CHAPTER XVII

On the Mud

NIGEL HEARD HAROLD lock the outer door behind him. He turned right and started walking homewards. The wind had risen: waves were slamming against the river-wall, and a creaking and thudding could be heard from where Harold’s barge was moored. As he came out opposite the Cutty Sark’s darkened windows, he saw a figure sitting on the parapet above the river, in the angle made by the wall between Ballast Quay and Harold’s house. There was a low whistle. Nigel stepped over the chain and went up to the solitary figure. Once again, he got a strong impression that he was being watched or followed.

“Thought you were never coming,” said Graham Loudron.

“What do you want?”

“Ssh! Keep your voice down,” Graham jerked his finger at the wall. “Don’t want him to hear us.”

“Look, it’s damned late. Have you been hanging about here ever since?”

“More or less. I tipped you the wink inside. Didn’t you get it?”

“Yes, but I can’t understand——”

Graham’s eyes glittered with excitement in the light of the street lamp at the end of the quay. “I found it. This afternoon. Hidden on the Sharon. That reel of tape the police were looking for—at least, it must be that one. Come along. I’ll show you.”

Graham stepped off the parapet, over the gunwale of the Sharon, on to her deck. After a few seconds’ hesitation Nigel followed him. They picked their way past the capstan, over several coils of rope and a tarpaulin, to the mainmast. It was dark enough here already, and at this moment the light went out in the windows of the room where Nigel and Harold had been sitting. The barge stirred uneasily at the onset of the waves that jostled her against the quayside: her moorings creaked: overhead the halyards were slapping and a block squeaked.

“Watch out here. Part of the decking’s gone.”

Graham led the way along the starboard side of the vessel, hugging the bulwark and skirting a strip of darkness, four feet broad, which ran from the foot of the mast to the raised after-deck of the barge. As he passed the end of this strip, Nigel looked down. He could just descry a jagged edge of planking, and below it, in the barge’s hold, a sluggishly stirring, faintly gleaming mass. Mud, he thought—it must be the mud which has gradually seeped in.

Graham, bent double, entered the main hatch. Nigel followed him down the ladder into a pit of darkness which proved to be the barge’s main cabin. Graham’s electric torch lit up for a few moments the mildewed pitch-pine of the walls, a tattered old calendar still hanging from one of them, and at the forward end the jagged planking Nigel had seen from above.

“That bit of floor’s gone,” said Graham, extinguishing his torch. “Keep away from that end, or you’ll fall into the bilge. Harold had a number of planks removed from here and the deck—they were rotten—but he never got round to replacing them. Are you armed?”

“Armed? Good lord, no. Why?”

“Well, I should think we could tackle Harold all right between us.”

“But why should we have to tackle Harold?”

“You’re very slow to-night. Didn’t you hear me hinting about the tape and the barge? I thought I might get him rattled enough to give himself away. Like you tried to do with me yesterday. I wouldn’t put it past him to guess that you and I’d go after the tape when we left.”

“Oh, I see.” In the blackness, Nigel could feel rather than see the excited young man’s eyes probing in his direction. Graham went on to describe how he had given much thought to the question of the missing tape which constituted Harold’s alibi for the night of Dr. Piers’s murder. He remembered at last a loose panel, with a shallow cavity behind it, which Harold had once shown him in this very cabin.

“He’d nailed it up, of course, after putting the tape in there. But I found it all right, this afternoon.”

“You’ve chosen a very dramatic way of revealing his secret,” said Nigel equably.

“Oh well, if you’re not interested——” Graham’s voice was positively pettish.

“But I am, I am. I suppose you did it this way so that you could crow over the police and myself. It’s certainly one up to you. And it’s very odd that the police didn’t find this hiding place,” Nigel added.

“They never thought of looking for the tape here.”

“And you did?” Now that Nigel’s eyes were growing accustomed to the darkness, he could see the shape of Graham Loudron sitting on the floor, his back against the bulkhead, hands in pockets. There was a loud thump and the barge faintly shuddered.

“I say,” Nigel whispered. “Could that be Harold, jumping on to the deck?”

“Don’t be nervous. It’s only the rudder. It’s a very heavy one, and the wheel’s broken loose from its lashings, so the rudder bashes up against the quay wall when you get a steamer’s wash coming in.”

“Why do you suppose Harold hid the tape?”

“Well, isn’t that obvious? If it was found, he’d have no alibi.”

“But why hide it? Why not burn it—those tapes are highly inflammable—or just run the recorder backwards and scrub it?”

“God knows why not. I’m no expert on Harold’s mentality. All I can say is, there’s a tape in there behind the panel. Look for yourself, if you don’t believe me.”

“Oh, I’ve no doubt there is. Now.”

“What d’you mean, ‘now’?”

“Well,” Nigel calmly told him, “the police examined this barge from stem to stern some days ago. They found no tape. But let’s see it, anyway.”

“See for yourself.” Graham shone the torch beam at the loose panel. Nigel moved over, withdrew the panel, and took out the reel of tape which stood on end behind it.

“What did I tell you?” said Graham, triumphantly.

“Oh, I didn’t doubt there’d be a reel there. A reel you’d faked up, with a telephone bell ringing.” Weighing the reel in his hand, he made a gesture as if to toss it into the bilge, then put it in his overcoat pocket. “You really are the most transparently foolish murderer I’ve ever come across.”

Clare, at her post in the porch of the empty house, had seen Graham reappear from her right about five minutes after he had walked away. He must have gone down Lassell Street, cut across to Pelton Road and returned to the waterside that way. She froze to immobility in the porch, which fortunately was in shadow from the street lamp, as he passed. He strolled, without any apparent attempt at concealment, on to Ballast Quay, where he moved out of the range of her vision: the sound of his footsteps ceased. He was evidently waiting for somebody, and that somebody could only be Nigel.

Some twenty minutes later the outer door of Harold Loudron’s house opened. Two voices said good night, and Nigel emerged. So unfurtive had Graham’s movements been that, though she knew he was a double murderer—or at least Nigel believed him to be—she could not for a moment entertain the idea that Graham would try anything on, here, to-night. Then Clare remembered how Sharon had been strangled, at this time of night, in the dark passage only fifty yards from where she stood. She hurried silently after Nigel and was about to call out a warning to him, when she heard his voice in amicable conversation with Graham. She paused for a moment in her tracks, the wind whipping her headscarf: Nigel surely knows what he is doing—I must let him play it his way, and not interfere.

Peering cautiously round the wall, she saw Nigel’s back as he stepped from the quay into the bows of the wrecked barge. She stood, undecided. Knock them up at the Cutty Sark and tell them Nigel was closeted with a murderer on the derelict opposite their windows? Walk home, leaving Nigel to carry out, uninterrupted, whatever his mysterious plan was? Find a telephone and ring the police? After only the briefest hesitation, Clare moved to the river-wall and soundlessly stepped on to the barge.

“And you’re the stupidest, most amateur detective,” was Graham’s schoolboyish retort. “Not even to come armed!”

“How do you know I’m not?”

Graham’s torch flashed on, its beam holding Nigel steadily. “It doesn’t much matter whether you are or not. I have a revolver, and I shall shoot if I see your hands going to your pockets.” Graham allowed the torchlight to fall for an instant on the revolver he held in his other hand. “Move back to the edge of the floor. Now sit down. Of course, I intend to shoot you anyway; but I like the idea of making you sweat a bit first.”

The torch-beam struck against Nigel’s eyes, and he closed them.

“Saying your prayers?” Graham jeered.

“What on earth will you get out of shooting me?” asked Nigel irritably.

“Pleasure.”

“A revolver shot would certainly be heard——”

“I doubt it. Listen.”

The old barge’s tackle creaked and groaned, slapped and rattled in the gusty wind: every now and then the heavy rudder thumped hard enough to shiver its timbers. Booming sounds came from the hollow lighters off Lovell’s Wharf as they pounded together.

“And even if it wasn’t heard, you’d never get away long with a third murder.”

Graham’s toneless voice had an edge of excitement on it. “Don’t you be so sure. When I shoot you, I shall tip your body over the edge there, just behind where you’re sitting. You’ll fall into the mud, which is quite deep—I’ve sounded it—and gradually suffocate, because I shan’t shoot to kill you stone-dead. Your body will sink into the mud and disappear. It might even never be found.”

“What a nasty little mind you have, my poor boy.”

“Don’t you dare patronise me!” Graham’s voice came out in a sudden spurt of venom. “It’s you who’s got to crawl to me. I’ll have you grovelling before long.”

“All right then. You’ve shot me and disposed of my body. Harold will give evidence you did not leave his house very long before I did. Other people must have spotted you hanging about here—you can’t expect the luck you had when you strangled Sharon. What’ve you arranged for an alibi? No, I’ll tell you. I bet you’ve made some childishly silly plan by which your brothers and sister will all come under suspicion: as you tried to do over Sharon’s murder.”

“Not so silly. You’ve underrated me from the start. That’s the mistake which has brought you here, into my power.”

“I haven’t underrated you at all. I saw, almost from the start, you were a particularly dangerous type—an incurable psychopath. In fact, I told Harold only just now that the murderer was a person with a hopelessly deficient sense of reality.”

“Cut out the jargon,” said Graham in his stony voice. “I’ve enough sense of reality to get rid of you.”

His eyes closed against the torch-beam which mercilessly played upon them, Nigel became aware of the smells in the derelict barge—a smell of mud, a smell of the grain she had once carried and with which she was impregnated, a smell of pervasive rottenness from cankered timbers. Or it might have been the smell of Graham Loudron.

The young man was now boasting about his scheme.

“Harold told me you were coming along here to-night. I arrived at his house first. I rang up from the hall, where he couldn’t hear me——”

“Rang up whom?”

“Who do you think? Your mistress or housekeeper or whatever you call her.”

“Clare Massinger?”

“Yes. Your —— —— —— Clare Massinger.” The vile words enunciated in that dead, toneless voice, appalled Nigel.

“I pretended it was Rebecca speaking—it took Clare in completely—and found out you had left your house. I said James had gone out somewhere. When the police start to look for you to-morrow, they’ll have all the same old suspects again: Harold—you were last heard of at his house: James out again, perhaps visiting a patient, perhaps not: Becky, who’d got out of bed to telephone your house, and had heard where you’d gone, and might have lain in wait for you along here: and of course, myself. I never make the mistake of giving myself too definite an alibi.”

“The mistake you make, my boy, is talking too much. While you’ve been chattering away about your cleverness, at least one person has come on to the deck and is listening—just up above my head there.”

It almost worked. Graham’s eyes switched upwards, the torch beam wavered: but not for long enough to allow Nigel to gather himself from his sitting position and make a leap.

“That was a feeble piece of bluff,” Graham complacently remarked.

Clare had pulled her head back just in time to avoid the torch-beam. She knew herself to be in a desperate quandary. If she called out for help, Graham would shoot Nigel at once. If she went for help, Nigel might well be killed before she returned with it. Besides, what could anyone do? Graham, at the side of the cabin, was protected by the decking above his head: it was Nigel, his face a white disc in the torchlight, who sat beneath the gaping hole where the deck timbers had been removed. The only way to get at Graham would be to shoot down at him diagonally from the forward end of that long rent in the deck: but Clare had nothing to shoot with. If only Graham could be enticed out from under the shelter of the decking, perhaps she could drop something on his head. Stealthily she crawled over the barge, groping for some heavy object. She encountered plenty of heavy objects, but they were all firmly fastened to the deck. There was the after-hatch: could she make her way down that and forward again into the main cabin, without Graham’s hearing her? No, not a hope—she did not even know that there was a way through, and she had no torch to find it if there was one.

Clare’s mind went numb now. She slid face-down on to the deck, weeping hopelessly. After a timeless pause of blank despair, she became aware that her right hand was touching a coil of rope. Carrying it, she crept back to the edge of the long rift in the deck. They were still talking. Thank God for that! Clare’s cold fingers began to uncoil the rope.

Nigel was talking, not because he thought there was the least hope of rescue from his predicament, but out of the mere animal instinct to prolong his life. To follow Graham, unarmed, into the barge had been a risk, of course: but he had gambled on its leading to a show-down, and he’d won that bet; and it shouldn’t have been so risky a bet for himself—Wright had assured him there was a tail on Graham Loudron. Graham must have shaken off this tail: or maybe some dumb plain-clothes operative was standing about on the quay waiting for Graham and Nigel to reappear from the stinking bowels of the barge.

“You killed Sharon,” said Nigel, “not because she knew something which would give you away, but because she’d told us this something. It was sheer vindictiveness on your part, you vicious little monster.”

“Talk on. You amuse me.”

“She’d told me that she waited ten minutes in your room before you appeared, and that when you did you were ‘madly above yourself,’ in a state of strange excitement—just as you were to-night in Harold’s house. You get a kick out of killing, don’t you?”

“Mouth beginning to feel a bit dry yet?”

“And the next morning you gave yourself away, irrevocably, by your surprise and consternation when you found the body was not there in the bath. Well, it’s lucky for your mother she didn’t live to see what a bloodthirsty little maniac you’ve grown up into.”

The torch-beam shook. Nigel could imagine the expression on Graham’s face.

“Leave my mother out of it, you —— ——!”

“Very well. We’ll turn to your father. You’d found his diary. You kept that piece of it for insurance—it looked good as a confession of suicide—and showed it to me when you felt I was uncomfortably close on your heels. It was quite a bold stroke on your part.”

“Thank you. May I have that in writing?”

“You’d been waiting for an opportunity to kill your father in such a way that it’d be taken for suicide. Also, you wanted to keep him in suspense for as long as possible—make him sweat it out.”

“Like I’m doing to you now.”

“Your chance came when you noticed Rebecca put a sleeping-powder into his coffee that night. Would you care to carry on from there?”

“Oh, it was too easy. I went up and found him in bed, asleep. I ran a bath, took off his pyjamas—I was wearing gloves, of course: put him in the bath—then I slit his wrists under the water. That sort of woke him up. He recognised me all right,” Graham added with an atrocious satisfaction, “before he croaked.”

‘‘You’d always wanted to do it that way, hadn’t you?”

“What do you mean?”

“Make him bleed to death. Like your mother, who died of hæmorrhages. ‘Poetic justice’ always appeals to the undeveloped, infantile mentality. Why, only yesterday you said to Rebecca, ‘He seduced my mother, and then let her bl-bleeding well starve to death.’ You never stutter. You just stopped yourself saying, ‘let her bleed to death.’ You can’t get that out of your head. I wouldn’t be surprised if this same penny-dreadful idea, quite as much as the notion of inculpating Rebecca, was what made you use her mother’s stocking.”

“I’d like to have killed her too—their mother.”

“Well, you could dig her body up and spit on it. That’d be fun, wouldn’t it, little boy?”

There was a hissing breath from Graham. Then he said, “You’re trying to make me lose my temper, so that I come and hit you, and you grab my gun. Don’t be puerile. You still don’t know what you’ve been up against. I’ve outwitted you at every turn, and you might as well admit it.”

How odd, thought Nigel, that in my last minutes on earth, I should be aware how the damp from these floorboards I’m sitting on is seeping through my coat, and feel quite resentful about it!

“You imagine yourself the cunning, heroic avenger,” he said, conscious that an absurdly inappropriate lecturing tone was coming into his voice. “That’s another typical delusion, like the delusion that you’re going to get away with these murders.”

“Perhaps I’m not. But, you see, I don’t care,” replied the young man with dreadful, unmistakable sincerity. “That’s why I’m so dangerous and why I’ve had all the luck so far—because I just didn’t care what happened to me, once I’d made my father bleed to death.”

“I asked you once if you hadn’t got any ambition. You said you’d like to be a first-rate jazz pianist; but your face gave you away—you’d already achieved your ambition. Nevertheless, don’t flatter yourself that you killed him to avenge your mother. That’s a nice, convenient delusion. Makes you feel big, doesn’t it, the idea of being a ruthless avenger?”

“Where will it hurt most to get the bullet?”

“The fact is, you’re rotten with resentment. You smell of it. You kid yourself you did it as retribution for what your mother suffered. But you can’t even be honest about that. You were getting your own back for what happened to you as a boy after she died—you couldn’t take it, even then—lots of boys have gone through as bad or worse, and not turned into futile little self-pitying thugs. No, you’re just out for yourself. You killed your father because of that, and because you wanted to get your hands on your share of his money——”

“That’s a lie!” Graham almost screamed.

“——to bolster up your pitiful ego. You’d have cut your own mother’s throat if it had suited your book.”

The silence that followed was more than the cessation of speech: it seemed to eat its way outwards like a pool of acid from the now just visible figure of Graham, corroding and corrupting the dank cabin against whose wall he stood. Nigel could talk no longer. He felt exhausted, exasperated, horribly soiled, too, rather than frightened. The barge creaked as another gust of wind struck it: overhead, a halyard chattered.

“I could break your nose with a bullet,” said Graham at last in an almost erotic murmur. “Or plug you in the pit of the stomach.” The torch-beam moved down. “Or smash your knee-cap.” The beam focused on Nigel’s knees. “Go down on your knees.”

“What?”

“I said I’d make you grovel to me. If you go down on your knees and beg me for mercy, I’ll shoot you in the head. Otherwise, I’ll put the bullet where it’ll take you much longer to die.”

“Judging by the way your hand is shaking I doubt if you could hit anything but the cabin wall.”

“Go on. Grovel.”

Nigel began to get up from the floor. Now he was on hands and knees, and just about to flex his legs into a sprinter’s starting position and hurl himself at Graham, who had come away from the side of the cabin and was standing only a few feet away. The floor felt slimy under Nigel’s hands. His muscles were cramped—they hadn’t the spring to launch him at his enemy. The thought flashed across his mind that in three seconds he would be paying for the trick he had played on James Loudron.

Clare had made a running knot and noose with one end of the rope. She had taken a turn round a stanchion with the slack. Now, crouching at the side of the gap in the deck, she waited. She prayed for Graham to come out from beneath the shelter of the decking at the side of the cabin. She heard his threats, and saw the torch-beam moving from Nigel’s face to his stomach to his knees. And then, at last, Graham himself moved. He was standing almost directly beneath her.

With the gesture of one throwing a hoop in a fairground booth, Clare tossed the noose, which spread out and fell over Graham’s head. The sound of its falling, the flash of it before his eyes, baulked Graham’s aim and at the same time startled him into pulling the trigger. The bullet flew higher than he had intended, and to the right. But, the instant before, Nigel had straightened up to make his desperate spring, so the bullet hit him in the left shoulder.

Clare saw its impact send him staggering backwards, to fall from the edge of the broken floor into the hold. She hauled at the slack of the rope, made it fast, then jumped down through the gaping deck into the cabin. The noose had tightened round Graham’s neck, and Clare’s convulsive haul on the rope had lifted him off his feet. He dropped torch and revolver, to scrabble at the choking noose. He was stretching his toes, trying to reach the floor, a dangling, dancing puppet.

Sobbing, Clare groped about for the torch on the slimy floor. Mercifully, the bulb had not been broken by the fall. She ran to the edge of the flooring. The torch-beam showed Nigel’s body, face down in the mud: he was slowly sinking into it, and without a struggle. Clare jumped down. The mud, glistening like chocolate blancmange, received her: she managed to get to her feet, but the mud was still up to her thighs, and when she tried for a purchase on Nigel’s shoulders, her feet slid on the slippery bottom of the barge.

After a violent effort, holding the torch between her teeth, Clare turned Nigel’s body over so that his face, thick with mud, was exposed. Tearing off her head-scarf, she began to clear out the mud which plugged his nostrils. She did not know whether he was alive or dead—only that she must free him somehow from the viscous, porridge-like stuff which coated him all over. She was talking to him, or his corpse, in a loving, urgent murmur. “Wake up, darling,” she heard herself saying. “It’s Clare. You’re all right. Wake up! Please.”

The clogged eyelids fluttered. The eyes opened. “Put out that bloody torch, you bastard,” Nigel mumbled.

“Oh, thank God! It’s me, love.” She pulled him upright against her body, but his legs had no strength in them and it was almost impossible to prevent him buckling and collapsing into the mud again.

“I can’t hold you up much longer,” Clare despairingly said.

“Good old Clare.” Nigel sighed comfortably, as if he was about to go to sleep. She gave him a violent shake.

“Ouch, that hurts, blast you, darling!”

It woke Nigel up anyway.

“Where did it hit you?”

“Shoulder,” he said, wincing. “What do we do now?”

Clare shone her torch along the hold. As far as its light reached, it showed nothing but a level expanse of mud. The floor through which Clare had jumped was just within reach of her fingers: she could drag herself up into the cabin, and run for help, but while she was getting it Nigel would sink down again into the ooze. And he was far too heavy for her to haul up, alone, with a rope. The deadly chill of the mud clasping her legs and thighs began to seep into her heart. Nigel opened his eyes a bit wider.

“Why not yell for help?” he inquired.

The extraordinary thing, Clare realised, was that in the stress and horror of the last few minutes, she simply had not thought of that.

She yelled, time and again, at the top of her voice, feeling her cries snatched away by the gusty wind, drowned by the rattle of halyards and the stunning thumps of the unlashed rudder, or never even penetrating out of this mausoleum of mud and rotting timbers. They were heard, however, at last—by Harold Loudron, who came running out of a door of his house which gave direct on to the quay. All but spent, Clare heard him shout and then the noise of feet running along the deck. Nigel’s voice was raised to the rescuer now in a croak. “Look out! He’s got a revolver!”

“It’s all right, darling,” said Clare. “He won’t use it.”

“Graham? He certainly will—unless he’s escaped.”

Light-headed with relief, Clare almost giggled. “Don’t fuss so. He can’t escape.”

“What on earth d’you mean?”

“I—he’s—well, you see, I hanged him.”