The Floating Admiral - Agatha Christie [41]
Rudge sat down on the bank and stared at the river. The tide was just running down to the slack, and the ripples went clucking and clapping against the sides of the punt and the boat-house. On the other side lay the Admiral’s boat, shivering slightly as the wash of the stream lifted her stern and dimmed the outlines of her mirrored shape in among the brown shadows. Between bank and bank the sun blazed full on the water. Rudge found the tune running in his head:—
“Ol’ man River, dat ol’ man River.
He must know sumfin’, he don’ say nuffin’—”
That reminded him that he had promised to get his landlady Paul Robeson’s record of “Swing low, sweet chariot.” And his wireless needed a new accumulator. Curse the river, with its perpetual chuckle and its imbecile tidal vagaries. He knew the Ouse at Huntingdon—slow, solitary, regulated by pumps and weirs, and little used for boating because of its derelict and weed-grown locks. He had seen rivers in Scotland, tumbling and brawling and full of stones, useful for nothing but for fishing in—if you liked that kind of thing. He had even taken a holiday trip to Ireland and seen the majestic Shannon harnessed and set to churning out electricity. But this river was a secretive beast and no good to anybody. What was the sense of a river with three feet between its high and low tide twice a day?
He looked at the mooring-post again (“Swing low, sweet chario-ot”) and measured with his eye the distance between the hitch of rope and the level of the river. Nearly eight feet. Neddy was right. Anybody on the river waiting to loose the boat at low tide would have to cut the painter. The boat would swing very low indeed (“coming for to carry me home”), and the painter would need to be a long one, if the boat was to ride in the water. Suddenly he got up, started out of his drowsy ruminations.
“I say, sonny,” he said aloud.
Peter emerged from the boat-house.
“How long should you say your painter was?”
“It’s about three fathoms—eighteen feet, you know. It has to be pretty long, you see, to allow for the fall of the tide.”
“Yes, I thought it would be.” Rudge measured with his eye the end of rope as it trailed in the stream, then tried to remember the look of the end left on the Vicar’s boat. Five feet or so at the most, he thought. But he couldn’t be sure. Probably it was quite all right, but, just as a matter of routine, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to fit the two cut ends together. He stared at the post again. He could see clearly in his mind’s eye the Vicar’s boat with the new manilla cut through and Neddy Ware demonstrating on his plug of tobacco the sharpness of the knife that had made the cut. The sun on the river was dazzling. Gazing at the post, Rudge’s eyes swam with water. But it seemed to him that that end was cut less cleanly than the other.
“What is it?” asked Peter, staring first at the post and then at the Inspector.
“Nothing much,” said Rudge, “just a little job I thought of, which I shall have to see to presently. I’ll go across now, I think, if you are not wanting the punt.”
He poled himself across without disaster, and found P.C. Bancock stolidly reading a newspaper on the farther bank. Telling him to keep an eye on the house and to take any telephone messages, Rudge hurriedly climbed into the police car and drove round across Fernton Bridge to Lingham. The Vicar’s boat was there, having been carefully loaded on to a farm cart and locked up in the “Dance Hall” of the local pub, where also lay, in charge of the local undertaker, the body of Admiral Penistone. On consideration Rudge had thought this the best arrangement, since the inquest would have to be held at Lingham, and it seemed better to leave the body there for the present, bringing it back, if necessary, to Rundel Croft for the funeral.
But the body did not interest Rudge for the moment. The boat with its painter was his object. On entering the “Dance Hall” Rudge found the