The Ebb Tide Read Free Page A

about.”
    “What have we here?” St. Ives asked.
    “Finn Conway, sir, at your service. I seen him come over the wall out back. ‘What’s this now?’ I asked myself. Why would a man come over a wall when there’s a door out front unless he’s up to no good?”
    “Quite right,” Tubby said.
    “He didn’t see me,” Finn said, “because I didn’t want him to. He headed straightaway toward the river with me following after him, and went into a gin shop in what they call Peach Alley.”
    “The Goat and Cabbage,” I said helpfully,
    “That’s the one. I took a look inside, nonchalant like, but I didn’t see him. Maybe he’s gone on through, I thought. There’s a lot of what you might call passages down along there by the river. I waited for a bit, thinking he might come out from where he’d gone, but then a man came in and told me to clear out.”
    “Can you take us there in the morning?” St. Ives asked, and Finn said that he could, and then assured us that he could find very nearly anyplace a second time if he put his mind to it, just as easy as the first time. He had lived hereabouts long enough to know the riverside, he said, although he was presently without an address and was looking forward to summer and to less of this wind.
    St. Ives asked him if he could find us a bite of supper, and sent him off with a handful of coins, considerably more money than was necessary, enough to tempt him if he were a rascally young hypocrite and not who he seemed to be, and in any event to get him out of the way while we reconnoitered.
    “He’ll be back right enough,” Tubby said. “He’s a game one. You should have seen him scale the garden wall, speaking of apes.”
    I could see that Merton was in a state, glancing fearfully about him as if at any moment his assailant might return to finish him off, but he calmed himself with an effort, and for the next quarter of an hour he laid out the facts as he knew them, and we pitched in with comments when we were able. Merton, it turns out, had been given the map by his uncle Fred, a sand pilot on Morecambe Bay who lives in the area of Grange-over-Sands. Fred takes excursions across the sands at low tide, Merton told us, out into the cockle beds off Poulton-le-Sands, or back and forth from Silverdale to Humphrey Head if the moon is right. Uncle Fred—a legend thereabouts—had been mired in quicksand, caught up by the incoming tide, run afoul of smugglers, and suffered all manner of perils and had lived to tell the tale. He wasn’t one of the Queen’s Guides, mind you, but that’s what made him useful to certain people, especially that class of dredger who fished the quicksand by night.
    Fred had found the map—it was as simple as that—near the top of the Bay. It was corked up in a bottle that had suffered some leakage. It looked curious to him, and he kept the map as a souvenir, putting it into a drawer and after a time forgetting about it. Then one day two weeks past he sorted out the drawer and found it again, and when Merton and he ran into each other at their Aunt Sue’s house in Manchester, he gave it to Merton as a curiosity. Merton put it straight into the catalogue without a second thought, although he’d been cagey with the description, in case there was more to the business than met the eye. Then he sent up to Chingford-by-the-Tower to alert St. Ives.
    “More what than met the eye?” Tubby asked, in his usual impatient way.
    “The thing is,” Merton said, “Uncle Fred talked the map around, you see, after he found it again in the drawer.”
    “Talked it around to whom ?” asked St. Ives, looking at him narrowly.
    “To the lads in a pub there in Poulton-le-Sands, over a pint, you know. Natural sort of thing, if you see what I mean, passing the time. Except there turned out to be two men sitting nearby, listening hard. One of them asked to see it, but Uncle Fred made up an excuse for not having it with him, although he did, right there in the