Chapter Twenty-Two

DURING the rest of the week, up to the week-end, Oldroyd’s slow mind was working on a certain limited amount of data, and endeavouring to discover more. Morris had suddenly adopted a new and unusual habit. That in itself was suspicious. Certain of the details of the habit were also suspicious---the going always to the same place and the staying unusually late. If Morris’s new love for the river was genuine, why did he always choose Clevedon Reach when there were plenty of places more accessible? It was quite a while before Oldroyd decided that it must be because he wanted to form a series of precedents, so that on some special day in the future there would be no comment made. But what was he meditating to do on that special day? Even Oldroyd’s slow mind jumped to the conclusion that he intended murdering his wife; but that seemed at first so motiveless that Oldroyd could not bring himself to believe it. But conviction came slowly. There was enough whispered office gossip about Morris’s passion for Miss Campbell to make it seem likely. Then---then---Oldroyd knew that Mrs. Morris’s condition might supply quite a deal of additional motive; in the old days Morris had often expressed himself forcibly to Oldroyd on the subject of “kids”. Oldroyd was not a man of acute psychological insight; quite on the contrary. But his recent adventures and his deadly fear and hatred of Morris were a sufficient spur to goad him into achieving a neat piece of deduction; he pierced Morris’s design almost completely.

But it was not enough to have done so much, to treat it as a purely academic problem. For thirty-six hours Oldroyd was haunted by indecision as to what he ought to do next. He shrank with repulsion from the possibility that he could wash his hands of the whole business and leave Morris a free hand to accomplish his design. Oldroyd had a prejudice (which Morris might have thought odd) against murder, even when he was not the destined victim. He hated the thought of little Mrs. Morris being done to death by her hairy brute of a husband. Yet, as he asked himself persistently, what was there he could do? The police would hoot with laughter if he went to them and said that his fellow-clerk had taken to going on the river with his wife, and therefore was plotting her murder. They would listen with more attention if he went on to say what else he knew of Morris, but that he could not do without betraying himself. Despite his bold words to Morris and his comforting repetition to himself of the convenient phrase “King’s Evidence,” he did not want to involve himself in such a fashion.

The little Yorkshireman gnawed at his nails and worried his silly little moustache as he tried to reach a decision. It is saying much for him that he eventually decided that he would make the sacrifice and go to the police if he could not think of any other method of saving Mrs. Morris’s life. All the same, before doing so, he started to probe all the other possibilities open to him.

There was something else he could do, after all, he decided. It would mean pitting his wits and his strength against Morris’s, and possibly entangling himself in an unsavoury business. But the entanglement would be nothing compared with the alternative of going to the police, and so could be ruled out. It was far harder to decide to face Morris in all his wrath and his strength. Morris inspired his enemies with very definite feelings of fear and repulsion. Oldroyd’s eventual decision to match himself against Morris in the fashion he foresaw was nothing short of heroic, whatever the arguments to the contrary which might be advanced. Two successful encounters with Morris might have given him self-confidence. He might be spoiling for a fight with the enemy who sought his death so ruthlessly. But for all that little Oldroyd, when he left off biting his nails and shut his fists instead, and when he announced to his vacant bedroom, “I’ll do it, too, by gum!” was being brave enough to justify quite a large amount of pride in his own conduct. He felt none at all, of course. He set himself, instead, to the unusually difficult task, for him, of trying to plan out all his actions for the morrow (which was Sunday) and to visualize those of Morris and his wife.

And such was his care and prevision that everything went off without a hitch. Early the next morning found him at Paddington Station, where he was the first person through the barriers and on to the platform where the 9.55 to Maidenhead was waiting. He did not enter the train immediately. He hurried down to the very farthest end of the platform and hid himself inconspicuously behind a mass of baggage. There he waited patiently until he saw Morris and his wife coming down the platform towards him. There was no mistaking Morris’s big body and rapid walk. Oldroyd, as he watched him, marvelled at his assurance of bearing. He quite dwarfed Mrs. Morris, who trotted along at his side, with feelings of mingled delight in her new frock and shame at the conspicuousness of her figure. Morris opened a carriage door, and the two climbed in! Oldroyd in his turn waited until the train was almost due to start before he walked back and entered a carriage near to the engine, so that he would not have to pass Morris’s carriage door.

At Maidenhead Station he lingered again in the train until it was almost due to go out again. Then he lingered further on the platform. Eventually the other two had quite a long start of 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, up-stream. 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 his screen of willows, and on to Boulter’s Lock. Oldroyd, following immediately once 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 week-end 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 to 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 Clevedon 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.

To-day, with more foresight, he had brought food and drink with him, but to-day, 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 to-day 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 down-stream. 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 down-stream, 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 down-stream 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 a 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 trembling 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 down-stream, 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. Every one 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.

THE END