Chapter 14 #2
Cherry and Alec laughed. “Right-oh,” Cherry agreed, “I’m prepared to put my life in your hands. Keep over to the island side of the channel, Fletcher, as we’re going the wrong way. The current’s pretty feeble close in, too—easier rowing. We’ll turn around at the head of the island.”
They came to the place where the Regatta course had started. The booms had been moved over to the bank already, out of the way of the boat traffic which would soon begin to move homeward. Still no one was about. The only sounds were the lap of water against the hull, the creak of oars in the
rowlocks, the twitters and warbles of birds in the trees on the island.
Daisy kept an eye out for the first glimpse of the temple. Before she saw it, she heard a shout. A moment later the tranquillity shattered at the crack of a gunshot.
For a moment Daisy was taken back to yesterday’s race and the starting pistol. Then another shot rang out, followed by a splash.
“Look! There!” Daisy cried, and pointed to where something came bobbing down the stream from the head of the island, moving with the current out towards mid-channel. Something maroon. Ambrose maroon? “Oh my gosh! It’s a man!”
Cherry had already twisted his head to look. Now he swung his sculls in-board, stood up, and dived into the river.
The skiff rocked. It was still making headway from the momentum of his last stroke, but any moment it would start to drift backwards.
With cautious haste, Daisy scrambled forward to the rowing bench.
Turning to sit down, she saw Alec, his jacket stripped off, leaning over the back of the stern bench to pull the rudder from its slot.
“Daisy, can you manage?” he demanded. “Cheringham needs help.”
“I’ll manage.” She swung the sculls out, glad Cherry had left them in the rowlocks.
Alec slipped over the gunwale, rocking the skiff again. Daisy saw him set off after Cherry with a dogged breast-stroke, then rowing demanded all her attention.
Somehow she managed not to catch a crab with her first two clumsy strokes. The rhythm returned—like riding a bicycle: once learned, never quite forgotten. Steering was another
matter. She was facing backwards. Gervaise was not there to shout at her to back water with the right, nor Phillip to fend off if she ran into the bank.
The bank was awfully close. The left scull brushed through the drooping fronds of a leaning willow. Daisy quickly corrected her course, pleased to see that at least she was moving upstream in the quiet water close to the island.
But where was she going?
She remembered the landing-stage in front of the temple.
If she could just get beyond it, the current would move her towards it, and it would be easier to get ashore than amongst the trees and bushes.
Only that was where the shots had come from.
Was a man with a gun standing there, listening, waiting?
Daisy rested on her oars for a moment. The birds were still silent after the shock of the shots. She forced herself not to look for Cherry and Alec, to concentrate on listening.
From beyond the top of the island came the creak of oars, the splashing of an inexpert oarsman.
He was escaping! Daisy bent with redoubled energy to the sculls. Slowly, so slowly, the trees crept by. She glanced round and saw between the leaves a patch of white wall, before a dark evergreen blocked the view again. Nearly there.
Drawing level with the temple, she glanced round again. His back to her, a man was rowing clumsily forwards, away from her, towards the Bucks bank.
Clumsy or not, he was pulling away. Daisy’s shoulders ached, her arms felt like lead, and she was getting a crick in her neck from trying to see behind her. As she cleared the tip of the island, the current caught her. She couldn’t fight it.
One more glance back. Dark hair, white shirt—a fat lot of
help that was. She turned her attention to reaching the island without sinking the skiff.
Stick the left scull in the water and make a strong stroke with the right.
Obediently, the skiff turned broadside to the stream.
Daisy shipped her oars and snatched up the boat-hook as the river carried her, drifting like thistledown in still air, towards the landing-stage.
Another skiff, the twin of hers, was moored there.
Kneeling, she reached for it with the boathook, caught the bow, and pulled herself in to shore.
“Daisy! Hullo! Daisy, where the dickens are you?”
An echo in her mind told her Alec had called before, when she was too busy to pay any heed. “Over here!” she shouted, trying to hang on to the boat-hook while grabbing the painter. “Here, at the temple. He got away!”
“All right, stay there, we’ll be right there.”
What spoke to Daisy next, as she stepped ashore, was a painful memory from summer days on the Severn: “Don’t end up with one foot on the bank and the other in the boat unless someone’s holding it.”
Too late. Daisy’s frantic effort not to do the splits failed dismally. She toppled into the river.
Coming up spluttering, she found her feet in three feet of water, the end of the painter clutched in a death-grip (Gervaise had not been pleased that time he’d had to swim after the dory). Daisy eyed the landing-stage, a good eighteen inches above the river’s surface. She’d have to wait for help.
In the meantime, fending off the skiff as the current kept bumping it against her, she gazed after the presumed villain of the piece. Though the wisps of mist were dispersing, too tenuous to block her view, he was too far off to be clearly visible.
Close to the Bucks bank, he had turned upstream. As Daisy, shivering, watched, he came to what looked like a boat-house, nosed in, and climbed ashore. To her disappointment, he didn’t fall in.
“Daisy? Where … ? Great Scott, darling, how did you manage to land in the river?” Alec’s face was carefully expressionless, but there was amusement in his voice.
“I decided to take a swim,” she said crossly. “You try getting out of a boat on your own.”
“It takes practice.” Cherry, behind Alec, was openly grinning.
He quickly sobered as Alec said, “Here, put him down, Cheringham. Gently does it.”
Between them, Daisy realised, they carried a limp body. “Who is it?” she asked in dread. “Is he … ?”
“He’s alive. Unconscious, with a head wound.” Alec knelt to give her his hands.
She handed him the painter and he tied it to an iron mooring-ring set in the landing-stage. Of course he was dripping wet too, as were Cherry and … “Bott?”
“Bott,” Alec confirmed, hauling her out. “He’s been half-drowned and creased by a bullet. We have to get him to a doctor, fast. Cheringham thinks it’ll be quickest to row back downstream to Bulawayo, telephone the local hospital from there, and run him into Henley by car.”
“Fletcher!” Cherry had tactfully turned his back as Daisy emerged from the Thames with her skirt clinging to her legs. He was stooping over something on the ground near the other skiff. “Here’s a pistol. A Mauser.”
“Don’t touch! Good find, well done. I’ll get the handkerchief from my jacket pocket to wrap it in.”
Alec sat down on the edge of the landing-stage with his legs in the skiff to retrieve his jacket from the stern seat. Daisy went over to Bott.
“Alec, this hankie round his head is soaked through with blood, and it started out sodden with river water, which I bet isn’t any too clean.
If you’ve got a clean, dry one, Bott’s head needs it more than the gun.
The pistol, I mean. Gervaise always insisted that a pistol is not a gun, though why …
Never mind. Here, you use my hankie.” She felt in the sleeve of her sodden cardigan and produced a soggy wad.
Alec reluctantly gave her the clean one. He took hers, wrung it out, and unfolded it. “This isn’t big enough to wrap the pistol,” he complained.
“Make do.”
Taking off the cardigan, now a source more of discomfort than warmth, she watched as he gingerly picked up the Mauser with the handkerchief. He sniffed the barrel.
“It’s been fired, of course. I hope there are fingerprints to help us find the owner, because it must be a War souvenir and it’s probably not licensed.” He sighed. “I suppose I’ll have to use my jacket to wrap it in. Let’s go.”
“There’s a pair of sculls in this other skiff,” Cherry reported. “Two of us can row.”
He and Alec lifted Bott again and, with Daisy steadying the skiff, laid him on the nearer arm of the V-shaped forward seat, his head on a cushion from the stern seat.
Daisy sat right at the bow, at the point of the V, pressing Alec’s folded handkerchief to the long, mercifully shallow furrow in Bott’s scalp.
If she lifted the pad, blood slowly welled up and trickled down.
She couldn’t guess how much he had lost, but his face was very white and he lay very still.
Shivering, she could only hope he wasn’t going to die while under her care.
Cherry, in command, directed Alec to the sternward rower’s bench. “If I can see you,” he explained, “there’s more hope of coordinating our strokes.”
Untying the painter, he threaded the loose end through the ring and handed it to Daisy. With her holding it and Alec wielding the boat-hook, there was no fear of Cherry landing in the drink as he stepped into the skiff.
“Right-oh, Daisy, let go and pull the painter in.” He smiled at her over his shoulder as he sat down on the nearer bench. “I’ll show you how to do the whole thing solo when we’re not in a rush.”
“After this weekend, I don’t think I’ll ever want anything to do with boats again,” Daisy muttered.
“Fletcher, shove off, please. Leave the sculling to me until we’re clear.”
Once out in the channel, with the current bearing them downstream, Cherry had Alec take a couple of strokes, then fell into rhythm with him. Daisy waited till it looked as if Alex knew what he was doing before she addressed the back of his head, beyond Cherry.
“Alec, I saw the man who shot Bott.”
“You didn’t recognise him?” Alec asked a trifle breathlessly.
“He was facing away from me, even though it meant rowing backwards. Or forwards, depending on how you look at it. All I could see was that he had dark hair, so I couldn’t identify him by his looks, but he went ashore on the Bucks bank, at a boat-house, and I think that must be Crowswood land.
There’s no public towpath along that side, is there, Cherry? ”
“That’s right. You can walk through the meadows from Bulawayo to Crowswood, I think, but it’s all private property. The boat-house over there belongs to Crowswood Place.”
“And only one person connected with the case is staying at Crowswood,” Daisy pointed out.
“Lord DeLancey,” said Alec, a world of perplexity in his voice.