The Riverboat Mystery (Jenny Starling #3)(58)

It didn’t take the policemen long to find her. Graves pulled up a similarly hefty chair to the one the cook had requisitioned, whilst Rycroft perched with perfect ease on a flimsy wooden and canvas folding deckchair.

‘Well, Miss Starling,’ Rycroft said. ‘You’re the expert,’ he added sarcastically. ‘What are your thoughts so far?’

Jenny dragged her eyes from the moorhens and looked at him. She sighed unhappily.

‘I think,’ she said, ‘that someone has either been very clever, or very lucky, or both. Unless . . .’ But the thought that suddenly popped into her head was a little too far-fetched to voice without first thinking it over.

And thinking it over very carefully, at that.

‘I don’t suppose you’ve heard from the medical examiner yet?’ she asked curiously.

Rycroft shook his head and explained about the railway disaster that had slowed things up.

Jenny sighed. ‘A pity. I would have liked to know if Mr Olney had been drugged. I don’t believe he was, of course, but . . . it’s nice to be sure of these things, isn’t it?’

Rycroft blinked. ‘Drugged? What made you ever imagine that he’d been drugged? The medico was sure that he drowned.’

Jenny nodded. ‘Oh yes, I’m sure that he did too.’

Rycroft slowly leaned back in his chair and took several deep breaths. He hated questioning women. They were so damned . . . illogical.

‘If there were drugs involved, then it was premeditated.’ He tried a different tack, and the cook willingly went with him.

‘If Gabriel was drugged, yes. But I don’t think he was. And I don’t think, somehow, that this was pre-planned. It smacks too much of desperation for that.’

Rycroft glanced at Graves to see if he was faring any better. Apparently he was, for he said slowly, thoughtfully, ‘You have some kind of problem with the method of killing, Miss Starling?’

Jenny started. There was no other word for it. She opened her eyes very widely and said, with total sincerity, ‘But of course I have. Don’t you?’

Rycroft clutched the side of the chair until his knuckles turned white.

Jenny stared at them, bewildered. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘But I thought . . . I mean, it’s so obvious that I was sure that you must have . . .’

Aware that she was not exactly earning herself any brownie points, she took a deep breath and started at the beginning.

‘On the face of it,’ she explained, ‘the rope and boot on the port side of the deck suggests that Mr Olney was overpowered, that the killer tied the rope to his foot, hauled him over the side, let him drown, pulled him back and put him in the cupboard. Yes?’

Rycroft let go of the chair, and nodded. ‘Yes.’

‘But that’s so patently absurd as to be laughable,’ she said, her voice rising an octave into a near-squeak of incredulity. ‘To begin with, how did the killer overpower Mr Olney? He was fit enough, and an old soldier to boot.’

Rycroft was beginning to feel uncomfortable. It occurred to him that whilst he had spent his time investigating, Jenny Starling had spent her time thinking. And he was beginning to appreciate just how exasperated his colleagues must have felt on their previous murder investigations where she had also been involved.

Now, he shrugged and tried to keep up with her. ‘Well, we assumed the killer gave Olney a crack on the head before trussing him up,’ he said, somewhat defensively, and looked at Graves, who nodded his agreement.

‘But didn’t the medical man say he could find no obvious cuts, bruises or outward marks of violence on the body?’ she reminded him. ‘At least, when I looked at Mr Olney with you, Inspector, I couldn’t see anything. Only his fingernails looked a bit broken, and his knuckles looked slightly discoloured. I don’t know enough about pathology, of course, to know if bruises can develop after death or not. But apart from that, there seemed to be nothing wrong with Mr Olney at all. Or am I wrong?’

Rycroft ran a finger around his collar. ‘No, you’re not wrong,’ he admitted uneasily. He too had noticed no obvious wounds on the body. And any medico examining a body — even giving it a very quick and preliminary look-over at the scene — would have noted any bashes on the head.

‘And surely one of the very first things a doctor checks is a body’s head?’ Jenny said, eerily echoing his own thoughts.

Rycroft reluctantly admitted that it was so. Looking back, he could see in his mind’s eye the police surgeon running his hands carefully over Gabriel Olney’s head.

‘And he didn’t report to you later on any bumps or bangs on Mr Olney’s head?’ she pressed.

Rycroft frowned, not liking the feeling he was getting that he was being backed into a corner. ‘No. He didn’t,’ he confirmed shortly.

‘So I repeat,’ the plump cook said, ‘how did the killer overpower Mr Olney?’

‘He couldn’t have. Unless he was drugged,’ Sergeant Graves said. ‘But you said you didn’t believe he was drugged.’

Jenny sighed. ‘No. I don’t think so, but I don’t know so. Not for sure. That’s why I wanted to know if you’d got the post-mortem report.’

Rycroft grunted. ‘Well, say for the moment the killer did dope Mr Olney somehow. He tied him up, chucked him over the side, and drowned him.’