CHAPTER IV

A Wind from the North-East

SIX DAYS LATER—it was a Saturday—Nigel awoke early with the vague sensation that some change had occurred since he went to sleep. His attention focused drowsily upon the curtains. They were no longer, as they had been every morning for over a week, grey-black rectangles backed by the blanketing fog outside: they glowed, and a strip of dazzling gold showed between them. Getting up, he parted them and looked out. Sunlight. Trees in the park waving their branches. A clear, cold, grey-blue sky. The claustrophobic hood of fog had been lifted away during the night by a wind that was tugging straight in his direction the white ensign over the Naval College. A north-easter.

Dressing quietly so as not to waken Clare, he went out. High up the hill here, the wind drilled into his right eye and numbed the cheekbone below it. Presently he was passing the Loudrons’ house. In the sunlight, the white paint of its windows and noble portico looked as if they had just been hosed down. Whatever its secret might be, the house was keeping it: no trace of its owner had been discovered since he disappeared eight days ago; not even the diary which might have explained the aberration, the despair, the stratagem—whatever it was that had taken him out to be swallowed up alive in the fog.

Alive? One had to presume so. The local D.D.I., with whom Nigel had got in touch through the medium of Chief Detective-Inspector Wright at Scotland Yard, assured him that they had given No. 6 a discreet going-over, and there was no evidence whatsoever of its owner’s having left the house dead. Radio and newspaper appeals had produced the usual crop of eye-witnesses who claimed to have seen Dr. Piers Loudron in a variety of places, from Deptford to Barrow-in-Furness, and the usual handful of harmless lunatics who eagerly confessed to having murdered him. These had all been sieved out, and nothing material was left in the mesh. If indeed he had suffered an attack of amnesia, he would probably be dead by now—of starvation; for his wallet was in the pocket of the suit he had taken off that night, he had drawn no money from a bank since his disappearance, and no hospitals or casual wards had taken him in.

He might just conceivably have been kidnapped. But why? And why should the kidnappers remain silently undemanding?

The local police, faced by this blind wall of negatives, were inclined to think that he must have left the house that night and fallen, either accidentally or on purpose, into the river. The Connemara-tweed overcoat was, after all, missing; and it was not altogether inconceivable that, in a state of mental derangement, the old man should put on no other clothing to walk out of the house to his death. Late at night or in the early hours of the morning, the fog being so thick, he could easily have got to the river, three minutes’ walk from his house, unobserved. But the fog, clamped down on the river day after day, had prevented any effective testing of this theory.

As Nigel strode into the High Road, the clock on St. Alfege’s church said twenty-five past seven. Unconsciously he quickened his pace. The river seemed to be drawing him towards it. The bodies of the drowned, made buoyant by the gases of their putrefaction, rise slowly to float on the surface again after six to ten days. It was now the eighth day since Dr. Piers Loudron had vanished, and the first of clear visibility.

All the way down the hill Nigel had been hearing the steam whistles of ships, released from the fog’s thrall, making their way upstream or downstream round the U-bend of the Isle of Dogs. As he turned left out of Nelson Parade, he saw the derricks, mast, high bridge structure and funnel of a vessel sliding past the pier. High tide, or something near it. The air thrummed with a vibration of many engines, and was impregnated with familiar river-smells—diesel oil, mud, tar, rotting detritus, chemical fumes—a sour amalgam of smells blown inland by the wind, which had a taste of salt in it too. The pier turnstile gates would be padlocked still. Nigel walked past the great brown-black hull of the Cutty Sark, under the towering tracery of its three masts and rigging, on to the railed space to the left of the pier. Early workers were pouring into the domed building which housed the lift that would take them down to the tunnel beneath the Thames: they would push their bicycles along its quarter-mile of white-tiled walls, while tugs, coasters, cargo-liners thrashed their way overhead.

Leaning on the rail and looking left, Nigel watched a huge, blue-funnelled Swedish cargo-liner, in ballast, being manœuvred away from its moorings opposite Deptford creek by two Sun class tugs, whose raked smoke-stacks and squat hulls, dwarfed by the Swede’s tremendous hulk, gave them a prissy, self-important air. Hugging the far bank to avoid the full thrust of the ebb, three deep-waisted Dutch family ships followed one another up-river, their motors pulsing heavily. The wash of passing vessels slopped lumps of water up the stone steps between Nigel and the domed building, from which Graham Loudron at this moment emerged and walked rapidly away. What could the young man have been doing across the river at this hour of the morning? Nigel wondered.

He himself now moved off towards the Naval College. In the right-angle formed by the river wall beyond the pier, an old man was leaning over the iron railing and gazing lugubriously down at the water. Nigel stopped beside him. The water was covered with a sluggishly-heaving carpet of debris, driven here by the north-east wind—packing-cases, bales of hay, tins of polish, halves of grape-fruit, a dead cat, a gym-shoe, a motor tyre, and thousands of pieces of wood; timbers big enough to have been the stern-posts of vanished sailing ships, planks from Scandinavian saw-mills, a mass of smaller lengths like kindling wood, all jostled together in a sort of flexuous, sodden mosaic which, like oil on water, subdued the waves made by passing ships and by the wind blowing diagonally across the tide.

“All that wood,” said the lugubrious man, spitting copiously into it. “Floats down the river. Then it floats up again. Backwards and forwards. Year after year. Makes you think, guv, don’t it?”

“What I can’t understand,” said Nigel, “is why the whole river isn’t blocked by it, like pack-ice. Where does all the rest of the wood go? Year after year, for centuries, people have been chucking wood into the river; it’s been falling off ships and barges, floating out from wharves. And it doesn’t sink for ages. It ought to have choked up the river long ago.”

“Time,” remarked his companion, “like an ever-rolling stream, bears all its sons away.”

“Yes, but——”

“Funny tricks this old river plays,” said the man, sucking his moustache. “Bloke I knew, years ago, got knocked in one night, making fast a German ship at Grunton’s Wharf. Couldn’t swim. ’E just went under, like a bit of bleeding pig-iron. Grunton’s Wharf’s on this side of the river, beyond the power station”—the old man pointed east. “Now, guv, where d’you reckon they’d find the corpse?”

Nigel gave the problem his full attention. “Depends what the state of the tide was when he fell in.”

“Top of the ebb. Like now, as it might be.”

“Well, I suppose the ebb might pull him out, along the river bottom. But the current round the Isle of Dogs has a strong southerly thrust at the bend there, so he’d be bound to get pushed back to this bank, wouldn’t he?”

“That’s what you’d think,” replied the old man with relish. “But they found him, couple of weeks later, over there.” He jerked his head towards the Luralda Wharf, on the far side of the river. “Nobody couldn’t account for it. Might’ve been an eddy—he could have got into the outflow from the power station. Some said suction.”

“Suction?”

“Screws of all them vessels passing. Pull you out towards them, see? Mash you up too. Old Bert was mashed up something horrible.”

“In the midst of life, we are in death.”

“You bloody said it, guv.” His faded eyes gazed dreamily at Nigel. “Ah. Old Father Thames. ’E’s sly all right. You’ve got to watch him. Mate of mine—he was master of a tug——”

After hearing another mortuary reminiscence, Nigel bade the old longshoreman good-morning and walked on past the Naval College, its grey stone gleaming in the sunshine, to the far end of the esplanade. Here, in the shallow inlet by the Trafalgar Tavern, another carpet of flotsam sullenly heaved. On the black wall beneath the building a high-water mark showed—only two feet below the little balcony of the central ground-floor window. It occurred to Nigel that, at high water, a body could be put into the river from such a window with hardly a splash. Gazing unseeingly at the wooden jetty of the Curlew rowing club, he did a sum in his head. High water to-day was at about 6 a.m. On the night Dr. Piers Loudron had disappeared, high tide must have been around 10 p.m.; and by 11 p.m. the ebb would have been running strongly.

He walked round the back of the Trafalgar Tavern, along Crane Street, past Holy Trinity Hospital—the seventeenth century alms-house over whose toy-like façade towered the chimneys of the power station; then under the clattering conveyers of the power station, through a scrap-iron yard, to emerge again on the river front opposite the Cutty Sark pub. At a wharf just beyond, partly hidden by a wall, a green flag with “Wreck” lettered upon it fluttering from the mast, lay a Thames sailing-barge. This must be the one which Harold Loudron had bought some years ago. Nigel peered round the wall, from which the bows of the barge projected. The bulwarks were broken off in places. A section of the deck planking amidships was gone, revealing a turgid compost of mud and water in the hold. The wheel, unlashed, made half turns as the waves thumped the great rudder, whose banging was answered by a kind of hollow, distant thunder, like the sound of the skittle game in Rip Van Winkle, as the swell bumped together a row of empty lighters moored side by side at Lovell’s Wharf.

Just beyond this barge, there showed the roof and upper story of a house, the rest concealed by the high wall. A door in the wall gave access to it: the front of the house must be right over the river. “Between the Cutty Sark pub and Lovell’s Wharf,” Harold Loudron had told him. It was certainly a strange place for the Loudrons to live in—the dapper young City gent and his exotic, restless wife—here amongst the racket of riveting, the grime from the power-station, the hissing roar of oxy-acetylene burners in the scrap-yard. They had the pub handy, and a glorious view down the reach past the Isle of Dogs. But otherwise the situation seemed quite out of character for both of them. No doubt, thought Nigel, it had seemed “amusing” at first: a new sensation for Sharon; and of course they got a rent-free house—it had belonged to Harold’s mother: but the novelty must have worn off pretty soon.

Sirens blew from across the Thames. Eight o’clock. Nigel began to retrace his steps, hungry for breakfast. From Ballast Quay he saw a police launch on patrol approaching up-river from the direction of the West India docks, a white moustache of foam bristling at its bows. He came out again on the esplanade by the Trafalgar Tavern. A white-hulled Spanish steamer, of graceful outlines, was gliding eastwards. Between this vessel and the shore, a pack of seagulls screamed and skidded in the air, circling over some debris. As Nigel took out his field-glasses and began to focus them, the police launch emerged from behind a collier unloading at the power-house jetty, and its bows lifted to the acceleration of its powerful engine. The river police had seen what Nigel too was looking at now, clear in the circle of his binoculars—the thing he had not come out this early morning with the least expectation of seeing, yet which, the moment he set eyes on it, made him feel that it had been waiting for him all these days to come out and find it, directing his steps this way like a destiny—a hulk of flesh, waterlogged and dirty-white, screamed over by gulls, lumbering and sliding with other flotsam on the choppy river.

The launch stopped on the leeward side of the body, obscuring Nigel’s view. On its after-deck, behind the cabin, two policemen got busy, one with a boat-hook, the other with a coil of rope. Wind and tide swinging the launch round, Nigel was shortly able to observe their catch. As it was hauled aboard, the rope noosed beneath its arms, the torso stood upright for a moment on the water. Decay and long immersion had bloated the face almost out of recognition, giving it a negroid appearance: the swollen tongue protruded from blubber lips in a grimace: the ruined eyes were smears of white. Only the silver-white of hair and beard suggested that this could be the remains of the elegant, vivacious Dr. Piers Loudron.

The policemen hauled again, their faces tight with repugnance. As the body slid over the gunwale, Nigel saw that it had no legs. The policemen laid it on deck, putting a tarpaulin over it, and the launch kicked into full speed.

Nigel took a few steps homeward; then, on an impulse, turned round and hurried back towards Harold Loudron’s house. The door in the wall was not locked. He passed through, across a small yard; hammered on the front door, rang the bell several times. At last Harold Loudron appeared in a cardinal-red dressing gown, his black hair dishevelled.

“What the devil——? Oh, it’s you. Has something happened?”

“Can I come in a minute?”

Harold led the way into a sitting-room, which ran the length of the house, with three tall sash windows overlooking the river. Nigel sat down on a window-seat cushioned with red leather. The room was panelled with birch, unpainted, and at one end of it was a dining alcove divided from the rest by a movable glass partition. Brilliant Mexican mats adorned the pear-wood floor. It all looked singularly like a model for gracious, modernistic living out of an Ideal Homes exhibition, except for the dust which lay thick on rubber-plants, tables and shelves—a general air of tristesse and seediness, which gave it the pathos of a room in an expensive doll’s house neglected by some spoilt child.

“I think your father has been found,” said Nigel.

Harold Loudron stared at him a moment, in what looked very like consternation. Then his eyes lit up (artificial lighting? Nigel wondered).

“Found! Oh, but that’s splendid. Thank God! We were——”

“I’m sorry. Not alive. I’ve just seen a body taken out of the river. I’m afraid it’s very likely his.”

“Oh God! How awful!” Harold lit a cigarette shakily: then, remembering his manners, offered his gold case to Nigel and said, “Good of you to tell us. You know, in a way it’s a sort of relief. We’d been worrying terribly. The suspense, you know.”

A relief it certainly was, of some kind, judging by the relaxation of Harold’s tense body.

“I thought you might like to ring up your brother straight away—break it to them before the police. Sometimes the police are a bit heavy-handed about——”

“Yes, of course. I’m really most grateful to——”

He broke off. Had he been on the point of saying “most grateful to your good self”? The meaningless, vulgar, business-man’s jargon would come naturally to him, thought Nigel.

“It’s a great shock,” said Harold Loudron. “I can hardly take it in yet. My father was a fine man. Greatly beloved. And so full of life.”

Harold seemed well launched upon a Rotarian-type oration, which would be more than Nigel could take on an empty stomach.

“Hadn’t you better telephone?”

“Quite.” But still Harold made no move. “You say—where did you see—er—the body being——?”

“Just beyond the Trafalgar Tavern. It had no legs.”

“What had no legs?” came a husky voice from the door. Sharon had slashed on some lipstick, but her puffy face and bedroom hair were not prepossessing.

“Darling, you shouldn’t have—Strangeways has very kindly looked in to—you must prepare yourself for a shock, I’m afraid.” Harold dithered round his wife in an uxorious manner that evidently tried her patience.

“They’ve found him, you mean?” she asked, coughing harshly.

Nigel told what he had seen. “Of course, I can’t be absolutely certain. But it had white hair and white beard. And it was the right build. We shall know soon.”

Sharon threw back her tangled red mane from over her eyes.

“But what’s this about no legs?” she asked.

“He must have been caught by a ship’s propeller.”

Sharon took three long, graceful strides to a kidney-shaped chair and sat down.

“Well, he wouldn’t have felt it.”

“Sharon! Darling!” Harold protested.

“Well, he was dead, wasn’t he? Drowned, I mean, before that?”

“I presume so,” said Nigel. “And drowning is a good deal more painful than——”

“My wife only meant that she was glad he didn’t suffer—er—from what you say happened later.” Harold spoke quite stuffily. He’s still besotted with this beautiful harpy of his, thought Nigel, glancing out of the window. Waves spanked the river wall directly below it; five or six feet below. A tug, dirty-white foam piled at its blunt bows and four empty lighters in tow, approached up the reach. It hooted four times, then twice.

“Ninety-degree turn to port,” said Harold absently.

“Sailor-boy!” Sharon’s voice was mildly satirical. She turned her diminished green eyes upon Nigel. “He’ll run away to sea one day if he isn’t careful.”

“Well, I’d better go and telephone,” said Harold doubtfully. No one gainsaying him, he went. Sharon at once slipped over to occupy the window-seat beside Nigel. Her wrap fell open and a waft of warm flesh smell came from her.

“This is going to upset poor old brother James,” she said.

“Him particularly?”

“Becky will feel upset. But actually it’ll be a merciful release for her. But James—he’s been shaking in his shoes. The practice. What’ll the patients say? The senior partner committing suicide. Oh dear, oh dear!”

“What makes you think Dr. Piers committed suicide?”

“Well, what else could it be?” Her eyes held his in a long, calculating look: there was a sort of excitement in them too. “You don’t mean—what they call ‘foul play ’?”

“Or accident. Who knows? I see it’ll be awkward for James, though, whatever it turns out to be. And Graham?”

Her eyes filmed over. “What about him?”

“Will he be very upset? I got the impression he was the favourite son.”

“It would take an earthquake to upset young Graham,” she murmured, frowning a little.

“Which brings us to Harold.”

“I suppose it does. But what’s all this in aid of? Why should you worry which of us is worried? Not that those anxious wrinkles on your forehead aren’t rather fascinating.”

“You and Harold will be glad of the money, I imagine.”

For a moment Nigel thought she was going to claw at his face with those blood-red nails of hers. But she controlled herself, digging them into the palms of her hands instead, and replied in a sort of husky purr:

“Yes, we shall. For one thing, we can get out of this dreary dump.”

“You don’t like it? I think it’s rather a romantic house.”

“So did I, once,” she said bitterly. “Of course, your generation were suckers for romance, weren’t you?”

Romance? thought Nigel. The distressed areas, the hunger marchers, the new barbarism of tinpot Tamburlaines? “And your lot is clear-eyed, disillusioned, realistic? The I’m-all-right-Jack brigade?”

“We only live once. Why the hell shouldn’t we enjoy ourselves?”

“Why not? Only it seems to make you either bored or bad-tempered. But perhaps you enjoy that.”

Sharon smiled a secret smile, her eyes glittering. She had roused this impassive man: the only antagonism she recognised was sex-antagonism, to her the first sign of sexual interest.

“Not all the time,” she said. “Tell me, are you a one-woman man?”

“I never consider propositions before breakfast.”

Sharon gasped, as if he had punched her. “You’re damned insulting, I must say.”

“I thought you were against the romantic approach.”

She looked at him consideringly. Then, leaning back so that her collar-bones stood out in ridges, she said, “Shall I give you breakfast here?”

“Why not?” said Harold Loudron, entering. “Do stay, won’t you, Strangeways? We could ring up your house and tell them——”

“It’s very kind of you, but I’d better be off.”

Sharon gave him a hot dry hand. As he went out, he felt her gaze upon his back, tenacious as brambles across a path.