Death on the Cherwell by Mavis Doriel Hay

Author:Mavis Doriel Hay
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sourcebooks
Published: 2016-05-23T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter XII

Jim Lidgett

On Sunday morning Inspector Wythe paid an early call on Braydon in the old-fashioned commercial hotel where the latter had chosen to lodge. Sabbath calm hung over the empty coffee room, and in a far corner Braydon sat at a table near the fire, a large-scale plan of the city of Oxford spread before him and walled along its further edge with an array of pots and jugs.

“Had visitors to breakfast, sir?” inquired Wythe, counting the coffee pots.

“Morning, Super! Count the cup before you form any theory,” Braydon advised. “I like lashings of coffee. The pot at the end is still hot; shall I ring for another cup?”

Wythe waved away the suggestion. “How much do you believe of that man Bayes’ story, sir?” he asked abruptly.

“Bayes is all right. He’s not consciously making up anything, though it’s unfortunate that he told the story to his pals before he told us. He saw a canoe go up the river and down again; other evidence, or lack of evidence, indicates that it was the canoe. I’m inclined to accept his time for the return journey—soon after three.”

“Then you wash out what the doctors say about the time of death, and the evidence of the watch?”

“The doctors, you remember, are not prepared to swear to anything. If we tell them the evidence indicates that she was alive at three, I don’t think they’ll dispute it. The watch is more difficult. It hardly seems likely that a business-like woman would keep her watch half an hour slow. But we mustn’t pay too much attention to that watch if it goes dead against all other evidence. When you paddle a canoe rapidly, a good deal of water may run down your arm, and that may have done the damage.”

“If that was likely, you wouldn’t expect her to be wearing it,” Wythe pointed out. “She wasn’t a novice in a canoe.”

“True. But there’s the possibility that she was in the habit of taking it off and forgot to do so on this one occasion, perhaps because it was a very important occasion, about which she was sufficiently anxious to make her omit a piece of routine. There’s another point. The watch may have been altered, deliberately, by the murderer. Suppose someone had an alibi for two-thirty-seven, but not for—let us say—three-thirty-seven.”

“And banked on no one seeing her after two-thirty-seven?” Wythe considered the problem. “Yes, I see. And what do you think, sir, about Bayes’s statement that there was a rug, and something under the rug, in the bottom of the canoe when she came down?”

“The rug, yes, since a rug has turned up. As for what was under it, don’t you think that was simply the second paddle, which we know she had, lying in the bottom of the canoe, with its end on one of the thwarts? With a rug over it, it might easily give the impression of ‘traps,’ as described by Bayes.”

“But why the rug?”

“That may be the key to the conundrum.

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