Last Respects Page 11

  ‘I do indeed, sir,’ agreed Sloan warmly. ‘Spacious, I think you could call them.’ As he had first entered Collerton House the stained glass of the inner front door and the wide sweep of the staircase had told him all he needed to know about the age of the house. It was Edwardian to a degree. Similarly the white polo-necked jersey of Frank Mundill had told him quite a lot about the man before him. He could have been a writer …

  ‘Unfortunately,’ Mundill was saying, ‘the boathouse is very carefully screened from the house so I couldn’t have seen anyone breaking in even though my studio faces north.’

  ‘An artist …’ To his own surprise Sloan found he had said the words aloud.

  ‘I’m an architect, Inspector,’ Mundill said, adding astringently, ‘There are those of my professional brethren who would have said “yes” to the word artist, though.’

  ‘Well, sir, now that you come to mention it …’

  ‘An architect is something of an artist certainly but he’s something of an engineer too.’

  A policeman, thought Sloan, was something of a diplomat.

  ‘As well as being a craftsman and a draughtsman, of course.’

  A policeman was something of a martinet, of course. He had to be.

  ‘And, Inspector, if he’s any good as an architect he’s something of a visionary, too.’

  If a policeman was any good as a policeman he was something of a philosopher too. It didn’t do not to be in the police force.

  Mundill waved a tapered hand. ‘However …’

  Then it came to Sloan where it was that he had seen the man’s face before. ‘Your photograph was in the local paper last week, sir, wasn’t it?’

  The architect squinted modestly down his nose. ‘You saw it, Inspector, did you?’

  ‘I did indeed,’ said Sloan handsomely. ‘The opening of the new Fire Station, wasn’t it?’

  ‘A very ordinary job, I’m afraid,’ said Mundill deprecatingly.

  In the police force very ordinary jobs had a lot to be said for them. Out of the ordinary ones usually came up nasty.

  ‘It is difficult,’ continued the architect easily, ‘to be other than strictly utilitarian when you’re designing a hose tower.’

  ‘Quite so,’ said Sloan.

  ‘We had site problems, of course,’ continued Frank Mundill smoothly, ‘it being right in the middle of the town.’

  Sloan nodded. Site problems would be to architects what identity problems were to the police: obstacles to be overcome.

  ‘Mind you, Inspector, I have designed buildings in Berebury where there’s been a little more scope than down at the Fire Station.’

  Municipal buildings being what they were, Sloan was glad to hear it.

  ‘There was the Junior School,’ said Mundill.

  ‘Split level,’ said Sloan, who had been there.

  ‘Petty crime,’ added Crosby professionally. He had been there too.

  ‘Plenty of site leeway in that case,’ said Mundill.

  There was precious little leeway with an unknown body. Where did you start if Missing Persons didn’t come up with anyone fitting the description of the body you had? The architect was warming to his theme. ‘There’s more freedom with a school than there is with some domestic stuff.’

  Sloan looked up. ‘You do ordinary house plans, too, sir, do you?’

  ‘Oh yes, Inspector.’ Mundill smiled thinly. ‘I do my share of the domestic side, all right.’

  All policemen did their share of the domestic side. ‘Domestics’ were what new constables on the beat cut their wisdom teeth on. It aged them more quickly than anything else.

  Sloan took a final look round the boathouse and said formally, ‘I’ll be in touch with you again, sir, about this break-in. In due course. Come along, Crosby …’

  He turned to go but as he did so his ear caught the inimical sound of the splash of oars. Sloan leaned out over the path and looked downstream as far as he could. He recognized Horace Boller and his boat quite easily. He had to screw up his eyes to see who his passenger was. And then he recognized him too. It was Mr Basil Jensen, the Curator of the Calleford Museum.

  ‘Terry?’ Miss Blandford pursed her lips. ‘Terry, did you say?’

  ‘I did.’ Police Constable Brian Ridgeford had begun his search for a boy named Terry at the village school at Edsway. School was over for the day but the head teacher was still there. ‘Haven’t you got any boys called Terry?’

  ‘The trouble,’ said Miss Blandford, ‘is that we’ve got more than one.’

  ‘Tell me,’ invited Ridgeford, undaunted.

  She opened the school register. ‘There’s Terry Waters …’

  ‘And what sort of a lad is Terry Waters?’

  ‘Choirboy type,’ she said succinctly.

  Ridgeford frowned.

  ‘The “butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth” sort of boy,’ amplified the teacher.

  Ridgeford’s frown cleared.

  She waved a hand. ‘If you know what I mean?’

  Ridgeford knew what she meant. The manner of boy to whom benches of magistrates in Juvenile Courts—who should know better—almost automatically gave the benefit of the doubt.

  ‘You probably passed him on your way here,’ said Miss Blandford. ‘He only lives down the road.’

  Ridgeford shook his head. ‘Not Terry Waters then.’

  He wasn’t expecting Terry or his friend to be Edsway boys. Mrs Hopton would have recognized Edsway boys when they had brought the ship’s bell into her shop. Children from all the other villages roundabout, though, came into Edsway School every day by bus. ‘What about the others?’ he asked.

  ‘There’s Terry Wilkins.’

  Ridgeford got out his notebook. ‘Where does he hail from?’

  ‘Collerton.’ She hesitated. ‘He’s not a bad boy but easily led.’

  Ridgeford knew that sort. A boy who wouldn’t take to crime unless the opportunity presented itself. There was a whole school of academic thought that saw crime as opportunity. Remove the opportunity, they said, and you removed the crime. If that didn’t work you removed the criminal and called it preventive detention.

  Miss Blandford said, ‘With Terry Wilkins it would depend on the temptation.’

  Constable Ridgeford nodded sagely. Who said Adam and Eve was nonsense? Temptation had had to begin somewhere. It didn’t matter that it had only been an apple to begin with. It was the principle of the thing. ‘Go on,’ he said.

  ‘There’s Terry Goddard.’ The Headteacher’s face became as near to benign-looking as Ridgeford had seen it. ‘He’s a worker.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘Not clever, mind you, but a worker.’

  Everyone liked a worker. Being a worker evidently exonerated Terry Goddard in Miss Blandford’s eyes from any activity the police were likely to be mixed up in. Perhaps being a worker meant you weren’t idle and that removed you a stage further from temptation. Ridgeford tried to think of some industrious criminals.

  Henri Landru must have been quite busy. In the nature of things eleven murders took time.

  Dr Marcel Petiot couldn’t have been much of a layabout either. He hadn’t kept a stroke record of the murders he had committed but the French police thought sixty-five—give or take a few.

  “That the lot, miss?’ he said aloud. ‘I’d been hoping for someone from Marby.’

  ‘There’s Terry Dykes.’ She looked Brian Ridgeford straight in the eye and said, ‘I don’t know what you want your Terry for, Constable, but I wouldn’t put anything past this one.’

  Ridgeford put the name down in his notebook. There was no point in asking expert opinion if you didn’t take account of it. He took down a Marby address with a certain amount of satisfaction, then he asked Miss Blandford if Terry Dykes had got a side-kick.

  “I beg your pardon, Constable?’

  Ridgeford searched in his mind for the right expression. ‘A best friend, miss.’ Bosom chum sounded distinctly old-fashioned but that was what he meant
.

  ‘Oh yes.’ Her brow cleared. ‘Melvin Bates.’

  Ridgeford wrote that name down too.

  ‘Melvin Bates hangs on Terry Dykes’ every word, so—’ she gave a quick nod and said realistically—‘I dare say that’s two of them up to no good.’

  Police Constable Brian Ridgeford took his leave of the Headteacher and applied himself to his bicycle and another journey to the fishing village beside the open sea. Judicious questioning of Marby natives led the policeman to the harbour. He’d find his quarry there for sure, he was told. They were always there, messing about in boats. Or just messing about. But as sure as eggs they’d be there.

  So they were.

  Two boys.

  There had been something that Brian Ridgeford dimly remembered in his training that advised against the questioning of juveniles by a police officer in uniform. Because of the neighbours. Brian Ridgeford squared his shoulders. There weren’t any neighbours on the eastern arm of the harbour wall.

  Just two boys.

  They saw him coming and at the same time saw that there was no point in retreating. They stood their ground as he approached, one standing against a capstan and the other with one foot on a coil of rope.

  ‘About that ship’s bell,’ began Ridgeford generally.

  ‘Wasn’t worth nothing,’ said the boy by the capstan.

  ‘The old woman said so,’ chimed in the other.

  ‘Load of old iron,’ said the first boy, kicking the capstan with his foot.

  ‘Waste of time going over there,’ said his friend.

  ‘She wouldn’t give us nothing for it,’ said the boy who was kicking the capstan. ‘You ask her.’

  ‘Where did you get it?’ asked Ridgeford.

  ‘Up on the Cat’s Back,’ replied the first boy glibly. ‘Didn’t we, Mel?’

  ‘Up on the Cat’s Back,’ agreed Melvin. ‘Like Terry said.’

  ‘Did you now?’ said Ridgeford evenly. ‘Suppose you tell me exactly where.’

  ‘By an old tree,’ said Terry.

  ‘Near the hut,’ said Melvin at the same time.

  ‘By an old tree near the hut,’ said Terry promptly.

  Constable Ridgeford decided that Terry Dykes already had the makings of a criminal mentality.

  ‘I suppose,’ said the policeman heavily, ‘that it fell off the back of a lorry up there.’

  ‘No,’ began Melvin, ‘it was in—’

  ‘There’s only a footpath,’ Terry Dykes cut in quickly.

  Any resemblance of the tableau formed by the three of them to Sir John Millais’ famous painting The Boyhood of Raleigh was purely coincidental. True, there was more than one beached rowing-boat on the shore in the background and there were certainly two boys and an adult in the composition but there any likeness ended. In Millais’ picture the two boys had been hanging, rapt, on the words of the ancient mariner as he pointed out to sea and described the wonders he had seen. In the present instance the tales were being told by the boys and Brian Ridgeford wasn’t pointing anywhere. He was, however, projecting extreme scepticism at what he heard.

  ‘So it didn’t fall off the back of a lorry, then,’ he said.

  ‘No,’ said Terry Dykes defensively, ‘it didn’t.’

  ‘Just lying there then, was it?’

  ‘Yes … No … I don’t know.’

  ‘You must know.’

  Terry Dykes shut his lips together.

  ‘Make up your mind, boy,’ said Ridgeford not unkindly. ‘Was it or wasn’t it?’

  ‘No,” said Terry sullenly, ‘it wasn’t just lying there.’

  ‘Well, then, where was it?’ demanded Ridgeford. When there was no reply from Dykes he suddenly swung round on Melvin Bates. ‘All right, you tell me.’

  Melvin Bates started to stutter. ‘I … i … it was in …’

  ‘Shut up,’ said Dykes, unceremoniously cutting off his henchman.

  ‘All right,’ said Ridgeford flatly, ‘I’ve got the message. The bell was inside somewhere, wasn’t it?’ He drew breath. ‘Now then, let me see if I can work out where. Over here in Marby?’ They were known as ‘constraint questions’: those whose answers limited the area of doubt. The best known constraint question was ‘Can you eat it?’ Ridgeford allowed his voice to grow a harder note. ‘And you found it inside somewhere, didn’t you?’

  It took him another ten minutes to find out exactly where.

  Constable Ridgeford was not the only policeman whose immediate quarry lay in Marby. As soon as Sloan and Crosby left Collerton House they too made for the fishing village by the sea.

  ‘We’ll pick up Ridgeford over there,’ predicted Sloan, ‘and he can take us to have a look at this dinghy he’s reported.’

  They’d left Basil Jensen still making his way upstream.

  ‘To see if it’s Tugboat Annie,’ completed Crosby, engaging gear.

  ‘It would figure if it were.’ He paused and then said quietly, ‘I think something else figures, too, Crosby.’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘I think—only think, mind you—that we just may have an explanation for a body decomposed but not damaged.’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘You think too,’ adjured Sloan. The road between Collerton and Marby was so rural that not even Crosby could speed on it. He could use his mind instead.

  ‘The boathouse?’ offered the detective-constable uncertainly.

  ‘The boathouse,’ said Sloan with satisfaction. ‘It’s early days yet, Crosby, but I think that we shall find that our chap—whoever he is—was parked in the water in the boathouse after he was killed.’

  ‘Why in the water, though, sir?’

  ‘The answer to that,’ said Sloan briskly, ‘is something called mephitis.’

  Crosby’s answer to this was utterly predictable.

  ‘And I hope you never do meet it either,’ said Sloan warmly, ‘because you won’t like it when you do.’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘Mephitis,’ spelled out Sloan for him, ‘is the smell of the dead.’

  Crosby assimilated this and then said, ‘So he was killed by a fall from a height first somewhere else …’

  ‘Somewhere else,’ agreed Sloan at once.

  ‘But …’

  ‘But left in the water afterwards, Crosby.’

  ‘Why?’

  Sloan waved a hand. ‘As I said before, graves for murder victims don’t come easy.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’ Crosby nodded. ‘Besides, he might have been killed on the spur of the moment and whoever did it needed time to think what to do with the body.’

  It was surprising how the word ‘murderer’ hung outside speech.

  ‘He might,’ agreed Sloan. He hoped that it had been a hot-blooded affair. Murder had nothing to be said for it at any time but heat-of-the-moment murder was always less sinister than murder plotted and planned. ‘He would need time and opportunity to work out what to do.’

  ‘And then,’ postulated Crosby, ‘the body was just pushed out into the water?’

  There is a tide in the affairs of men, which, taken at the flood, leads on … No, that wouldn’t do. It wouldn’t have been like that at all. It would have been the furtive opening of the boathouse doors during the hours of darkness, and after the furtive opening the silent shove of a dead body with a boat-hook while the River Calle searched out every cranny of the river bank and picked up its latest burden and bore it off towards the sea.

  ‘Unless I’m very much mistaken,’ said Sloan austerely, ‘the body left the boathouse at night.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Probably,’ he added, ‘in time to catch an ebb tide.’ He would have to look at a tide table as soon as he got back to the police station but darkness and an ebb tide made sense.

  ‘Do we know when, sir?’ asked Crosby, who was perforce driving at a speed to satisfy his passenger.

  ‘Some time before he was found,’ said Sloan dourly, ‘but not too long before.’

  That was a lay interpretation of
what Dr Dabbe had said in longer words.

  Long enough to pick up Gammarus pulex.

  Long enough to become unrecognizable.

  Long enough to be taken by the river to the sea.

  Not so long as to be taken by that same sea and laid on Billy’s Finger.

  Not so long as to disintegrate completely.

  That would have been something that an assassin might have hoped for: that the body would fall to pieces.

  Or that it would reach the open sea and be seen no more.

  ‘Why did the boat go too?’ Crosby was enquiring.

  ‘I think,’ reasoned Sloan aloud, ‘that if a boat is found adrift and a body is found in the water simple policemen are meant to put two and two together and make five.’

  That was something else a murderer might have hoped for.

  ‘It might have happened too,’ said Crosby, ‘mightn’t it? He’d only got to get a bit further out to sea and he wouldn’t have been spotted at all.’

  Sloan stared unseeingly out of the car window. ‘I wonder why he was put into the river exactly when he was.’

  On such a full sea are we now afloat …

  ‘Well, you wouldn’t choose a weekend, would you, sir?’ said Crosby.

  Never on Sundays?

  ‘The whole estuary’s stuffed with sailing boats at the weekend,’ continued the constable. ‘You should see it, sir.’

  ‘I probably will,’ said Sloan pessimistically, ‘unless we’ve got all this cleared up by then.’

  The detective-constable slowed down for a signpost. ‘This must be the Edsway to Marby road we’re joining.’

  ‘Something,’ said Sloan resolutely, ‘must have made it important for that body to be got out of that boathouse when it was.’

  The car radio began to chatter while he was speaking. ‘The gentlemen from the press,’ reported the girl at the microphone, ‘would like to know when Detective-Inspector Sloan will see them.’

  ‘Ten o’clock tomorrow morning,’ responded Sloan with spirit, ‘and not a minute before.’ He switched off at his end and turned to his companion. ‘And Crosby …’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘While you’re about it,’ said Sloan, ‘you’d better find out about the niece. And what Mrs Mundill died from too. We can’t be too careful.’