Free Last Respects by Catherine Aird Page B

over the difficult terrain. Farebrother slackened his pace only once. That was when a small trawler suddenly emerged from the harbour mouth. He stopped and took a good look at it. Ridgeford stopped too.
    â€˜Something wrong?’ he asked.
    â€˜She’s cutting it a bit fine, that’s all.’
    â€˜Cutting what?’ asked Ridgeford. He could read the name Daisy Bell quite clearly on her prow.
    â€˜The tide,’ said Farebrother. ‘She’d have had a job to clear the harbour bar if the water was any lower.’
    â€˜I didn’t think you went out on an ebb tide,’ said Ridgeford naively.
    â€˜You don’t,’ said Farebrother. ‘Not without you have a reason.’ He resumed his fast pace over the shingle, adding, ‘Unless you’re dying, of course.’
    â€˜Dying?’
    â€˜Fishermen always go out with the tide. Didn’t you know that? They die at low water …’
    The dinghy that had been beached was old, weather-beaten and very water-logged.
    â€˜She’s still got her rowlocks with her, though,’ said the lifeboatman professionally. ‘Funny, that.’
    â€˜But there’s no name on her,’ noted the policeman with equal but different expertise. ‘She could have come from anywhere, I suppose?’
    â€˜Not anywhere.’ Farebrother looked the police constable up and down and evidently decided as a result of his appraisal to be helpful. ‘The tide brings everything down from the north hereabouts.’
    That hadn’t been quite what Ridgeford meant but he did not say so.
    â€˜Not up from the south,’ continued the lifeboatman. ‘You never find anything that’s come up from the south on this shore.’
    That, thought Ridgeford silently, tied in with a body floating in the estuary of the River Calle.
    â€˜Especially with the wind in the west like it’s been these past few days,’ added the other man. ‘It’s a south-east wind that’s nobody’s friend.’
    â€˜Yes,’ said Ridgeford. While Horace Boller almost instinctively knew the state of the tide, so Farebrother would be equally aware of the quarter of the wind. You probably needed to be a farmer to consider the weather as a whole. It was a case of each man to his own trade. Stockbrokers doubtless knew the feel of the market—by the pricking of their thumbs or something—and equally the police … Ridgeford wasn’t sure what it was that a policeman needed to be constantly aware of. There must be something that told a policeman the state of play in the great match ‘Crime versus Law and Order’. The knocking off of helmets, perhaps.
    â€˜Against the current that would be, too,’ continued Farebrother, who was happily unaware of the constable’s train of thought.
    He made going against the current sound almost as improbable as flying in the face of nature. Had Farebrother been a carpenter, decided Ridgeford to himself, he would have said ‘against the grain’.
    Aloud he said to the lifeboatman, ‘What about this rope at the bow?’
    â€˜The painter?’ Farebrother looked at the end of the dinghy and the short length of line dangling from it. ‘She either slipped her mooring or she was untied on purpose.’
    â€˜Not cut loose or anything like that, then?’
    Farebrother shook his head, while Brian Ridgeford limped over to the dinghy. He steadied himself against it as he felt about in his shoe for a stray piece of shingle that had made its way into it.
    â€˜Someone’ll be along soon looking for it,’ predicted the lifeboatman, indicating the beached dinghy.
    Ridgeford wasn’t so sure about that. He found the pebble and removed it.
    â€˜With a red face,’ added Farebrother.
    The face that sprang at once to the policeman’s mind was white. Dead white was the name that artists’ colour-men gave to paint that colour. The owner of that