Mad Hatter's Holiday by Peter Lovesey Read Free Book Online Page B

distractedly at the ends of his moustache and beat a tattoo on the pier-deck with his left heel. With an air of decision, he dismantled the tripod, put the parts in his bag and left the pier at a quick step.
    The bathing-machine woman was monstrous, quite capable of earning a second living in one of the freak shows in the arches under the promenade. When Moscrop reached her, she had taken Jason out of his pram and put him into a Corporation bath-towel which she was holding at both ends and using as a swing-boat. The child was taking the exercise manfully.
    Moscrop coughed. ‘You’ll pardon me for asking? I think I recognise the little fellow. Is it Dr. Prothero’s child?’
    She stopped swinging and Jason came to rest with a springy impact against the swell of her stomach. ‘What?’
    ‘The child, Ma’am. I was inquiring if it was young Jason Prothero.’
    ‘Couldn’t tell you.’ She had tiny brown eyes that seemed devoid of intelligence. ‘Couldn’t tell you nohow.’
    ‘That’s his pram for sure.’
    She wriggled her shoulders in a non-committal way and her chins vibrated. Jason rebounded against her stomach. ‘If you say so.’
    ‘I’m certain of it.’
    There was a period of silence between them with only the roll of the waves intervening.
    ‘I see that you’re looking after the boy,’ he began again. ‘He’s in good hands.’
    There was no response.
    ‘I know something of the family, you see. It’s unusual for them to be this far along the beach. Most irregular. I wonder now, would you—er—happen to have noticed who left him here?’
    She took the two ends of the towel in her right hand, so that Jason was suspended inside like Baby Bunting, and pointed out to sea with the left. ‘Her.’
    ‘I beg your pardon.’
    ‘Her. She left him here. Asked me to keep him happy.’
    He climbed on the first step of the nearest bathing-machine for a better view and followed the line of her finger. There was undoubtedly someone in the water. Two people. A man and a woman bathing together. Deuced irregular. One heard that such things went on, but hardly expected to see it at Brighton in the season. Just as well they had picked one of the most isolated sections of beach.
    He delved into the bag for his binoculars. Not from any indelicate motive; he merely wished to investigate a little notion that had burgeoned in his brain. The sea was choppy this morning and there was a deal of spray about. It took almost a minute’s diligent work with the glasses to locate the bathers. They were holding hands, if you please, and jumping the waves together as openly as if they were fully clad and performing a schottishe in the Pavilion ballroom.
    The man wore university costume of dark blue wool, rendered skin-tight by the water. The shoulder-straps could not have been more than two inches wide. His partner’s bathing-dress of vertical red and white stripes was revealed only in glimpses, for she modestly (if such a word could be applied) endeavoured to keep her shoulders below the surface. Her hair was held in place by an oilskin mob-cap.
    Then, as he watched, she was caught in the cusp of a larger wave, tipped off-balance and swept several yards inshore, shrieking in delighted panic, and ending inelegantly on hands and knees in the shallows. From there she subsided, laughing, into a sitting position, tugging down the sailor collar that had ridden up around her head. How it was that her companion was thereupon similarly upended by the action of the water and carried irresistibly towards the same spot must remain one of the ocean’s mysteries. Suffice to say that the next moment Moscrop saw the red, white and blue in a conjunction that had nothing to do with patriotism. Moreover, the colours were unconscionably slow in disentangling. When at length they did, he was able, before the bathers plunged back into the deeper water with hands still linked, to confirm his earlier suspicion. The young woman in the red and white