Parting Breath Read online

  When Detective Inspector Sloan next saw Crosby he was approaching the fountain and the constable was crossing the Tarsus College quadrangle with a steaming jug of coffee in one hand and in the other two cups, one on top of the other, and balanced on top of those a plate with some sandwiches on it. The sandwiches were perilously crowned with a salt cellar.

  Sloan regarded his subordinate for a long moment and then said sardonically, ‘And for your next trick?’

  ‘I wasn’t absolutely sure what a College Buttery was,’ said Crosby virtuously, ‘so I went to find out.’ He cast an anxious glance at the salt cellar, which was wobbling as uncertainly as a Balkan throne. ‘Sir, do you think we could sit down by the fountain?’

  As they settled themselves on the parapet Sloan looked at his watch. He would telephone his wife next to say that he wouldn’t be home before morning. She wouldn’t mind. Or if she minded she wouldn’t say. It was one of the things she was used to. And if, when it came, the new baby cried in the night she knew she would have to soothe it alone. The first nursery rhyme that any detective’s child learnt was ‘Bye, baby bunting, Father’s gone a-hunting.…’

  ‘The man Colin Ellison,’ said Crosby basely dividing the sandwiches on a purely mathematical basis and without any regard to rank, ‘says he doesn’t know anything about anything.’

  ‘He was part of the great row in the library,’ said Sloan, ‘his room was robbed, and for my money he was somewhere he shouldn’t have been yesterday evening.’

  ‘He says he didn’t even know Moleyns was dead until he got to the dining hall this evening.’

  ‘And,’ added Sloan, ‘he was around here about the time Moleyns bought it. Or so Sneezy says.’

  ‘Sneezy, sir? Oh, yes, our Stephen Smithers.’

  ‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,’ said Sloan crisply. ‘Before your time, Crosby.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  Now he came to think about it, you could get wallpapers with the nicer characters from the rich store of English fairy tales printed on them especially for children’s nurseries. They, he and Margaret, would have to think about having that – nothing frightening, of course, but enough pictures for the baby to build fantasies of its own around.

  ‘Coffee,’ said Crosby, unwittingly interrupting a vision which was a confusion of fairly-tale castles and knights in shining armour that would have greatly surprised him had he been able to share it. ‘They,’ he went on, ‘were Colin Ellison’s things all right, sir. He checked them through quite carefully for me just now.’

  ‘All present and correct?’

  ‘Nothing missing – he was sure about that – and nothing damaged that he could see.’

  ‘And no fingerprints either, I take it?’

  ‘No, sir. It doesn’t make sense.’

  ‘It will,’ said Sloan rather wearily, ‘in the end. So will Moleyns’ wanting to see the Chaplain when we find out what all that caper was about.’ He bit into a sandwich. ‘Tell me, Crosby, why should a man of that age want to see a chaplain?’

  Crosby frowned. ‘About getting married, sir would you think?’

  ‘Married?’ grunted Sloan. ‘I hadn’t thought of that.’

  ‘It wouldn’t be a christening,’ continued the constable, in whose family circle the Church featured in Rites of Passage on wheels and nothing else, ‘would it, now?’

  ‘Why not?’ asked Sloan, intrigued. ‘Even students …’

  ‘If it was a christening,’ pronounced Crosby, ‘the mother would lay it on, wouldn’t she?’

  ‘I wouldn’t know about that,’ murmured Sloan. And he didn’t either. Not yet. But soon he would be learning. ‘And,’ he added curiously, ‘how are you so sure?’

  ‘My sisters,’ said Crosby bashfully. ‘Always making an uncle of me, they are.’

  Sloan tried to visualize a neat and tidy Crosby standing near the font with a white bundle in his arms, failed – and helped himself to another sandwich. ‘Assuming,’ he said with heavy irony, ‘that the marriage service is out and that christenings are women’s work’ – fatherhood was going to be a new experience for Sloan; he obviously had a lot to learn – ‘what else do you think Moleyns might have wanted to consult a chaplain about?’

  ‘I couldn’t say, sir, I’m sure.’

  ‘What sort of problem would you consult a chaplain about?’ asked Sloan, changing his tack slightly. After all, Crosby couldn’t be that much older than all these undergraduates – and everyone couldn’t be of the same simple faith as the Superintendent.

  ‘Getting married,’ said Crosby without hesitation.

  ‘You’ve got a one-track mind,’ snapped Sloan.

  ‘Yes, sir.’ He coughed and tried again. ‘Perhaps Henry Moleyns had been and gone and done something that he shouldn’t have done, then.’

  ‘Confession? That’s a thought.’ Sloan had seen many men weighed down with guilt in his time, a prison sentence a welcome expiation in spite of what the reformers said.

  Crosby lifted his coffee cup. ‘You usually want to tell somebody if you’ve blotted your copy-book, sir, don’t you?’

  ‘That’s just as well, too,’ said Sloan flatly, ‘otherwise there would be a sight fewer cases solved.’

  ‘Course, he might just have had a simple problem about what to do about something,’ ventured Crosby.

  ‘He was going to see Professor Watkinson, too, and he’s a historian.’

  ‘A historical problem, then,’ said Crosby obligingly.

  ‘That reminds me.’ Sloan flipped over the pages of his notebook. ‘The Professor said that he sent him a note.’

  ‘It’s not in his room.’

  ‘Now, there’s a thing,’ said Detective Inspector Sloan absently. ‘Make a note about that.…’

  ‘I’ve got the Berebury and District General Hospital on the line,’ announced Higgins, the porter, who was manning the Tarsus switchboard, ‘with a call for Detective Inspector Sloan. A Dr Dabbe.’

  ‘Put him through,’ said Sloan.

  The Bursar of Tarsus had found him a room at the opposite side of the quadrangle – ‘murder headquarters’ seemed to Sloan an improbable description of it. The room belonged to a don of Tarsus presently enjoying a sabbatical year in the United States and was furnished with modern prints by De Chirico. He had only half an eye for them, which was just as well: he had a feeling that closer examination might not be a good thing. The bookcases, too, were full of books that Sloan would not have liked his wife to read.

  But what worried him most of all was the white carpet. In Sloan’s milieu carpets were for covering floors serviceably. This one was not only white but slightly fluffy and he didn’t see how it could stay white for very long while the room doubled as a working place for a Scene of Crime Officer. The only comfort was that John Hardiman had assured him that the owner would not be back for a year.

  ‘That you, Sloan? Dabbe here.’

  There wouldn’t be any carpets where Dr Dabbe was ringing from, Sloan knew that. Only a stout composition floor hosed down a dozen times a day. And there were no prints hanging on the wall, except perhaps X-ray ones.

  ‘This post mortem,’ began the pathologist.

  ‘Yes, Doctor.’ Sloan pulled his notebook towards him.

  ‘The deceased was a young man of average build – about twenty years old – you’ve got his exact age, I expect – properly nourished.…’

  Pathologists had hobby-horses, too, and obesity was one of Dr Dabbe’s. He was always having a go at Sergeant Gelven – seventeen stone without his whistle – about his weight. ‘See you soon,’ was his favourite form of greeting to the portly detective, ‘on my slab.’ He would chide the too thin, also, but not so often.

  ‘… and quite muscular,’ went on Dr Dabbe now.

  ‘He’d been on a bicycle tour,’ Sloan informed him absently, ‘so he would be.’

  ‘Had he? Well, there were certainly no signs of disease present. The cause of death was a penetrating wound between the fourth rib and the
fifth rib just to the left of the sternum.’

  ‘Missing the bone?’ said Sloan.

  ‘It isn’t bone there,’ said Dabbe. ‘Only cartilage. Bony rib doesn’t start until another inch each side of the breastbone.’

  ‘Missing the cartilage, then,’ said Sloan patiently.

  ‘That sort of wound is almost always going to miss the cartilage,’ said the pathologist. ‘Most things coming up against it are going to be deflected either above or below the rib and through the intercostal muscles.’

  ‘Are they?’ said Sloan non-committally.

  ‘If you think of your ribs as being like Venetian blinds on edge you can see that anything pointed at them would stand a good chance of getting through, can’t you?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Sloan. ‘What we need to know, though, is –’

  ‘The wound,’ went on the pathologist, equally undeflected, ‘extends through the pericardium and the anterior wall of the left ventricle.’

  ‘Which means …’ said Sloan gamely.

  ‘I opened the pericardial sac, of course,’ said Dr Dabbe, not listening.

  ‘Of course,’ murmured Sloan.

  ‘Naturally it was full of blood.’

  Noises of agreement seemed called for, so Sloan made them.

  ‘And the subject was standing up.’

  ‘Was he?’ said Sloan. He didn’t know how much that information was going to help him, but he wrote it down.

  ‘As Vespasian said,’ remarked Dr Dabbe.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Vespasian. He was a Roman emperor who held that emperors should die standing up.’

  ‘Did he?’ said Sloan.

  ‘Vespasian? No, come to think of it, I don’t believe he did. Died in his bed.’

  Sloan took a deep breath. ‘And Henry Moleyns?’

  ‘He nearly did,’ said Dr. Dabbe cheerfully. ‘There’s a trickle of blood down the outside of the skin under the fourth intercostal space to prove it.’

  ‘That’s something, I suppose,’ said Sloan, who had not for one moment lost track of the things he wanted to know. ‘Now, Doctor, about the weapon.…’

  ‘Sharp, of course. It went through his clothes, too.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Thin. Eight millimetres at the outside.’

  Sloan wrote that down, too. Not that he liked metric measurements. Oh, he understood them all right, and in theory they made adding up easier, but he still couldn’t – what was the word they used these days? – he couldn’t conceptualise them. Now, inches and yards he could imagine, and if anyone mentioned miles he knew where he was at once. The new baby would be all right. He’d never learn anything else.

  ‘And not less than six point five,’ continued the pathologist.

  ‘Six point five,’ echoed Sloan.

  ‘Measure twice and cut once, as my old granny’s dressmaker used to say, Sloan.’

  ‘Yes, Doctor.’ Dr Dabbe always took an incorrigibly light-hearted view of his work. Perhaps it was the only way. Perhaps it was because pathologists were insulated from their patients in a way that other doctors weren’t by death and – by custom – they never saw relatives anyway. That would have suited Sloan, too: It was when you saw the relatives that you saw crime as the pebble in the pond – the ripples reaching out further and further, lapping up the quiet by-waters of other people’s lives. Drowning them sometimes, too.

  ‘The sizes of the holes in the clothes, the skin and the visceral and parietal edges of the pericardium are all very much the same,’ carried on the pathologist, ‘so whatever the instrument was, it doesn’t appreciably thicken up for the first part of its length.’

  ‘Amazing what you can tell from a hole,’ remarked Sloan, ‘isn’t it?’

  ‘I haven’t finished,’ said Dabbe. ‘There’s something else.’

  ‘The angle?’ hazarded Sloan after a quick think.

  ‘The angle was very interesting, Sloan.’

  ‘Not an upward thrust, then?’ Upward thrusts were what they usually had on Saturday nights outside the pubs at the railway end of the town.

  ‘Almost dead straight.’

  ‘That’s odd.’

  ‘There was something else,’ said Dabbe.

  ‘What was that?’

  ‘The depth.’

  ‘What was so odd about that?’

  ‘It wasn’t too deep,’ said Dabbe slowly; ‘or too shallow.’

  ‘But just right?’ There had been an advertisement once, Surely.…

  ‘Exactly right,’ said Dr Dabbe, totally serious now. ‘So exactly right, Sloan, that whoever caused it either got everything spot on just by accident or …’

  ‘Or,’ finished Sloan for him, choosing his words with care, ‘it was a highly skilled job.’

  ‘Very,’ agreed the pathologist. ‘By someone who’d done it before or been taught how. Sleep well, old chap.’

  11 One – Two

  He did not sleep well. He was not the only one.

  There were other people destined to have an unquiet night at the University of Calleshire as well as Detective Inspector Sloan. All might have seemed outwardly serene but all was by no means still. For one thing, events of the day were being brought to the official notice of various highly-placed persons in the county.

  The Vice-Chancellor, duly apprised by the Bursar of the true seriousness of the situation, saw his own duty as happily clear. He at once passed the buck upwards in two directions – spiritual and temporal.

  He telephoned the Bishop’s Palace first.

  ‘My Lord …’

  The Bishops of Calleford had by long custom held the position of University Visitor. The present incumbent heard the news from the Vice-Chancellor and offered appropriate words of comfort as befitted his office but nevertheless included the third Psalm – ‘Lord, how are they increased that trouble me!’– in his own devotions that night.

  The Vice-Chancellor politely acknowledged the words of comfort, though they were likely to avail him little against the strictures of either the national press or the University Senate – the Scylla and Charybdis of his life – and it was not accidental that he put Scylla first. He rang off and telephoned the University Chancellor, the Duke of Calleshire, at Calle Castle.

  ‘Your Grace …’

  At other less pressing moments the Vice-Chancellor was wont to ponder exactly why custom and usage demanded that he address two such eminently different characters – albeit each of them in his own way exalted – by archaic forms of address that seemed to have got themselves transposed.

  His Grace the Duke of Calleshire fortunately considered over-reaction to be the mark of Common Man and took the news calmly enough. As a father of six he was in any case by now pretty well inured to the shocks that youth can inflict upon the middle-aged. He at first took an eighteenth-century view of the cause. ‘Some girl, I suppose.…’

  Police Superintendent Leeyes, one eye on the clock and more experienced in having to wake people when the night was really advanced, also decided to put his own superior in the picture at a relatively decent hour. He put in a call to the Assistant Chief Constable: like the Vice-Chancellor, keeping the problem within the family but going upwards.

  ‘At the University of Calleshire, sir,’ said Leeyes grittily. There were no problems of title and mode of address here.

  ‘Ah, yes. In Berebury.’

  ‘That’s right.’ The Superintendent let out a sigh of relief. At least the Assistant Chief Constable (Magdalen College, Oxford, as well as the police one) wasn’t going to pretend not only that he’d never heard of the University of Calleshire – a lot of people did that – but also that there were only two universities in England, one of which he’d been to. A lot more people did that.

  ‘A sharp instrument, did you say? More of that about these days than there used to be.’ There were no words of comfort from this quarter. Only a completely professional view. ‘At least,’ he qualified this, ‘the Home Office statisticians say there are, and they should know, I sup
pose.’

  ‘And what is there less of, then, sir?’

  ‘Still looking on the bright side, Superintendent?’

  ‘They say,’ replied Leeyes without conviction, ‘that every cloud has a silver lining.’

  ‘Blunt instruments haven’t gone up much. Not as a means of killing, anyway.’ With the prerogative of high authority he changed the subject abruptly. ‘What about the sit-in?’

  ‘Still going on.’

  That was the point in time at which Detective Inspector Sloan managed to get through on the telephone to Superintendent Leeyes with Dr Dabbe’s report.

  ‘He said what?’ demanded the Superintendent explosively.

  ‘That whoever stabbed Moleyns knew exactly what he was doing.’

  For once his superior responded with total silence.

  ‘Down to the last centimetre,’ added Sloan weakly – finding to his surprise that Leeyes’s silences were more unnerving than his peppery utterances.

  ‘There’s something going on there,’ said Leeyes at last – and profoundly.

  ‘It does put a different face on things, sir, doesn’t it?’ agreed Sloan.

  ‘Call it a new dimension,’ said Leeyes, who had once struggled through the opening chapter of Mr J. W. Dunne’s well-known work, An Experiment with Time.

  ‘An experienced killer,’ mused Sloan. They didn’t get many of those in Calleshire.

  ‘In our manor,’ said Leeyes. ‘Ay, there’s the rub.’

  ‘Beg pardon, sir?’

  ‘Hamlet.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Science,’ announced Leeyes suddenly.

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘They do science there, don’t they?’

  ‘There are a lot of laboratories and things around,’ said Sloan vaguely.

  ‘Then I reckon there’s something going on there,’ said Leeyes again.

  ‘Someone did let some white mice out,’ remembered Sloan. ‘Yesterday. If yesterday was Wednesday …’ De Chirico’s metaphysical paintings were unnerving things to have on the wall of a living room. Distracting wasn’t in it. The only one that he thought he could understand was the print nearest to the telephone and that looked to him like Harlequin and Columbine. There had been a police pantomime for the kids once at Christmas with Harlequin and Columbine in it – with Harlequin bent on frustrating the knavish tricks of the Clown who was in love with Columbine. A proper police set-up that had been – plot and all, now he came to think of it – with Woman Police Constable Perkins – Pretty Polly – as Columbine, a tall lad with good legs from Traffic Division as Harlequin – not that Columbine’s legs hadn’t been good too, they had – and a crafty-looking type from Plain-clothes Division as the Clown. He’d have to brush up on pantomimes too now, with the baby coming – next year would be too soon, of course; it wouldn’t be old enough – but after that …