‘I can’t say I have unless it’s on the police list which it sounds as if it might be. Or would it be Shakespeare?’

‘The latter. There’s a bit about the eccentricities of river currents. The poem really refers to the Avon and Clopton Bridge, but it might have been written about the Chyne at this very point. Something about the stream that, coming through an arch, “yet in the eddy boundeth in his pride back to the strait that forced him on.” Look at that twig sailing towards us now. It’s got into just such a current, do you see, and instead of passing down the main stream is coming into this bay. Here it comes. Round it swirls in the eddy and back it goes towards the bridge. It’s a strong and quite considerable sort of countercurrent. Stay where you are, Fox, for a moment, will you? Get down on your sinful old hunkers and bow your head over an imaginary fish. Imitate the action of the angler. Don’t look up and don’t move till I tell you.’

‘Ah, what’s all this, I do wonder,’ Mr Fox speculated, and squatted calmly at the water’s edge with his great hands between his feet.

Alleyn skirted round the crucial area and disappeared into the willow grove.

‘What’s he up to?’ Curtis asked of no one in particular and added a rude professional joke about Mr Fox’s posture. Sergeant Oliphant and PC Gripper exchanged scandalized glances. Bailey and Thompson grinned. They all heard Alleyn walk briskly across Bottom Bridge though only Fox, who faithfully kept his gaze on the ground, was in a position to see him. The others waited, expecting him for some reason of his own to appear on the opposite bank.

It was quite a shock to Dr Curtis, Bailey, Thompson, Oliphant and Gripper when round the upstream point of the willow grove bay the old punt came sliding with Alleyn standing in it, a wilted daisy-head in his hand.

The punt was carried transversely by the current away from the far bank and across the main stream into the little willow-grove harbour. It glided silently to rest, its square prow fitting neatly into the scar Alleyn had pointed out in the downstream bank. At the same time its bottom grated on the gravel spit and it became motionless.

‘I suppose,’ Alleyn said, ‘you heard that, didn’t you?’

Fox looked up.

‘I heard it,’ he said. ‘But I saw and heard nothing until then.’

‘Cartarette must have heard it too,’ Alleyn said. ‘Which accounts, I fancy, for the daisies. Brer Fox; do we think we know whodunit?’

Fox said: ‘If I take your meaning, Mr Alleyn, I think you think you do.’

7. Watt’s Hill

CHAPTER 7

Watt’s Hill