The Riverboat Mystery (Jenny Starling #3)(51)

Rycroft quickly consulted the witness statement again, his eyes narrowing. He looked as if he might like to let rip with a curse, but restrained himself with an effort. Unfortunately, this self-restraint made his face quiver and his eyes bulge. To Jenny’s somewhat alarmed eye, he looked a bit like a frog made out of blancmange that she’d once created for a child’s birthday party.

Which gave her an excellent idea to recreate the design, this time as a birthday cake. The dons at the college where she worked often called upon her to bake a cake for their offspring.

‘It says here it was about a quarter past two,’ Rycroft admitted grimly, snapping the cook’s attention back to the matter in hand.

She sighed deeply. ‘I see.’

Graves’ great bulk shuddered, just once, as he too understood the full import of the timing. If the murder hadn’t been committed until between 4 and 4:15, then . . .

‘What the blazes was he up to?’ Sergeant Graves muttered more to himself than to anyone else.

‘I shouldn’t attach too much importance to this business, Inspector Rycroft, if I were you,’ Jenny said quietly. She was always reluctant to offer advice, mainly because people so seldom had the good sense to take heed of it when it was offered. She did so now only because she was sure that Rycroft was the sort of man who could get very nasty if he was seen to be publicly embarrassed.

‘Oh?’ Rycroft said icily.

Jenny smiled. ‘I think you’ll find that O’Keefe was searching for the papers that Gabriel Olney was brandishing about yesterday afternoon, during the fight he had with Lucas. I think that he and probably the captain got their heads together sometime yesterday evening and mapped out a plan of action.’

Rycroft thought for a second or so and, intrigued in spite of himself, said somewhat less coolly, ‘Carry on.’

‘I think they thought that if they could destroy whatever Olney was using to blackmail Mr Finch, then the plan to sell the Swan would fall through, and their jobs and homes would be safe.’

‘But surely Olney would have made copies?’ Graves pointed out with reasonable logic.

Jenny shrugged. ‘I imagine that occurred to them too. But it was worth a chance. After all, it wouldn’t be hard. During dinner, O’Keefe was always absent, so nobody would remark on it. He could take a good long hour to meticulously search the Olneys’ room. If he found the papers, well, all to the good. If it turned out that Olney could produce duplicates when the time came to hand over the deeds to the boat, well, what had they lost? I should think that to men of action like O’Keefe and Captain Lester, they would consider it a chance well worth taking. And better by far than attempting to do nothing about it at all.’

Rycroft slowly stroked his chin. ‘So you don’t think it has anything to do with the murder itself?’

But on that, Jenny was too wily to be drawn. She merely shrugged and said that, at the moment, she couldn’t see how it could have.

Rycroft reluctantly agreed, but nevertheless proceeded to march straight into the boiler room like an invading fury.

Jenny, who’d not taken a really close look around inside the engine room before, took the opportunity to follow them in and have a good nose.

The room was more or less divided into two, with the wood and coal in one section of the room and the actual boiler and engine in the other. O’Keefe, who’d been sat on top of a fairly respectable woodpile, slowly stood up. His feet rustled a crumpled sheet of thick plastic that he’d cast aside and which now lay on the floor.

‘Yeah?’ he asked, not quite surly, not quite polite.

‘We would like to know what you were doing in Gabriel Olney’s room at two o’clock this afternoon,’ Rycroft said.

O’Keefe gave him a long, slow, measuring look. No doubt he was wondering what the policeman actually knew, and how much he had merely guessed.

Rycroft smiled. It was quite a nasty smile. ‘You were seen, O’Keefe,’ he said shortly. ‘So let’s not have any fun and games, hmm?’

Brian ran a dirty hand through his dark hair, then shrugged. ‘Oh. Right. Well then, I suppose I’d better tell yer. I was looking for them papers of Olney’s.’

If he thought anyone would be surprised by his answer, he was thoroughly disappointed. Rycroft merely gave a what-did-I-tell-you-about-this-damned-cook look to his sergeant, and Graves gave a there’s-more-to-you-than-meets-the-eye look to Jenny Starling, and O’Keefe was left to wonder, in some frustration, just what it was that was going on.

‘Did you find them?’ Rycroft got on with it brusquely. Reluctantly O’Keefe nodded.

Rycroft held out his hand.

O’Keefe stared at it for a moment, then shrugged, then smiled. It was a roguish smile. O’Keefe shook his head. ‘I ain’t got ’em on me. I hid ’em upstairs, in the lav.’

‘Go and get them,’ Rycroft ordered shortly.

O’Keefe nodded and moved forward. Just when he’d got to the door, Jenny, whose mind had wandered a little, suddenly snapped to, and said curiously, ‘Is this the wood we saw you bring on board yesterday?’ She nodded at the woodpile on which he’d been sitting.

The engineer, somewhat surprised by the cook’s presence, not to mention the copper’s tolerance of her, looked at her suspiciously. ‘What’s it to you then?’