Last Respects iscm-10 Page 14

  “No!” She’d been surprised at her own fierceness. She must have caught it from Frank Mundill. “We want her to die at home in her own bed. Besides,” she said illogically, “she’s far too poorly to go into hospital.”

  “Do her eyes water?” asked Peter suddenly.

  “Yes, they do. Why?”

  “I just wondered.”

  “There’s nothing more they could do for her if she was in hospital,” said Elizabeth, still het up over his suggestion. “We’re doing all anybody could. Dr. Tebot says so.”

  “I’m sure you are,” he said soothingly. “It was only a thought. But don’t you go and knock yourself up, will you?”

  “I’m young and strong,” she had said, and she meant it.

  Now—since Peter had gone and her aunt had died—she wasn’t sure how strong she was. She wasn’t as young as she had been either.

  She stared at the slide rule.

  It hadn’t been missing that last evening that Peter Hinton had come. She was certain about that. He would undoubtedly have mentioned the fact and gone hunting for his instrument. And he hadn’t lost it that evening because they hadn’t sat in the hall at all.

  She shivered involuntarily.

  That only left the time that he had come over—the time which she had never been able to fathom—when he had left the note and the ring on the hall table. In spite of herself her eyes drifted over in the direction of the hall table, seeing in her mind’s eye the piece of paper and the circlet of metal lying there again—just as she had done the first time. She’d been carrying her aunt’s tray down the stairs at the time…

  She looked round the hallway. Surely he wouldn’t have sat on the window-seat to compose the note? Congés deserved to have more time spent on them than that. Besides she might have come down the stairs at any time and found him sitting there and that would never have done. She rejected the notion almost as soon as she had thought of it. No, that note and the ring had been slipped on the table at a very opportune moment.

  And the slide rule?

  She couldn’t imagine exactly when the slide rule had slipped out of its proud owner’s pocket and fallen deep down between the cushions. But it had been after the last time she had seen him—and it meant that when he had last come to the house he had sat on the window-seat long enough for it to work its way out of his pocket. She sat there quite motionless for a long time while she thought about it.

  14

  Soften the evidence.

  « ^ »

  The lecturer at Luston College of Technology rolled his eyes at his first visitor the next morning and said, “Hinton? He was another drop out, that’s all, officer. We get them all the time.”

  “Do you know why?” asked Detective Constable Crosby.

  “This isn’t a kindergarten.”

  “No, sir, I’m sure.”

  “Hinton wasn’t any different from all the others,” he said irritably.

  Crosby said he was sure he hoped not. “Did you make enquiries at the time, sir?”

  “I didn’t but the registrar will have done. He’ll have had a grant, you know, and that will have had to be signed for.”

  “Quite so, sir.” In an uncertain world the accounting profession was more certain than most. “Examinations, do you think it was, sir?”

  “Examinations?” snorted the lecturer. “It’s not examinations that they’re afraid of. It’s hard work.”

  “Can you tell me when he was last here?”

  “That’s not difficult. It’ll be here in the register.” He ran his thumb down a list. “Hinton, E R., was here for the first two weeks of the summer term and not after that.”

  “Thank you, sir, you’ve been most helpful.”

  The courtesy appeared to mollify the lecturer. He opened up slightly. “He was supposed to be doing a dissertation, too, but he never handed it in. His home address? You’ll have to ask the registrar for that too. I have an idea his family were abroad…”

  Detective Inspector Sloan intended to concentrate first of all on the Mundill ménage. He began sooner than he expected when he bumped into Inspector Harpe of Traffic Division crossing the police station yard.

  “Mundill?” Harry Harpe frowned. “I know the name.”

  “Demon driver?”

  “No, it wasn’t that.” He frowned. “Mundill—let me think a minute.” He slapped his thigh. “Got it!”

  “Inner guidance?” suggested Sloan, not that Mundill had looked a drinker.

  “Not that either.” Harpe knew all the heavy drinkers for miles around. “He’s an architect, isn’t he?” Harpe nodded to himself with satisfaction. “Then he designed the multi-storey car park last year. He got some sort of architectural award for it. I met him at the official opening. You remember, Sloan, the mayor’s car was the first one in.”

  Sloan had a vague memory of bouquets and mayoral chains and speeches and photographs in the local paper.

  Harpe emitted a sound that for him was a chuckle. “But he couldn’t understand the principle it was built on. I heard Mundill trying to explain it to him. The mayor couldn’t see why the cars going up never met the cars going down.”

  “Two spirals,” said Sloan immediately, “one within the other.”

  “Mundill gave it some fancy name and that didn’t help the mayor one little bit.”

  “Double helix,” supplied Sloan.

  “That was it,” agreed Harpe. “Mundill told him there was a well in Italy—at Orvieto, I think he said it was—that was built on the same principle. The donkey going down never met the donkey coming up. Clever chap. Not the mayor,” he added quickly. “Mundill.”

  “It’s a good car park,” said Sloan.

  And it was.

  “Keeps the cars off the streets,” agreed Harpe.

  Sloan left Harpe while he was still thinking about the apotheosis of Traffic Division’s dreams—totally empty roads.

  When he got to his room Sloan picked up the telephone and made an appointment with Frank Mundill to go over to Marby during the morning to identify the boat on the beach.

  He sat in front of the telephone for a long moment after that and then he dialled the County Police Headquarters at Calleford.

  “I want a police launch,” he said to the officer at the other end.

  “Speak on.”

  “Strictly for observation.”

  “If you want the drug squad you’ve got the wrong number.”

  “I don’t.”

  “That makes a change,” said the voice equably.

  “At least,” said Sloan, “I don’t think I do.”

  “Myself, I wouldn’t put anything past the drugs racket.”

  “No.” That was something he would have to think about. There was probably no one at greater risk than an addict—unless it was a pusher who double-crossed his supplier. Then revenge was simple and swift.

  “This launch you want—where and when?”

  “Off Marby. Round the headland. I shall be sending a constable up on the Cat’s Back there to keep watch as well.”

  “Belt and galluses,” remarked the voice. “When do you want this observation kept?”

  “Low tide,” said Sloan without hesitation.

  “Right you are. By the way,” asked the voice, “what are they to observe?”

  “A small fishing trawler called The Daisy Bell,” said Sloan, replacing the receiver.

  Then, unable to put it off any longer, he knocked on the door of Superintendent Leeyes’s office.

  “Ha, Sloan! Any progress?”

  “A little, sir.” Intellectuals were not the only people to be troubled by the vexed relationship between truth and art. “Just a little.”

  “Know who he is yet?”

  “Not for certain,” said Sloan. He could have delivered a short disquisition, though, on the phrase “growing doubts.”

  Superintendent Leeyes waved a hand airily. “Find out what happened first, Sloan, and look for your evidence afterwards.”

/>   That wasn’t what they taught recruits of Training School.

  “We haven’t got a lot of evidence to consider,” said Sloan.

  But it was too subtle a point for the superintendent.

  “You’ve got a body,” boomed Leeyes.

  “Yes, sir.” Dr. Dabbe’s full post-mortem report had been on Sloan’s desk that morning, too. It didn’t tell him anything that the pathologist hadn’t already told him, except that the young man had had a broken ankle in childhood, which might help.

  In the end.

  “With a piece of copper on it,” Leeyes reminded him.

  “Yes, sir.” There were those who would call that an obol for Charon but they were not policemen. Sloan had a search warrant for Alec Manton’s farm now. And he’d have to find out what Mr. Jensen at the museum had been up to. Things were obviously moving in the archeological world. Jensen had been out when he rang the museum.

  “This ship under the water,” said Leeyes abruptly. “Who does it belong to?”

  “Strictly speaking,” said Sloan, “the East India Company, I suppose.”

  “Ha!”

  “But…”

  “Not findings, keepings, eh, Sloan?”

  “No, sir.” Not even a bench of magistrates in the Juvenile Court would go along with that piece of childhood lore and faulty law. A roomful of lost property at the police station testified to the opposite too. He cleared his throat, and carried on, “Under the Merchant Shipping Act of 1894…”

  “Been at the books, have you, Sloan?”

  “A wreck is deemed to belong to the owner…”

  Come back, Robert Clive, all forgiven.

  “And if the owner isn’t found?” asked Leeyes.

  “The wreck becomes the property of the state in whose waters she lies.”

  Full fathom five…

  “And, sir, the goods discovered in a wreck…”

  “Yes?”

  “Can be auctioned.”

  “Who benefits?” asked Leeyes sharply. “Or does the Crown take?”

  “The finder gets most of the proceeds.” The superintendent’s phrase reminded Sloan of a move on the chessboard.

  The superintendent looked extremely alert. “That’s different.”

  “Salvage,” added Sloan for the record, “is something quite separate.”

  Leeyes’s mind was running along ahead. “You’re going to track this farmer down, aren’t you, Sloan?”

  “Oh, yes, sir.” Alec Manton was high on his list of people to be seen.

  So was a man called Peter Hinton.

  Before that there was still some routine work to be done at the police station. He picked up the phone and quickly dialled a number.

  “Rita, this is Detective Inspector Sloan speaking. I’d like to talk to Dr. Dabbe if he’s not too busy.”

  “He isn’t doing anyone now, Inspector, if that’s what you mean.”

  That was what Sloan did mean.

  “Hang on,” said Rita, “and I’ll put you through straightaway.”

  If a girl wasn’t overawed by death, then neither doctors nor police inspectors were going to carry much weight…

  “Dabbe here,” said the pathologist down the telephone.

  “We may,” said Sloan circumspectly, “repeat may—just have a possible name for yesterday’s body.”

  “Ah.”

  “There’s a man called Peter Hinton who was last seen alive about two months ago at his lodgings in Luston.”

  “You don’t,” said the pathologist temperately, “get a great hue and cry from lodgings.”

  “If,” advanced Sloan cautiously, “we had reason to believe that he might be our chap—your chap, that is—what would be needed in the way of proof?”

  “His dentist,” replied Dr. Dabbe promptly, “his dental records and a forensic odontologist. You’d be half-way there then.”

  “And the other half of the way?”

  “A good full-face photograph that could be superimposed on the ones that have been taken here.”

  “I’ll make a note of that,” said Sloan.

  He could hear the pathologist leafing through his notes. “Wasn’t there a broken ankle in childlood, too, Sloan?”

  “So you said, Doctor.”

  “Everything helps,” said Dr. Dabbe largely, “and when they all add up, why then—well, there you are, aren’t you?”

  Which was scarcely grammar but which did make sense.

  Detective Constable Crosby reported back to the police station with what he had gleaned about Peter Hinton and the death of Mrs. Mundill.

  “I checked on her death certificate like you said, sir.”

  “Yes?” said Sloan. You couldn’t be too careful in this game.

  “Cachexia,” spelt out Crosby carefully.

  “And?” said Sloan. Cachexia was a condition, not a disease.

  “Due to carcinoma of the stomach,” continued Crosby. “It’s signed by Gregory Tebot—he’s the general practitioner out there.”

  Crosby made Collerton sound like Outer Mongolia.

  Sloan assimilated his information about Peter Hinton too.

  Soon he was telling the reporter from the county newspaper that he couldn’t have a photograph of the dead man.

  “We might get an artist’s impression done for you,” he said, “but definitely not a photograph.”

  “Like that, is it?” said the reporter, jerking his head.

  “It is,” said Sloan heavily. “But you can say that we would like to have any information about anyone answering to this description who’s been missing for a bit.”

  “Will do,” said the reporter laconically. He shut his notebook with a snap. If there was no name, there was no story. It was sad but true that human interest needed a name.

  “So,” he said, “there’s just the widower…”

  “Frank Mundill.”

  “And a niece…”

  “Elizabeth Busby.”

  “And there was a boy-friend,” said Sloan.

  “Peter Hinton.”

  “It wouldn’t do any harm,” said Sloan slowly, “to check on Celia Mundill’s will.”

  Crosby made an obedient note.

  “Though,” said Sloan irascibly, “what it’s all got to do with the body in the water I really don’t know.”

  “No, sir.”

  “And Crosby…”

  “Sir?”

  “While you’re about it, we’d better just check that Collerton House wasn’t where our body fell from. I don’t think it’s quite high enough. And there are shrubs under nearly all the windows. They wouldn’t have healed.”

  In time Nature healed all scars but even Nature took her time…

  Frank Mundill was ready and waiting at Collerton House when Sloan and Crosby arrived at the appointed time.

  “We’ve just heard about the body that they’ve found in the estuary,” he said. “Someone in one of the shops told my niece this morning.”

  Sloan was deliberately vague. “We don’t know yet, sir, if there is any connection with it and the boat that was taken.”

  The architect shuddered. “I hope not. I wouldn’t like to think of anyone coming to any harm even if they had broken in.”

  “The inquest will be on Friday,” Sloan informed him. “We may know a little more by then.”

  Once over at Marby the architect confirmed that the boat beached beside the lifeboat had come from Collerton House.

  “No doubt about that at all, Inspector,” he said readily. “It’s been in that boathouse ever since I was married and for many a long year before that, I daresay.”

  Crosby made a note in the background.

  Mundill gave the bow a light tap. “She’s good enough for a few more fishing trips, I should say. She’s hardly damaged at all, is she?”

  It was true. The boat had dried out quite a lot overnight and in spite of its obvious age looked quite serviceable now.

  “I suppose,” said Mundill, “that I can see about get
ting it back to Collerton now?”

  “Not just yet, sir,” said Sloan. “Our scientific laboratory people will have to go over it first.”

  Mundill nodded intelligently. “I understand. For clues.”

  “For evidence,” said Sloan sternly.

  There was a world of difference between the two.

  “Then I can collect it after that?”

  “Oh,” said Sloan easily, “I daresay they’ll drop it back to the boathouse for you.”

  “When?”

  “Is it important?”

  “No, no, Inspector, not at all. I just wondered, that’s all. It doesn’t matter a bit…”

  Elizabeth Busby had hardly slept at all that night. And when she had at last drifted off, sleep had not been a refreshment from the cares of the day but an uneasy business of inconclusive dreams.

  Waking had been no better.

  She came back to consciousness with her mind a blank and then suddenly full recollection came flooding back and with it the now familiar sensation that she was physically shouldering a heavy burden. The strange thing was that this burden seemed not only to extend to an area just above her eyes but to weigh her down from all angles. At least, she thought, Christian in The Pilgrim’s Progress only had a burden on his back—not everywhere.

  Propped beside her bedside lamp was Peter Hinton’s slide rule. She had considered this again in the cold light of day. And got no further forward than she had done the evening before. It really was very odd that Peter should have taken a water-colour painting of a beach and left his slide rule behind him.

  As she had got dressed she viewed the prospect of another day ahead of her without relish. It wasn’t that she wanted to spend her whole life wandering in the delicate plain called Ease, just that she could have done without its being spent so much in the Slough of Despond. She had eventually got the day started to a kind of mantra of her own. It was based on Rudyard Kipling’s poem If and concentrated on filling the unforgiving minute with sixty seconds’ worth of distance run…

  The whole day stretched before her like a clean page.

  True, there were the finishing touches to be put to the spring-cleaning of the spare room and today was the day that the dustbin had to be put out, but otherwise there were no landmarks in the day to distinguish it from any others in an endless succession of unmemorable days.