,’ said Pat, once again intervening to spare me a most distressing statement. ‘She has only just been identified.’ He looked at Ernest, sorry and a little helpless.

The portrait photograph of the dead girl lay in the bureau drawer just behind Ernest. I felt myself move towards it, inexorably, unwillingly.

Arthur, who, floating in an academic world of ideas, had heard nothing of the murder, stared at me, surprised. Ernest watched me in silence, and stepped aside as I reached behind him, opened the drawer, and drew out the photograph. It was as though we were bound by an invisible thread of intense electric tension. I handed it to him. He fixed his eyes upon it. The silence was long and dreadful.

‘How did she die?’ he said suddenly.

‘She – she was found in the river,’ I said uncomfortably, anxiously, doubtfully. There was much more to say on the subject, but I found myself unable to say it.

‘She drowned herself?’

‘The police believe it was murder,’ said Pat. ‘She didn’t drown. She was strangled.’

‘Who did it?’ snapped Ernest, in a tone for which, had I known the answer to his question, I would have hesitated to give it to him.

‘Ernest, we don’t know. No one knows.’

‘Well,’ he said, ‘you’re going to find out, Vanessa. You are going to find her killer for me. I am hiring you, if you will take the case.’

It was so unexpected that I fluttered momentarily.

‘I – I don’t know where to start,’ I began.

‘But I know. Come down to London with me tomorrow, and I’ll show you.’

‘You’re not really going to take this on, Vanessa?’ said Arthur, as I sat in our bedroom half an hour later, brushing my hair. We had sent Pat away, plied Ernest with promises, camomile tea and laudanum, and sent him to bed. The nervous tension of the evening had left us both feeling drained and exhausted. I wanted to sleep. The ivory-backed brush almost slipped from my fingers. I put it down and went over to the bed, pulling back the covers, touching the fresh white sheets, welcoming their soothing, restful contact. Arthur blew out the dressing-table candle, leaving only the two little ones on our bedside tables burning. Their flames cast two soft round glows upwards to the ceiling. It is so much easier to talk in the near darkness.

‘I think I am,’ I said thoughtfully.

‘But what is Ernest’s call to hire you?’ he objected. ‘What has he to do with this actress? Just because he admired her!’

‘How stupid men are,’ I sighed. ‘Can you not see that Ernest was mad about her? She occupied his mind and soul, that much is clear.’

There was a hesitation.

‘But Kathleen…’ he said meekly.

‘I know,’ I said. ‘But it happens. And the girl is dead. He
will remain obsessed unless the thing is solved and the murderer brought to justice. Legal justice, of course. Ernest must be prevented from taking anything into his own hands.’

‘The police will find the murderer,’ he said.

‘Well and good,’ I assented. ‘I won’t object if they reach the solution before I do.’ I lay back and watched the flickering light on the ceiling.

‘Will you go to London tomorrow?’ said Arthur, propping himself on his elbow and facing me in the glow.

‘Yes,’ I said, looking into his brown eyes. He reached over and put his hand on mine. Then he took his candle and blew it out. A little puff of fragrant smoke wafted across the room. I took mine and did the same. Darkness, silence and tenderness settled over us.

‘Bother,’ said Guglielmo to himself. ‘My money’s already practically gone, and I haven’t even got the metal and batteries yet. Perhaps the cobbler will buy my shoes from me. I can go back barefoot.
’

When I came downstairs in the morning, I found Mrs Widge standing in the doorway to the dining room, holding a tray containing a large silver coffee pot, a toast rack, a covered dish and a fragrant, steaming sponge cake, and looking offended.

‘He’s gone off, ma’am,’ she said, ‘he’s gone, Mr Dixon is. He left a note.’ She gestured with her two chins towards the dining table, where an envelope was propped against the vase which decorated its centre.

‘Oh, Mrs Widge,’ I said, ‘had you prepared an extra-lovely breakfast for our guest? I’m sure if he’d known he would have stayed for it! But as it is, we shall have to enjoy it ourselves. The sponge cake will be much appreciated in the nursery, I know.’

I extracted Ernest’s note from its envelope and read it.

Goodness
, I thought to myself, as I sat alone at the table in front of the large quantity of succulent things that Mrs Widge was setting upon it.
I wonder whose address that is? Whom does Ernest want me to meet? Some of the girl’s friends, I suppose. He seems to know all kinds of people in the acting world. Islington, though – that’s hardly the kind of place where actors live!

Arthur came down a few minutes later, freshly shaven, and poured himself a cup of coffee before sitting down. His eye roved appreciatively over the table.

‘Mrs Widge has outdone herself,’ he remarked. ‘Where is the happy beneficiary of all this effort?’

‘Arthur, right or wrong, he learnt last night that the girl he loved is dead,’ I said. ‘Do you expect him to be interested in sponge cake?’

‘Well, I don’t know about sponge cake, but sausages, maybe?’ he said, lifting a dish cover and spearing one with a fork. I opened my mouth indignantly, but shut it again. He cannot help it. The idea that Ernest should be in love with an actress while being married to Kathleen is not an admissible one in Arthur’s moral world. He would not deny, in theory, that such a thing can happen, and there are even moments when he might be brought reluctantly to speak of it, but certainly not at table in the clear light of day. One cannot change people.

‘He left early,’ I contented myself with saying. ‘He must have caught the first train, and he’s left me a note asking me to meet him in London at nine o’clock this evening.’

‘To meet
him
?’ he said, surprised.

‘Well, to meet someone. He just left an address.’

‘A bunch of murderers, probably,’ he said.

‘Nonsense, Arthur. I suppose he wants me to learn something about the dead girl’s friends and relations.’

‘One of whom killed her, unless she was killed by a passing tramp.’

‘She might have been,’ I said thoughtfully. ‘She was found in the river in the early morning, and had not spent more than a few hours there, Inspector Doherty told me. She must have been killed in the middle of the night.’ I wondered if the police knew more or less precisely at what time she actually died. Post-mortems do allow them to determine such information. I realised that I knew almost nothing about the circumstances of her death, and that my first task should really be to find out more.

To this end, I proceeded to the police headquarters after breakfast and enquired if Inspector Doherty was available. He was in, and seemed quite pleased to see me.

‘An excellent tip, that one about Geoffrey Archer,’ he told me. ‘Good work. I am very angry with Pat for stealing the bracelet, obviously. But he insists that he did it entirely without your knowledge. You should have brought it straight back here when he gave it to you, you know that. In fact, you ought to have told me immediately that you thought it might have come from Robert Sayle’s. Still, let bygones be bygones. Our talk with Archer was conclusive. The girl has been identified beyond a doubt.’

‘I suppose Mr Archer is not the murderer?’ I asked, thinking suddenly of Estelle’s anxiety on that score.

‘No,’ replied the inspector. ‘Do you think we didn’t ask ourselves that question at once? We questioned him about his relationship with her, and found out that although he was not precisely keeping her, he did give her the occasional gift of
money for services rendered. The child she was expecting might have constituted a motive of sorts, though it’s not clear why it would represent a threat to a man in his position, but some people panic about such things; perhaps she was threatening to make a public scandal. However, be that as it may, he’s out of the running with a cast-iron alibi.’

‘Oh, that is interesting,’ I said. ‘Are you allowed to tell me what it is?’ If I had asked him straightforwardly, he might have been reluctant to give me details out of pure official discretion or the fear of my continuing to meddle (little did he know…), but the word ‘allowed’ had the hoped-for effect of piquing his sense of importance.

‘Certainly I can tell you. The girl Ivy Elliott was last seen at a party at Mr Archer’s home on the evening of 21st June. Mr Archer was present, obviously, and there was a fairly large number of guests. Sergeant Forth and I questioned them all.’

He handed me a list of some twenty names. Although not personally acquainted with any of them, I saw more than one that I recognised as belonging to people of the highest social standing in Cambridge. The testimony of each witness had been taken down and signed. I read rapidly through the statements. Most of them had virtually nothing to say on the subject of Ivy Elliott’s presence at, and departure from, Mr Archer’s home on the night of the dinner party. They had simply not taken any notice. A few were more observant.

‘Did you notice that he gave her money?’ I said to Inspector Doherty, surprised by the vehemence of this last statement.

‘Well,’ he said uncomfortably, ‘what do you expect?’

‘Oh, I know,’ I said, ‘I didn’t mean that. I meant that it’s strange that the money was not found on her. Or was it?’

‘No, it wasn’t,’ he said.

‘Where did she put it?’ I wondered. ‘Was she carrying a bag of any kind?’

‘We asked Archer that. Look here.’

He separated Mr Archer’s statement from the others, and handed it to me, pointing to the lines at the end. I read:

‘It’s all very odd,’ I said, looking up. ‘Where can she have been going, all by herself, on foot, at midnight? Why on earth didn’t she simply stay at Mr Archer’s home?’

‘Read Archer’s statement from the beginning,’ he counselled me. ‘It’s quite interesting.’