Slight Mourning Read online

  And he’d done a routine test for alcohol in the deceased’s blood and found some but not a lot.

  And done a routine post mortem to establish the exact cause of death and found poison as well.

  TWO

  “He won’t actually call it poison, though,” Police Superintendent Leeyes had informed Sloan when he had had Dr. Dabbe’s report.

  That had been on the Monday.

  “Oh, no,” he went on. “Poison’s too strong a word for our precious pathologist so he doesn’t use it.”

  “What,” inquired Sloan cautiously, “does he say then?”

  “A potentially injurious substance,” trumpeted Leeyes scornfully. Never a man to mince words himself he could never understand anyone else doing it either.

  “Ah.”

  “He says,” continued Leeyes unappeased, “that during his examination he found evidence that the deceased had ingested … ingested … now there’s another damn silly word …”

  “Eaten or drunk,” supplied Sloan, “and he doesn’t know which.”

  Leeyes glared at him. “I know that.” He straightened out the paper in front of him. “Now, where was I?… oh, yes … had ingested a compound which he believes may have had strong sedative qualities.”

  “Dope,” said Sloan simply. He waved a hand expressively. “The stuff you give horses and neurotic women. When you’re not giving them pep pills,” he added.

  “Either way,” responded Leeyes tartly, “winner or loser, will do in a motor car.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Dr. Dabbe says,” went on Leeyes, still consulting the report, “that it may have been taken thera … thera … therapeutically …”

  “As medicine.”

  “Or in excessive quantity.”

  “An overdose,” translated Sloan, like all policemen and doctors more familiar with overdoses than he used to be.

  “Or in a normal dose but with its effect potentiated—why the devil can’t the man write decent English—by alcohol.”

  “Very likely.” Sloan’s experience was that alcohol potentiated everything—but especially motorists.

  “But,” Leeyes waved the report in front of him in Sloan’s face, “driving under the influence isn’t going to stick and it doesn’t get us anywhere anyway because he wasn’t.”

  “No, sir?”

  “He says the blood level of alcohol as analysed by the gas chromatographic method is well below the legal limit. Nowhere near it, in fact. And that’s without any playing about.”

  Sloan nodded. He understood that bit all right. No blowing into little bags, no little tubes turning colour, no engineered delays, no prevarication about taking blood—and, above all, no argument.

  He coughed. “What about under the influence of drugs, sir?”

  The superintendent slammed Dr. Dabbe’s report down on the desk. “He won’t say that for sure, either.”

  “Not until they’ve done a bit more analysing, I suppose …”

  “Listen, Sloan. Quote: ‘I cannot say with any degree of exactitude and without further examination’”—Leeyes savagely mimicked the precise language of the police pathologist—“‘the quantified effect of a substance alien to the body whose chemical and pharmacological properties have not yet been established.’”

  “So that, sir …”

  “Wait for it, Sloan. Wait for it.” Leeyes might have been a sergeant on the parade ground. “That’s not all. Listen to this bit …” He resumed his reading: “‘… or the effect of a synergic or catalystic agent should either or both have been present in the body at or immediately previous to death.’”

  There was a small silence.

  “Either,” said Sloan flatly, “he knows but he’s not saying …”

  “Or”—Leeyes glared across his desk at him—“he doesn’t know and doesn’t want to say so.”

  “There’ll be things to analyse, won’t there?”

  “He’s pickled some bits and pieces,” agreed Leeyes graphically, “and put them in jars. It’s all written down here. Stomach, liver, kidneys, and spleen. Anyway Constable King told us that much.”

  Police Constable King acted as coroner’s officer and routinely represented the Division at post mortems ordered by the coroner.

  “The coroner …” began Sloan.

  “The inquest …” said Leeyes at the same instant.

  The two policemen regarded each other for a long moment.

  Then …

  “I’ll leave you to talk to the coroner,” said Leeyes basely. “This half-baked stuff isn’t evidence …”

  Miss Cynthia Paterson could see at a glance how upset old Professor Berry was.

  And no wonder.

  He practically tottered into the church for the funeral, his gnarled veins standing out, knotted and blue, on his shaky old hands.

  She felt very sorry for him. Not that any of all this could be said to be his fault. Bill Fent always took him home after a dinner party at Strontfield Park if no one else was going toward Cleete—just as he and Helen always asked her to come to dinner when the professor was invited.

  He was a theologian and an old friend of her late father’s rather than of hers, but she knew him well and in any case she’d long ago reached an age that was socially ageless. Just as, equally long ago, she’d reached a status that was socially neutral. She was just the old rector’s daughter—everything and nothing, so to speak. She dined at the Park—to keep their numbers right—and took tea with the district nurse; she had the travelling county librarian to luncheon and gave the peripatetic teacher for the deaf a bed from time to time—and earned her living in almost everyone’s garden.

  The Washbys followed the professor in.

  They, decided Cynthia Paterson, had probably brought him over from Cleete today. They had been going to take him home on Saturday night but at the last minute Dr. Paul Washby had had a call. He was the only doctor in the village—had been ever since he had succeeded old Dr. Whittaker—and Veronica was his new wife.

  They—Paul and Veronica Washby—were much more of Bill and Helen Fent’s age group than she and the professor. Veronica Washby was one of the prettiest girls Cynthia Paterson had seen in a long time. She was as pretty as … as a fritillary, decided Cynthia. The dinner party at Strontfield Park had been in her honour. Paul Washby’s bride was being welcomed to the village and being introduced to Constance Parva.

  Next but one to Cynthia in her pew, Mrs. Ursula Renville leaned forward to pick up a prayer book. Ursula Renville—middle-aged or not—was tall, graceful and indefinably elegant. Now she was more like a willow than a fritillary. No, willow was too substantial. Not willow. There was something else in the garden that Cynthia was reminded of … Ursula Renville was more like … like … she’d got it … like dierama pulcherrima. The wandflower. Hanging mauve flower bells suspended from a slender arching stem. Not completely hardy, of course—but then that went for Ursula Renville too. And didn’t like being moved when mature. You could say that, thought Cynthia silently, about pretty nearly every well-rooted inhabitant of Constance Parva.

  The Washbys had settled themselves down in a pew beside Peter Miller, the farmer. You couldn’t very well call it their usual place because they didn’t come to church often enough for that. Oddly enough, Cynthia Paterson, true daughter of the rectory that she was, wasn’t too sorry about this. Paul Washby, excellent general practitioner that she had every reason to suppose him to be, had more than a touch of Chaucer’s Physician about him, and every gentle reader suspected his religious observance to have been mere form.

  Cynthia Paterson knew her Chaucer better than most people. She’d read The Canterbury Tales aloud to her father time and again in his declining years when his eyes had begun to fail—and not in modern English either but sounding every syllable and last “e” in true medieval style.

  The more she thought about it the more Paul Washby fitted Chaucer’s bill of the man of medicine. Fonder of gold than he cared to let show, that good
pilgrim had been ready enough to enter into a fairly unholy alliance with the Apothecary. And if the Plague had meant more work and therefore more money surely he hadn’t minded about that dread disease as much as he should have done …

  Caught up in a vision of a train of pilgrims in an earlier England her mind drifted away from the church again …

  So did Sloan’s.

  His mind went back to when he’d seen the coroner for West Calleshire. It had been in the coroner’s office in Berebury on Monday afternoon.

  That worthy solicitor had been affable to a degree.

  And he hadn’t been born yesterday, either.

  “I shall hold an inquest, Inspector, at eleven o’clock on Wednesday morning in the Guildhall,” he pronounced as soon as he had heard Sloan out, “and the only evidence that I propose to take that day will be that of identification.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “Who’ll do that, by the way? Not the widow, I hope …” He was a compassionate man.

  “No, sir. Constable Bargrave has seen her, of course, but she wasn’t keen. Still very shocked, he said. There’s a cousin, I understand, though, who was staying there at the time. A Mr. Quentin Fent.”

  The coroner nodded and made a note. “And in the first instance, Inspector, I shall adjourn the inquest for one month.”

  “Thank you, sir. That would be a great help …”

  “In the hope,” continued the coroner blandly, “that the other injured party—I’ve got his name, haven’t I? Ah, yes, Mr. Tom Exley—in the hope that Mr. Tom Exley will be recovered sufficiently by then to give evidence.”

  “Thank you, sir,” said Sloan again, grinning to himself. There was no doubt that the coroner was as wily as they came—as befitted a man qualified in law who spent his days tangling with doctors.

  “No point in rushing things, Inspector.”

  “None, sir.”

  “And we don’t want any hares started, do we?” The coroner, mostly desk-bound, always thought of himself as a country solicitor.

  “No, sir,” agreed Sloan stolidly.

  “On the other hand this does need looking into—just in case. We haven’t got the full report yet, have we? Probably only his usual sleeping tablet stirred up a bit too much by a large nightcap.” He grimaced feelingly. “The sort of one you’d need after a big dinner party.”

  “Could be,” agreed Sloan. He and his wife, Margaret, did not entertain on such a scale. His own parents came to see that his wife was looking after him properly. His in-laws visited to check that his wife—their daughter—was being decently cherished. And that—so far—was all. Besides, semi-detached houses in suburban Berebury did not lend themselves to stylish dinner parties and Sloan’s own nightcap was usually milky coffee. “We do know, sir, he wasn’t expecting to have to go out again that night but Dr. Washby had a late call and at the last minute couldn’t take another guest home. Fent took him instead.”

  “Quite so,” said the coroner, making another note. “A month then, I think, would do very well all round. If there is anything more that I should know abut the post mortem, Dr. Dabbe and his analyst friends will have come up with it by then. And a month will do you?”

  “I hope so, sir.”

  “After all, Inspector,” he mused, “identification is really what inquests were all about. It was after the Norman Conquest they started having them.”

  “Really, sir?”

  “You only had ’em at all to make sure that the dead man wasn’t a Norman,” said the coroner cheerfully. “If he was English it didn’t matter.”

  “Fent was English all right, sir.”

  The coroner ignored this. “If he was a Norman, you see, the English had to pay a fine. Hence all the fuss about identification. You tried to prove your body wasn’t Norman. Presentment of Englishry, it was called …”

  Which was how it had come about that when the next batch of mourners entered the church the thoughts of Detective Inspector Sloan were rooted even further back in the past than those of Miss Cynthia Paterson.

  Mr. and Mrs. Daniel Marchmont were among those who came in in that batch, and neither Sloan nor Cynthia Paterson, abstracted as they both were, overlooked the fact. Mrs. Marjorie Marchmont wasn’t often overlooked. Her husband might have been. Easily. But not Mrs. Marjorie Marchmont. There was a natural ebullience about her, underlined by her large size, which even the circumstances of a funeral could not quell. And a child-like preoccupation with the present.

  The first thing which she did, observed by both Sloan and Cynthia Paterson, was to consider the church flowers, and then to leave her pew to tweak a piece of wayward greenery back into place. Actually, Cynthia Paterson, no mean flower arranger herself, thought the arrangement much better as it was before but Marjorie Marchmont evidently felt it lent nothing to her decoration. She rammed the adjacent flowers even farther into the vase and then went back to her place.

  What Sloan also noted was that—the family apart—all the guests at Saturday night’s fatal dinner party were now assembled in the church. He ticked them off mentally: there should be eight. There was the professor—he’d seen him come in with the doctor and his wife, that was three; the Daniel Marchmonts, who’d just arrived—you couldn’t miss her—must be fifteen stone if she was a pound—five; the Renvilles—now there was a good-looking woman—he didn’t know what to make of them yet—seven; they were sitting next to the gardener woman—Miss Paterson—a proper village spinster if ever he saw one—that made eight.

  They’d all assembled at Strontfield Park just before eight o’clock on Saturday evening. Bill Fent had died as near to midnight as didn’t matter. Those were the only fixed points in time that Sloan had.

  He’d done his level best to winkle a few more out of the pathologist. That had been on Tuesday. And it hadn’t been easy.

  “Sloan, I can’t be expected to say for sure,” Dr. Dabbe had said cagily, “when the deceased took whatever it was he did take until we know exactly what it was he took, can I?”

  “No, Doctor.” It was the only answer.

  “All I’ve got to go on until I have the analyst’s full report is that there was something there which perhaps shouldn’t have been.”

  “No more than that, Doctor?”

  “Not yet, Sloan. When we know exactly what it was he took …”

  “Or had given,” pointed out Sloan soberly.

  “True. Your pigeon that one, of course,” said the pathologist, who also fancied himself a countryman. “On my part …”

  “Yes, Doctor?”

  “I might go so far as to say that I think it was a narcotic that he’d taken, and that it was unlikely that he’d had it very early that evening or the effects would have been apparent before he set off to take the old boy home.”

  Sloan nodded.

  “There’s one more conclusion that we can draw while we’re about it, Inspector …”

  “Oh?”

  “That if substance ‘X’ had emetic qualities …”

  “Emetic?”

  “Sick-making.” Dr. Dabbe grinned. “If it did …”

  “Then,” concluded Sloan for him, “the deceased didn’t take it until after dinner. I quite agree. We’d heard that he ate his dinner all right.”

  “Heard?” chortled Dabbe robustly. “I know for sure, Sloan. I had a look.”

  That slightly earthy aspect of the case was also troubling someone else.

  By Sloan’s side in the church Detective Constable Crosby stirred. Raw, brash, and the constant despair of the entire complement of the Berebury Police Station, the superintendent had been quite right about Crosby. No one would take him for a policeman. The constable’s conception of “plain-clothes” was a piece of natty gent’s suiting, and Sloan could only call his choice of a tie for a funeral conspicuously unsuccessful.

  “Sir,” he whispered now, “what will they do with the bits afterwards?”

  “Bits?” inquired Sloan bleakly.

  “His innards. The b
its they put in jars. They aren’t being buried today with the rest of him, are they?”

  “I should hope not.”

  “Well, then …”

  “If there’s anything in them that oughtn’t to be there then they’ll be wanted as evidence and be preserved.”

  “For ever?”

  Sloan sighed. “We could offer them to the Black Museum, I suppose …”

  “And if not,” persisted Crosby hoarsely, “will they have a special service for his liver and his lights or …”

  Sloan never did hear Crosby’s idea of a suitable alternative, and a sudden bob of activity on the part of Miss Nellie Roberts’ straw hat saved him from having to take official notice of the question.

  The organ music died precipitately away and—following Nellie’s lead—the congregation got to its feet. Through the open door from the direction of the lich-gate could be heard the crunch of feet upon gravel and then, approaching the church porch, the firm voice of the present rector of St. Leonard’s, Constance Parva, beginning the Order for the Burial of the Dead.

  THREE

  First on her feet was Miss Cynthia Paterson. She was slightly ahead of Nellie Roberts’ blue straw hat because she’d been keeping her ear subconsciously attuned to Gregory Fitch’s minute bell. He’d stopped his tolling when the cortège reached the church, his task done for the moment.

  Just like the inscription on the bell said “Too the grave do summons al” so Bill Fent had answered the summons now.

  Like Detective Inspector Sloan, she too noted that all the guests who had been at the dinner party at Strontfield Park were now in the church. From there onward her thoughts were rather different.

  Fellowship was the image which sprang to her mind.

  Fellowship and Jollity to be precise.

  Fellowship was a character in another piece of early literature to which her late father had been addicted in his own old age—The Summoning by Death of Everyman. More to the point than most sermons, but too strong for modern congregations, as he’d often declared before going down to the church to deliver a well-thought-out piece of scholarship about the Hittites.