The Riverboat Mystery (Jenny Starling #3)(59)

But Jenny was already shaking her head. ‘Inspector, does that sound reasonable to you?’ she asked, and Rycroft was back once more to clutching the side of his chair.

‘Consider the difficulties,’ she urged, for all the world like a teacher instructing a classroom. ‘The killer would have to have doped Mr Olney sometime in the afternoon. Without being seen. He — or she — would then have had to either hide the unconscious man, or go through the rigmarole with the rope and drowning that you’ve just described, again without being seen. Then the killer would have to hide the body in my cupboard — still without being seen. How? How could all this be done?’

Rycroft swallowed hard. ‘We know that at four o’clock the deck was dry,’ he began. ‘The killer could reasonably guess that the captain would be on the bridge, and O’Keefe in the engine room.’

‘Providing it was neither of them that did it,’ she put in.

‘Right,’ Rycroft conceded.

‘And he knew that Jasmine would be in her room,’ Graves put in brightly.

‘Right. The note was a decoy,’ Rycroft agreed.

‘But by four o’clock Jasmine had been out of her room for a good forty-five minutes,’ she pointed out, hating to rain on their parade. But facts were facts.

Rycroft groaned. ‘But she went back up to her room for a quarter of an hour,’ he suddenly remembered. ‘To change, or whatever. And at just about four o’clock too.’ He was reluctant to let a good theory go to waste, just because the facts didn’t fit.

‘The Leighs were on the opposite side of the boat,’ Graves added, getting carried away with the theorizing now, ‘and you were in the galley.’

‘So how did the killer get the body into my cupboard?’ she asked bluntly.

‘When you were taking Dorothy Leigh her tea and toast,’ Rycroft said quickly.

Jenny looked from one policeman to another. ‘But don’t you see how risky this all is?’ she asked, exasperated. ‘What’s to stop me from going back to the galley straight after taking Dorothy her toast? The killer couldn’t know that I would take a stroll around the boat. And besides all that, Lucas Finch was wandering around all afternoon. He could have bumped into the killer at any point in these proceedings.’

‘If it isn’t Finch we’re after.’ This time it was Rycroft’s turn to put in the little dig.

Jenny ignored this childishness and kept doggedly to the point. ‘What’s to have stopped the Leighs from leaving the starboard deck? How could the killer know how long Jasmine would be gone? She might only have nipped up to the loo. She could have been gone only a minute or so. But in that time the killer dragged Olney’s body to the side, drowned him and carted him back to my cupboard? I don’t think so.’

Graves scratched his chin. ‘If he or she did, it sounds . . .’ He looked lost for words.

‘Desperate?’ Jenny supplied one for him helpfully. ‘Suicidal? Risky?’

‘And yet, it worked,’ Rycroft pointed out.

‘But did it?’ she asked sceptically. ‘If so, how come the deck was wet, but not the route the killer must have taken to my galley? Why wasn’t the galley floor wet? It wasn’t, you know. Only the cupboard floor was wet.’

‘I know that,’ Rycroft snapped, although in fact that detail had totally escaped him. ‘The killer must have covered him in something dry.’

‘The plastic sheet,’ Graves suddenly whooped, remembering the cook’s fascination with the engineer’s woodpile and its covering and now understanding it. ‘It was bound to dry out quickly in the boiler room, and putting it in the engine room meant that it was also out of sight.’

‘So the killer must have waited until Brian O’Keefe had stepped out of the engine room,’ she said. ‘He has to every now and then, of course,’ she added thoughtfully. ‘I’ve seen him. He checks in with the captain every so often for a start. Then he checks the paddles at the back. Oils things. But it all takes time. How did the killer know that O’Keefe was going to conveniently leave the engine room and allow him or her time to put the wet plastic over the wood to dry out?’

‘But O’Keefe did leave the engine room,’ Graves pointed out. ‘He was going to ask the captain where they were. But then recognized the straight stretch of river, or so he said. So he was out of the engine room for a few moments at least.’ Then he frowned. ‘Of course, the killer would still have to have been nippy. Very nippy now that I think about it.’

‘Incidentally,’ Jenny put in, ‘I hope you realize the significance of that straight stretch of river.’

Rycroft glanced at her. He didn’t look pleased. ‘Significance?’

The cook sighed. Did she have to point out even the obvious?

‘The Swan travels at about four miles per hour. On a straight stretch of river, such as the one we travelled down yesterday afternoon, the captain could have tied off the wheel, murdered Olney, and gone back, without anyone knowing. With the boat travelling slowly, the straight stretch could be made to last for at least half an hour, and the boat would be perfectly safe without anyone steering her. Other boats would be sure to see her coming a long way off and steer to either side of her, so there’d be no question of a collision to give the game away. The captain could have left the wheelhouse any time during that period. It’s a wonderful sort of alibi to have. Everyone thinks the captain must be steering the boat. But that’s not necessarily so.’