Safer Dead

‘I wonder if someone’s talked? My stars! The old man will bust his truss! Look at this mob!’

There was no hope of overtaking the procession of cars ahead of us. We had to follow along behind them. About a quarter of a mile from the lake, the cars slowed to a crawl.

We could see three cops ahead in the road, holding up the traffic.

‘Let me get out a moment,’ Scaife said.

I stopped the car and waited while he spoke to one of the cops, then he came back, scowling.

‘There are about a couple of thousand sightseers around the lake and more coming every minute,’ he said, getting back into the car. ‘We’ve had to call out the reserve to handle them. Someone’s talked all right. We can go through. Mind how you go.’

I edged out of the stream of traffic and drove on until we reached the lake.

Six police cars and a couple of trucks stood under the trees. The ground around the water’s edge swarmed with pressmen and cameramen. There were even two units of the newsreel hawks busily setting up their cameras.

A squad of police was working on three powerful searchlights, directing their white, glaring beams on to the still surface of the water.

Harris was climbing into his frog outfit when Scaife and I joined the group at the water’s edge.

Creed glared at me.

‘Is this your doing?’ he demanded in a voice you could cut ham on.

‘Not guilty, captain. I haven’t said a word.’

‘That’s what everyone is saying. Well, I hope for someone’s sake we find this girl.’

He turned to Harris who was shivering in the still night air and snarled at him to hurry up.

Harris got into the boat; two cops shoved it off, scrambled aboard and began to row to the centre of the lake. Nearby was a powerful winch, anchored to a tree. At the end of the steel cable was a set of clamps. Three policemen were loading the clamps into another rowboat. They pushed off, and as they rowed after the first boat, two other policemen paid out the cable. Scaife and I kept away from Creed. We stood under the trees watching the two boats as they slowly neared the centre of the lake.

A couple of newspaper cameramen tried to put out their own boat with the view of getting photographs of Harris as he entered the water, but a squad of police blocked them off. One of the cameramen went over to Creed to protest, but he didn’t get anywhere. Creed vented his spleen on him, and the cameraman retreated, shaken.

‘If that barrel only contains cement,’ Scaife said out of the corner of his mouth, ‘you’re going to see the nearest thing to an earthquake you’re likely to see. It’s my bet Harris has been shooting his mouth off. There’s nothing he likes better than publicity.’

Harris had gone into the water and the waiting crowd watched, silent and tense. After ten minutes or so he reappeared and waved to the boat that carried the tackle. The oarsmen rowed over to him and lowered the clamps over the side.

‘Won’t be long now,’ Scaife said restlessly. He lit a cigarette, took an impatient draw, then tossed the cigarette into the lake. After what seemed an age, Harris’s head again appeared above the water and he waved.

Creed turned to the two men on the winch.

‘Okay, start winding,’ he snapped.

The two men bent to their task. It was as much as they could do to turn the handles and Creed shouted to two other cops to help them.

Slowly the drum turned, winding in the cable. After ten minutes, Creed changed the four men who stood back, sweating and panting.

‘I think we might get back a little,’ Scaife said under his breath. ‘If the old man spots us, he’ll get us to do some of that, and it looks like hard work to me.’

We moved further back into the shadows.

It took more than an hour of slow winding before the barrel broke surface.

A wild, frenzied cheer broke out from the crowd as the four policemen slopped into the water and manhandled the barrel ashore. A beam from one of the searchlights was directed on to it, and there was a rush of cameramen to photograph it.

They wanted Creed to pose beside it, but he wouldn’t do it. I could see he wanted to, but he was scared the girl wasn’t inside the barrel, and he wasn’t taking the risk of making a fool of himself.

A black, closed truck, like an ambulance, edged to where the barrel lay.

‘That’s the mortician’s truck,’ Scaife said. ‘Creed’s not taking the risk of opening the barrel here. Come on, let’s get out of here. We’ll go to the mortuary. That’s where they’ll open it.’

We pushed our way through the excited crowd, and once clear of them, we ran fast to the Buick. I had trouble in turning the car, so congested had the road become. I got the car turned at last, and drove fastback to town.

The mortuary was behind police headquarters. I parked the Buick in the police park, and we walked over to the mortuary building.

A fat little man, wearing a rubber apron and rubber gloves came out of a room as we entered the tiled passage.

‘Evening, sergeant,’ he said, his badly shaven face lighting up. ‘How’s it coming? Did they get it up?’