The Ebb Tide Read Free Page B

pocket of his coat. He didn’t like the look of either of them, and didn’t know them, although he could describe them right enough. The one was a tall, scowly sort of fellow, swarthy, Fred told me. Unpleasant. A murderer’s face, Fred called it. The other had dead white hair, and a face that looked as if it had been carved out of ice. There was something wrong with this second man that you couldn’t quite name—Dr. Fell comes to mind. It was the tall man who did the talking.”
    St. Ives gave us a glance at this juncture. The detail of the white hair and the unnamable malevolence suggested that our man was indeed Ingacio Narbondo, now known as Dr. Frosticos, or sometimes Frost, St. Ives’s longtime nemesis and the last man on earth I wanted anything to do with. He had gone out of our lives some time back—out of the world, I had hoped. His interest in the map would be as avid as that of St. Ives, although he would be considerably more ruthless in its pursuit.
    “I take it that you saw these same men again?” Hasbro asked.
    “Just the tall one,” Merton said. “The first time was there in Manchester. Fred saw him on the street and pointed him out to me. He was loitering in a doorway and smoking a pipe. That could have been a coincidence, of course, or perhaps another tall man with similar features. We were on the other side of the street, you see, and it was evening. But then I saw him again, shortly after I was back in London, and no mistake this time. He followed me to the shop, and he wasn’t clever at it either. Bold is the word for it.”
    “You’re certain he followed you?” St. Ives asked.
    “Yes,” Merton said. “The second sighting there in Manchester might have been coincidence, but the third time always smells of a plot.”
    “And the white haired man?” I asked him.
    “No. Only the tall one. The catalogue hadn’t been distributed yet, but he asked straightaway to buy the map, said that he’d heard it had fallen into my hands. No preamble, no beating about the bush. ‘I want the Morecambe Sands map,’ he said.”
    “And you told him to bugger off,” Tubby said.
    “Not in so many words,” Merton said, pouring himself another glass of brandy. He swirled it in the light, looking shrewdly at us. “I played the fool, you see. Denied knowing anything about it. He accused me of lying, and I told him to get out. Then two days later there he was again, but with a copy of the new catalogue, Lord knows where he’d gotten his hands on it, which he laid on the counter along with the required sum, accurate to the penny. I told him I’d already sold it. He called me a liar, which of course was accurate, and walked out without being asked. I hoped that was the end of it.”
    “But he sent his simian cohort back in tonight and bloody well took it,” Tubby said.
    “Ah! Ha ha! He believes he took it!” Merton said, brightening up, but then shut his eyes and held his forehead with the pain of laughing, and it took him a moment to get going again. St. Ives had a keen look on his face.
    “Now, here’s the long and the short of it,” Merton continued, looking around again, his voice dropping. He tipped us a wink. “I hoped I’d seen the end of the gentleman, you see, and yet I’m a careful man. I set to work and devised a false map on a piece of the same sort of paper—but quite a different part of the Bay and with the landmarks changed. Correct in all other ways. I doctored the ink so that it ran, as if the paper had been soaked in seawater, but not so much that the map couldn’t be made out. Then I colored it up with dyes made of algae and tobacco and garden soil, and I slipped it into the box under the counter, where I keep small money to make change for the customers. Our man searched for it, as you can see, throwing things around the floor. Then he spotted the box, helped himself to the money, and found the map. Of course I played my part. ‘Take the money,’ I said to him, ‘but for