Last Respects Page 17

  Thus they came to Berebury. Reassured by yet another glance in his rear-view mirror, Frank Mundill steered the car towards the centre of the town.

  ‘Frank, I don’t understand …’

  ‘You will. I’ve just got to park the car. It won’t be difficult. It’s early closing day.’

  He made for the multi-storey car park. Entrance was by ticket from a machine. He took the ticket and the entrance barrier automatically rose to let them through. He placed the ticket on the dashboard and nosed the car up to the first level. There were plenty of parking spaces there but he did not stop. Nor at the second level. It being a quiet afternoon there were no cars at all above the third level. The fourth level was empty too.

  ‘Frank, where are we going? Why are we going right to the top? You must tell me.’

  ‘Upward and ever onward,’ he said, a smile playing on his lips now.

  The car swept round the elliptical corner at the end of the building and up on to the highest level of all.

  ‘Frank …’

  ‘Soon be there,’ he said, accelerating. There were no other cars in sight now—just the bare ramps and parking places. He gave a swift tug at the steering-wheel and soon they were in the open air again on the very top of the car park. He pulled the car neatly into a parking bay and got out.

  Elizabeth followed him.

  ‘This way,’ he said. ‘Do you know that on a clear day you can see Calleford?’

  ‘I don’t want to see Calleford,’ she said. ‘I want to know why the picture you said Peter wanted has been sold.’

  ‘You shall,’ he said softly. ‘You shall know everything soon. But first come this way.’

  He walked away from the edge of the car park to the very centre.

  ‘Follow me, Elizabeth. I designed this place, remember. I know what to show you.’

  ‘Faster,’ said Sloan between gritted teeth.

  Crosby changed up through the gears with demonic speed. ‘Which way?’

  ‘Berebury,’ said Sloan. There was just the one hope that he was right about that.

  The constable raced the car through the gates of Collerton House. With dressage and horses it was walk, trot, canter. With a souped-up police car it was a straightforward gallop from a standing start.

  ‘Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,’ said Crosby. ‘Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.’

  ‘Let’s hope that we find the right wall,’ said Sloan tersely.

  Crosby concentrated on keeping one very fast car on the road. He took Billing Bridge faster than it had ever been taken before, narrowly avoiding caroming off the upper reaches of one of its stanchions.

  ‘The car park in Berebury,’ said Sloan in a sort of incantation. ‘The multi-storey car park. It must be.’

  ‘What about it?’ asked Crosby, cutting round a milk-float. The milkman was used to imprecations from faster drivers but not to being overtaken at that speed.

  ‘It’s the right height,’ said Sloan.

  ‘So are a lot of things,’ said Crosby, crouching over the wheel as if he were a racing driver but in fact looking more like Jehu than any denizen of the race track.

  ‘Mundill designed it,’ said Sloan. ‘Two spirals round a central well. Come on, man, get a move on.’

  Crosby put his foot down still further and the car ate up the miles into Berebury. They shot through the main street and swung round into the entrance of the car park. It did nothing for Sloan’s blood pressure that they had to pause at the entrance like any shopping housewife to collect a ticket and allow the automatic barrier to rise.

  ‘Hurry, man,’ urged Sloan. ‘Hurry!’

  Crosby raced through the gears as fast as he could: the slope of the ramp needed plenty of power. The corner at the end, though, was tighter than any at Silverstone. He took it on two wheels.

  ‘And again,’ commanded Sloan at the next level.

  But they had lost speed on the way up. Crosby took the next bend more easily but at a slower rate.

  ‘Keep going.’ adjured Sloan. He had his hand on the door catch.

  They reached the top floor and came out into the sunshine. The sudden glare momentarily distracted both men but there was no disguising the dark blue Ford Zephyr standing in solitary state on the top platform or the two figures standing by the parapet of the central well. One of them had his arm round the other who appeared to be resisting.

  ‘Stop!’ shouted Sloan as he ran.

  The man took a quick look over his shoulder and standing away from the other—a girl—vaulted lightly over the parapet.

  CHAPTER 17

  Here ends all dispute.

  ‘I suppose,’ snorted Superintendent Leeyes, who was a sound and fury man if ever there was one, ‘that you’re going to tell me that everything makes sense now.’

  ‘The picture is a little clearer, sir,’ said Detective-Inspector Sloan. He was reporting back to Superintendent Leeyes the next morning: the morning after Frank Mundill’s spectacular suicide over the edge of the parapet at the top of the multi-storey car park.

  ‘Perhaps, then, Sloan, you will have the goodness to explain what has been going on.’

  ‘Murder, sir.’

  ‘I know that.’

  ‘More murder than we knew about, sir.’

  ‘Sloan, I will not sit here and have you being enigmatic.’

  ‘No, sir,’ said Sloan hastily. ‘The first murder wasn’t of Peter Hinton at all. It was of Celia Mundill.’

  ‘The wife?’ said Leeyes.

  ‘The wife,’ said Sloan succinctly. ‘Frank Mundill wanted to marry Mrs Veronica Feckler.’

  ‘Ha!’ said Leeyes.

  ‘So,’ said Sloan, ‘he set about disposing of his wife.’

  ‘He made a very good job of it,’ commented Leeyes.

  ‘He nearly succeeded,’ said Sloan warmly. ‘He would have done but for Peter Hinton putting two and two together.’

  ‘So that’s what happened, is it?’

  ‘Elizabeth Busby tells me that Hinton was something of a student of criminology, sir. His favourite reading was the Notable British Trials series.’

  ‘He suspected something?’

  ‘We think so. Hinton wanted Mrs Mundill in hospital.’

  ‘That wouldn’t have done for a murderer,’ said Leeyes.

  ‘No.’

  ‘So Peter Hinton had to go?’ grunted Leeyes.

  ‘Exactly.’ Sloan cleared his throat. ‘I—that is, we—think that he came back one day and challenged Mundill.’

  ‘And that was his undoing?’

  ‘It was because he was a threat, you see, to the successful murder of Mrs Mundill.’

  Talk of successful murders always upset the Superintendent. ‘Do you mean that, Sloan?’

  ‘I do, sir,’ said Detective-Inspector Sloan seriously. ‘It was as near perfect as they come. We would never have known about the murder of Mrs Mundill if he hadn’t killed the young man too.’

  Leeyes didn’t like the sound of that. ‘How perfect?’

  ‘Arsenic, at a guess.’

  ‘You can’t have a perfect murder with arsenic’

  ‘You can if it’s diagnosed and treated as cancer of the stomach,’ said Sloan.

  ‘But what doctor would …’

  ‘An old doctor who has had a letter from another doctor saying that that was what was wrong.’

  Leeyes whistled. ‘Clever.’

  ‘Very clever,’ said Sloan. ‘Each year the Mundills went at Easter to housekeep for a locum tenens. Mundill’s sister is married to a single-handed general practitioner in Luston. While Mrs Mundill was there she had a severe attack of sickness. The locum—a Dr Penthwin—arranged for her to have an X-ray at Luston Hospital.’

  ‘But it would be normal,’ objected Leeyes at once.

  ‘Of course it would, sir,’ said Sloan, ‘but that doesn’t matter.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘All that matters is the letter that the Mundills bring back from Dr Penthwin to their own doctor at Collerto
n, Dr Gregory Tebot.’

  ‘A forgery?’ said Leeyes.

  ‘From start to finish,’ said Sloan who had seen it now. ‘Mundill writes it himself in the locum’s name on professional writing paper. His brother-in-law knows nothing about it—neither does the locum, for that matter. Anyway Dr Penthwin’s soon gone. Dr Tebot gets the letter which he thinks is from Dr Penthwin and starts treating Mrs Mundill for an inoperable cancer of the stomach.’

  ‘Most doctors would,’ agreed Leeyes reluctantly.

  ‘Mundill sees that the doses of arsenic follow the course of the disease,’ said Sloan. ‘Peter Hinton asked if her eyes kept on watering. He’d spotted it was arsenic, I’m sure about that. That’s what put us on to it too.’

  Leeyes grunted. ‘Mundill’s had long enough to look it all up in the books while he was over there.’

  ‘He’d even,’ said Sloan, ‘had long enough to go through the patients’ medical records until he finds a letter with the wording pretty nearly the same as he wants.’

  ‘Clever,’ said Leeyes again. A whole new vista of medical murder opened up before him. ‘Has it been done before, do you think?’

  ‘Who can say?’ said Sloan chillingly. ‘Anyway, Dr Tebot isn’t going to start on fresh X-rays or anything like that, is he? He wouldn’t see any need for them.’

  ‘The nearly perfect murder,’ said Leeyes.

  ‘There was something else going for him, too, sir.’

  ‘What was that?’

  ‘Celia Mundill didn’t want to be cremated.’

  ‘And that suited the husband, I’m sure,’ said Leeyes.

  ‘Cremation requires two medical certificates,’ said Sloan. ‘Burial only one.’ He’d lectured Crosby on the burial of victims of murder. A grave was the best place of all.

  ‘The nearly perfect murder,’ said Leeyes again.

  ‘He almost spoilt it, sir.’

  ‘How come?’

  ‘Gilding the lily.’ It was surprising how often that happened with murderers. They wouldn’t—couldn’t—leave well alone.’

  ‘What lily?’

  ‘The grave, sir. Mundill insisted on his wife being buried by the water’s edge where the river floods.’

  ‘To help wash the arsenic away,’ said Leeyes. He cast his mind back. ‘That’s been done before, hasn’t it?’

  ‘And to aid decomposition,’ completed Sloan. ‘I don’t know how much it would have helped, but I dare say he thought that if anyone got any bright ideas after he married Mrs Feckler …’

  Leeyes grunted. ‘He was going to marry her, was he?’

  ‘He was,’ said Sloan. ‘On his wife’s money. Financially he had nothing to lose by her death and a lot to gain.’

  ‘That’s always dangerous,’ said the voice of experience.

  ‘Mundill had a life interest in his wife’s estate,’ said Sloan, ‘but he wanted a little capital too.’

  ‘Don’t we all,’ said Leeyes.

  ‘That,’ said Sloan manfully, ‘is why he sold a picture that wasn’t his to sell.’

  ‘Ha.’

  ‘And blamed its disappearance on Peter Hinton.’

  ‘An opportunist if ever there was one,’ commented Leeyes.

  ‘What put the girl’s life in danger,’ said Sloan, ‘was her spotting the report of the sale in the daily paper.’

  It had been a close thing yesterday.

  ‘If it hadn’t been for that, eh, Sloan, Mundill might have got away with murder.’

  ‘I’m sure I hope not, sir,’ said Sloan.

  ‘And the fisherman,’ said Leeyes. ‘Why did he have to go?’

  ‘We think,’ said Sloan slowly, ‘that Boller must have been trying to apply a little pressure to Mundill.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘He wasn’t a nice man,’ said Sloan obliquely. ‘He could easily have known about Mundill’s visits to Mrs Feckler’s cottage. He was about at all hours, remember, and not very scrupulous.’

  ‘He could have spotted that sandhopper creature.’ Leeyes had seen the report on Gammarus pulex.

  That was probably what took him up river the first time,’ said Sloan, ‘but I think it may have been his cousin Ted who gave him the real clue.’

  ‘Cousin Ted? You’ll have to do better than that for the Coroner, Sloan.’

  ‘Ted Boller is the village undertaker.’

  ‘What about it?’

  ‘Mundill wouldn’t have the coffin screwed down.’ The exhumation of Celia Mundill had begun that morning. A loose coffin lid had been the first thing that they had found. ‘Ted Boller didn’t give it much thought but he did happen to mention it to his cousin.’

  ‘Horace Boller.’

  ‘Precisely, sir. It probably didn’t mean anything to Horace either until he saw the girl beside her aunt’s grave on Tuesday afternoon and realized how near the water it was.’

  ‘And so he put two and two together?’

  ‘He probably just thought he would tackle Mundill about it.’

  Leeyes nodded. ‘By then, of course, Mundill will have got an appetite for murder.’

  ‘It grows,’ said Sloan. That was one area where policemen and psychologists were at one. An appetite for murder grew on itself. ‘Besides, sir, he couldn’t risk Boller raising any doubts about Celia Mundill just when he was concentrating on keeping suspicion away from the body in the water.’

  ‘Talking of the body in the water, Sloan, what I can’t understand is why Mundill broke the boathouse doors open. That just drew attention to the place.’

  ‘If,’ said Sloan, ‘anyone had found that body in there at any time without the outer boathouse doors having been prised open they would know that Mundill had put the body there.’

  ‘And why not leave it there, Sloan, safely in the boathouse? Tell me that.’

  ‘Because, sir,’ said Sloan, ‘the girl’s father was expected back from South America and he liked his little bit of fishing. The boathouse would be the first place he’d make for. We were told that right at the beginning.’

  They’d been told almost everything: it was just a matter of sorting it all out. That was all.

  ‘There’s another thing, Sloan.’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘Those copper things that were found in their pockets …’

  Brenda Ridgeford said, ‘I still don’t understand about those copper things in their pockets, Brian.’

  ‘They were meant to put us off the scent,’ said her husband in a lordly fashion, ‘but they didn’t.’

  ‘You mean the Clarembald wasn’t anything to do with the murders?’

  ‘Nothing,’ said Brian Ridgeford.

  ‘But …’

  ‘Mundill—’ yesterday Brian Ridgeford wouldn’t have dreamed of calling the architect anything except Mr Mundill but today the man was reduced to the ranks of common criminals—‘simply took them from Mr Manton’s farm when he was over there.’

  Alec Manton was still entitled to be called ‘Mr’.

  Alec Manton and his amateur underwater research group had been investigating the trailings caught up by a trawler. That was how, explained Ridgeford, they had come on the Clarembald. They had proceeded to excavate the wreck.

  In good faith and secrecy.

  It had been the secrecy which had baffled Basil Jensen. When news of the great discovery was brought to the notice of an excited archaeological world the name of the Curator would be nowhere to be found.

  ‘The biggest ever find on his patch,’ said Ridgeford, ‘and he wasn’t being allowed a hand in it.’ He searched about in his mind for a parallel. ‘It would be like not letting me in on an armed raid in Edsway, Brenda.’

  ‘I don’t want you in on any armed raids anywhere,’ said his wife. ‘Professional death comes in two ways, you know.’

  ‘They’d got a load of those copper ingots ashore,’ said the constable, ‘and we reckon Mundill spotted them one day at the farm. They didn’t need keeping under water, you see.’

  The sheep-dipping tank at
Lea Farm had yielded a bizarre collection of wooden objects—a sea chest, a fid bound with lead, a table and something called a dead eye.

  ‘Used for tightening the shrouds.’ Alec Manton had explained helpfully.

  Brian Ridgeford had been no wiser.

  ‘Poor Mr Jensen,’ said Brenda Ridgeford. ‘Left out in the cold like that.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Brian Ridgeford uneasily. Far from leaving the Museum Curator out in the cold, he’d very nearly taken him into custody yesterday. ‘He’s waving a protection order at Mr Manton now.’

  ‘A piece of paper isn’t going to save anything,’ said Mrs Ridgeford.

  Constable Ridgeford wasn’t so sure about that. ‘With the strong arm of the law behind it …’

  ‘There’s ways round the strong arm of the law, Brian Ridgeford,’ she said provocatively, ‘I can tell you.’

  ‘That’s as may be, my girl,’ he said with dignity, ‘but only when the law allows it.’

  ‘I suppose, Inspector,’ said Elizabeth Busby shakily, ‘that I have to thank you for saving my life.’

  ‘No, miss, you don’t.’ Sloan was sitting on the window-seat in the hall of Collerton House again.

  ‘He was going to kill me,’ she said, ‘because I knew about the picture.’

  ‘Murder’s a dangerous game,’ said Sloan sententiously, ‘especially once the novelty’s worn off.’

  ‘Poor, poor Aunt Celia.’

  Detective-Inspector Sloan bowed his head in a tribute to a woman he had never seen alive. Dr Dabbe was doing another post-mortem now—to make assurance doubly sure. Inquest-sure, too.

  ‘The old, old story,’ she said bitterly.

  ‘The eternal triangle,’ agreed Sloan. He’d read something once that put it very well: ‘The actors are, it seems, the usual three. Husband, wife and lover.’ It practically amounted to a prescription for murder. Aloud he went on, ‘And then murder once done …’

  ‘Peter … poor Peter, too.’

  ‘He’d stumbled on your aunt’s murder,’ said Sloan.

  ‘He’d always been fascinated by crime,’ she said. ‘He read a lot about it.’

  ‘It was very clever of him.’

  ‘So he had to go, too,’ she said tightly.

  ‘He had to be silenced,’ said Sloan. He coughed, ‘I take it that he’d have gone easily enough to have a look at the multi-storey car park if invited?’