The Riddle of the River by Catherine Shaw Page B

accompanied by an anxious ringing of the bell. I opened it at once. Pat, whom I had entirely forgotten for once, stood upon the doorstep, shaking his shoes and wiping off the drops of a misty drizzle from his forehead, where it appeared to have caught him unawares.
    ‘Oh, Pat, come in,’ I said quickly, ushering him forward to the detriment of the floor. ‘Have you got news?’
    ‘Yes, I have. We have her name,’ said Pat. ‘And I have a lot to tell you.’ He took off his hat and dropped it over the umbrella stand, while I helped him to divest himself of his dampened overcoat.
    ‘Who was she?’ I urged him.
    ‘She turns out to have been an actress in some kind of roving theatre company no one ever heard of,’ he began.
    I closed my eyes for a moment, then opened them and looked at him.
    ‘Ivy Elliott,’ I said.
    He stared at me for a moment as though I were a magician or a mind-reader, gaping. Then he nodded slowly.
    ‘Still waters run deep,’ he said reproachfully. ‘You knew it all along, even while you sent me off on that ridiculous chase. You knew it – why, you even told me you thought the girl might have been an actress! What a lot of trouble you could have saved us. Why didn’t you say?’
    ‘I couldn’t,’ I said. ‘It was just a wild guess. I never had time to find any proof.’
    At that precise moment, the door of the dining room flew open, and Arthur and Ernest emerged. Arthur was his usual sober self, but Ernest had an odd gleam in his eye.
    ‘Oh, hello, Pat,’ said Arthur. ‘Vanessa, guess what? Ernest went to see
A Midsummer Night’s Dream,
and he says the Titania we saw simply isn’t the same actress as the one he meant. She’s a replacement.’
    ‘The very idea,’ added Ernest, ‘of imagining that I can’t tell if a woman is large or small, or wearing a wig.’
    ‘And Ernest says she had to be replaced suddenly, because she seems to have disappeared,’ went on Arthur.
    ‘She’s absolutely gone,’ added Ernest bitterly. ‘They say she’s ill, up at the theatre, but I’ve asked around all my acting acquaintances, and something fishy is going on. No one knows where she is. She was all set to play Titania last Monday, and never turned up. They gave the role to her understudy, who was herself booked to play the First Fairy.’ He glanced at me, and paused suddenly, becoming aware of something. I glanced at Pat, and saw that he had grasped the situation. He looked seriously at Ernest.
    ‘Are you talking about a missing actress?’ he said with unusual gentleness.
    ‘Yes,’ replied Ernest. ‘Missing since last Monday, and no one seems to know where she has gone.’
    ‘What was her name?’ was the next, inevitable question.
    ‘Ivy Elliott,’ he replied, the little glint intensifying in his eye. I felt Pat grow tense next to me, bracing himself. Ernest’s passionate feelings were quite manifest, and they reared up like a massive wall, preventing us from speakingopenly and naturally about the dead girl.
    ‘Why, what is going on?’ said Ernest suddenly, growing both defensive and aggressive. ‘Why are you all silent?’ He looked from me to Arthur accusingly. ‘Do you know something that I don’t?’
    ‘Not me,’ said Arthur. ‘Do you, Vanessa? Obviously you do. Perhaps you had better tell it as it is.’
    ‘A young woman was found drowned, here in Cambridge, last week,’ said Pat, once again intervening to spare me a most distressing statement. ‘She has only just been identified.’ He looked at Ernest, sorry and a little helpless.
    The portrait photograph of the dead girl lay in the bureau drawer just behind Ernest. I felt myself move towards it, inexorably, unwillingly.
    Arthur, who, floating in an academic world of ideas, had heard nothing of the murder, stared at me, surprised. Ernest watched me in silence, and stepped aside as I reached behind him, opened the drawer, and drew out the photograph. It was as though we were bound by an invisible thread of