Last Respects iscm-10 Page 13

  They had both been fond of their father but they had loved him without illusion.

  Elizabeth was able to pour out the tea without thinking about Diana the Huntress. As always when she was sitting in the hall her eyes drifted to the model of the Camming valve. It was the Camming valve on which the family fortunes had been founded. It was the Camming valve which had brought Peter Hinton into her life. He’d come from Luston College of Technology with a dissertation to do. He’d chosen the Camming valve and its influence on the development of the marine engine. What more natural that he should come to Cordon Camming’s house in the course of writing it? True, Gordon Camming had actually designed his valve in the back kitchen of some Victorian artisan’s cottage, demolished long ago in a vigorous council slum clearance scheme, but Collerton House was what he had built. It was a monument to his success and as near to a museum as there was.

  Frank Mundill had sunk his tea with celerity. “I’ll be going now,” he said, getting to his feet.

  She nodded, her train of thought scarcely disturbed this time. In her mind’s eye she was seeing Peter Hinton bending over the model as he had done the first day he came.

  “We’ve got a drawing of it at the college,” he said when he saw it, “but not a model.”

  “It’s a working model,” she had said eagerly, anxious to be helpful. “Grandfather used to make it work for me when I was little. I can’t do it, though.”

  He had come…

  She remembered now his tiny smile as he had said, “I can. Would you like to see it working again?”

  He had seen…

  “Oh, please.”

  He had conquered…

  He’d come back again, of course, another day. And another day. And another.

  What she couldn’t understand was why he had gone and not come back.

  She sat in the window-seat now, taking her tea in thoughtful sips. She sat there so long that the cushion became less comfortable. She shifted her position slightly, almost without thinking. To her surprise this made for less comfort rather than more. Something was sticking into her. The fact took a moment or two to penetrate her consciousness. When it did she put her hand down between the cushions. It encountered something oblong and unyielding. She stood up abruptly and snatched the cushions away. All doubt ended when she set eyes on the object.

  It was Peter Hinton’s slide rule and she knew it well.

  13

  ’Tis what we must all come to.

  « ^ »

  Some savage breasts cannot be soothed. That of Superintendent Leeyes came into this category.

  “What I want, Sloan,” he snapped, “are results.”

  Detective Inspector Sloan was reporting to him in the superintendent’s office at Berebury. “Yes, sir, but…”

  “Not theories.”

  “No, sir.” Actually Sloan didn’t have any theories either but this seemed to have escaped the superintendent’s notice.

  “Have you any idea at all what’s going on over there?”

  “Finding The Clarembald comes into it,” said Sloan slowly, “though where the dead man fits in with that I really don’t know.”

  “Don’t forget that he had that copper thing…”

  “Barbary head.”

  “In his pocket.”

  “Yes, sir, so he did.” Sloan cleared his throat. “But there are a lot of other things we don’t know.”

  “Who he is,” trumpeted Leeyes. “You haven’t got very far with that, have you, Sloan?”

  “We have one lead, sir. The girl at Collerton House had a boy-friend who’s not around any more. Crosby’s chasing him up now just to be on the safe side.”

  “There’s another thing we don’t know besides who the body is.”

  “Why he was set out into the mainstream when he was,” said Sloan before the superintendent could say it for him.

  “Exactly,” growled Leeyes.

  This was one of the things that was puzzling Sloan too. “There must have been a reason,” he agreed. “After all he’d been dead for quite a while and in the water too. Dr. Dabbe said so.”

  “And then suddenly someone…”

  “The murderer,” said Sloan. That was something he felt sure about.

  “The murderer decides to punt him into the river.”

  “There’ll be a reason,” said Sloan confidently. “We’re dealing with someone with brains.”

  Leeyes grunted again.

  “Anyone,” said Sloan feelingly, “who can kill someone without them being reported missing has got brains.”

  “It doesn’t happen often,” conceded Leeyes.

  “And anyone who can find somewhere as clever as a boathouse to park a body until it’s unrecognisable knows what they’re doing. Do you realise, sir,” he added energetically, “that if that man Horace Boiler hadn’t been out there fishing that body might well have just drifted out to sea and never been seen again?”

  “A perfect murder,” commented Leeyes.

  “Exactly, sir.” Though for the life of him Sloan didn’t know why murder done and not known about should be called perfect…

  “The dinghy,” said Leeyes. “What about the dinghy?”

  “I think that went just in case the body was picked up,” said Sloan.

  “A touch of local colour, eh?” said Leeyes grimly.

  “We’ve examined it,” said Sloan, “and it answers to Mr. Mundill’s description. I don’t think there’s any doubt that it’s the one from his boathouse but we’ll get him over in the morning to identify it properly.”

  “That’s all very well, Sloan, but where does The Clarembald come in?”

  “I don’t know, sir. The things from the ship,” he couldn’t bring himself to use the word “artefacts” to the superintendent, “that have been coming ashore…”

  “Treasure trove,” said Leeyes, never one to split hairs on precise meanings.

  “Perhaps, sir. I don’t know about that yet.”

  “These things then…” said Leeyes impatiently.

  “Indicate that someone has found the East Indiaman.”

  “Don’t forget the diver, eh, Sloan, don’t forget the diver.”

  “No, sir, I haven’t. This farmer—Alec Manton—has been hiring a local trawler. Ridgeford saw it going out at low tide.”

  “Did he indeed?” There was a pause while Superintendent Leeyes considered this and then he abruptly started on quite a different tack. “This height that Dr. Dabbe says he fell from…”

  “I’ve been thinking about that, sir,” said Sloan. Every case was like solving a jigsaw and some pieces of that jigsaw had straight edges. A piece of jigsaw puzzle that had a straight edge helped to define the puzzle. So it was in a murder case. He always thought of the forensic pathologist’s report as so many pieces of straight edge of a jigsaw puzzle. And the pathologist had said that the man had fallen to his death. That became fact…

  “Well?”

  “Apart from the cliffs…”

  “Which are too high.”

  “There isn’t very much in the way of a drop round Collerton and Edsway.” Inland from the cliffs the rest of the Calleshire littoral was—like Norfolk—very flat.

  “He fell from somewhere,” said Leeyes, who had taken Dr. Dabbe’s report for gospel too.

  “A dying fall,” said Sloan, conscious that it had been said before.

  “But where from?” asked Leeyes irritably. “Would a church tower have done?”

  “It’s the right sort of height,” agreed Sloan, “but it’s not exactly what you could call private, is it, sir? I mean, would you climb a church tower after dark with a murderer?”

  “No,” said Leeyes robustly. “And I wouldn’t buy a secondhand car from one either.”

  “I’ll get Crosby to check at Collerton Church anyway,” said Sloan, “but what I think we’re looking for is a sort of hidden drop. Remember he would have had to have been pushed from the top and then stayed at the bottom…”

  “Dead
or dying.”

  “Until whoever pushed him came down and picked up the body.”

  “Darkness or privacy,” agreed Leeyes.

  What was it that Crosby had said?

  Pussy’s down the well.

  It would have had to have been somewhere where murderer and victim could have gone together without comment.

  Then the lonely push…

  “And,” said Leeyes, “then the body had to be got from wherever it fell to the boathouse. Have you gone into the logistics, Sloan?”

  “The boot of a car would have done.”

  “And then?”

  “For the last part? A wheelbarrow,” said Sloan. “That would have done too. It’s the easiest way to carry a body that I know. And there are several around the house.”

  “Not one of these plastic affairs, Sloan. You mean a good old-fashioned metal one.”

  “Yes, sir.” When a man came automatically to put the word “good” together with the word “old-fashioned,” it was time for him to retire. He coughed. “The trouble, sir, is that there is a perfectly good asphalt path to the boathouse that doesn’t show any extra marks. We’ve looked.”

  Leeyes grunted. “So what you’re saying is that he could have been killed anywhere and brought to Collerton.”

  “By land or water,” said Sloan flatly. “With a barbary head in his pocket.” That barbary head was a puzzle. Was it a pointer to The Clarembald or was it to point them away from someone else?

  “It’s what you might call wide open still, isn’t it, Sloan,” said Leeyes unencouragingly. “You’ll have to look on it as a challenge,” he added.

  “I’m starting with a search warrant for Lea Farm at Marby,” said Sloan flatly. “There’s something funny going on there.”

  Landladies didn’t always come up middle-aged and inquisitive. Sometimes they were young and indifferent.

  “Pete?” said Ms. Cheryl Watson, shrugging her shoulders. “He was around.”

  “When?” asked Detective Constable Crosby.

  She opened her hands expressively. “Don’t ask me. He’ll be back.”

  “When?” asked Crosby.

  “When he feels like it. He’ll settle up for his room all right, don’t worry.”

  Crosby did not say that that was not what was worrying the county constabulary.

  “What about his gear?” he said instead.

  “Still around,” she said largely. “And his mail. He’ll be back for them.”

  “Why did he go?”

  Her eyes opened wide. “He had exams, didn’t he?”

  “You think he chickened out?”

  “A man has to be himself,” said the self-appointed representative of a different way of life, “hasn’t he?”

  “I wouldn’t know about that,” said Crosby.

  “Examinations are the sign of a decadent culture,” pronounced the young woman. ‘Always making you prove yourself.”

  “A sort of initiation rite, you mean?” suggested Crosby.

  “That’s right,” she said eagerly.

  The course at the Police Training College made a man prove himself. Or leave. It was a sort of initiation rite too. A police constable was let into the mysteries of the service at the same time as he was being sorely tried by his instructors.

  Ms. Watson looked Detective Constable Crosby up and down with unattractive shrewdness. “Is Pete in trouble then?”

  “Not that we know about,” said Crosby truthfully.

  “There was something else besides examinations.”

  “Was there?” he murmured.

  “He had a bird.”

  “Ah.”

  “Don’t say that.” She looked at him. “No, Pete was hell-bent on marriage.”

  “Was he?”

  “No less,” she said. “He was real old-fashioned about it.”

  Crosby gave the absent Mr. Hinton a passing thought.

  “He often said he wasn’t going to settle for anything less than marriage.”

  “Makes a change,” said Crosby. The beat made a man philosophical about some things.

  “She’d got money, you see,” said Ms. Watson simply. “Or would have one day. I think that’s what he said.”

  It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man seeking good fortune must be in want of a wife in possession of one…

  “Anyway,” she said, “don’t you worry. Pete Hinton is old enough to take care of himself.”

  Crosby said he was sure he hoped so too, but he came away with a disturbing description.

  Elizabeth Busby sat alone in the empty house. She sat quite still at one end of the window-seat staring at that which she had found at the other.

  Peter Hinton’s slide rule.

  It must have slipped out of his pocket the last time he had sat there. It couldn’t have been before that because he would have missed it and then—for sure—a search on a grand scale would have been instituted. If it hadn’t been found, then St. Anthony’s aid would have been invoked. A practical young man like Peter Hinton hadn’t really believed in St. Anthony, but Elizabeth had done so, and gradually Peter Hinton had begun to call upon him too for lost things.

  Or said he had done.

  His precious slide rule would have been missed very early on. It was never out of his pocket—it was almost his badge of office. His course at Luston was a sandwich affair—so much time at his studies, so much time on the shop floor. His shop floor employment had been with Punnett and Punnett, Marine Engineers, Ltd., and it was after that when he went to the College of Technology. And much as very young doctors flaunted their stethoscopes, so the slide rules of embryo engineers were frequently in evidence.

  She cast her mind back yet again to his last visit. In fact she had already gone over it in her mind a hundred times or more—searching every recollection for pointers of what was to come. She hadn’t found any—their only disagreement had been about her aunt—and now she couldn’t recollect either any indication that the famous slide rule hadn’t been around. She screwed up her eyes in concentrated memory recall and came up with something that surprised her. Surely they hadn’t been near the window-seat on Peter’s last visit at all?

  He’d come over from Luston to see her—it had had to be like that since Celia Mundill had begun to be so ill after Easter—on one of her aunt’s really bad days. Elizabeth had been dividing her time between the bedroom and the kitchen. There had been no spare time for sitting together on the window-seat or anywhere else. In fact she hadn’t had a great deal of time to spare for Peter Hinton at all but that had been simply because of her aunt’s illness. She had wondered for a moment if it had been this which had so miffed him that he had taken his departure, but what manner of man would begrudge her time spent with the dying?

  Because her aunt had been dying. Elizabeth had known that ever since Celia’s X-ray at Easter when Frank Mundill had taken her to one side and told her that that was what the doctor over at Calleford had said. He’d brought a letter back with him for Dr. Tebot, Celia Mundill’s own doctor at Collerton—dear old Dr. Tebot who looked like nothing so much as the doctor in Luke Fildes’s famous picture—but he had enjoined secrecy on Dr. Tebot as well as on Elizabeth. Celia Mundill had an inoperable cancer of the stomach but she wasn’t to know.

  “Not ever,” Frank Mundill had said at the time.

  “But the doctor…”

  “The doctor,” said Mundill, “said she need never know.”

  “I don’t see how.”

  “They call it ‘stealing death,’ ” Frank Mundill had told her.

  Come away, come away, death…

  “Dr. Tebot said it’s not as difficult as it sounds, Elizabeth, because the patient always wants to believe that they’re getting better.”

  “A sort of conspiracy,” Elizabeth remembered saying slowly at the time.

  “A conspiracy of silence,” Mundill had said firmly. “You don’t need to lie. Anyway, Elizabeth, she won’t ask you.”

  “N
o…”

  “She’ll ask the doctor and he’ll know what to say, I’m sure.”

  “I’m sure, too,” she’d said then with a touch of cynicism beyond her years.

  And she had proceeded to watch her aunt decline. Severe vomiting had been accompanied by loss of weight. Abdominal pain had come, too, until the doctor had stopped it with a hefty pain-killer. It had needed injections though to stop the pains in her arms and legs. The district nurse had come to give her those and Elizabeth had been glad of the extra support.

  Nothing though had stopped the vomiting or the burning pain in the patient’s throat.

  Or her loss of weight.

  Frank Mundill had been marvellously attentive. At any moment of the night or day when Celia had said she could eat or drink he’d been on hand with something. Gradually though she’d sunk beyond that.

  “She may get jaundiced,” Dr. Tebot had warned them one day.

  So she had. Soon after that her skin took on a yellow, jaundiced look. Celia Mundill had died too with the brown petechiae of premature age on her skin. One day she’d slipped into a merciful coma.

  That, when it happened, though, was too late for Peter Hinton. He’d taken himself off by the time Celia Mundill had breathed her last. Perhaps, Elizabeth had thought more than once, he couldn’t stand the atmosphere of illness—there were some men, she knew, who couldn’t. Thank goodness Frank Mundill hadn’t been one of them or she would never have coped. He’d been marvellous.

  She sat quite still now in the window-seat, increasingly confident that the last time that Peter Hinton had come to the house they had not sat together there. They’d only met in the kitchen. Elizabeth had been waiting and watching for the district nurse while Frank Mundill was taking his turn in the bedroom beside the patient. She remembered now how difficult she had found it to think or speak of anything but her aunt’s illness.

  True, they’d nearly quarrelled but not about themselves.

  About Celia Mundill.

  “She looks so awful now,” Elizabeth had cried. That had been the worst thing of all. Celia Mundill was just a ghastly parody of the woman she had been a few short months ago.

  “What about her going into hospital?” Peter had urged. “Don’t you think she ought to be in hospital? I do.”