IX

THE LIGHTER

I HAD A couple of hours in hand before setting off across London for my date with Inspector Redpath at Ilford. Half of me would have liked to go to sleep, but the other half was still too much worked up, and by the time I’d got back to my flat it would scarcely have been worth turning in, anyway. So I walked across Putney Bridge and went into the Bishop’s Park by Fulham Palace. It was a still, autumn afternoon, and I wandered upstream along the stretch of river known as Barn Elm Reach. According to the theory in the police file on the Southwark Bridge mystery it was somewhere about here that the body of the dead man had been put in the Thames. Well, it would have been possible enough. Assuming that the body had been supported by at least two men, so that it could have been taken for a drunk, there were plenty of places where it could have been got to a waiting boat. More probably, I thought, it would have been on the other bank of the river – the Surrey side – where there were a number of yacht moorings. But it didn’t seem to matter much – a dinghy from any of the moorings could have been rowed across the river easily enough.

I tried to visualise the scene. It had to be around midnight, to allow time for the tidal stream to get the body to Southwark. What was the moon doing then? My diary had a table of the moon’s phrases, and I looked it up – the moon would have been in the last quarter, so there wouldn’t have been much moonlight to worry about. There must have been at least two men to support the corpse – one of them could, perhaps, have been a woman, but she would have had to be a particularly strong woman, for it is no light job to support a corpse by an arm round its shoulders, and to walk with it. At least two people, then, possibly a man and a woman, but probably two men, with the corpse, and at least one other person with the boat – that meant a minimum of three people directly engaged in the crime. And if the use of cartridges to weight the body suggested something extempore about the action, the three – and the boat – would have had to be assembled at short notice. I didn’t believe it: of course it was possible, and it would account for the downstream journey with the tide, but other facts about the body didn’t seem to fit elaborate planning. Nor could I believe that a weighted body, floating underwater, would have kept to a tidal timetable so meticulously. Again, it was possible, but there are many snags and hazards in the river, and to reach Southwark Bridge by the time it did a body put into the Thames around here would have needed phenomenal luck – or deliberate navigation. And I didn’t see how a dead body could navigate itself, or, in any practical way, be navigated.

So what? The body had unquestionably got to Southwark Bridge because it was found there, and it had apparently been in the water for about the right length of time. If it hadn’t floated down with the tide it must have started from somewhere else, but, in a tidal river, it was hard to see how it could have got where it did without moving with the tide. Arithmetic was on the side of the theory in the police file. Yes, but the equation might involve algebra rather than arithmetic, and I didn’t feel that the police theory solved the equation: there were still a great many factors unknown.

I did not find these reflections particularly comforting, and I set off for Inspector Redpath’s house wondering whether I wasn’t wasting his time as well as my own. On my way to the underground station I passed a telephone box and I felt half inclined to ring up and cancel my appointment, and go home to sleep instead. But Redpath was expecting me; whatever plans he might have had for the evening had already been upset, and it wasn’t fair to him – or to his long-suffering wife who had doubtless prepared a meal for me – to cry off now.

Redpath seemed genuinely pleased to see me, and the simple warmth of his welcome made me feel better. Meeting his wife and two nice kids – a girl of ten and a boy of eight – also made me conscious of what I’d missed in the breakup of my own marriage, and the strange life that circumstances had pushed me into since. But that was neither here nor there – my immediate concern was to see if we could discover any link between the dead man at Southwark Bridge, the dubious affairs of the Ingard empire, and whatever was going on at Winter Marsh.

‘Would you like to talk business before or after supper?’ Redpath asked.

‘If it doesn’t upset the cooking, let’s get business over first,’ I said. ‘I won’t keep you long. There’s been a development in that case I’ve been handling which may have some bearing on your case at Southwark Bridge. I want to talk it over with you as soon as possible.’

Redpath, of course, knew nothing of the empty cartridge case I’d found last night at Winter Marsh. When I told him about it, he whistled slightly. ‘It’s certainly a link with the Southwark Bridge case – your case as much as mine now, from what the Assistant Commissioner told me. But it’s a damned queer link. It isn’t as if the man was shot – a gun with particular ammunition in it might be used anywhere. He wasn’t shot, he was knocked on the head, and the medical evidence, and the timing, make it hard to see how he could possibly have been killed somewhere way out at the far end of the estuary. And if he was killed anywhere near Winter Marsh, why not dump his body there? It’s a desolate enough part of the world.’

‘I don’t want to pour cold water on your tidal theory,’ I said. ‘It’s a damned ingenious piece of arithmetic, and it meets the facts as you knew them. But you didn’t know anything of a possible connection with Winter Marsh, and there’s a hell of a lot more that we haven’t any idea about at all. If you’ve done a lot of hard thinking about something, it’s horribly easy to start – quite unconsciously – trying to fit facts to your own theories. If the case came to you as a new case now, would you still think it probable that the body was put in the river somewhere as far upstream as Hammersmith or Putney?’

‘God knows. It must have been upstream from Southwark Bridge or the tide would have carried it somewhere else.’

‘If it was carried by the tide at all. Suppose it was dumped almost where it was, from a boat?’

Redpath considered. ‘It was broad daylight when the woman on the bridge saw the body – it was not far off midsummer, remember. She would have seen a boat.’

‘Can we be absolutely sure that she didn’t?’

*

Redpath was getting more and more unhappy. ‘It looks as if I may have slipped up badly,’ he said. ‘I did interview her myself, but I must confess I looked upon it more or less as a routine job. She’d made a statement to the constables, and she just repeated it to me. She just happened to be walking across the bridge on her way to work, as she did every morning. I’m afraid it didn’t occur to me to ask her about anything else. It didn’t seem possible that she could be mixed up in the matter.’

‘I don’t for a moment suppose that she is. Look, Ian, if you don’t mind my calling you by your Christian name – I’m much older than you are, anyway – you haven’t slipped up in any way at all. You did what looked like a straightforward job in a straightforward way – having the woman’s statement to the constables, a lot of people wouldn’t have bothered to go to see her at all. It’s easy for me, coming on the scene months later, to think up questions that might have been asked at the time. I’m not here to queer your pitch – if ever we get to the bottom of things much of the credit will be due to you. As things have turned out, and if you don’t mind, I’d like to have a word with the woman – Mrs Millings, isn’t it? – myself. But that’s no reflection on you.’

‘Well, sir, it’s good of you to say so. But I still think I slipped up.’

‘Come off it, and cut out the “sir”. I’m a guest in your house. This is a team effort. You helped me a lot over the dentist and the teeth, and maybe I can help you over Mrs Millings. What sort of a woman is she?’

‘It was some time ago . . . a good sort, I’d say. Precious little schooling, but that’s not her fault, and a hard life, which wouldn’t be her fault, either. Nicely dressed kids, and she keeps her council flat spotless. That’s about all one can say.’

‘It gives a sharp little picture, though, and a useful one. Now, Ian, let’s forget about Southwark Bridge and join your wife.’

*

I think I comforted Redpath. One of the most difficult aspects of my job is having to butt in – and from the top – on the work of real professionals. My own oblique way of looking at things does, sometimes, have advantages, but police work would get nowhere if it were left to people like me.

*

Mrs Millings’s address was in the file, and I felt fairly confident that she would be at home on Sunday morning. She was and, unhappily, she was obviously frightened by my call. Bustling the children across the passage to her neighbour, she faced me defensively in her spotless little living room, looking wretchedly worried.

One of the rotten aspects of the class structure of our society is that the propertyless classes tend to be afraid of the police. ‘Working class’ is a silly term, begging far more questions than it offers in the way of description. The real divide that came with the industrial revolution was between the propertyless and the propertied – a few pounds in a building society counting, at least in nineteenth century terms, as property. The police were the guardians of property, and the propertyless, instinctively, feared them. We who had fathers and grandfathers with some reserves in their lives, and money if need be to pay lawyers, too often scarcely comprehend the instincts of those whose forbears often had nothing but a day’s wages between themselves and disaster. My unannounced appearance on her doorstep – as she had no telephone I could not let her know beforehand – terrified Mrs Millings. My first job was to try to make her less worried. ‘I wonder if you could be very kind and let me have a cup of tea?’

Whatever she had been expecting, it wasn’t this, and the familiar domestic task of getting out the tea things comforted her a bit. ‘No milk or sugar, please,’ I said. ‘Got to watch my figure, you know.’

She gave a thin little smile, but still, it was a smile. She poured a cup for herself as well as for me, and over the tea I said, ‘You have absolutely nothing to be afraid of. You did a good job in spotting that dead man in the river by Southwark Bridge in the summer – if there’d been any life left in him, he could have been revived, and he would have owed his life to you. But he was dead, and so far we’ve got nowhere in trying to find out how he got there. I’ve come along to see you because there’s just a chance that you may remember seeing something that you weren’t asked about before.’

‘I didn’t see nothing, mister. Only the man lying there on the mud. And the birds, of course – it was the birds flocking round that made me look.’

‘I don’t suppose there was anything else to see, then. But that was on the City side of the bridge. You’d walked across from the Southwark bank. Can you remember what the river looked like as you crossed the bridge?’

‘Tide was out – but it must have been, or he wouldn’t have been on the mud. And it was some time back. No, mister, there wasn’t nothing else.’

‘You must know the river pretty well. Were there any ships about that morning?’

‘No, mister, you don’t see many ships above Tower Bridge nowadays, not like you used to. It’s all changing, you know.’

‘Boats then? There’s generally something moving on the river.’

She puckered her face in thought. ‘Not what you’d call boats,’ she said. ‘But there’d be a few of them lighter things tied up, and waiting for some tug to come along and take them off somewhere. Come to think of it, perhaps there was a lighter being moved.’

‘With a tug?’

‘No – yes, that’s why I remember it. Just one man, with a big oar. Don’t see it so often nowadays, and I’ve always puzzled how they do it. Yes, I’m fairly sure there was a lighter moving that morning. I saw it when I got on the bridge at the Southwark end.’

‘Can you remember what it was doing?’

‘Well, it wasn’t doing nothing, except coming across the river, slow like.’

‘Was it going towards the City bank?’

‘No, it was coming this way. There was two or three other lighters tied up off the warehouses, and I suppose it was just coming to join up with them and wait for a tug.’

‘You watched the lighter as you walked across the bridge. And it was out of sight when you saw the man?’

‘It wouldn’t be out of sight, but I wasn’t looking at it – I’d walked past it, you see, and it had gone behind me. I couldn’t have seen the man if the lighter had been there, because I couldn’t see through the lighter.’

She couldn’t recall anything else, and I thought that she’d done pretty well to think about the lighters. Whether they meant anything was another matter. She was much less worried now. I asked her about her children, and she chatted away about how they were doing at school. I asked if I could say goodbye to them, and she called them back into her flat. I shook hands with each of them, and in doing so gave each of them a five-pound note. It was a private tribute to a gallant little family – I had no intention of trying to recover it from my expenses.

*

Did Mrs Millings’s lighter mean anything? I walked back across Southwark Bridge treading, I suppose, more or less in her footsteps – you can’t deviate much on the pavement of a bridge. It was a greyish autumn day, and the tide was making: otherwise the river scene was not much different. There were still two or three lighters moored to buoys off the Southwark bank, but no sign of life around them. On a Sunday morning there was little traffic on the river. I imagined a lighter being sculled across from the other bank. It would not go straight, the lighterman with his long sweep would skilfully use his tide. On that summer morning it was near the last of the ebb. Odd time for a lighter to be moving? Not necessarily – I didn’t know what he was doing, and a skilled waterman could move a lighter pretty much as he wanted, using an eddy or current here, slack water there. Mrs Millings had said that the lighter appeared to be crossing the river to the Southwark bank. Depending on how near it was to the bridge, and the angle at which it crossed the river, it might have masked her view of the City bank for some time. Impressions of visual experiences months afterwards may not be accurate, but there is usually something in them. ‘I couldn’t see through the lighter,’ she had said. That at least implied that at some point the lighter was between her and the bank where she saw the body. Well, maybe it was. What did it matter?

Then a point struck me so forcibly that I stopped in my tracks. If Mrs Millings had been able to see the body from the bridge, why hadn’t the lighterman seen it? He was much nearer, and watermen have an instinct for noticing anything on the river. I leaned on the parapet and gazed down into the Thames. No magic whirlpool showed me a picture of what had happened. I felt suddenly rather cold, walked on, and was thankful to see a taxi a minute or two later. I took the cab back to my rooms, and stood myself a drink. That evening Seddon rang up to say that a message had come from the Spanish police to say that the MV Agnes had sailed from Bilbao. He’d made a date with the River Police for ten o’clock in the morning.

*

Superintendent Carstairs had a severe but rather beautiful room at the top of the River Police Headquarters, with a magnificent view over the Thames. I’d asked Redpath to come along, and I think he was glad to be asked, though he still seemed a little ill-at-ease. The Superintendent had Detective Sergeant Burgess with him, and two other River Police officers, whom he introduced as ‘probably our best boatmen’.

Seddon, as the senior policeman present, opened our conference. He explained that both the Home Office and the Metropolitan Police were interested in a T and T line coaster, the MV Agnes, believed to be on her way from Northern Spain to the Thames. ‘For a variety of reasons which I needn’t go into, we think that she may not come directly to the Thames, but may make a call first at the old Ministry of Defence training area at Winter Marsh, to the north-west of Foulness Island, on the Crouch. If she does this, she will probably make for Winter Marsh at some time between midnight and the early hours of next Wednesday morning – that’s the day after tomorrow – when the tidal conditions will be about right. We don’t know why she may be making for Winter Marsh – we do suspect that she is concerned in landing some form of illegal cargo, and we want to be sure of having an adequate force on hand to deal with things when she gets there. The Navy is cooperating with us – they hope to pick up the Agnes somewhere off Ushant as she comes into the Channel. They won’t shadow her up-Channel in case she gets suspicious and changes her plans, but they’ll try to pick her up again off Dover, and a frigate will keep an eye on her to find out where she goes. It will be dark by then – or, at least, we hope so, if our timetable is anything like right – and the frigate will be out of sight, and following her by radar.’

‘What, exactly, do you want from us?’ the Superintendent asked.

‘Chiefly, your experience. You know the estuary as nobody else does. The Agnes is a biggish vessel to get into the quay at Winter Marsh, though we reckon she’ll be able to do it within two or three hours of high tide. But we don’t know what’s going to happen, and we’d like to have one of your launches standing by with, say, about a dozen men on board. I can provide the men if you can provide and man the boat.’

‘We’ll see about that. Let’s have a look at the chart.’

There were large-scale charts of the estuary on the walls of the Superintendent’s office. ‘She’ll have to approach Winter Marsh from the Crouch,’ he said, ‘but we could have our force in readiness on the River Roach. There’s this inlet here – it’s not more than half a mile from the quay at Winter Marsh, and I doubt if anyone would see us there at night. We’d need some signals, though, to know what to do and when to do it.’

‘Pilotage is compulsory for the Crouch,’ said one of the River Police officers. ‘You pick up a pilot from the cutter cruising off the Sunk Light vessel. Could a couple of our chaps go on board with the pilot?’

‘If our guesses are anything like right, she won’t stop for a pilot.’

‘Then she’s committing an offence, and we could intercept and board her.’

‘Well, the Navy could do that. We’d find out what she was carrying, but we wouldn’t know just what she intended to do with it. No, we want her to dock at Winter Marsh and start unloading before we intervene.’

‘What about the Customs? Isn’t this rather a job for the Waterguard people?’

‘I’ve been in touch with the Customs, of course, and they’ve promised to provide at least two officers for our police party. But – again if our theories are anything like right – this case is a police job. It has far wider ramifications than the smuggling of contraband.’

‘Right. We’ll certainly provide a boat – she’d better be one of our bigger launches, Delphinium, I think. She can take the whole party, she’s got cover, and, if need be, she’s capable of over thirty knots. Where can you join her? Let’s see – we don’t want a police boat to be seen around during the day. What about Burnham? We’ll get her round this evening, and she can lie up there all tomorrow – anyone interested will think that she’s put into one of the yacht yards for repair of something. Time?’

‘We estimate zero hour at around midnight. To be on the safe side we ought to be in the Roach by ten p.m. The Agnes couldn’t get in then, because there wouldn’t be enough water for her. But something else may be happening, and we ought to be on hand.’

‘No problem. It’s not much more than three miles from Burnham to the mouth of the Roach, and at half speed Delphinium can do that comfortably in a quarter of an hour. Allow another quarter of an hour for getting to the inlet just above Winter Marsh – it’s no distance, but it’s tricky navigation, and we’ll be without lights. Say your party joins us at Burnham at 9 p.m. If we’re to be in position by ten, that’ll leave about half an hour in hand for contingencies. Do we carry arms?’

‘I’ve been thinking about that,’ Seddon said, ‘and while I hope it won’t come to anything so drastic I feel that we ought to be equipped with firearms. There’s evidence of some sort of armed guard at the camp on Winter Marsh, and while the last thing we want is a shooting match, we’ve got to be ready for anything. The Customs men won’t be armed – I know that preventive men have been in plenty of fights in the past, but it’s scarcely the thing nowadays. I shall issue revolvers to my policemen – and they’ll all be men who’ve been through the police course in handling weapons.’

‘I’ll do that too, then. There’ll be four of us, myself and Sergeant Burgess, and two police boatmen. We don’t have much to do with pirates these days, but you never know. And I’ll have a few rifles on board, too, just in case.’

That settled, I asked the Superintendent if we could go back to the Southwark Bridge case.

‘Rotten case, that,’ he said. ‘God knows how many hours we put in on it, and Inspector Redpath and the Met men, too. But we never got anywhere. How does it crop up now?’

‘I don’t know that it does, but there’s been a funny little coincidence.’ I explained about the cartridge case on Winter Marsh. ‘Inspector Redpath and I discussed it all on Saturday, and we came to the conclusion that it might just be worth having another interview with Mrs Millings – the woman who saw the body.’

Redpath looked at me gratefully. ‘Don’t see what she can add now,’ the Superintendent said.

‘Well, as you said a moment ago, you never know. I went to see her yesterday, and she remembered that when she was on the Southwark side of the bridge – before she knew anything about the body – she saw a lighter being sculled across the river.’

‘What of it? There’s still a lot of lighter trade on the Thames.’

‘The lighter was coming from the City bank, just below the bridge. Why didn’t the lighterman see the body?’

‘You’ve got a point there – if her recollection is at all reliable. I remember the case well. She didn’t say anything about a lighter in her statement.’

‘She wasn’t asked. She was shocked at seeing the body, and she was worried about being late for work. She didn’t mention the lighter because she didn’t think of it – it didn’t seem to have anything to do with the body. She only remembered it when I asked her to go back over her whole walk across the bridge, to think back to what the river was like that morning, to describe everything she’d seen from the bridge.’

‘If we’d known about it at the time we might have found the lighterman. It was months ago now. We can certainly make inquiries, but I doubt if we’ll get anything.’

‘I wasn’t thinking of that so much, but rather of the placing of the body. If the lighterman had anything to do with it, you wouldn’t find him. The point that occurs to me is this – could the body have been dumped from the lighter a few minutes before it was seen? All inquiries so far were based on the probability that it had been put in the water somewhere much higher up the river, around Hammersmith or Putney. If it had been dumped from the lighter, the inquiries could scarcely help coming to nothing.’

The Superintendent was keenly interested now. ‘Opens up quite a new line,’ he said. ‘I wonder . . . but could it possibly have been like that? As I recall it, the medical evidence was that the body had been in the water for some hours. It was on the mud, uncovered by the tide. If it had been dumped from a lighter more or less where it was found, it would have been muddy rather than sodden. And why the cartridges? We reckoned that they were there to weight the body so that it would float below the surface.’

‘Yes, it was an ingenious reconstruction, on the evidence you had very well thought out, if I may say so. The lighter is new evidence. I can think of various reasons for keeping the body in the river before it was finally dumped, but they’re all guesswork. Whether we’ll ever get any more facts, God knows. But I’d be grateful if you’d think about the lighter.’

‘I can promise you that all right,’ the Superintendent said.