The Nine Tailors (36 page)

* * *

The only other thing of interest that happened during the next week or so was the sudden death of Mrs. Wilbraham. She died at night and alone—apparently from mere old age—with the emeralds clasped in her hand. She left a will drawn up fifteen years earlier, in which she left the whole of her very considerable estate to her Cousin Henry Thorpe “because he is the only honest man I know.” That she should cheerfully have left her only honest relative to suffer the wearing torments of straitened means and anxiety throughout the intervening period seemed to be only what anybody might have expected from her enigmatic and secretive disposition. A codicil, dated on the day after Henry’s death, transferred the legacy to Hilary, while a further codicil, executed a few days before her own death, not only directed that the emeralds which had caused all the disturbance should be given to “Lord Peter Wimsey, who seems to be a sensible man and to have acted without interested motives,” but also made him Hilary’s trustee. Lord Peter made a wry face over this bequest. He offered the necklace to Hilary, but she refused to touch it; it had painful associations for her. It was, indeed, only with difficulty that she was persuaded to accept the Wilbraham estate. She hated the thought of the testatrix; and besides, she had set her heart on earning her own living. “Uncle Edward will be worse than ever,” she said. “He will want me to marry some horrible rich man, and if I want to marry a poor one, he’ll say he’s after the money. And anyway, I don’t want to marry anybody.”

“Then don’t,” said Wimsey. “Be a wealthy spinster.”

“And get like Aunt Wilbraham? Not me!”

“Of course not. Be a nice wealthy spinster.”

“Are there any?”

“Well, there’s me. I mean, I’m a nice wealthy bachelor. Fairly nice, anyway. And it’s fun to be rich. I find it so. You needn’t spend it all on yachts and cocktails, you know. You could build something or endow something or run something or the other. If you don’t take it, it will go to some ghastly person—Uncle Edward or somebody—whoever is Mrs. Wilbraham’s next-of-kin, and they’d be sure to do something silly with it.”

“Uncle Edward would,” said Hilary, thoughtfully.

“Well, you’ve got a few years to think it over,” said Wimsey. “When you’re of age, you can see about throwing it into the Thames. But what I’m to do with the emeralds I really don’t know.”

“Beastly things,” said Hilary. “They’ve killed grandfather, and practically killed Dad, and they’ve killed Deacon and they’ll kill somebody else before long. I wouldn’t touch them with a barge-pole.”

“I’ll tell you what. I’ll keep them till you’re twenty-one, and then we’ll form ourselves into a Wilbraham Estate Disposals Committee and do something exciting with the whole lot.”

Hilary agreed; but Wimsey felt depressed. So far as he could see, his interference had done no good to anybody and only made extra trouble. It was a thousand pities that the body of Deacon had ever come to light at all. Nobody wanted it.

* * *

The New Wash Cut was opened with great rejoicings at the end of the month. The weather was perfect, the Duke of Denver made a speech which was a model of the obvious, and the Regatta was immensely successful. Three people fell into the river, four men and an old woman were had up for being drunk and disorderly, a motor-car became entangled with a tradesman’s cart and young Gotobed won First Prize in the Decorated Motor-cycle section of the Sports.

And the River Wale, placidly doing its job in the midst of all the disturbance, set to work to scour its channel to the sea. Wimsey, leaning over the wall at the entry to the Cut, watched the salt water moving upward with the incoming tide, muddied and chafing along its new-made bed. On his left, the crooked channel of the old river lay empty of its waters, a smooth expanse of shining mud.

“Doing all right,” said a voice beside him. He turned and found that it was one of the engineers.

“What extra depth have you given her?”

“Only a few feet, but she’ll do the rest herself. There’s been nothing the matter with this river except the silting of the outfall and the big bend below here. We’ve shortened her course now by getting on for three miles and driven a channel right out into the Wash beyond the mudbanks. She’ll make her own outfall now, if she’s left to herself. We’re expecting her to grind her channel lower by eight or ten feet—possibly more. It’ll make all the difference to the town. It’s a scandal, the way the thing’s been let go. Why, as it is, the tide scarcely gets up higher than Van Leyden’s Sluice. After this, it’ll probably run up as far as the Great Leam. The whole secret with these Fen rivers is to bring back all the water you can into its natural course. Where the old Dutchmen went wrong was in dispersing it into canals and letting it lie about all over the place. The smaller the fall of the land, the bigger weight of water you need to keep the outfall scoured. You’d think it was obvious, wouldn’t you? But it’s taken people hundreds of years to learn it.”

“Yes,” said Wimsey. “I suppose all this extra water will go up the Thirty-Foot?”

“That’s right. It’s practically a straight run now from the Old Bank Sluice to the New Cut Outfall—thirty-five miles—and this will carry off a lot of the High Level water from Leamholt and Lympsey. At present the Great Leam has to do more work than it should—they’ve always been afraid to let the Thirty-Foot take its fair proportion of the flood-water in winter, because you see, when it got down to this point it would have overflowed the old riverbed and drowned the town. But now the New Cut will carry it clean off, and that will relieve the Great Leam and obviate the floods round Frogglesham, Mere Wash and Lympsey Fen.”

“Oh!” said Wimsey. “I suppose the Thirty-Foot Dyke will stand the strain?”

“Oh, dear, yes,” said the engineer, cheerfully. “It was meant to from the beginning. In fact, at one time, it had to. It’s only within the last hundred years that the Wale has got so badly silted up. There’s been a good deal of shifting in the Wash—chiefly owing to tidal action, of course, and the Nene Outfall Cut, and that helped to cause the obstruction, don’t you see. But the Thirty-Foot worked all right in the old days.”

“In the Lord Protector’s time, I suppose,” said Wimsey. “And now you’ve cleared the Wale Outfall, no doubt the obstruction will go somewhere else.”

“Very likely,” replied the engineer, with unimpaired cheerfulness. “These mudbanks are always shifting about. But in time I daresay they’ll clear the whole thing—unless, of course, they really take it into their heads to drain the Wash and make a job of it.”

“Just so,” said Wimsey.

“But as far as it goes,” continued the engineer, “this looks pretty good. It’s to be hoped our dam over there will stand up to the strain. You’d be surprised at the scour you get with these quiet-looking rivers. Anyhow, this embankment is all right—I’ll take my oath of that. You watch the tide-mark. We’ve marked the old low level and the old high level—if you don’t see the one lowered and the other raised by three or four feet within the next few months, you can call me—a Dutchman. Excuse me a minute—I just want to see that they’re making that dam good over there.”

He hurried off to superintend the workmen who were completing the dam across the old course of the river.

“And how about my old sluice-gates?”

“Oh!” said Wimsey, looking round, “it’s you, is it?”

“Ah!” The sluice-keeper spat copiously into the rising water. “It’s me. That’s who it is. Look at all this money they been spending. Thousands. But as for them gates of mine, I reckon I can go and whistle for ’em.”

“No answer yet from Geneva?”

“Eh?” said the sluice-keeper. “Oh! Ah! Meaning what I said? Ah! that were a good ’un, weren’t it? Why don’t they refer it to the League of Nations? Ah! and why don’t they? Look at thisher great scour o’ water a-com’n’ up. Where’s that a-going to? It’s got to go somewhere, ain’t it?”

“No doubt,” said Wimsey. “I understand it’s to go up the Thirty-foot.”

“Ah!” said the sluice-keeper. “Always interfering with things, they are.”

“They’re not interfering with your gates, anyway.”

“No, they ain’t, and that’s just where it is. Once you starts interferin’ with things you got to go on. One thing leads to another. Let ’m bide, that’s what I say. Don’t go digging of ’em up and altering of ’em. Dig up one thing and you got to dig up another.”

“At that rate,” objected Wimsey, “the Fens would still be all under water.”

“Well, in a manner of speaking, so they would,” admitted the sluice-keeper. “That’s very true. So they would. But none the more for that, they didn’t ought to come a-drowning of us now. It’s all right for him to talk about letting the floods out at the Old Bank Sluice. Where’s it all a-going to? It comes up, and it’s got to go somewhere, and it comes down and it’s got to go somewhere, ain’t it?”

“At the moment I gather it drowns the Mere Wash and Frogglesham and all those places.”

“Well, it’s their water, ain’t it?” said the sluice-keeper. “They ain’t got no call to send it down here.”

“Quite,” said Wimsey, recognising the spirit that had hampered the Fen drainage for the last few hundred years, “but as you say yourself, it’s got to go somewhere.”

“It’s their water,” retorted the man obstinately, “let ’em keep it. It won’t do us no good.”

“Walbeach seems to want it.”

“Ah! them!” The sluice-keeper spat vehemently. “They don’t know what they want. They’re always a-wantin’ some nonsense or other. And there’s always some fool to give it ’em, what’s more. All I wants is a new set of gates, but I don’t look like getting of ’em. I’ve asked for ’em time and again. I asked that young feller there. ‘Mister,’ I says to him, ‘how about a new set o’ gates for my sluice?’ ‘That ain’t in our contract,’ he says. ‘No,’ I says, ‘and drowning half the parish ain’t in your contract neither, I suppose.’ But he couldn’t see it.”

“Well, cheer up,” said Wimsey. “Have a drink.”

He did, however, feel sufficient interest in the matter to speak to the engineer about it. when he saw him again.

“Oh, I think it’s all right,” said that gentleman. “We did, as a matter of fact, recommend that the gates should be repaired and strengthened, but you see, the damned thing’s all tied up in some kind of legal bother. The fact is, once you start on a job like this, you never know where it’s going to end. It’s all piecemeal work. Stop it up in one place and it breaks out in another. But I don’t think you need worry about this part of it. What does want seeing to is the Old Bank dyke—but that’s under a different authority altogether. Still, they’ve undertaken to make up their embankment and put in some fresh stonework. If they don’t, there’ll be trouble, but they can’t say we haven’t warned them.”

“Dig up one thing,” thought Wimsey, “and you have to dig up another. I wish we’d never dug up Deacon. Once you let the tide in, it’s got to go somewhere.”

* * *

James Thoday, returning to England as instructed by his employers, was informed that the police wanted him as a witness. He was a sturdy man, rather older than William, with bleak blue eyes and a reserved manner. He repeated his original story, without emphasis and without details. He had been taken ill in the train after leaving Fenchurch. He had attributed the trouble to some sort of gastric influenza. When he got to London, he had felt quite unable to proceed, and had telegraphed to that effect.

He had spent part of that day huddled over the fire in a public house near Liverpool Street; he thought they might remember him there. They could not give him a bed for the night and, in the evening, feeling a little better, he had gone out and found a room in a back street. He could not recall the address, but it had been a clean, pleasant place. In the morning he found himself fit to continue his journey, though still very weak and tottery. He had, of course, seen English papers mentioning the discovery of the corpse in the churchyard, but knew nothing further about it, except, of course, what he had heard from his brother and sister-in-law, which was very little. He had never had any idea who the dead man was. Would he be surprised to hear that it was Geoffrey Deacon? He would be very much surprised indeed. The news came as a terrible shock to him. That would be a bad job for his people.

Indeed, he looked startled enough. But there had been a tenseness of the muscles about his mouth which persuaded Superintendent Blundell that the shock had been caused, not so much by hearing the dead man’s name as by hearing that the police knew it.

Mr. Blundell, aware of the solicitude with which the Law broods over the interests of witnesses, thanked him and proceeded with his inquiries. The public house was found, and substantiated the story of the sick sailor who had sat over the fire all day drinking hot toddies; but the clean and pleasant woman who had let her room to Mr. Thoday was not so easy of identification.

Meanwhile, the slow machinery of the London police revolved and, from many hundreds of reports, ground out the name of a garage proprietor who had hired out a motor-bicycle on the evening of the 4th of January to a man answering to the description of James Thoday. The bicycle had been returned on the Sunday by a messenger, who had claimed and taken away the deposit, minus the charge for hire and insurance. No, not a district messenger: a youth, who looked like an ordinary out-of-work.

On hearing this, Chief Inspector Parker, who was dealing with the London end of the inquiry, groaned dismally. It was too much to expect this nameless casual to turn up. Ten to one, he had pocketed the surplus deposit and would be particularly unwilling to inform the world of the fact. Parker was wrong. The man who had hired the bicycle had apparently made the fatal mistake of picking an honest messenger. After prolonged inquiry and advertisement a young Cockney made his appearance at New Scotland Yard. He gave his name as Frank Jenkins, and explained that he had only just seen the advertisement. He had been seeking work in various places, and had drifted back to Town in time to be confronted with the police inquiry on a notice board at the Labour Exchange.

He very well remembered the episode of the motorbike. It had struck him as funny at the time. He had been hanging round a garridge in Bloomsbury in the early morning of January 5th, hoping to pick up a job, when he see a bloke coming along on this here bike. The bloke was short and stocky, with blue eyes and sounded like he might be the boss of some outfit or other—he spoke sharp. and quick, like he might be accustomed to giving orders. Yes, he might have been an officer in the mercantile marine, very likely. Come to think of it, he did look a bit like a sailor. He was dressed in a very wet and dirty motoring coat and wore a cap, pulled down over his face, like. This man had said: “Here, sonny, d’you want a job?” On being told “Yes,” he had asked: “Can you ride a motor-bike?”