Say Goodbye to the Boys by Mari Stead Jones

to look up – and he saw her. Reported it to the police.’
    â€˜It’s a fact,’ Emlyn said. ‘It would have to be old Mash, wouldn’t it? He was training, would you believe? Pounding up the prom and he spots this old girl up there. Just goes to show – if you want to hide something then leave it in a prominent place.’
    We were aboard the Ariadne , sitting on some sackcloth because the roof of the cabin was so hot. Mash was giving another coat of red paint to the old boat’s keel. He’d looked up and she was sitting there on the old King’s knee, sea holly in her hand. He was very proud that he had been the one to find her, Emlyn said. But they held him at the police station all morning.
    Emlyn pointed towards the dune ‘Oh God, look what’s coming – anyone for tennis? You can smell the mothballs from here!’
    Amos Ellyott stood on top of the dune, his stick raised like a sword. He was wearing a white shirt with billowing sleeves, a tie and white cricket flannels of stunning tightness. On his head the biggest straw hat. ‘Halloo there,’ he called, ‘it is I, Ellyott!’
    I suggested that we hide, but Emlyn went down to escort him over the mud and heave him, rung by rung, up the ladder. And all of that afternoon under a burning sun the old man talked death from the deck chair. He knew little more than we did about Miss Porterhouse, but he was positive that she had died of strangulation. He found that fascinating. The same method as before. Some sort of strap had been used. Bizarre, the old man said, bizarre and puzzling. No one, as yet, had come forward to claim her, either.
    â€˜No one’s claimed Lilian – is that what you mean?’ I said.
    Two ladies of such different backgrounds, he went on. Lilian Ridetski had no relations because of an accident of birth; Miss Porterhouse would probably have outlived hers – and she had never been married to a Polish airman, now officially listed as a deserter. Andrei Ridetski. A very fastidious gentleman. Something of a dandy, and rumoured to be involved in the underworld of Warsaw.
    Had he perhaps taken flight because of the lady’s sexual appetite? ‘That is a possibility, my friends – but I doubt such a reason would instigate him opting for desertion in a foreign land, for leaving a prospering little business, and a warm little nest. The premises were in the lady’s name, but they were purchased by Ridetski, who, we are led to believe is a penniless Polish refugee. Where did the money come from? Was there, perhaps, assistance? There are claims that he has been sighted, he added from behind a white handkerchief which now covered his face.
    â€˜Seen here – in Maelgwyn?’ I asked.
    â€˜Elsewhere,’ Amos replied. ‘Persons answering to his description.’
    Later he awoke to tell us that George Garston had admitted finally that he had made use of the secret room on the top floor to store unspecified goods.
    â€˜George Garston would be involved in the black market, wouldn’t you say? But on the night in question he was attending a concert in the village hall at Brynberth. He was accompanied by his son, he claims. It was an affair that continued well into the night. But there would have been time. There is always time when one is desperate.’ He appeared to have gone to sleep again. We stretched out and surrendered to the heat.
    â€˜However,’ he said. We both sat up. Beneath us we could hear the old boat’s timbers shrinking, ‘let us consider some other intriguing factors...’
    â€˜Not the day for considering anything,’ Emlyn protested. ‘I think I’ve got heat stroke.’
    Amos Ellyott’s thin, precise voice, rasped on relentlessly. ‘Mrs Ridetski was a lady who loved finery – a gaudy dresser, I am given to understand. Yet, on the night in question, she had not dressed in her usual fashion. We must