“Our anchor!” Roger cried out in disbelief.
I didn’t even know that we had an anchor – we certainly never used it. But now we were learning from Inspector Waggens that our anchor had been used to keep Mr. Hedges submerged in the canal.
The inspector pursed his lips so that his generous gray mustache curled up into his nostrils, causing his nose to twitch. “Looks like the perpetrator hit our good warden on the leg and the head – possibly with your windlass – then tied your anchor to him and threw him in the lock. Then he used your windlass to fill the lock so that his body wouldn’t be seen. Happened sometime late yesterday afternoon or early evening.”
I felt sick. Mr. Hedges was a stern little geezer, but why would someone kill him so brutally?
Inspector Waggens turned to Roger. “Maybe you can tell me something about where you were during that time frame?”
“Me?” Roger’s bloodshot eyes bugged out. “Why me?”
The inspector smiled. “Why not you?” he replied his eyes twinkling behind his steel-rimmed glasses.
My nausea turned to icy panic. What was going on? I glanced at Caroline; the blood was draining from her face.
The inspector drummed his fingers on our cabin table, where he had joined us after the business of dealing with the “crime scene” had been completed. I had made a pot of tea, but he was the only one drinking it. The rest of us had let our cups go cold.
Beads of sweat appeared on Roger’s bald pate. “We told you everything that happened yesterday,” he stuttered. “I was with these people the entire time.”
“And you never once left their company?” the inspector asked, a merry dubiousness lacing his voice. What was so amusing to this man? I thought angrily.
“No, never!” Roger protested, then caught himself. “Oh, wait. I did go out for a cigarette at the pub… But that was just for a few minutes!”
“A cig-a-rette, eh?” Waggens replied with enunciating sarcasm.
Caroline put her head in her hands. Waggens turned to her. “How long was your husband gone for?”
She sat up as tall as her tiny frame would allow her, her skin as pale as the silver-gray hair now pulled back severely from her face. “Inspector, do we need to have an attorney here? Your questions sound as if they have an objective behind them, and I’d like to know what that is before we find ourselves unwittingly implicating ourselves in something in which we have absolutely no involvement!”
I admired Caroline’s articulate composure, which I knew she was summoning over her fear.
“It’s all right if you don’t answer,” Waggens calmly replied. “The waitress told us that he was gone for 20 minutes, which would be time enough to get to the lock, do the deed, and be back again.”
“But why!” Roger shouted. “Why in the world would I want to harm that old man?”
The inspector’s eyes, which had been restlessly giving our cabin a once-over, suddenly stopped and focused on a point right beyond my head. He reached across the table, past my right ear, and came back with a small plastic bag in hand.
“Might this be a reason?” he asked with what sounded like a giggle, waving the bag of dope that Roger had carelessly left sitting on the cabin shelf.
Read on.
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