Last Respects iscm-10 Read online

  “Put it where I put my pistol, Twiz,” he’d said, “and the Tooth Fairy will find it and leave you a silver sixpence.”

  “Did the Tooth Fairy find your pistol?” she had wanted to know, forgetting all about her tooth. “What did she leave you for your pistol?”

  That had been on one of her parents’ rare and glorious leaves when for once they had all been together as a family. Then, all too soon, it had been over and her mother and father had gone again. By the time they came back on their next furlough Elizabeth had all her second teeth and had grown out of believing in fairies of any ethereal description. Even sixpences had been practically no more.

  So today she’d humped an occasional table along to the guest bedroom to put beside the bed. She even knew which side of the bed her father would choose to sleep on. The side nearer the door. That was another legacy from years of living in foreign and sometimes dangerous places…

  The table had been heavier than she had expected but when she came to move it she realised that Frank Mundill must have gone back to work—his office was in the converted studio right at the top of the house—and so wasn’t around to give her a hand. That was after they’d had a scratch luncheon together in the kitchen—Mundill had heated up some soup and rummaged about in the refrigerator until he’d found a wedge of pâté for them both. He’d hovered over the electric toaster for a while and promised to rustle up something more substantial that evening.

  “Don’t worry, Frank.” She’d brushed her hair back from her face as she spoke. “I’m not hungry.”

  “Can’t honestly say that I am either,” he shrugged wryly. “Still, we’d better try to eat something, I suppose…”

  She had given him a look of genuine pity. Frank Mundill’s profession might be architect but his great hobby was cooking and it had been quite pathetic during his wife’s last illness to see him trying to tempt her failing appetite with special delicacy after special delicacy. On her part Celia Mundill had gallantly tried to swallow a mouthful or so of each as long as she had the strength to do so—but the time had come when even that was more than she could manage.

  “I’ll have the bedroom done by tonight,” Elizabeth had said abruptly. She tried not to think about Aunt Celia’s last illness. It was too soon for that.

  “Don’t overdo it, though, will you, Elizabeth?”

  She shook her head.

  Only her father and mother were allowed to call her Twiz. With everyone else she insisted upon Elizabeth in full. None of the other traditional diminutives were permitted either. She never answered to Liz or Betty or Beth or—save the mark—Bess. Peter had teased her about that once.

  “Even Queen Elizabeth didn’t mind that,” he’d said. “Good Queen Bess rolls around the tongue rather nicely, don’t you think?”

  “No, I don’t, and don’t you dare call me Bess either, Peter Hinton. I won’t have it!”

  And now she had to try not to think about Peter Hinton either.

  “Give me a call when you’re ready for some tea,” she’d said to Frank Mundill that afternoon. His secretary was on holiday this week. “I expect I’ll still be up in the bedroom,” she added. “I’m making a proper job of it while I’m about it.”

  So the afternoon—the afternoon that the body of the unknown man was brought ashore at Edsway—passed for her in hard work. It was the only way in which Elizabeth Busby could get through the days. Anyway it wasn’t so much the days—they were just periods of time to be endured—as the nights. It was the nights that were the greatest burden.

  They were pure hell.

  For the first time in her life Elizabeth had come to see the long stretches of the night as something to be feared. The leaden march of the night hours shook her soul in a way that the hours of the day didn’t. The days were easier. There were punctuations in the day. There were, too, the constant demands of civilised behaviour to be met and there were the recurring needs of her body to be attended to. She had to wash, to dress, to eat and to drink—even if she could no longer be merry. All the blessedness of a routine was there for the using.

  She found rather to her surprise that she washed, dressed and—sometimes—ate just as she had always done. She answered the telephone, wrote letters, did the dusting and attended—acolyte-fashion—to the washing machine just as if nothing had happened.

  That was in the daytime.

  It was a constant source of wonder to her that after the day when her own heaven had fallen and “The hour when earth’s foundations fled” she still got through the days at all.

  The nights, of course, were different.

  In a world that had tumbled about her ears the nights had turned into refined torture. There was no routine about the long watches of the night, no demands on her time to be met until morning, and no requirement of her body that could be satisfied—not even sleep.

  Especially not sleep.

  The nighttime was when she could have walked mile after mile—however weary she had been when she dropped into bed. Instead custom required that she spend it lying still in a narrow bed in a small room. The room—her room—got smaller and smaller during the night. She could swear to it. There had been a horror story she’d read once when she was young about the roof of a four-poster bed descending on the person in the bed and smothering him…

  She’d been of an age to take horror in her stride then, to laugh at it even. Horror in those days had been something weird and strange. Now she was older she knew that horror was merely something familiar gone sadly wrong… that was where true horror lay…

  Why, she thought angrily to herself as she shook out a duster, hadn’t someone like Wilkie Collins written about the bruising a girl’s soul suffered when she’d been jilted? That should have given any novelist worth his salt something to get his teeth into…

  3

  Tell the Sheriff’s Officers that I am ready.

  « ^ »

  Detective Constable Crosby—he who could most easily be spared from the police station—brought the car round for Detective Inspector Sloan as that officer stepped out of the back door of Berebury Police Station.

  The constable was patently disappointed to learn that there was no hurry to get to wherever they were going.

  “No hurry at all,” repeated Sloan, climbing into the front passenger seat. “You can take it from me, Crosby, that this particular problem isn’t going to run away.”

  The other man withdrew his hand from the switches to the blue flashing light and siren.

  “On the contrary,” forecast Detective Inspector Sloan, “I shouldn’t be surprised if it’s not going to be with us for quite a while.”

  The trouble with Superintendent Leeyes was that his gloom was catching.

  “Yes, sir,” said Crosby, immediately losing interest. “Where to, then, slowly?”

  And the trouble with Detective Constable Crosby was that he was only nearly insubordinate.

  Sloan settled himself in the car, reminding himself of something he knew very well already: that Detective Constable Crosby wasn’t by any means the brightest star in the Force’s firmament. As far as he, Sloan, could make out, the only thing that Crosby really liked doing was driving fast cars fast. That was probably why Inspector Harpe, who was in charge of Traffic Division, had insisted that the constable was better in the plain clothes branch rather than the uniform one.

  “Call us ‘Woollies’ if you like, Sloan,” Harpe had said vehemently at the time.

  “I don’t…” began Sloan; though there were those in plenty who did.

  “But,” swept on Inspector Harpe, “I’m not stupid enough to want that boy Crosby behind the wheel of one of Traffic Division’s vehicles.”

  “No, Harry.”

  “First time he was tempted,” sniffed Harpe, “he’d be after a ton-up kid.”

  For Adam and Eve temptation had been an apple.

  For a traffic duty policeman temptation was a youth behind the wheel of a fast car ahead of him and going faster, ever f
aster. The driver would be showing the world in general—but the police car in particular—what his car would do. If it was his car: ten to one it would be somebody else’s car. Taken for a joy ride. Taken on a joy ride, too.

  Luring on the Law was practically a parlour game.

  And as Inspector Harpe of Traffic Division knew only too well, what was begun “sae rantingly, sae wantonly, sae dauntingly” usually ended up on Robert Burns’s present-day equivalent of the gallows-tree—a fatal motorway pile-up. Because, as a rule, the Law’s cars could do rather better than anyone else’s, and the Law’s drivers were trained. They were trained, too, of course, not to respond to taunting behaviour. That training, though, took a little longer than learning to drive well.

  “The first time someone tried it on Crosby,” Harpe had predicted, “he’d fall for it. You know he would, Sloan. Be honest now.”

  “Well…”

  “Hook, line and sinker, I’ll be bound,” said Harpe. “I’m prepared to bet good money that he’d go and chase some madman right up the motorway until they ran out of road. Both of them.”

  “But…” Even Superintendent Leeyes wasn’t usually as bodeful as this.

  “Catch Crosby radioing ahead to get the tearaway stopped instead of going after him.”

  “Oh, come off it, Harry,” Sloan had said at the time. “You were young once yourself.”

  At this moment now he contented himself with telling Crosby where to go. “Dr. Dabbe is expecting us at the mortuary,” he said as the police car swung round Berebury’s new multi-storey car park and out onto the main road. Crosby automatically put his foot down.

  “In due course,” said Sloan swiftly. “Not on two stretchers.”

  The consultant pathologist to the Berebury District Hospital Group was more than expecting them. He was obviously looking forward to seeing the two policemen. He welcomed them both to his domain. “Come along in, Inspector Sloan, and—let me see now—it’s Constable Crosby, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, Doctor.” Crosby didn’t like attending post-mortem examinations.

  The pathologist was rubbing his hands together. “We’ve got something very interesting here, gentlemen. Very interesting indeed.”

  “Have we?” said Sloan warily. Cases that were “open and shut” were what made for a quiet life, not interesting ones.

  The pathologist indicated the door to the post-mortem theatre. “What you might call a real puzzler.”

  “Really?” said Sloan discouragingly.

  “As well as being ‘a demd, damp, moist, unpleasant body’ as Mr. Mantalini said.”

  “Not drowned, anyway, I hear,” advanced Sloan, who did not know who Mr. Mantalini was. The case was never going to get off the ground at all at this rate.

  “Not ‘drowned dead’ anyway,” agreed the pathologist breezily. “You know your Charles Dickens, I expect, Sloan?”

  Sloan didn’t but that wasn’t important. What was important was what the pathologist had found.

  He waited.

  “In my opinion,” said Dr. Dabbe, getting to the point at last, “confirmed, I may say, by some X-ray photographs, this chap we’ve got here… whoever he is…”

  “Yes?” said Sloan, stifling any other comment. The body’s identity was something else that the police were going to have to establish.

  Later.

  “… and however wet he is,” continued the pathologist imperturbably, “was dead before he hit the water.”

  “Ah,” said Sloan.

  “Furthermore…”

  Even Constable Crosby raised his head at this.

  “Furthermore,” said the pathologist, “in my opinion he died from the consequences of a fall from a considerable height.”

  Detective Constable Crosby clearly felt it was incumbent on him to say something into the silence which followed this pronouncement. He looked round the room and said, “Did he fall or was he pushed?”

  “Ah, gentlemen,” Dr. Dabbe said courteously, “I rather think that your department, isn’t it? Not mine.”

  Detective Inspector Sloan was not to be diverted by such pleasantry. There were still some matters that were the pathologist’s department and he wanted to know about them.

  “What sort of height?” he asked immediately.

  “Difficult to say exactly at this stage, Sloan,” temporised the pathologist. “There’s a lot of work to be done yet. I’ve got to take a proper look at the X-rays, too. I can tell you that there are multiple impacted fractures where the shock effect of hitting terra firma ran through the body.”

  Sloan winced involuntarily.

  The pathologist was more detached. “It demonstrates Newton’s Third Law of Motion very nicely—you know, the one about force travelling through a body.”

  Sloan didn’t know and didn’t care.

  “He didn’t fell from the air, did he?” he asked. There had been parts of a dead body dropped from an aeroplane on the Essex marshes just after the last war. That case had become a cause célèbre and passed into legal history and he, Sloan, had read about it. “We’re not talkig about aeroplane height, are we?”

  “No, no,” said Dr. Dabbe. “Less than that.”

  Sloan nodded. “But he didn’t fell into the water?”

  “Not first,” said the pathologist. “I think he hit the earth first.”

  That only left fire. If Sloan had been a medieval man he would have promptly enquired about the fourth element—fire—that always went with earth, water and air. He wasn’t, he reminded himself astringently, any such thing. He was a twentieth-century policeman. “A fall from a height,” he said sedately instead.

  “Yes,” said the pathologist.

  “And onto hard ground,” said Sloan.

  “Hard something,” said Dr. Dabbe. “As to whether it was ground or not I can’t say yet.”

  “Not into the sea, though?” concluded Sloan.

  That stirred Detective Constable Crosby into speech again. “What about Cranberry Point?” he suggested. “That’s a good drop.”

  “Rather less than that, too, I think,” said Dr. Dabbe more slowly, “though I can’t tell you for certain yet. I’ll have to have a look at the exact degree of bone displacement…”

  The knee bone was connected to the hip bone and the hip bone was connected to the thigh bone…

  “You can get out onto the cliff above Kinnisport,” persisted Crosby, “if you have a mind to.”

  “But,” pointed out the pathologist, “if you go over the cliff there you don’t hit the water.”

  “No more you don’t, Doctor,” agreed the constable, in no whit put out.

  Sloan had forgotten for a moment that the pathologist was a Sunday sailor himself. He remembered now that Dr. Dabbe sailed an Albacore somewhere in the estuary. He was bound to know that stretch of the river and coastline well.

  “You hit the rocks if you go over the edge up there,” pronounced Dr. Dabbe, thus revealing that he had already given the cliffs beyond Kinnisport some thought.

  “But not the water,” agreed Sloan. That was what had saved Cranberry Point from becoming Calleshire’s Beachy Head all right. “The tide never comes in to the very bottom of the cliff.”

  “Exactly,” said Dr. Dabbe. “He wouldn’t have ended up in the water if he’d gone over the cliffs there.”

  “Unless,” said Inspector Sloan meticulously, “someone had then punted the body into the sea.” It might be Dr. Dabbe’s function to establish the cause of death; it was Detective Inspector Sloan’s bounden duty to consider all the angles of a proposition. “After he’d fallen…”

  “Or been pushed,” said Crosby unnecessarily.

  It was Sloan whom the pathologist answered. “Yes, Inspecter, I suppose you shouldn’t discount the theoretical possibility that someone dragged him off the rocks at the foot of the cliff and into the sea.”

  “They’d have had a job,” said Crosby roundly, forgetting that it was no part of the office of constable—detective or otherwise—to ar
gue with an inspector—detective or otherwise—let alone with a full-blown medical man.

  Sloan regarded Crosby with a certain curiosity. It wasn’t the breach of protocol that intrigued him. After all, protocol was only significant in one of two ways—either in its observance or in its breaching. What he had noted was that Detective Constable Crosby—traffic policeman manqué—didn’t as a rule take such an interest in a case early on. He wondered what it was about the matter so far that had caught his wayward attention.

  “I must say, Sloan,” added Dr. Dabbe, who never minded with whom he argued, “from my own experience I can confirm that it would be the devil’s own job to get in there under the cliffs with a boat to do any such thing.”

  “Would it, Doctor?” Cranberry Point, then, could be discounted.

  “It certainly wouldn’t be a job for a man on his own,” said Dabbe, “and the tide would have had to be exactly right.”

  “And as for walking round the cliffs from Kinnisport, sir,” put in Crosby.

  “Yes?” said Sloan, interested in spite of himself. Crosby was no walker. His stint on the beat had proved that.

  “You’d have your work cut out to do it, sir, without the coastguards seeing you.”

  If Superintendent Leeyes had been there he would have automatically added a rider to the effect that the coastguards hadn’t anything else to do but look out at the sea and the cliffs. The superintendent wasn’t there, of course, because he never went out on cases at all if he could help it. He stayed at the centre while his myrmidons fanned out and then reported back. The still centre, some might say; others were more perceptive and spoke wisely of the eye of the hurricane…

  “Exactly,” said Dr. Dabbe, who was fortunately able to concentrate entirely on the matter in hand. Forensic pathologists didn’t have superior officers chasing them. In theory, at any rate, they pursued absolute accuracy for its own sake—at the request of Her Majesty’s Coroner and at the behest of no one else. The only people of whom pathologlsts had to be wary, thought Sloan with a certain amount of envy, were opposing counsel in court who wanted to give the Goddess of Truth a tweak here and there to the benefit of their particular client.