The Crystal World. Robert MacFarlane

had played some part in the attempted murder – Sanders assumed that the would-be assassins were by now a safe distance from the police.

      During the short walk from the hotel Sanders had half-expected to hear Ventress whisper to him from the shadows within the arcade, but there had been no signs of him in the town. However improbable, the unrelieved heaviness of the light over Port Matarre convinced Sanders that the white-suited figure had already left.

      To Louise he pointed out the jumble of wrecked catwalks and the charred hulk of the motor-boat lying in the shallows, and described the attack by the mulatto and his men.

      ‘Perhaps he was trying to steal some jewellery from the boats,’ Louise suggested. ‘They may have been defending themselves.’

      ‘No, more than that – this mulatto was really after Ventress. If the police hadn’t arrived we’d both have ended face down in the river.’

      Grimacing to herself, Louise took his arm, as if barely convinced of Sanders’s physical identity in the nexus of uncertainty at Port Matarre. ‘But why should anyone attack him?’

      ‘I’ve no idea – you didn’t find anything out about Ventress?’

      ‘No, I was following you most of the time. I haven’t even seen this small man with a beard. You make him sound very sinister.’

      Sanders laughed at this. Holding her shoulders for a few steps, he said: ‘My dear Louise, you have a Bluebeard complex – like all women. As a matter of fact, Ventress isn’t in the least sinister. On the contrary, he’s rather naive and vulnerable …’

      ‘Like Bluebeard, I suppose?’

      ‘Well, not quite. But the way he talks in riddles all the time – it’s as if he’s frightened of revealing himself. I’d say he knew something about this crystallizing process.’

      ‘But why shouldn’t he tell you directly? How could it have any bearing on his own situation?’

      Sanders paused, glancing down at the sun-glasses which Louise still carried in her hand. ‘Doesn’t it with all of us, Louise? There are white shadows as well as black behind us in Port Matarre – why, God alone knows. Still, of one thing I’m sure, there’s no actual physical danger from this process, or Ventress would have warned me. If anything, he was encouraging me to go to Mont Royal.’

      Louise shrugged. ‘Perhaps it would suit him to have you there.’

      ‘Perhaps …’ They had passed the main piers of the native harbour, and Sanders stopped and spoke to the half-castes who owned the fishing boats moored along the bank. They shook their heads when he mentioned Mont Royal, or seemed too unreliable to trust.

      He rejoined Louise. ‘No good. They’re the wrong kind of boats anyway.’

      ‘Is that the ferry over there?’ Louise pointed a hundred yards along the bank, where half a dozen people stood at the water’s edge near a landing stage. Two men armed with poles were steering in a large skiff.

      When Louise and Dr. Sanders approached they saw that the boatmen were bringing in the floating body of a dead man.

      The group of onlookers moved back as the body, prodded by the two poles, was beached in the shallows. After a pause, someone stepped forward and pulled it on to the damp mud. For a few moments everyone looked down at it, as the muddy water ran off the drenched clothing and drained from the blanched cheeks and eyes.

      ‘Oooohh …!’ With a shudder, Louise turned and backed away, stumbling a few feet up the bank to the landing stage. Leaving her, Dr. Sanders bent down to inspect the body. That of a muscular fair-skinned European of about thirty, it appeared to have suffered no external physical injuries. From the extent to which the dye had run from the leather belt and boots it was plain that the man had been immersed in water for four or five days, and Sanders was surprised to find that rigor mortis had still not occurred. The joints and tissues were malleable, the skin firm and almost warm.