The Floating Admiral - Agatha Christie [30]
“Ever tried to cut new manilla with an ordinary pocket knife? No, I suppose not. But you can take it from me that you’d find it a pretty tough job. And when you’d finished you’d have left a frayed edge. But this rope was cut clean through, like as though it had been cut with one stroke of a very sharp knife. Anyway, cut it was, and the boat left to drift.”
Ware tapped out his pipe, and began slowly to refill it. He drew from his pocket the end of a cake of tobacco, which he shaved carefully into the palm of his hand. “This knife is pretty sharp,” he remarked. “I keep it so on purpose to cut up my baccy. But I wouldn’t reckon to cut through that painter with it at one stroke. No, it was a sharper and stronger knife than this that did the job, I’ll be bound.”
While he proceeded to fill and light his pipe, Inspector Rudge’s thoughts were busy. The possibility that Admiral Penistone had taken his boat out again and rowed down the river seemed to be greatly strengthened. In that case, he had probably been murdered somewhere near Whynmouth, and his body had reached the spot where it was found much as Ware had supposed. But was there any way of verifying this?
In the first place, what time had he started? The doctor had given it as his opinion that he had been killed before midnight. Again, if he had indeed been the visitor to the Lord Marshall, he had reached Whynmouth soon after eleven. His departure from Rundel Croft could not have been very long deferred; his impatience to leave the Vicarage seemed to point to a desire to start as soon as possible. His excuse to his niece for not going up to the house with her, that he wished to smoke a cigar before going in, was probably mainly to get her out of the way. He had probably intended to start as soon as she was out of sight and hearing.
But if he had done so, how was it that the Vicar, who was in the summer-house till twenty minutes past ten, had not seen him? Suddenly Rudge remembered the Vicar’s evident confusion when he had heard of the murder. Was it possible that he had actually seen the Admiral’s departure on this mysterious journey, and had his own very good reasons for not disclosing the fact? It was at least possible.
The Inspector’s reflections were interrupted by a remark from Ware, who had at last succeeded in getting his pipe to draw satisfactorily. “Queer thing that I don’t seem to recognise Admiral Penistone,” he said. “There was only one of that name in the Navy List when I was serving, and I saw him more than once.”
“Did you? When was that?” asked Rudge eagerly.
“Why, on the China Station, twenty years ago and more. I was in the Rutlandshire then, one of the three-funnelled County class cruisers, she was, and the very devil to roll in a seaway. I remember once being caught in the edge of a typhoon, and she pretty nigh carried everything away, alow and aloft. That’s her, over there.”
He pointed with the stem of his pipe to one of the photographs that adorned the room. “Her sister ship was on the same station with us. Huntingdonshire, she was called, and you couldn’t tell t’other from which, except by the bands on their funnels. Our six-inch guns for’ard was a bit higher above the deck, that was all. Huntingdonshire’s skipper was a man called Penistone, and a better officer you couldn’t meet. The Huntingdonshires swore by him. She was always a happy ship, all on board properly looked after. And smart too. Captain Penistone had been a gunnery expert before he was promoted, and he kept it up on his own ship. When he commanded her, Huntingdonshire had the best gunnery record in the Navy.”
“Was this the same man whose body you saw in the Vicar’s boat this morning?” asked Rudge.
“Well, if it was, he’s changed a lot since I knew him. Not that the body I saw wasn’t about the same height, and all that. But, if it was the same face, it has changed a lot in the last twenty years. It was the expression I go by mostly. The Captain Penistone I knew was a jovial sort of chap, with