Plain Murder Read online

  At Maidenhead Station he lingered again in the train until it was almost due to go out again. Then he lingered farther on the platform. Eventually the other two had quite a long start on him on their way to the river. They had hired their skiff and were well on their way to Boulter’s Lock before Oldroyd reached the riverside. There he hired a dinghy and sculled slowly after them.

  He passed the lock in the batch behind them; by the time he emerged Morris’s energetic sculling had taken them up round the bend, but Oldroyd pulled stubbornly after them, upstream. Cautiously looking over his shoulder from time to time, he caught sight of them at last, moored beneath the trees at the very head of the reach, almost at Cookham, and when he had them well in view he, too, pulled into the bank and moored, where willows screened him, in one of those little niches where lovers have moored since time immemorial. Peering out through the willows he had the skiff well in view, and so he set himself to wait, with uncomplaining patience, until the end of the day.

  One thing only had Oldroyd forgotten in his plans for the day, and that was food for himself. But his native stubbornness came to his rescue. He bore the pangs of hunger and thirst and inactivity for hour after hour, as noon changed to afternoon, and afternoon to evening. There was heroism in that, too, for Oldroyd had strong ideas on the subject of the correct treatment of his interior.

  Worst of all, on this day all his trouble and care and patience were wasted; Morris did nothing that day which contravened the law. At nightfall he untied his skiff and rowed back down the river, past Oldroyd behind the screen of willows, and on to Boulter’s Lock. Oldroyd, following immediately they had passed, had to wait for them to pass the lock first, and in consequence he delivered back his dinghy to a very impatient and irate boat hirer. Moreover, he only just caught his train back to London, although he was lucky in avoiding Morris’s eye in the seething weekend crowd on the platform. Oldroyd reached his lodgings at midnight, very tired, very exasperated and, worst of all, very hungry – and, of course, there was no food accessible to him.

  After an experience like that Oldroyd might have been fully justified in abandoning his plan. He could so easily have come to the conclusion that he was wrong, that Morris meditated no harm, and that there was no need to continue to go to this incredible amount of trouble. It would have been an easy, comfortable course to take. But Oldroyd had more courage; he had the courage of his convictions, although the scoffer may sneer that it was, instead, only pigheaded obstinacy. He reasoned with himself that Morris had gone on the river three or four times already in his careful arranging of a series of precedents, and that there was no reason whatever that he should have timed the ‘accident’ he had in mind for the first occasion when Oldroyd followed him. Morris, Oldroyd knew, would act with cunning and caution, and only when he was certain that the time was ripe.

  Yet, all the same, Oldroyd was worried and anxious. He was not at all sure what Morris’s plan actually was, or even whether he really had a plan. And possibly – now that Oldroyd had time to think this kind of fear came readily enough – that plan might be more subtle than Oldroyd was counting on. It might actually be directed against Oldroyd himself; that meeting with Mrs Morris in the teashop might not have been so accidental as it appeared. Morris was quite capable, to Oldroyd’s mind, of plotting the whole thing so as to lure Oldroyd on to the river with him, so that the next time Oldroyd followed them he might find himself in the grip of the tiger’s claws. He would be found drowned later, the victim of one more deplorable accident. Oldroyd did not miss the possibility, which shows how acute his wits were becoming, but he shrugged his shoulders at it, metaphorically speaking. He would face Morris in his rage as he had faced him before. Next Sunday would perhaps solve the question for him; until then he could bear to wait. But the waiting seemed long to Oldroyd, all the same, and he looked at Morris more and more anxiously as the week went by when he met him in the office.

  And so next Sunday morning found Oldroyd once more the first to enter upon the platform of the 9.55 Paddington to Maidenhead. Once more he saw Morris stride, and Mrs Morris trot, up the platform. Once more he slunk behind them to the riverside and, hiring his dinghy, pursued them up the length of Cliveden Reach. The friendly willow was still there, and in exactly the right position to overlook the couple as they rested moored to the bank. Oldroyd settled himself for another long period of waiting.

  Today, with more foresight, he had brought food and drink with him, but today, curiously enough, he felt neither appetite nor thirst. His throat felt constricted with excitement. He felt a powerful premonition, which had not been at all apparent the week before, that today would bring with it the crucial development. He could not eat, nor drink, but spent the long, weary afternoon and evening moving restlessly about the dinghy, parting the branches of the willows every two minutes to see that all was well in the skiff.

  So that it was with a dull feeling of disappointment that, when night fell, he heard the clatter of sculls being put into the rowlocks, and the dip of the blades. Then the skiff came slowly past him, heading downstream. Looking out from under the willow, he saw Morris’s heavy profile clearly outlined against the pale sky. He heard him make some remark in a low voice to his wife, and he heard her reply. Oldroyd, crouched in his boat, realized at that moment the nightmare character of the whole affair. For a space he began to doubt not merely himself and his own sanity, but the very occurrence of the incidents of the last six months. He felt he could not believe that Harrison had died by Morris’s hand, or that Reddy had met his death otherwise than by accident. He even began to doubt whether Morris had twice tried to kill him. Certainly he could not believe that Morris was planning to kill his wife. Then he remembered how his throat had pained him one evening after a surprise visit from Morris, and he shook himself back to reality.

  Still at the back of his mind, as he untied the painter and pushed out into midstream, there was a half-formed decision not to repeat this ridiculous business of shadowing again. Looking back down the river he saw, two hundred yards downstream, a small black shape on the surface of the water. That was Morris’s skiff. He leaned forward to take a few gentle strokes with his sculls in pursuit.

  Then, before the stroke could be completed, he heard something which caused him to throw all his strength upon his sculls, so quickly did the tenseness of his nerves cause him to react. From the black shape downstream there came a scream and a splash. As Oldroyd sent the dinghy flying down to the skiff he heard another scream which was choked half-way through in an ugly, bubbling fashion.

  The state of mind of a murderer at the instant of his crime is something hard to imagine, but Oldroyd was offered some insight into it when his dinghy had covered the gap between it and the skiff. The latter was floating bottom upwards. All round it were floating dark lines and masses – cushions, sculls and boathook. Beside the skiff was something paler in hue – Morris’s face. Oldroyd caught a glimpse of it in the faint light as the dinghy came surging up. The brows were set in a frown of horrible intensity; the jaw was locked in an expression of furious determination. Morris was treading water, and he had his arms outstretched to his wife, whose white dress was just visible in the black water. A casual excited glance might have thought he was trying to hold her up, but instead Morris was pushing her down under the surface.

  So intent had Morris been on his task that he had not heard the swirl of the water under the bows of the dinghy as it came rushing up, while Oldroyd, scull in hand, sprang to his feet to see what he could do. Morris caught sight of Oldroyd; he may even have recognized him in that faint light, for his expression changed to one of intense malice and rage. But Oldroyd did not stop to look or inquire. The scull was in his hand. All his hatred and fear and loathing found vent as he reversed his grip on it and swung the butt with all his strength upon Morris’s head. It struck with a dull crash and Morris relaxed his grip on his wife and sank, inert and limp, below the water. Oldroyd suddenly found himself trembli
ng and weak as he stood in the swaying boat.

  So the career of Morris was ended. For months now he had opposed himself to the law, and it was not the law which defeated him. On those grounds Morris might claim posthumously a highly successful criminal record. All the machinery of society, all the thousands of police, the majesty of law, the last awful threat of the gallows had been successfully defied. It was instead by the vigour and courage of a private individual that he had been thwarted at last. But that, of course, would have been only the very poorest consolation to Morris.

  His body lay at the bottom of the river, bumping gently over the gravel as the current took it very slowly downstream, rolling it over and over with languid movements, down to where the rushing weir of Boulter’s Lock awaited it, where the posts and piles and torrential stream effectually erased all sign of what Oldroyd’s oar had done to its head. Everyone was sorry that a deplorable accident had deprived the world of a most forceful and efficient member of society, who had bade fair to rise to the greatest distinction. Save perhaps Oldroyd, and possibly Mrs Morris, who, despite all that Oldroyd could say, could never afterwards quite believe that the fierce hands which had held her so mercilessly under water had really been trying to save her and not to drown her.

  Oldroyd, still trembling, had noticed a gleam of white below the surface of the water; he had reached down and found Mrs Morris’s unconscious body floating there; enough air had remained in her clothes to keep her half afloat when her husband sank. Somehow Oldroyd pulled her out, and prompt measures at My Lady Ferry had brought her back to life.

  So that even Morris’s great record proved on analysis to be nothing to boast about. His two great successes are balanced by three utter failures, while no one can deny that he had been amazingly favoured by fortune. Certainly Oldroyd felt no inducement whatever to follow his example; he remains satisfied with having committed one murder and with having been accessory to another. The coroner’s jury which investigated Morris’s death saw fit to congratulate Oldroyd on his very prompt rescue of Mrs Morris, and quite understood that in the darkness his failure to save Morris as well was perfectly excusable. And they added a very valuable rider to the verdict which commented on the danger of changing seats in a skiff in the middle of the river.

  PENGUIN CLASSICS

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  First published by The Bodley Head 1930

  Published in Penguin Classics 2011

  Cover illustration by Nick Morely

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  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  ISBN: 978–0–141–97135–3