It was Phillipa. who stopped them.
“Let’s go on board,” she said. “We can do no good here.” Tony turned towards the landing-stage.
“Hold the ladder in, Giles, while I go down again,” he said. But Giles was looking at Susan.
“Is that true?” he asked, in a troubled voice. “Is there nothing we can do?”
“Why ask me?” she said. “Why not ask Miriam?”
“You don’t mean that,” he answered, going to help Tony.
She did not, but she was so confused by the most recent event that she now felt nothing but resentment. Only not against Giles, she reminded herself, ashamed of her own churlishness.
She went forward and stood beside him. He was still holding the ladder, for Phillipa this time. When she was safely on the stage below, he handed the bags down to Tony.
“I’m sorry I said that,” Susan told him. “I’m a bit rattled by what’s happening.”
He looked up at her and grinned, then scrambled to his feet.
“You’ve every right to be. If we only knew what is happening.”
“Do you think Miriam is mad?”
He looked at her.
“Do you?”
“No.”
“Neither do I. But I’m damned if I know whether she’s play-acting deliberately for some obscure reason, or if she can’t help herself.”
“If she can’t help it, then it means she’s genuinely frightened.”
“Of Henry? Can you believe that?”
She shook her head.
“No, I can’t. In his own way he’s fond of her. I know he is. And he’s worried to death about her—as well as about himself.”
“I know.”
“His back has been worse this last week. And something else is wrong. Haven’t you noticed how swollen his hands are?”
“Can’t say I have. But I haven’t looked particularly. He got down on his knees quite briskly to look at the ladder. But that could have been in the excitement of the moment. He went off walking rather slowly.”
“His ankles were swollen this morning, too, Francine told me.”
Tony and Phillipa were sitting in the dinghy, waiting. They had the luggage piled in the bows of the little boat.
“Shall we take this off, and come back for you two?” Tony called.
“You do that. Bring a bit of rope back, so I can fix this ladder for the last one down.”
Tony pushed off. Giles and Susan sat on the bank to wait.
“This last scare was a genuine accident,” said Giles, after a time. “The wood is rotten and it gave way. It might have gone any time. No one could possibly arrange for it to go the precise moment Miriam got on to the ladder. Besides, Tony had already used it.”
“I know. It was sheer bad luck it had to be Miriam.”
“And it was sheer bad luck for some criminal or other it had to be you who was caught in the first trap, and Tony in the second.”
“They were traps, then, were they?”
“They damned well were. Pretty sinister ones, too. And noticeably of the same pattern.”
“How do you mean?”
“In each case there would have been a disappearance, without obvious cause, and without trace.”
Susan drew a long breath.
“Of course. The seat would have been put back over the cover, which would have been put back over the hole. And the notice would have been put back in its real place.”
“Exactly. But the main question is this. Who were those traps set to catch? I know that Miriam used to go and sit on the memorial seat to enjoy the view in solitude. And she used to sunbathe on the sand near the warning notice. But surely if she made a habit of going to these places, you’d expect her to know them so well she’d notice any change in them, immediately. She may be neurotic, but she’s no fool.”
“Yes. I’m sure you’re right. If the traps were meant for Miriam, they were very clumsily thought out. But suppose they were not meant for her?”
“Who then?”
“Me, perhaps. Or even you.”
“In heaven’s name, why?”
She looked at him, steadily.
“We are assuming all the time that Henry has done these things, aren’t we?”
“I suppose so. Who else could it be?”
“I’m wondering about Francine.”
“Francine!”
“Yes.”
“But she seems to be devoted to Miriam. Actually she’s tackled both Pip and myself on the subject.”
He laughed self-consciously, and Susan pretended to be indignant.
“On the strength of your old attachment, I suppose? Does she think it still operates? In any case, how did she find out about it?”
“Snooping, I gather from Pip. She might take a sentimental view, I suppose. But she’s French. I don’t think it’s likely. Just wishful thinking, perhaps.”
“I was a bit doubtful about you, myself, at first. But not for long.”
He gave her a quick kiss, and another, more prolonged.
“She practically accused me of making Miriam unhappy, so I suppose she may really have noticed you and me getting to like each other, and wanted to get rid of me. A bit drastic, though.”
“Impossible, really. I’m being fanciful. She knows you are going as soon as you can. You’ve been trying to get away ever since you came. Besides, respectable French housekeepers don’t go in for crime.”
“With a few notable exceptions. However, I think we can cut out Francine, however much she sympathises with Miriam. Besides, she wouldn’t be capable of doing the actual physical work of preparing those traps. I mean, moving the seat, and the notice board.”
“No, of course not. Silly of me. Wash that out.”
“So it must be Henry. But you may be right about the intended victim. It is quite on the cards that Henry might want to get rid of me. Miriam described him as a sort of obscure ogre, but I didn’t believe a word of it at the time.”
“He isn’t. He is never very forthcoming, but then he is never really well. I can’t say I know him at all, though. And I’ve been here nearly two months.”
“I thought he behaved in a rather sinister manner just now. He did nothing whatever to help Miriam, or to comfort her afterwards. Simply took her off with him as if she’d been a dog in disgrace.”
Susan shivered, and drew closer to Giles. He put an arm round her.
“Why don’t you come with us? For a day or two, at least. While we’re cruising on this side.”
She said, wistfully, “If only I could.”
“Then why not …?”
“Look,” she said, scrambling to her feet, “here’s Tony back with the dinghy.”
By this time the wind had dropped to a light breeze. The sun shone brilliantly from a clear sky. The open channel in the distance beyond the mouth of the river, looked very inviting.
“I wish we were going now” said Phillipa.
They were all four sitting about the deck, while Phillipa dispensed tea from the cockpit.
“Better, tomorrow morning,” Giles corrected. “If we’re going on east to Lézardrieux we need to take the latter part of the ebb out of here, so that by the time we’re clear of the rocks at Les Heaux it’ll have turned and be in our favour again along the coast and into the next river. I haven’t done my sums yet, but that’s the general idea.”
“We’ll be starting between five and six tomorrow morning, then?” Tony asked.
“Something like that. Unless you want to try the inside channel, the mainland side of Les Heaux.”
“No, we don’t,” said Phillipa, emphatically. “We want to avoid all possible hazards from now on.”
“You can’t do it on this coast,” Giles reminded her.
After tea he took Susan for a row in the dinghy. They drifted down the river on the tide without much effort, and landed on the other side of the water, at the hard below Pen Paluch. They pulled the dinghy up the beach, fastened the painter to a ring in the little harbour wall, and walked up the hill.
The village here lay more steeply than Penguerrec. The houses were terraced and the narrow road climbed up and round and back again. There seemed to be only one shop in the place, but they had not come to buy stores, only to explore and be together.
They walked on through the village and found a country road. It had a good surface and tall hedges. Too tall, Giles complained, to see where they were. When they came to a gate, he climbed it and stood precariously on top, balancing himself with the help of a small tree in the hedge.
“Plougrescant church is dead ahead,” he reported. “We might go and look at it.”
Susan laughed.
“It’s about six miles from here by road,” she said. “You can’t go direct anywhere. All fields and winding lanes. Just like Devon.”
“Right. Then we’ll find a nice secluded field and enjoy the sun.”
There were flies in the field, and the sun was very hot, far hotter than on the boat in the river. But Susan and Giles were much too engrossed with one another to notice these discomforts. Later, when the sun had left their corner of the field, sinking down now to the west, they went back to the harbour hand in hand, and rowed slowly up to Shuna, unhindered by the tide, which was nearly at slack water.
Susan wanted to go straight back to the house, because she had been away so long, but the others persuaded her to have dinner on board. Afterwards Giles took her to the landing-stage and walked with her up the path through the woods.
At the edge of the lawn he stopped.
“I won’t come to the house,” he said. “I’ve written this final note to Miriam, simply thanking her from the three of us for her hospitality. Will you give it to her, and a similar message to Henry?”
She promised to do this.
“Write to me at Peter Port,” Giles said. “We ought to be there in three or four days from now. And take care of yourself.”
He kissed her and went away, and Susan watched him until he was out of sight. Then she went into the house.
They turned in early on Shuna, because they had to be up at dawn the next day. Giles lay awake for a long time, listening to the quiet breathing of his sleeping crew, and the gentle slapping of the river against the sides of the yacht. Susan was his girl, he decided, and he meant to marry her. This affair was not make-belief, like all the other encounters with which he had tried to solace himself since Miriam broke out of his life so cruelly. And so disastrously, it seemed, to her own happiness. He lay awake, knowing that he would marry Susan, and wondering what his life would have been like if he had married Miriam. She and Henry had no children. Perhaps that was partly the cause of her present pitiable state. But it might be her own fault, not her misfortune, and not Henry’s selfishness. In that case he could be thankful she had let him down. And again his thoughts went round to her strange insistence upon danger and death, her obsession with fear, her wild attempts to renew her power over him. Without Susan’s presence and all that it had come to mean for him in these few days, he knew he would have been lost. Even now, he realised with dismay, he was thinking more of Miriam than of his new young love. At last he fell asleep, adding his own quiet breathing to that of his sleeping friends.
The tide came in, filling the creek, rising up the river banks. The landing-stage rode level under the full moon. Not a breath of wind stirred the rigging. And at the turn of the tide, about three in the morning, Shuna began to move. Her bows swung gently round, as they always did, to face upstream to meet the current beginning to flow towards the sea. But she did not only turn, she began almost at once to slide down the river. Faster and faster she moved, swinging sideways now, borne along by the rush of the ebb, towards the sea and the jagged rocks round which the eddies surged and swept.
A fishing boat had come into the river that night, bound for Tréguier. She did not belong to either of the villages at the mouth of the river, and had no moorings of her own in their harbours. She had not picked up any of the empty moorings, but had dropped her anchor in the stream just clear of the other boats, trusting to the late hour to save her from any trouble with other shipping.
Shuna was swept broadside on into the bows of this vessel, with a crash that woke everyone on board.
Giles was on deck in a matter of seconds. At first he thought the fishing boat had run into him, in spite of the full moon and the riding light he always hung from his forestay. But he realised almost at once that the fishing boat was fast at her anchor and Shuna was the truant.
The crew of the fishing vessel had gone ashore to spend the night with friends. There was no one aboard. Giles and Tony made Shuna fast to her, and as the first grey fight began to drown the shadows of the moon, they inspected the damage. A considerable amount of paint had gone, the gunwale was badly dented in several places. Two of the stanchions to which the life-lines were fastened had carried away, but otherwise, above the waterline Shuna had come off fairly well.
“We were lucky to hit a boat,” said Tony, “and not a fixed target like a rock.”
“A rock would probably have holed us,” answered Giles.
He looked dazed and bewildered.
“I can’t think how it happened,” he kept repeating. “We held in the gale, so why not tonight, with no wind at all?”
“Springs,” said Tony. “We must have pulled up our anchor.”
“But I let down an extra five fathoms this morning—I mean yesterday morning—on purpose,” said Giles. “Give me the torch!” he added, quickly.
Going forward he stooped over the chain, and swore fiercely.
“Come here, Tony!” he shouted.
Tony went quickly up to the bows.
“Look at the figures on the chain,” Giles said. “Lucky I painted them all on fresh this season. The fathoms are in red.”
“Someone has taken in the chain.”
“Someone who knew exactly how far to take it in to guarantee we’d drag at the top of the flood. This was another deliberate trap, and we know who it was intended for, this time.”
“And therefore all the other times,” said Phillipa, who had joined them.
“Very likely,” Tony agreed. “Only we’ll never prove that. I doubt if we’ll ever prove anything. We’ve only your word for letting out extra chain, Giles. Good enough for us, but not for the natives over here.”
“Susan saw me putting it down. I showed her.”
“Fair enough. But that wouldn’t make any difference to the gendarmerie.”
“Possibly not. No point in arguing it. We’d better get the anchor in now. God knows where it is, or the chain either.”
They soon discovered this. Their chain was firmly wrapped about that of the boat to which they were tied. They dared not pull it free without danger of casting both boats adrift.
“Have to wait for the owners,” said Giles. “Better get dressed and see what we can do about those stanchions.”
They did not have to wait long. About half-past four a heavy dinghy with an outboard motor put off from the hard and four men came on board the fishing boat.
Recriminations were followed by a long explanation from Giles, patently not believed.
“But don’t you understand?” he shouted at last, “if I’d made a mistake over the chain when we came here, and if I hadn’t put down more yesterday morning, we’d have floated off yesterday, when we were all at the creek bathing, or rather when we were having lunch at the château. It didn’t happen then, so the chain must have been altered some time after that, when the tide had gone down a bit.”
Reluctantly the fishermen agreed that this was probably what had happened. They hastened to add that they did not belong to Penguerrec themselves. Giles saw the point of this, and ignored it.
“How do you propose we disentangle the chain?” he asked.
The skipper of the fishing boat had a simple remedy.
“I pull up my chain and when we come to yours, we cut a link, and we are both free.”
“And my anchor at the bottom of the river,” said Giles. “No, thank you.”
He explained his own scheme. They would pull in their respective chains until the tangle appeared and then, from the big dinghy, they could secure his anchor, and sort out the trouble.
“And if we are off the bottom by then?” asked the fisherman.
“We’ll have our engines on, which will keep us under control,” Giles answered.
After some further argument this scheme was adopted. Giles retrieved his anchor, but they found it necessary to cut his chain in order to free it. Several links had been damaged.
“It is a pity,” said the fisherman, politely, “but there was no other way. You will have to have it repaired. And in the mean-time …” He shrugged, looked at his crew, and added, with a grin, “You had better get out to sea quickly.”
Giles grinned back.
“Not before I find out who did the dirty on me,” he said.
The other’s face hardened.
“That would be a mistake,” he said, briefly.
“Why so?”
The man’s face went blank.
“Do you start now, at once?” he asked. “I have to go to Tréguier.”
“If you can give me ten minutes to rig a line on my anchor, I’ll move further in-shore.”
The skipper agreed, and even proved helpful to the extent of telling Giles exactly where he could lie to avoid the mooring chains of the other boats and also avoid drying out.
Working fast, Giles and Tony got out the rope they used for the kedge anchor, and reinforced it with another line. Presently they moved away from the fishing boat, and dropped the anchor again.
“It ought to hold in this weather,” Giles said. “And it isn’t for long.”
“Why can’t we go now?” Phillipa asked.
“For two reasons. One, that we’ll have to go west now to Morlaix, to get the chain fixed, which means we want to use the whole of the ebb, which goes westerly along the coast. Two, that I’m going ashore to have it out with Henry.”
He went below, without waiting for an answer, and neither of the Marshalls made any further protest.
Giles’s anger festered throughout breakfast, a silent and uncomfortable meal. Then, alone, he set out for the hard.
“You look after Shuna.” he said to Tony, as he pushed away from her. “I’ll look after Henry.”
But when he reached the château he found that this was impossible. For Henry Davenport had disappeared.