Free Last Respects by Catherine Aird Page A

other side of Edsway—to the south and west. It had never been the same, local legend ran, since a Danish invasion in the ninth century.
    â€˜That’s what the man said,’ answered Mrs Ridgeford. ‘I told him you’d go straight over there. Was that right, Brian?’
    Since their marriage was still at the very early stage when it was unthinkable that she could have done anything that wasn’t right—the action being sanctified solely by virtue of its having been taken so to speak—this was a purely rhetorical question.
    â€˜Of course it was, darling.’ Brian Ridgeford nodded approvingly.
    â€˜Or,’ she added prettily, turning her face up towards his, ‘have I done the wrong thing?’
    This too was a purely token question.
    It got a purely token response in the form of a kiss.
    â€˜Where did I leave my bicycle clips?’ asked Police Constable Brian Ridgeford rather breathlessly.
    Marby-juxta-Mare was a village facing the sea. It was beyond the headland known as the Cat’s Back that protected Edsway from the full rigours of the sea. The road, though, did not follow the coast. It cut across below the headland and made Marby much nearer to Edsway by land than by sea.
    A man called Farebrother had taken charge of the dinghy. He was a lifeboatman and knew all about capsized dinghies.
    â€˜She wasn’t upside down when we found her,’ he said. ‘And not stove in or anything like that or she’d never have reached where she did on the shore.’
    â€˜Has she been there long?’ asked Ridgeford cautiously. Boats, he knew, always took the feminine—like the word ‘victim’ in the French language—but he didn’t want to make a fool of himself by asking the wrong question.
    â€˜Just the length of a tide,’ said the lifeboatman without hesitation. ‘We reckon she’d have been gone again after the turn if we hadn’t hauled her up a bit.’
    Ridgeford nodded sagely. ‘That’s a help.’
    â€˜No one’ll thank you for letting a dinghy get away.’ Farebrother wrinkled his eyes. ‘It’s a danger to everyone else, too, is a dinghy on the loose. No riding lights on a dinghy. You could smash into it in the dark and then where would you be?’
    â€˜Sunk,’ said Ridgeford.
    â€˜Depend on your size, that would,’ said the lifeboatman, taking this literally, ‘and where she hit you.’ He hitched his shoulder, and sniffed. ‘Anyways we put her where she can’t do any harm and,’ he added, ‘where she can’t come to any more harm either.’
    â€˜Any more harm? said Ridgeford quickly. ‘But I thought you said she wasn’t damaged.’
    â€˜So I did,’ said Farebrother. ‘But she must have come to some harm to be out on the loose like she was, mustn’t she? That’s not right.’
    â€˜I see what you mean,’ said the constable. Put lost dinghies into the same category in your mind as lost children and things fell into place.
    â€˜An insecure mooring is the least that can have happened.’ Farebrother picked up his oilskin jacket. He was a tall man with a thin, elongated face and high cheek-bones. From his appearance he might have descended directly from marauding Viking stock.
    â€˜I don’t think that that’s what it was,’ said the young policeman, mindful of the dead body that he’d helped to bring ashore that afternoon.
    â€˜Anyways,’ said the other man, ‘she’s safe enough now. She’s over this way … the other side of the lifeboat station … just follow me.’
    This was easier said than done. Farebrother set off at a cracking pace along the rocky sea shore of Marby-juxta-Mare, so different from the fine estuary sands of Edsway, his seaboots crunching on the stones. Constable Ridgeford stepped more cautiously after him, slipping and sliding as he tried to pick his way