Slight Mourning Page 11

  The doctor didn’t argue about this. Instead she said, “And Annabel’s looking after you all right, I’m sure.”

  “Between them,” said Helen Fent to the doctor in a sudden burst of savagery, “Quentin and Annabel are managing everything very nicely, thank you.”

  There was a small dark-haired man waiting for Sloan in his office. Detective Constable Crosby performed the honours.

  “This is Mr. Hickory, sir. The expert on Town and Country Planning you wanted to see.”

  “From the county architect’s department at Calleford,” added Mr. Hickory cautiously. “What can we do for you, Inspector?”

  “You can explain to me,” said Sloan, “about planning permission and development …”

  Mr. Hickory drew breath.

  Sloan added a hasty rider: “… in words that I can understand.”

  “I see. Well, planning permission’s a funny thing …”

  Sloan’s eyebrows went up.

  “No, no, Inspector. Don’t misunderstand me. Not funny in the police sense, though you do get a bit of that, too, from time to time.” Hickory smiled thinly. “I daresay we’ve all been approached in our day.”

  Sloan preserved a decent reticence on this. It wasn’t the sort of thing policemen talked about among strangers.

  “No, not funny,” went on the planning man. “Quixotic would be a better word. Not in theory, mark you. Oh, dear, no. In thoery the surveyors recommend and the committees decide …”

  “Man proposes, God disposes,” muttered Crosby under his breath.

  “And in theory,” said Hickory, “the committees take all decisions in the best interests of the community as a whole …”

  “Don’t we all,” said Sloan politely. Crosby just rolled his eyes.

  “Yes—well,” Hickory went on, “committees are funny things, too.”

  Sloan, who had made this discovery while still a constable, brought Mr. Hickory from the general to the particular: “About development at Strontfield Park …”

  “Ah, yes.” The local authority man unrolled a map of East Calleshire and pointed. “Here’s Constance Parva. You see this part marked in yellow …”

  Crosby craned his neck over Hickory’s shoulder while Sloan examined the map for yellow markings.

  “That’s what’s called the village envelope. Since the 1947 Town and Country Planning Act. Development is normally allowed within this area—except sometimes what we call backland housing. Outside it …”

  “The white part?”

  “That’s right, Inspector. Permission for development of the white part is a bit different. Not so …”

  “Automatic?”

  “More debatable, shall we say,” murmured Hickory. “Discretionary, in fact.”

  “And this main drainage they all talk about?”

  “Drains,” said Mr. Hickory delicately, “er—open the way for more development.”

  Crosby opened his mouth to speak.

  “I can see that,” said Sloan hurrying into the breach.

  “They like churches, too,” volunteered Hickory.

  “Do they indeed!” said Sloan, suppressing a variety of retorts which included references to temples of Midas …

  “They give the community a focal point,” continued Hickory unabashed.

  … and bowing in the house of Mammon. (Sloan’s mother had been a great Bible reader.)

  Hickory waved a hand. “From the Town and Country Planning point of view, I mean.”

  … to say nothing of worshipping at the altar of Moloch.

  “So,” managed Sloan sardonically, “given drains and a church …”

  “In that order,” mouthed Crosby, sotto voce.

  “… within the yellow village envelope you get development?”

  “We’d rather,” Hickory entered a caveat, “it wasn’t first-class agricultural land.”

  “It isn’t. Not at Strontfield,” said Sloan.

  Crosby looked surprised.

  “If it was good enough to farm well,” explained Sloan patiently, “Fent would have farmed it well and the farm next door wouldn’t have got the name of Fallow.”

  “That’s right.” Mr. Hickory blinked and consulted some more papers. “That’s what the applicants said. It’s not productive land out there. They thought an injection of new blood would revitalize the rural community …”

  “Very public-spirited of them, I’m sure,” murmured Sloan.

  “New houses would improve the shops and services,” read out Hickory, “stop the drain from the countryside, and so forth …”

  “They were in it for their health, then, I take it,” said Sloan.

  Mr. Hickory permitted himself a thin smile. “Not entirely.”

  “For sticky shovels, more like,” said Crosby.

  “It didn’t even go to appeal,” said Hickory. “They got outline permission on the first application so they must have been on a good wicket.”

  “Outline permission?”

  Hickory twisted in his chair. “Taking the temperature of the water, you could call that. Agreed in principle, but you’ve still got to get the detail approved. And if you don’t get outline …”

  “Yes?” asked Sloan curiously.

  “… then you haven’t had to go to the expense of designing the development you had in mind down to the last brick.”

  “But they got outline for Strontfield,” said Sloan.

  Hickory nodded. “Without a struggle.”

  “When?”

  “July last year.”

  “Then what?”

  “Then nothing. No detailed plans were ever submitted by the applicants.”

  “And who were they?”

  “Calleford Enterprises Limited.” Hickory flicked a paper over. “A couple of builders, a pair of local businessmen, the duke’s cousin …”

  “Ah, the lord on the board?”

  “That’s him.” Mr. Hickory paused. “They say he’s all right when he’s sober.”

  “We do know him,” remarked Sloan distantly. “Our Traffic people …”

  “Quite so,” said Mr. Hickory.

  “They’re always after his blood,” revealed Crosby chattily. “Trouble is, he’s so used to the stuff.”

  Sloan tried to get back to the land. “This outline permission …”

  “They’ll get him one day,” said Crosby. “Inspector Harpe says that if it’s the last …”

  Sloan overrode Crosby. “Fent had no part in this application then?”

  Hickory shook his head. “None. The owner’s consent isn’t necessary, but he is advised of both the application and the outcome.”

  “Seems fair enough,” said the police officer.

  “Usen’t to be,” said the planning man, “in the days before they notified the owner. He’d’ve sold his land to the developers before he woke up to what it was worth with permission. You’d be surprised …”

  Sloan had stopped being surprised at the limitless nature of human folly and greed a long time ago. He said, “So what we’ve got here is some not too good agricultural land with outline planning permission for development for houses …”

  “And a small shopping precinct.”

  “Which hasn’t been taken up by the developers or anyone else,” said Sloan, wondering how Peter Miller Fent and Fallow Farm fitted into this picture.

  “To date,” said Hickory.

  “All of which,” added Sloan to Crosby when the local authority man had gone, “may have everything or nothing at all to do with the death of William Fent.”

  “This might, though, sir.” Crosby had picked up the papers which Hickory had left with them. “Here, sir, take a look at this.”

  He handed over a sheet of business writing paper. It was headed “Calleford Enterprises Limited.” In the list of directors was the name of R. Renville.

  TWELVE

  “Well,” said Crosby eloquently, “do we have to throw a six or can we start now?”

  “Now,” said Sloan, get
ting to his feet.

  “With Mr. Peter Miller Fent?”

  “No. He’ll keep for a bit.”

  “Renville?”

  “No,” said Sloan thoughtfully. “I think we’ll start with the gardener woman. I bet she’s the best talker of the lot of them.”

  Miss Cynthia Paterson’s cottage in Constance Parva was at the church end of the High Street. It was quite small with a long sloping cat-slide roof at the back, and no front garden to speak of. They found the entrance at the side. They were led to it by a little notice set in the front wall over an arrow:

  Rich or poor

  Just the one door.

  Sloan knocked on it. A dog barked somewhere but there was no answer.

  “I can see an old bird in the greenhouse,” remarked Crosby, peering about him.

  The two policemen made their way across the garden to the greenhouse where a grey head was bobbing about amid the greenery.

  “Won’t keep you a moment,” she called out through the door. “Come in. I’m just trying to catch a bee. There it is …”

  Constable Crosby ducked hastily as something zoomed past his left ear.

  “I don’t know how it got in here,” she said. “I do try not to let them get at the flowers.”

  The bee came back past Crosby. It sounded cross.

  “Drat the thing,” exclaimed Miss Paterson. “Look, there it is. Catch it, young man … it’s not good for the flowers. Fast-moving insects are always dangerous to the garden. Some of the slow-moving ones aren’t exactly helpful either.”

  Crosby picked up an empty flower-pot and advanced toward the bee. The bee retreated just out of his reach.

  “The flowers do go off dreadfully if they’re pollinated,” lamented Miss Paterson, “and these are for show.”

  “Very nice they are, too,” said Sloan politely.

  “They won’t be if that bee gets at them,” said the lady gardener. “There it is—you’ll get it now.”

  Unbidden, a snatch of his school-days came back to Sloan: a boyish Ariel helping a thicker-set Prospero into his cloak and singing, “Where the bee sucks, there suck I.” The anxiety then, as he remembered it, had been to do with Ariel’s voice breaking.

  “I’ve often wondered how Buddhist gardeners get on,” remarked Miss Paterson conversationally.

  “Buddhists?” inquired Sloan.

  “They’re not allowed to kill anything—not even white fly.”

  The bee seemed unwilling to be killed either and sailed effortlessly upward and out of Crosby’s reach.

  “There’s a chair,” suggested Miss Paterson.

  Crosby eyed a rickety example of bent woodwork, long superannuated from the kitchen, and said, “I think I can get it when it next comes down.”

  “Yes—you’re tall enough.” She swung round and glanced sharply at Sloan. “You’re tall too. Policemen?”

  “Yes, madam,” said Sloan, and introduced themselves.

  Miss Paterson nodded toward Crosby, and said, “He should be able to catch a bee, then, shouldn’t he?”

  “He should,” agreed Sloan cautiously, though there were moments when he doubted Crosby’s capacity to catch anything.

  It was hot in the greenhouse and the constable was perspiring gently now. The bee had speeded up.

  “I’ve seen you both before, haven’t I?” Miss Paterson adjusted her glasses and peered at the two police officers, “Yesterday. You were at Bill Fent’s funeral. At the back of the church.”

  “Yes.” Sloan hesitated and then told her about Tom Exley dying too. “We wanted to talk to you about the dinner party at Strontfield. Had anything been said that might have distracted Mr. Fent’s concentration and so forth …”

  Miss Paterson gave him a shrewd look. “There were no arguments, if that’s what you mean, and he hadn’t had too much to drink, either.”

  “The conversation?”

  “Pretty general. At my end of the table anyway.”

  “You were between …?”

  “Dr. Washby and young Quentin Fent.” She snorted delicately. “Anyone would think a country dinner party was a fertility rite—all the fuss Helen went to to get her table right as she called it.” She tucked a wayward strand of grey hair into place, and said, “Everyone was being kind to the new girl—Dr. Washby’s wife, that is. Veronica. She didn’t really know any of us, so there wasn’t too much local talk—not to begin with, anyway. After a bit, of course, you can’t keep away from village chat—if you live in a village, that is. You know how it is.”

  “Any particular chat?” inquired Sloan casually.

  He knew how it was, all right. That was one of the things about the job. Once you were on it you could hardly talk about anything else. Not while you were at the police station anyway and half the time when you weren’t either …

  “Oh, just the usual …”

  Crosby still hadn’t caught the bee.

  Miss Paterson waved a hand. “A post mortem on the village fête—that’s always good for a bit of in-fighting—the Government—always something to talk about there …”

  “Quite so,” said Sloan with the strict impartiality demanded of the Best Police Force in the World.

  “And the Pennyfeather brothers,” recollected Miss Paterson. “They’re our local bother boys. Somebody’s usually got a story about them. Always on the look-out for trouble and finding it. Knock a man down as soon as look at him.”

  “Do you hear that, Crosby?” said Sloan. “You’ll have to watch your step.”

  “Yes, sir.” Crosby sounded glum. The bee—still at large—sounded outraged.

  Miss Paterson forged on. “Yet another baby at Fallow Farm Cottage—they’ll soon have to sleep head to tail down there—oh, and Gregory Fitch’s father.”

  “What had he been up to?”

  “Nothing. It’s just that they managed to get him into an old folks’ home at last, and Bill was telling us about it. Fitch’d been the Fents’ gardener all his life—lived down in Keeper’s Cottage beyond the old Folly but he’d reverted to stock a bit lately …”

  Sloan, who grew roses for a hobby, nodded.

  “Quite gone to seed,” said Cynthia Paterson briskly. “Started talking nonsense about goings-on in the Folly and so on. Nature taking over again and all that. Civilization’s not really very deep, is it?”

  “Thin as paint,” said the policeman feelingly. “Ask any man on the strength …”

  “Anyway, in the end Paul Washby had to get him taken away. Well, they’d tidied the old chap up so much over at the hospital that Greg didn’t know him on the Sunday when he went in to see him. He told Bill he walked right past the end of the bed. Never seen him with his teeth in before, he said.”

  “Ah,” said Sloan, who was of an age now to be sympathetic about teeth. He was peering out of the greenhouse while she spoke to see if he could spot signs of the cultivation of rhubarb.

  “Mind you,” said Miss Paterson showing an exemplary staying power with the original question, “being a mere woman I don’t know what the gentlemen talked about when we left them.”

  “You left them?”

  “All alone,” she said solemnly, echoing his tone.

  “All the men?” This added a new dimension to his inquiries about poisoning. “Why?”

  “I shouldn’t be surprised if it wasn’t St. Paul,” said the old rector’s daughter unexpectedly. “Someone who didn’t like women must have started it, mustn’t they? And he didn’t like women, I mean. St. Paul.”

  “Started what?” asked Sloan wildly.

  “The custom. We’re pretty backward out this way and we still leave ’em to it”

  “Leave who to what, Miss Paterson?” The Mad Hatter’s Tea Party sounded saner than this.

  “The gentlemen to the port,” she said, splashing some water on a potted salpiglossis. “This is a good colour, isn’t it?”

  “Oh, the port …” Sloan rapidly tried to call to mind what he knew about port. It wasn’t a lot. You had to
pass it to the left or something—that was it. Left was the port side. The opposite of starboard. There was another thing he’d heard about port.

  “Tawny?” he said tentatively.

  “Vintage, I should think,” said Miss Paterson. “There.

  “Just so,” said Sloan. On quite another plane from life at Strontfield Park there was Kitty, Kitty. She was a disreputable old soak down in the town at Berebury, who had never been known to touch anything but port and lemon. She always came when she was called, did Kitty, Kitty … Now there was somebody who must know all there was to know about port.

  “But as to what they talked about while they were sipping it, Inspector, I couldn’t begin to say.”

  “I can see,” said Sloan ponderously, “that Women’s Lib hasn’t got very far in Constance Parva.”

  Miss Paterson smiled thinly. “Too true. I only hope that Mrs. Washby isn’t going to mind the change from London. The depths of the countryside aren’t everyone’s cup of tea.”

  “The village might grow,” ventured Sloan.

  He found a pair of alarmingly intelligent eyes fixed upon him. “Oh, you’ve heard about the new development, have you? Well, Inspector, that was one thing we didn’t talk about—both sides being represented so to speak.”

  “Very wise, madam.”

  “And now it’s not Bill’s problem any more.”

  “No.” Sloan cleared his throat. “Have you been up to the Park since—er—since …”

  “No,” she said gruffly. “Nothing I could say, is there? Or do. The doctor will have given her something—not that I’ve any time for doctors myself. Don’t trust all these things they give you these days. Besides, only your contemporaries can give you comfort. Haven’t you discovered that yet, Inspector? The young can’t imagine how you feel. The oldies—like me—have got over it all long ago. Peer groups or some such nonsense they call it now.” Abruptly Miss Paterson stooped down toward a cucumber plant and pinched something near the centre. “Always nip out the male flowers,” she said, “if you want good cucumbers.”

  “Doesn’t do anything for the bitterness, though,” murmured the gardener within the policeman, the philosopher within the man. His gaze drifted from the cucumbers to the bee. “You only want to find a bird to chat with now, Crosby,” he said pleasantly, “and then you’ll know the lot.”