The Lizard in the Cup by Peter Dickinson

Author:Peter Dickinson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Road Media Mystery & Thriller
Published: 2015-02-03T03:54:01+00:00

7

But it was Dave Warren who was water-skiing. Buck, with obstinate courage, was driving the speedboat again, while Thanassi fretted on the terrace with a little walkie-talkie radio. A screen had been set up between his table and the headland.

“Where you been, Jim?” he said, far from genially. “We needed you. We got to get a fix on where that boat sank. Go and stand where you were standing yesterday—tell me what you think. Hi, Tony, have a good time?”

Pibble leaned on the balustrade of the terrace and stared at today’s scene, trying to superimpose yesterday’s fading image on it and see where the pictures failed to match.

“They’re too far from the headland,” he said after a while.

“That’s what I told Buck. Whassamatter, honey? Off your feed?”

While he talked sharply into his gadget Tony appeared beside Pibble with a plate of ham. He saw that her own ice-cream was half its usual size.

“I figured you wouldn’t want any more beer,” she said.

“That’s fine,” said Pibble, and turned to look at the glaring water. Thanassi’s low, white cruiser, now anchored in the mouth of the bay, made the perspectives different moreover it was impossible for the dancers to repeat the moves of yesterday’s dance, and even if they had been able to, sending the same veils of spume arching across the same areas of blue, Pibble couldn’t have been sure that this was so the shapes and angles changed so fast that what seemed like a memory of yesterday might be only a memory of five minutes earlier.

“Ask him to go round that circle again,” he said, “and stop as soon as he’s heading away from the shore.”

The boat came round, the plumes of its wake sank, Dave subsided into the water. Everything lay drifting to stillness.

“That’s about it,” said Pibble. “I think the boat was about twenty yards further to the right yesterday, and a little further away from us.”

“Buck says no,” said Thanatos after a further colloquy. “He says you’re likely right about the line from here, but he was never so near the shore. I reckon he’d be a better judge of that.”

Dave was swimming to the boat. He heaved himself aboard, and then there was a further period of adjusting the position, and finally an indecipherable series of movements aboard before the engine rattled again and the boat moved off, leaving a red buoy bobbing where it had been.

“I’ve got a couple of divers coming tomorrow with a geomagnetometer,” said Thanatos. “They trail it behind a boat and it picks out metal objects on the sea bed where they cause bumps in the earth’s magnetic field. The guy I called isn’t sure whether my boat’s got enough metal on it to register, but I’d like to give it a try. I want to see that motor.”

“So do I,” said Pibble.

“Yeah. We’ve got a lot of things here that don’t add up. Find anything new this morning, Jim? It’d better be good, sneaking Tony off me for a morning when I’m not allowed to get my exercise skiing in my own bay.

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