Longshot полностью

Doone with slight reluctance admitted that there seemed to be marble stuck to the underside of one more floorboard on each side of the hole.

The plank on the table was about eight inches across. Harry had taken three of them down with him; five altogether had been doctored. The trap with its missing section of beam had been three and a half feet across, and Harry, taking the envelope bait, had gone through its centre.

‘Have you finished snooping round my place now?’ Sam demanded, and Doone shook his head.

‘I want to work on my boat,’ Sam objected.

‘Go ahead, sir. Never mind my men, if they’re there.’

‘Right.’ Sam stood up with bouncing energy, quite unlike a patient suddenly stricken with flu. ‘Bye, Tremayne. Bye, Mackie. See you, John.’

He went out to his car carrying his jazzy jacket and tooted as he drove away. The kitchen seemed a lot less alive without him.

‘I’d like to talk to Mr Kendall alone,’ Doone said placidly.

Tremayne’s eyebrows rose but he made no objection. He suggested I took Doone into the dining-room while he told Mackie about Roydale’s gallop, and Doone followed me docilely, bringing the plank.

The formality of the dining-room furnishings seemed at first to change his mood from ease to starch, but it appeared to me after a short while that he was troubled rather by indecision as to which side I was now on, them or us.

He seemed to settle finally for us, us being the police, or at least the fact-seekers and, clearing his throat, he told me that his men with grappling irons and magnets had missed finding the floorboards the first time, probably because the floorboards weren’t magnetic. Did I, he wanted to know, think the trap-setter had taken magnetism into account.

I frowned. ‘Stretching it a bit,’ I said. ‘I should think he looked around for something heavy that would take glue, and with all that junk lying around there was bound to be something. The marble happened to be perfect. But the whole thing was so thoroughly thought out, you really can’t tell.’

‘Do you know who did it?’ he asked forthrightly.

‘No,’ I said truthfully.

‘You must have opinions.’ He shifted on his chair, looking around him. ‘I’d like to hear them.’

‘They’re negative more than positive.’

‘Often just as valuable.’

‘I’d assume the trap-setter had been a guest at Sam Yaeger’s boatyard party,’ I said, ‘only you warned me never to assume.’

‘Assume it,’ he said, almost smiling and in some inner way contented.

‘And,’ I went on, ‘I’d assume it was the person who killed Angela Brickell who wanted to fix the blame for ever on Harry by making him disappear, only...’

‘Assume it,’ he said.

‘Anyone could have killed Angela Brickell, but only a hundred and fifty or so people went to Sam’s party, and half of those were women.’

‘Don’t you think a woman could have set that trap?’ he asked neutrally.

‘Sure, a woman could have thought it out and done the carpentering. But what woman could have lured Angela Brickell and persuaded her to take all her clothes off in the middle of a wood?’

He sucked his teeth.

‘All right,’ he said, ‘I agree, a man killed her.’ He paused, ‘Motive?’

‘I’d guess... to keep a secret. I mean, suppose she was pregnant. Suppose she went out into the woods with... him, and they were going to make love... or they’d done it... and she said “I’m pregnant, you’re the father, what are you going to do about it?” She was full of jumbled religious guilts but it was she who was the seducer...’ I paused. ‘I’d think perhaps she was killed because she wanted too much... and because she wouldn’t have an abortion.’

He made a sound very like a purr in his throat.

‘All right,’ he said again. ‘Method: strangulation. Guaranteed to work, as everyone around here knew, after the death of that other girl, Olympia.’

‘Yes.’

‘Opportunity?’ he said.

‘No one can remember what they were doing the day Angela Brickell disappeared.’

‘Except the murderer,’ he observed. ‘What about opportunity on the day Mr Goodhaven fell through the floor?’

‘Someone was there to drive his car away... no fingerprints, I suppose?’

‘Gloves,’ he said succinctly. ‘Too few of Mr Goodhaven’s prints are still there. No palm print on the gear lever, for instance. I don’t know if we’d have worried about that if we’d thought he’d done a bunk. It was a cold day, after all. He might have worn gloves himself.’

‘You might have guessed at collusion,’ I suggested.

‘Did you ever consider police work?’

‘Not good at that sort of discipline.’

‘You don’t like taking orders, sir?’

‘I prefer giving them to myself.’

He smiled without criticism. ‘You’d be no good in uniform.’

‘None at all.’

He was entitled, I supposed, to his small exploratory excursion around my character; and if he himself, I thought, had been wholly fulfilled by uniform, he would still be in it.

Perkin in his overalls appeared in the open doorway, hovering.

‘Is Mackie over here?’ he said. ‘I can’t find her.’

‘In the kitchen with Tremayne,’ I said.

‘Thanks.’ He swept a gaze over Doone and the plank and said with irony, ‘Sorting it out, then?’