Last Respects iscm-10 Page 10

  “And if that’s not enough,” continued Leeyes, aggrieved, “we’ve got Ridgeford playing pirates.”

  “He’s having quite a day for a beginner, isn’t he?” said Sloan. “A body and buried treasure.”

  “Hrrrrumph,” said Leeyes.

  “He’ll have to remember today, won’t he,” said Sloan, “when the routine begins to bite.”

  Leeyes sniffed. “He’d have me out there, Sloan, if he could…”

  Sloan didn’t say anything at all to that.

  “Mind you, Sloan, with my background I’ve always been interested in the sea.”

  Sloan could see where this was leading.

  “Did I,” said Leeyes, “ever tell you how we got ashore at Walcheren?”

  “Yes,” said Sloan with perfect truth. Nobody had been spared that story. Recitals of the superintendent’s wartime experiences were well known and were to be avoided at all costs. He didn’t even “stoppeth one in three.” Every officer on station got them.

  “Bit of a splash,” said Leeyes with the celebrated British understatement favoured by men of action in a tight corner.

  Detective Inspector Sloan could see where this was leading, too. In another two minutes Superintendent Leeyes would have constituted himself Berebury’s currently ranking expert on underwater archeology. And then where would they be?

  “I’ll see Ridgeford presently, sir,” Sloan said firmly, “and find out about the ship’s bell too.”

  “And this dinghy that he keeps on about over at Marby,” said Leeyes. “You won’t forget that, will you, Sloan?”

  “No, sir, I’ll see about that as soon as I can…” But before that, come wind, come weather, he had every intention of going up the River Calle.

  A little later a police car with Detective Constable Crosby at the wheel and Detective Inspector Sloan in the front passenger seat swept out of the police station at Berebury for the second time that afternoon. The driver negotiated the traffic islands with impatience and then steered past the town’s multi-storey car park. Eventually he swung the car onto the open road and out into the Calleshire countryside. In a wallet on the back seat of the police car was a hastily drawn-up list of everyone who lived beside the River Calle on both sides of the river east of Billing Bridge.

  “There’s a note of the riparian owners, too, sir,” said Detective Constable Crosby, “whoever they are when they’re at home.”

  “The fishing rights belong to them,” said Sloan.

  “Oh, the fishing…” said Crosby, putting his foot down.

  “There’s no hurry,” said Sloan as the car picked up speed.

  “Got a catch a murderer,” said Crosby, “haven’t we?”

  That, at least, decided Sloan to himself, had the merit of reducing the case to its simplest. And he had to admit that that was not unwelcome after a session with Superintendent Leeyes…

  “Chance would be a fine thing,” he said aloud.

  “Someone did for him,” said the constable. “He didn’t get the way he was and where he was on his own.”

  “True.” As inductive logic went it wasn’t a very grand conclusion but it would do. “Can you go any further?”

  “We’ve got to get back to the water,” said Crosby, crouching forward at the wheel like Toad of Toad Hall.

  Sloan nodded. In all fairness he had to admit that what Crosby had said was true. All the action so far had been in water… He said, “What do we know so far?”

  “Very little, sir.”

  It was not the right answer from pupil to mentor.

  In the Army mounting a campaign was based on the useful trio of “information, intention, method.” He wasn’t going to get very far discussing these with Crosby if the detective constable baulked at “information.”

  “Could you,” said Sloan with a hortatory cough, “try to think of why a body killed in a fall should be found in water?”

  “Because it couldn’t be left where it fell,” responded Crosby promptly.

  “Good. Go on.”

  “I don’t know why it couldn’t be left where it fell, sir,” said the constable. “But if it could have been left, then it would have been, wouldn’t it?”

  “True.”

  “Heavy things, bodies…”

  Sloan nodded. What Crosby had just said was simple and irrefutable but it wasn’t enough. “Keep going,” he said.

  Crosby’s eyebrows came together in a formidable frown. “Where it fell could have been too public,” he said.

  “That’s a point,” said Sloan.

  “And it might have been found too soon,” suggested Crosby after further thought.

  “Very true,” said Sloan. “Anything else?”

  “Where it was found might give us a lead on who killed him.”

  “Good, good,” said Sloan encouragingly. “Now, why put the body in the water?”

  But Crosby’s fickle interest had evaporated.

  “Why,” repeated Sloan peremptorily, “put the body in the water?”

  Crosby took a hand off the steering wheel and waved it. “Saves digging a hole,” he said simply.

  “Anything else?” said Sloan.

  Crosby thought in silence.

  “Are there,” said Sloan tenaciously, “any other good reasons why a body should be put in the water?” It looked as if they were going to have to make bricks without straw in this case anyway…

  Crosby continued to frown prodigiously but to no effect.

  “It is virtually impossible to hide a grave,” pronounced Detective Inspector Sloan academically.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And,” continued Sloan, “the disposal of a murdered body therefore presents a great problem to the murderer.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “It often,” declared Sloan in a textbook manner, “presents a greater problem than committing the actual murder.”

  “Murder’s easy,” said Crosby largely.

  “Not of an able-bodied young man,” Sloan reminded him. “Of women and children and the old, perhaps.” He considered the tempting vista opened up by this thought—but unless you were psychotic you murdered for a reason, and reason and easy victim did not always go hand in hand.

  The constable changed gear while Sloan considered the various ways in which someone could be persuaded into falling from a height. “He must have been taken by surprise on the edge of somewhere,” he said aloud.

  “Pushed, anyway,” said Crosby.

  “Yes,” agreed Sloan. “If he’d fallen accidentally, he could have been left where he fell.”

  “Shoved when he wasn’t looking, then,” concluded Crosby.

  “We have to look for a height with a concealed bottom…”

  “Pussy’s down the well,” chanted Crosby.

  “And not too conspicuous a top,” said Sloan.

  “Somewhere where the victim would have a reason for going with the murderer,” suggested Crosby.

  “He’d have had to have been pretty near the brink of somewhere even then,” said Sloan. “That’s what parapets are for.”

  “With someone he trusted then,” said Crosby.

  “With someone he didn’t think there was any need to be afraid of,” said Sloan with greater precision. He reached over to the back seat for the list of riparian owners. He wasn’t expecting any trouble from them. Fishing in muddy waters was a police prerogative and he didn’t care who knew it.

  Horace Boiler was as near to being contented with his day as he ever allowed himself to be. As he pushed his rowing boat off from the shore at Edsway—Horace had never paid a mooring fee in his life—he reflected on how an ill wind always blew somebody good.

  He would have known that his two passengers were policemen even if the older one hadn’t said so straightaway. There was a certain crispness about him that augured the backing of an institution. Horace Boiler was an old hand at discerning those whose brief authority was bolstered by the hidden reserves of an organisation like the police force and the
Army—the vicar came in a class of his own—and those who threw their weight about because they were merely rich.

  Horace had quite a lot to do with the merely rich on Saturdays and Sundays. The rich who liked sailing were very important in the economy of Edsway. From Monday to Friday ihey disappeared from Horace’s ken—presumably to get richer still in a mysterious place known simply as the city. Horace himself had never been there and when someone had once equated the city with London—which he had been to—Horace’s mind failed to make the connection.

  Nevertheless Sunday evenings always saw a great exodus of weekenders, albeit tired and happy and sometimes quite weather-beaten, from Edsway back to the city. The following Friday evening—in summertime anyway—saw them return, pale and exhausted, from their labours in the town and raring for a weekend’s pleasure—and sunburn in the country. Horace, whose own skin bore a close resemblance to old and rather dirty creased leather, could never decide whether sunburn was a pleasure or a pain for the weekenders.

  As a rule therefore Horace Boiler only had Saturdays and Sundays in which to pursue the important business of getting rich himself. This accounted for his contentment this day which was neither a Saturday nor a Sunday. Extra money for one trip on a weekday and at the expense of Her Majesty’s Government to boot was a good thing; extra money twice was a cause for rejoicing. Not that anyone would have guessed this from Horace Boiler’s facial expression. His countenance bore its usual surly look and his mind was totally bent on the business of deriving as much financial benefit as he could from this particular expedition—as it was on every other excursion which he undertook.

  He gave his starboard oar an expert twist to get the boat properly out into the water and then set about the important business of settling the oars comfortably in the rowlocks. Some weekend sailors, rich and poor, conceded Boiler to himself, also threw their weight about because they knew what they were doing in a boat—but they were few and far between.

  He didn’t know for certain yet if his two passengers were sailors or not, although he already had his doubts about the younger man. Both men had distributed themselves carefully about the boat in a seaman-like manner and had actually managed not to rock the boat while clambering into it. They had even accomplished this without getting their feet wet, which was something of an achievement, and was connected, although his passengers did not know this, with the fact that Horace was sure of getting a handsome fee for the outing. Doubtful payers and those who were so misguided as to attempt to undertip the boatman always got their feet wet.

  The question of a fee for the journey they were about to undertake was very much on Detective Inspector Sloan’s mind too. The payment—whatever it amounted to—would eventually have to come out of the Berebury Division imprest account. This was guarded by Superintendent Leeyes with a devotion to duty and tenacity of purpose that would have done credit to a Cerberus.

  “Take you to where I found the poor man?” Horace nodded his comprehension. “That’s what you want, isn’t it?”

  “It is,” said Detective Inspector Sloan, detaching his mind with an effort from an unhappy vision of Superintendent Leeyes standing like a stag at bay over the petty cash at Berebury Police Station. “Can you do that for us?”

  “Certainly, gentlemen,” said Horace readily, even though he already knew that they were policemen not gentlemen; Horace’s usage of modes of address was a nicely calculated affair and closely linked with the expectation of future reward. “No trouble at all.”

  Sloan settled himself at the bow of the boat, reminding himself that any hassle to come over payment for their trip should take second place to tangling with a murderer. He only hoped Superintendent Leeyes would feel the same.

  For the fourth time that day the boatman began to row out into the estuary of the River Calle. Detective Inspector Sloan looked about him with interest. Seeing a map of the estuary with a cross marking the spot where the body had been found was one thing, but it was quite a different matter seeing the spot for oneself. He’d have to trust the boatman that it was the same spot though—he’d tried to rustle up Constable Ridgeford to get him to come with them, but according to Mrs. Ridgeford he’d had to go off on his bicycle to see to something. And so they had had to put to sea without him. Just, thought Sloan to himself, a distant memory stirring, the Owl and the Pussy-cat… except that Boiler’s old boat wasn’t a beautiful pea green…

  Horace Boiler had bent to the oars with practised ease and was rowing in a silence designed to save his breath. Then…

  “You’re going out to sea,” observed Sloan sharply. “I thought you’d found him ferther up river.”

  “Got to get round Billy’s Finger, haven’t I?” responded Boiler resentfully.

  “I see…” began Sloan.

  “And pick up the tide.” Nobody could be surlier than Boiler when he wanted to be.

  “Of course.”

  “I’m an old man now,” said Boiler, hunching his shoulders and allowing a whine to creep into his voice. “I can’t go up river like I used to do.”

  “Naturally,” said Sloan, crisply, nevertheless taking a good look at his watch. “Let me see now—what time was it exactly when we left?”

  “I go by St. Peter’s clock myself,” snapped Boiler. “Always keeps good time, does St. Peter’s.”

  “Splendid,” said Sloan warmly. “That’ll make everything easier…” He settled back onto his hard seat. A warning shot fired across the bows never came amiss…

  Presently the rowing boat did turn up river. Rowing against the eddies was not such hard work for Horace Boiler as it would have been for most other men because he came of river people and knew every stretch of quiet water that there was. This did not stop him giving an artful pant as he eventually shipped his oars and caught a patch of slack water.

  “ ’Bout here it was, gentlemen,” he said, histrionically drooping himself over the oars as if at the end of a fast trip from Putney to Mortlake against another crew.

  Detective Inspector Sloan was concentrating on the water. “How far does the tide come up the estuary?”

  The boatman wrinkled his eyes. “The sparling—they turn back half-way between Collerton and Edsway no matter what.”

  “They do, do they?” responded Sloan vigorously. The habits of sparling were no sort of an answer for a superintendent sitting at a desk in Berebury Police Station.

  “Always go to the limit of the salt water, do sparling,” said Boiler.

  “Ah,” said Sloan. That was better. Sparling must be biological indicators too.

  “Only see them in the summer, of course,” said the boatman.

  “Been this year then, have they?” asked Sloan, unconsciously lapsing into the vernacular himself.

  “Not yet.” Horace Boiler unshipped an oar to stop the boat drifting too far.

  “It’s summer now,” remarked Detective Constable Crosby from the stern.

  “Not afore Collerton Fair,” said Horace Boiler flatly. “Sparling come at fair time.”

  Detective Inspector Sloan turned his head and regarded the southern shore of the river mouth with close attention. Not far away a heron rose and with an almost contemptuous idleness put the tips of his wing feathers out as spoilers. They’d left Edsway and the open sea well behind but they could now see Collerton Church clearly up river of them. Far inland were urban Berebury and ancient Calleford and what townspeople chose to call civilisation…

  “Do smell of cucumber,” rasped the boatman unexpectedly.

  “What does?” asked Sloan. They were a long way from land.

  “Sparling.”

  “An,” said Sloan again, his mind on other things. “Pull the boat round a bit, will you? I want to see the other way.”

  The view down river was unrevealing. Edsway itself, though, was clearly visible, as was the headland beyond. Kinnisport and the cliffs at Cranberry Point were just a smudge in the distance.

  “That headland behind Marby stands out, doesn’t it?”
observed Sloan, surprised. Seen from nearer to, the rise in the land wasn’t quite so apparent.

  “That’s the Cat’s Back,” said Boiler. “Proper seamark, that is.”

  “Funny,” said Crosby ingenuously, “I never thought you had seamarks like you had landmarks.”

  Somewhere not very far away a gull screamed.

  “Take us up river now,” commanded Sloan abruptly.

  Horace Boiler bent to his oars once more. He rowed purposefully and without comment out of the narrowing estuary and into the river proper. Detective Inspector Sloan, sitting at the bow, was almost as immobile as a carved figurehead at the prow. He did turn once to begin to say something to Detective Constable Crosby, but that worthy officer was settled in the stern of the boat, letting his hand dangle in the water and regarding the consequent and subsequent wake with the close attention that should have been devoted to the duties of detection.

  Sloan turned back and looked ahead. Speech would have been wasted. Instead he turned his mind to studying the river banks. That was when, presently, he too saw the doors of the boathouse belonging to Collerton House. Even from midstream he could see where a crowbar had been used to prise open the lock.

  11

  This is a downright deep tragedy.

  « ^ »

  Frank Mundill was soon back at the riverside. This time he had Detective Inspector Sloan and Detective Constable Crosby with him, not Elizabeth Busby. Sloan had a distinct feeling that he had seen the man from Collerton House before but he couldn’t immediately remember where.

  Mundill indicated the boathouse doors very willingly to the two policemen and then pointed to the empty stretch of water inside the boathouse.

  “Our dinghy’s gone, Inspector,” he said.

  “And this, I take it, sir, is where she was kept, is it?” said Sloan, giving the inside of the boathouse a swift looking-over.

  “It was.” Mundill tightened his lips wryly. “She wasn’t exactly the Queen Elizabeth, you know, but she was good enough for a day on the river with a rod.”