The Floating Admiral - Agatha Christie [92]
He had been cunning, had Neddy Ware. The Inspector ruefully acknowledged to himself that he had been completely taken in by the old man. Neddy Ware had given him precisely correct information on all matters concerning the river and its tides which he could have checked from anyone else who was familiar with them; even on points which might have told against himself he had been accurate; but what about his speculations, which the Inspector had unconsciously put on practically the same basis as the rest? It was difficult now to disentangle speculation from fact, even in consultation with his note-book, but there seemed to Rudge two main ideas which Ware had deftly given him and which had lain in his mind ever since as a basis on which any theory of the crime must be founded: that if the Admiral had taken his boat out at all that night he must have taken it down-stream, and that it would have taken him an hour to row to Whynmouth. How did these two ideas look now?
For the first there really seemed no reason at all. Why must the Admiral have gone down-stream? So that the abandoned boat could have drifted to where it was found at the time it was found. But was it found at that time? And at that place? The whole of Ware’s first story must now be viewed with the deepest suspicion.
What about the second point, then? From Rundel Croft to Whynmouth, by water, was about two and three-quarter miles. The Admiral must have started at between a quarter-past and half-past ten. At that time the tide was, even according to Ware’s own information, at its strongest ebb. Could a lusty man not row a boat, with a swiftly flowing tide to help him, at faster than a slow walking pace? Nonsense; of course he could. Twice as fast. Very well, then. Neddy Ware had wanted to deceive the police as to the time the Admiral could have reached Whynmouth that night (assuming for the moment that on the other point he had been speaking the truth, and it was down-stream the Admiral had gone). Now why the deuce had he wanted to do that?
At this point the Inspector mechanically pushed his full plate of gooseberry pie away from him and allowed one of his landlady’s best efforts to get stone cold.
There were only two possible reasons that Rudge could see; one, that somebody had an alibi for half-past eleven, but not for eleven o’clock; and the other, to make the police think that the man who called at the Lord Marshall just after eleven was an impostor—which was exactly what they did think. But in that case the man really was the Admiral. …
This was getting altogether too difficult. Rudge noted the point for future reference, and followed another line.
There was another advantage too in shifting forward the time of events by half an hour or so. Just after midnight the brother, Walter Fitzgerald, had been in the Admiral’s study. This extra half-hour gave him plenty of time to get there, break the news to his sister, and begin his search for File X, by midnight. Without it, Rudge had found the time-table exceedingly cramped.
Well, there already were the answers to any number of his thirty-nine articles of doubt. Rudge turned them up in his note-book and glanced through them, to see whether this intervention of Neddy Ware’s cleared up any more puzzles.
It did, at once. 26: Why was the Admiral wearing a coat? Rudge remembered the difficulty. If it was the Admiral who had taken out his boat that night, and a fairly warm night at that, why wear