Chapter Five
Although they all suspected, no one said the words.
The boy, at Solomon’s question, explained, “Fred Baines was taking his boat down the canal, and when the chamber drained, you could see there was a body there.”
“Is it definitely dead?” Solomon asked quietly.
“Oh yes, sir.”
That was fervent enough. Solomon dropped his voice further. “Did you recognize…?”
The boy shook his head. “No, sir, I couldn’t see his face.”
By the time they reached the lock, the body had been hauled up on to the canal bank in front of the lockkeeper’s cottage.
Solomon, striding along beside Harvey, put a hand on his arm. “Sir, let me inquire first…”
But Harvey shook him off and kept moving. The huddle of men around the corpse parted. The constable made some instinctive move to hide the body, then clearly thought better of it.
Harvey sank to his knees. “My boy,” he whispered.
Percival Harvey lay on his back, soaking wet, with traces of all sorts of canal filth in his hair and clothing.
His skin was a sickening gray blue. A young man who would never now have the chance to grow into his potential or fulfill any destiny.
Solomon ached for the tragedy of that, and for the father’s raw grief on stark display.
Constance felt it too. When he glanced at her, she looked rather white again, her arms wrapped around herself in shock. Instinctively, he took her arm and drew her back, away from the terrible sight.
“His chest,” she said. “There’s something wrong with his chest.”
Solomon went forward again and bent to grasp Harvey’s shoulder. Nothing could help him now, but it seemed only human to remind the man he was not alone.
“Has the doctor been sent for?” he asked the constable who stood to attention on the other side of the body, awkwardly clutching his hat in respect.
“Don’t think he’ll be much use,” said the rather unkempt man beside the constable.
Solomon crouched down beside Harvey. Percy’s expensively tailored coat hung open, splayed in a curiously shapeless and ungainly way.
Solomon reached out to the nearest dripping pocket and drew out a large, rough stone.
There were others in there. At the same time, he saw what Constance meant about the dead man’s chest. He smoothed the wet, dirty fabric of Percy’s waistcoat.
A small hole was visible, and it went through the shirt too.
The tragedy was no accident. Someone had shot Percy and filled his pockets with stones in the hope that his body would stay hidden in the canal.
*
“You are the lockkeeper?” Solomon said to the unkempt man who had stood beside the constable before making way for the local doctor’s arrival.
“I am. And yes, that is my cottage right here. Name’s George West.”
“Grey,” Solomon said. “I’ve been helping Mr. Harvey look for his son in London. Did you know Percy had returned to Channing?”
“No, and I didn’t see him go into the canal neither.” The man spoke with an aggression that seemed to be habitual rather than specific. There was no obvious fear in his eyes.
“You didn’t hear a gunshot?”
West straightened his shoulders, his bushy eyebrows flying upward. “Gunshot?”
“He’s been shot in the chest. There’s no telling where that happened, of course, but since you live so close, I thought you might at least have heard his body go into the water.”
“Well, I didn’t. No saying he went into the lock anyway. Could have gone in anywhere upstream and washed into the lock when the chamber was filled.”
“And when was the chamber last filled?”’
“When Fred’s boat came up from Channing yesterday, then went up to the moorings at Larchford for the night.”
Solomon regarded the barge-like vessel waiting still on the other side of the gates, its worried crew on deck. “That boat?”
West nodded. “Brought various merchandise to the town from London yesterday. Does so every month. Then he ties up for the night and makes some other stops before heading back to Channing and London again.”
“When did he come through the lock yesterday?” Solomon asked.
West scratched his head. “’Bout five o’clock in the afternoon, I reckon, by the time he got to the lock.”
“So the body might have floated into the lock then, when you opened the gates to raise the water level? Without your noticing?”
“It’s possible,” West said with a shrug.
“So no other boat came downstream between Fred going up and coming back?”
“It’s not the busiest route.” There was a hint of defensiveness in the lockkeeper’s voice.
“Before Fred came upstream,” Solomon asked, “when was the last time you raised the water level in the lock?”
“Tuesday? Monday? No, it were Tuesday right enough, for the squire. Sir Felix. He likes to travel by boat. Stands to reason, when he owns the canal.”
On Tuesday, Percy had still been in London. So if his body hadn’t been dumped directly into the lock chamber, then it must have floated in from farther up yesterday when the gates were opened.
Solomon glanced around him. The body was being loaded onto a cart.
The doctor was with Harvey, awkwardly patting his arm and talking in soothing tones.
Constance was walking around the canal bank, her eyes on the ground.
They would have to examine the opposite bank too, and some distance upstream toward the town.
Surely a gunshot actually in the town would have been noticed and investigated?
Solomon thanked the lockkeeper and approached the serious-looking middle-aged constable.
“Constable Wills? My name is Grey. My wife and I were helping Mr. Harvey look for his son in London. I don’t suppose you received any reports of unexplained gunshots yesterday, either in the town or around this part of the country?
Probably before five o’clock in the afternoon? ”
The constable shook his head, although he did not look surprised at the question, so at least he had noticed the wound in Percy’s chest.
“Grey!” Harvey called suddenly, his voice hoarse yet curiously powerful. “Grey, where are you?”
Solomon went to him at once. Constance, her head up, closed in on him, too.
Harvey grasped his arm in a tight grip that was almost painful, his face racked with anguish. “Grey, you will find who did this! My son did not just fall into the canal!”
“No, he did not,” Solomon agreed quietly.
Harvey shook his arm, almost like a terrier. “Then find my son’s murderer, Grey. You have to!”
*
“Wills, the constable, will help us,” Solomon said, as he and Constance walked along the bank of the canal, searching in vain for anything that might indicate the place Percy had entered the water—blood, the tracks of a scuffle or a dragged body.
“I heard Harvey issue the order,” Constance said. “The poor man looked bewildered.”
“A murder around here is unusual, I suppose. Especially the murder of a gentleman. But I don’t think Wills is unwilling or stupid. We just need to talk to him without Harvey’s hovering over him.”
Constance nodded agreement. The doctor had taken Harvey home in his gig, to help in breaking the news to Mrs. Harvey.
Constance was not sorry to be absent for that.
The poor woman’s pain would be unendurable, and there was nothing anyone could do for her.
Constance did not want to even imagine that kind of grief.
It opened a welter of warnings, alarms, and doubts.
What should I do? What should I do?
Ruthlessly, she squashed the panic, distracting herself with the business in hand. They were here to find Percy Harvey’s killer, and she would give that her all before she let personal possibilities consume her.
“We don’t need to feel guilty,” Solomon said beside her, “just because we admitted we did not care for what we knew of the dead man.”
Since there was no one around, she took his hand. Solomon was too observant. He had seen that something more than the crime was disturbing her. It wasn’t even a bad guess, although it barely scratched the surface.
“Oh, I don’t really,” she said. “I was wondering if we shouldn’t stay at an inn instead of with the Harveys. The last thing they need is strangers around the house at such a time.”
Solomon nodded, returning to his perusal of the ground at his feet, and across on the other side of the canal, which swept on into the distance before curving around and eventually rejoining the Grand Union Canal. This was known as the Everett-Channing loop, apparently.
They were approaching a much more opulent, brightly painted barge than Fred Baines’s. This one was moored on the near side of the canal, with space for several more boats to tie up. From these moorings, a path led straight toward an elegant old manor house.
“Larchford House,” murmured Constance, who had been speaking to the lockkeeper’s wife over her garden hedge.
“Sir Felix Everett’s property. I believe his grandfather built this section of canal at the end of the last century, to join Channing and other towns with the Grand Union Canal.
He still owns it and employs the lockkeepers. ”
Solomon nodded again. He was gazing upward at the humped bridge that led over the canal from the end of the path to the opposite bank. He paused for a moment, then climbed up the steps.
Constance followed him. “Are you thinking he was shot on the bridge and heaved over the side into the water?”
“It’s possible, isn’t it?” Solomon said. “I suppose it depends how well planned the murder was.”
“Surely it can’t have been that well planned when Percy only arrived on Thursday and was already in the canal by five o’clock in the afternoon when the lock was filled for Baines’s boat.”
“It was planned enough to fill Percy’s pockets with stones in the hope of weighing him down,” Solomon said grimly.
“That looks like panic to me,” Constance said, “not planning.”
“You may be right. I can’t see anything here to show it’s where he went in. I wonder if they can dredge the canal in search of the weapon?”
“I’m sure Harvey can arrange it. Do you want to walk the other side of the canal while we’re here?”