He reached the small landing-stage where the hire-boats were moored.

Joe, the boatman, was not there yet for which Pascoe was grateful. He was the kind of surly suspicious Yorkshireman who at birth probably examined his mother's breast closely for several minutes before accepting the offer. But at least he made a definite witness.

No, he didn't recognize the photo of Brenda Sorby. No, there was no boat unaccounted for. No, there was no one who had come back alone.

Forced to admit that the sudden storm had brought the boaters back in a bit of a rush, he grudgingly conceded that a foursome might have come back as a threesome. But no singles, and he'd seen 'em all. Rain or no rain, he checked the gear in each boat before refunding the two pound deposit; and all deposits had been returned.

But the Choker must have used a boat. The nearest bridge giving access to the isthmus was a mile downstream, too far to risk carrying a body. In any case, why come so far to dump it?

The only alternative was that the Choker was one of the barge people, a theory approved by Andy Dalziel who tended to lump all people who lived itinerant lives together as 'dirty gyppos'. Pascoe, however, had done a paper at university on the education of 'travelling children' in England and knew that the attitudes and lifestyles of the different societies varied considerably. Fairground and circus folk, for instance, were generally speaking much concerned about their children's schooling, and where they could afford it, often sent them to private boarding-schools. Gypsies on the other hand were much more suspicious of 'the system', and much more conscious of their independence from it, a consciousness which made integration of their children into any conventional school much more difficult. The barge people in the same way had once presented an even greater problem, but one which had been in part solved by time and the disappearance of their way of life as canal traffic ceased to be economically viable. There were signs of a resurgence recently and no doubt, thought Pascoe, the problem too would return.