‘There you are! Up to you now!’

An embarrassment. He should have left it up in the mistletoe. But he gave me no chance, and there was I with the proceeds of a pointless burglary which had been the major’s idea anyway.

I had no doubt that Marrin was drowned. Thus there was no object – at any rate for the moment – in remaining dead. What I had to do in order to get the full facts and keep in touch with developments was to reappear at Broom Lodge as the spontaneous and sympathetic visitor. So I rearranged my den to look as if some tramp had lived there in the past but not recently, and took the last train back to London. Next day, bathed, respectable and dressed with conventional casualness I drove down to the Forest and paid a casual call at Broom Lodge as if on my way to South Wales. The place was disorganised, the workshops silent, and groups hanging about like listless bees without a queen.

Elsa met me at the front door and told me that her uncle was dead.

‘His body was found yesterday afternoon caught in a salmon weir below Purton. The police telephoned us at once.’

‘Good God! One of his fishing expeditions?’

‘I think so. He drove away the night before last without telling anybody, and I know it’s the river when he does that. It looks as if he must have fallen in. He wasn’t dressed for a dive. I told the police to make enquiries at Bullo Pill. And, Piers, we’ve had a burglary. The police discovered it. All the drawers in the lab had been turned out and I don’t quite know what is missing except that he stole the golden bowl.’

My face must have shown my surprise and horror, but under the circumstances both were natural enough. Had the major lied to me, or, more likely, had one of the damned druidicals slipped in and pinched the sacred totem for the use of the sect?

‘Casket and all?’ I asked.

‘He just smashed the casket and took it. And the police have come back again this morning. They are wondering if there couldn’t be some connection between Simeon’s death and the burglary.’

There could indeed be. Burglar knows Marrin is out and that the lab will be empty. Obvious, and what actually happened. Alternatively and much worse, burglar pushes Marrin into the river to be sure that he can’t interrupt and then returns to Broom Lodge for the gold.

‘The dinghy was picked up by a coaster coming into Sharpness,’ she went on. ‘His diving stuff in its case was on board. People at Bullo confirmed to the police that his boat was missing and said that he must have taken it out the night before last. And somebody saw a man about midnight carrying a bundle and scrambling up the railway embankment instead of taking the lane past the cottages. That looks queer, doesn’t it?’

I asked her what would happen now, and whether Broom Lodge could carry on.

‘I suppose so. I know he’s left everything to the commune.’

‘And nothing to you?’

‘I don’t want anything. It’s all so uncertain. Who owns what? Think of lawyers and the Revenue trying to find out where an alchemist got his gold!’

She had a moment of hysteria, laughing and sobbing at the same time.

‘But, my darling, you know he wasn’t one.’

‘I don’t! He was so many things.’

I asked if the major was about. I hoped he wasn’t. I could imagine him complicating the whole situation with military or esoteric incoherencies.

‘No, I hear he’s spending his time praying in Blakeney church. The return of the prodigal I suppose, now that poor, deluded Simeon isn’t here to influence him. I think he’ll go home.’

A voice materialised from behind us where there had been nobody.

‘Excuse me, Miss Marrin! I wonder if I might have a word with this gentleman.’

A detective-sergeant in plain clothes identified himself. This, I thought, could be the end, but it was only a beginning. He had been informed that the late Mr Marrin had taken me diving with him at the Guscar Rocks. Could I tell him how experienced he seemed and what his practice was? Did he always change in his dinghy, or on the night of his death would he have been crossing the river with the intention of going in off the land somewhere on the other side?

I found it easy and natural to tell him the little I knew: that I had the impression he always went in off the land and that unless his boat was fairly large and stable he would not have dived from it and returned to it.

Then he turned to the experiment in salmon fishing, of which he had heard from the commune, and to late-night dives which he gathered Mr Marrin seldom spoke of because they had some religious meaning for him. Perhaps I could explain that. The sergeant was evidently relieved to have a chance of talking to a sane outsider.

I made what sense I could of it all, telling him that the commune believed in the transmigration of souls, that service to mankind in this life was what would be remembered in the next and that they trained themselves in simple crafts which could be useful at some future time when the survivors of inevitable disaster – disease, starvation or atomic pollution – had reverted to the same state as neolithic man.

To my surprise he thought there might be something in it.

‘Making a bloody mess of our world we are, Mr Colet, and that’s a fact. But what has it got to do with underwater fishing?’

‘I think you’d be on safe ground in describing Mr Marrin as a keen naturalist,’ I said, ‘but with an original point of view of his own. He was not interested in description or discovery, but what you and I and the fish have in common. All life is one and that sort of thing.’

‘Thank you very much, Mr Colet. You make it all much clearer than those poor … er, yes. And I can’t get anything very exact about the missing objects.’

‘Which of them?’ I asked, feeling that I was now accepted as a friend and confidant of the late Simeon Marrin.

‘Some small objects of gold. And according to members of the commune a golden bowl of great value. It was in a casket which was smashed.’

‘Oh, he made them. That was his hobby. He wasn’t a very experienced goldsmith but he enjoyed it. He once told me that his work had only the value of the gold.’

‘You don’t know, I suppose, where he bought it?’

I replied that I had never asked him, and then thought that I ought to try to conform to the evasive and contradictory answers which he would have got from the more credulous members of the commune.

‘I’ve heard some nonsense about mining and also that he had a process for extracting gold from sea water.’

‘Is that possible?’

‘Yes, but I believe it would cost far more to extract than its worth.’

‘So it would not be possible in his laboratory?’

‘No. If you’re thinking of all that lead, mercury and other stuff in the lab I’m pretty sure it was for experiments with alloys.’

‘Would you say it was widely known that he had so much gold on the premises?’

‘I don’t know. Not widely, I should think. But you had better ask the members of the commune that. They gave hospitality freely. It looks to me as if someone knew he had fallen out of his boat and drowned and then made a dash across country to get at the gold.’

‘He may not have been drowned, sir. It could have been a blow at the back of the skull which killed him.’

I wondered whether an autopsy could tell whether he drowned after being knocked out by the blow and falling in, or whether it came by accident while he was still just alive. There couldn’t, I think, be conclusive evidence either way after eighteen hours at the mercy of the tide and tangling with a salmon weir.

I could guess what had happened. Marrin had tumbled out of the dinghy, rigid with terror, and though the lias below Hock Cliff is softish rock there are chunks of hard stone imbedded in it. If he had crashed his head on one, that accounted for the swiftness with which the ebb had carried his body away.