Slight Mourning Page 4

  “All the same, Sloan,” said Dabbe more seriously, “we do have a pretty little problem here. Haven’t we, Writtle?”

  “Very nice,” agreed Writtle judiciously. “Mind you, Inspector, we shouldn’t have had a problem at all if Dabbe here hadn’t been wideawake. I can tell you that not every county pathologist would have spotted what he did at a routine traffic accident post mortem.”

  “Come, come, Writtle,” protested Dabbe with due modesty, “anyone would have noticed those petechical haemorrhages on the pericardial surfaces.”

  “What about the loss of aeration in the lungs, then?” countered Writtle. “Very like the findings in ventricular fibrillation.”

  “True.”

  “I should say nine chaps out of ten would have put that down to primary myocardial ischaemia.”

  “Surely not.”

  “Especially if there was any narrowing of the coronary arteries.”

  Sloan coughed. “Gentlemen …”

  “And that,” added Writtle handsomely, “was before you got anywhere near the stomach.”

  “You must agree,” pointed out the pathologist, “that he was a bit too young for too much ticker trouble.”

  “Exactly,” exclaimed Writtle. “That’s just what I mean. Not everyone would have remembered that the aorta can be hypoplastic with minimal atheroma in younger subjects.”

  Sloan smoothed out the pages of his notebook.

  “Gentlemen,” he said again, more loudly this time, “if we might begin at the beginning, please …”

  Both men turned toward him.

  “The stomach,” said the pathologist. promptly.

  “The seat of all the humours,” chipped in Dr. Writtle.

  “Behold the stomach”—Dr. Dabbe produced a large sealed glass jar and slid it along the laboratory bench toward Sloan and Crosby—“otherwise known as Exhibit A.”

  Sloan took one quick look at the glass jar and then averted his eyes.

  Crosby opened his eyes wide and vowed never to eat tripe again. Ever.

  “I thought there was a distinct loss of tone in the stomach,” said Dr. Dabbe. “What did you think, Writtle?”

  “Definitely.” The analyst pointed a bony finger at the contents of the jar. “No irritation of the duodenal mucosa, though. All of which does tend toward …”

  “Quite,” said the pathologist

  “The stomach …” said Sloan, beginning to write.

  “Ah, Sloan, it was the liver that was really interesting,” said Dabbe.

  By what was apparently some sort of legerdemain another jar appeared as if from nowhere and came sliding down the bench. This one was labelled “B” and it came to rest in front of Detective Constable Crosby. Crosby swallowed audibly and began to babble about vegetarianism.

  “All right. The liver, then,” sighed Sloan, writing that down instead.

  “The interesting thing about the liver,” began Dr. Dabbe in a hortatory tone, “is that—I say, Inspector, your constable’s gone a very funny colour all of a sudden. Are you feeling all right, boy? Hey, Writtle, catch him before he falls. Here, put him on this chair. Had we better put his head between his knees, do you think?” he asked anxiously. “I haven’t had a live patient in thirty years, you know … never did like ’em when they could answer back. Wonder what could have upset him …” The pathologist peered round the hospital laboratory, which was lined from floor to ceiling with gruesome specimens, saw nothing untoward, and took another look at Crosby. “Feeling better now? Good. Now, Sloan, where was I?”

  “We’d got as far as the liver being interesting,” Sloan answered him evenly. He tried not to look at Crosby. Sitting uneasily on a chair, his head sunk between his knees and his face the colour of old putty, was no place for anyone detailed to assist him on an investigation of anything stronger than a missing bicycle pump. The essential policeman in Sloan turned away from the unedifying sight.

  “Oh, the liver was interesting, all right,” said Dabbe. “Very.”

  “In what way, Doctor?”

  “The liver had more of the—er—alien substance in it than the peripheral blood did,” said the pathologist, “at the same time, mark you, Sloan, as there was still some of the same substance—whatever it was—in the stomach.”

  “I see, Doctor,” said Sloan, “and that means …?”

  It was the Home Office analyst who fielded his question this time. “When you have that situation, Inspector, it indicates that death occurred before peak absorption and not all that long after the substance had been taken.”

  “Ah,” said Sloan, “and if death hadn’t—er—occurred when it did when might it have been expected to—er—have occurred—if it was going to occur at all, that is?”

  “We thought you’d want to know the time,” said the two scientists in unison.

  “We’ve done some work on it,” added Dabbe.

  “But not all of it,” said Writtle.

  “Enough to be able to say …” began Dabbe.

  “Only approximately, mind you,” put in Writtle cautiously.

  “Yes?” murmured Sloan gently. He did his best to sound encouraging. At this rate they would be in the laboratory all night and he didn’t like it any more than Crosby did really.

  The pathologist twiddled a pencil between his fingers. “Assuming that no medical aid was summoned or happened to be to hand …”

  Sloan said, “I think we can assume that, Doctor.”

  “And that no remedial measures were taken …”

  “Yes?”

  “Then I think our subject would have died …”

  Sloan looked up. He’d forgotten that doctors who were forensic pathologists didn’t have patients any more. Only subjects.

  “… some time during Saturday night,” continued Dr. Dabbe. “What do you think, Writtle?”

  Writtle stroked his chin. “I’m only an analyst, of course, but say between three and five o’clock in the morning …”

  “There you are, Sloan,” said Dabbe generously. “The dead of night. What more do you want?”

  The rector, a weather eye on the chief mourners, had now got down to a brief eulogy of the late Bill Fent, tailored to the occasion. Miss Cynthia Paterson didn’t listen too closely to the clergyman’s valedictory tributes. She’d heard them all before. Besides, she was thinking about something else. She wasn’t so absorbed, though, as not to be aware that Ursula Renville had been crying for some minutes or that little Veronica Washby, Paul’s new bride, was very near to tears. Oddly enough Cynthia Paterson was glad about this—a tough doctor’s wife was no help to any village.

  Predictably Marjorie Marchmont remained dry-eyed. Cynthia knew that there wouldn’t be so much as a sniff from Marjorie for all that she’d probably known Bill Fent better than any of them. And there never would be. She wasn’t a person who could project her emotions beyond herself. Cynthia herself wasn’t tearful either. Spinsters don’t cry. She’d found that out long ago. When she’d discovered that there was no one to comfort a spinster’s tears … Besides, being the rector’s daughter had toughened her to death—or perhaps it was the gardener in her that made her so aware that everything which lived and grew and flowered had a mortal end.

  The rector had reached the last Collect now and the undertaker’s men moved forward … that was another change with the times, thought Cynthia. Time was when a coffin would be borne by men from round the deceased—work-mates, employees, friends, and relatives—a last tribute. That custom had died out too, along with bell-ringing. The men who came forward now were strangers to her and, she was sure, to the Fent family too. The men put their shoulders to the oak coffin, turned unsteadily, and began their journey back down the chancel.

  The family followed.

  Even as she averted her eyes from the sad little procession Cynthia wondered why she did so. What primitive feeling made one hesitate to look upon grief and fear when joy and anger were no trouble to watch? Her mind dawdled on the thought while she focused her eye
s on the pulpit—on the reredos—on the Lady Chapel—anywhere where she could not possibly catch Helen Fent’s eye. Opposites, she thought, firmly, were always intriguing. Her father had once preached on Giotto’s opposites in the chapel at Padua.

  She recounted them to herself as first the coffin and then the mourners passed by the end of her pew: Justice and Injustice; Fortitude and Despair; Temperance and Wrath; Prudence and Envy (a neat pair, those); Faith and Inconstancy; and Charity and Folly. A fine sermon those last two had made. That the medieval opposite of Charity should be Folly had intrigued the Reverend Wilfred Paterson no end …

  The last of the family mourners passed out of sight and the atmosphere in the church relaxed.

  Veronica Washby looked as if she might be able to get by now without actually crying. Ursula Renville gave a final convulsive sob and Marjorie Marchmont changed her mind about the flowers again. She stepped out of her pew and gave them another strenuous prod.

  Of the men, Professor Berry looked old and sad, and Paul Washby slightly impatient. That came, she decided charitably, of his being a doctor. Daniel Marchmont—one always had to look twice to see where the self-effacing Daniel Marchmont had got to—was waiting for his wife to finish lashing the flowers into shape. Richard Renville, a considerate man if ever there was one, turned to Cynthia and chatted with her in an undertone, thereby giving his wife a little more time in which to collect herself.

  “Tappet’s Corner of all places,” he said. “Bill knew it as well as anyone else round here. Better, probably.”

  “It’s a bad bit of road, even on a bicycle,” said Cynthia. “I sometimes get off there and walk myself.”

  “It always has been a bad bit of road,” mused Renville. “My grandfather turned his trap over there once, though I must say he was on his way home from market at the time.”

  “Bill wasn’t on his way home from market,” remarked Cynthia.

  “I know,” said Renville, taking her meaning straightaway. “And he wasn’t in a hurry, either. Now if it had been one of the Pennyfeather boys in a souped-up old banger I could have understood it. But not Bill. One of the best drivers this side of Calleford.”

  “And one of the best cars,” added Cynthia temperately.

  “What … oh, yes, of course. Nothing wrong with that, I’m sure.”

  “Then perhaps the other driver …” she suggested.

  Renville shook his head. “Doesn’t sound like it to me. Fellow in his middle thirties. Married with two kids. Steady sort of chap from all that I hear.” Richard Renville himself was the sort of chap who always managed to pick up what information there was going. Some people were like that.

  “It was a family car.” Cynthia herself had heard that. “Not a sports model or anything like that.”

  Renville came near to a chuckle. “The car oft proclaims the man, you mean?”

  “Doesn’t it?”

  “Perhaps it does,” he conceded in a decorous whisper. “Time we changed ours and neither of us wants to. A pair of stick-in-the-muds, the Renvilles of Constance Parva.” He slipped his hand under his wife’s arm as she made a movement toward the aisle. “Aren’t we, dear?”

  Ursula Renville nodded mutely.

  Cynthia Paterson waited a moment and then stepped out of the pew herself. She found she was standing between the young farmer Peter Miller and Herbert Kelway.

  “This is a sad day for Constance Parva,” said the grocer. “They don’t come like our Mr. Fent very often.”

  “I certainly couldn’t have had a better neighbour,” added Peter Miller with an emphasis Cynthia thought was intended for her.

  She found a phrase in reply which had stood her in good stead after many a funeral. It fitted into those awkward moments when it didn’t seem permissible to speak except of the deceased, but when everything else about them had already been said.

  “His sun went down while it was yet day,” she murmured.

  All of the congregation were standing now, and Detective Constable Crosby was using his position at the very back of the church and his height—well above minimal police regulation—to survey the rest of the mourners. He studied the backs of their heads one by one so hard that, irritated, Sloan whispered to him.

  “Is your middle name Lombroso, then, Crosby?”

  “No, sir,” he whispered back. “Edward.” There was a pause. “Who’s Lombroso?”

  “An Italian chap who thought you could tell a bad ’un from the set of his ears.”

  “Oh.” There was another pause. Then, “And can you?”

  “Not that I know of,” sighed Sloan. “It’s not as easy as that.”

  He wished that he had Sergeant Gelven with him today instead of Constable Crosby. Gelven was a policeman to his finger-tips—to his finger-prints, you might say—and sturdy, reliable, and resourceful into the bargain. And, of course, it showed.

  “First time I’ve looked for villains at a funeral, sir,” Crosby resumed his chatty whispering.

  “They may not be here,” said Sloan, though he didn’t believe that himself. Everyone who had had anything to do with the Fents’ fatal dinner party was at the funeral—right down to the village grocer who supplied Strontfield Park and the neighbouring farmer who had called in at the house before the party.

  “Sure to be, sir,” Crosby hissed back confidently. “It’s always family or friends who do you in …”

  Sloan grunted. Ninety per cent of the time it was, too.

  “… and they’d be here anyway,” continued Crosby. “Up front.”

  “All right, all right,” he said. “I promise we’ll start with the kith and kin as usual.” Sloan allowed his gaze to travel to the pews nearest the coffin, his thoughts not so far removed from those of Miss Cynthia Paterson after all.

  “Nearest and dearest, that’s who it’ll be, sir, I bet,” pronounced Crosby with all the airy assurance of the young.

  “I’ll make a note,” said Sloan solemnly. “A hundred to one?”

  “Unless it was a pure accident,” qualified the constable quickly.

  “There’s no such thing as a pure accident, Crosby,” responded Sloan in a firm undertone, “and the sooner you get that idea into your head the better.”

  It had been Inspector Harpe of Traffic Division who had taught Sloan that. There were only two sorts of accidents, the melancholy Harpe insisted after half a lifetime’s study of every untoward incident and accident in the county of Calleshire. There were, Happy Harry always said, ignorance accidents and going-somewhere-to-happen accidents, but never, never simon-pure accidents.

  “Besides, Crosby,” Sloan added for good measure, “whatever it was the deceased swallowed in the way of an injurious substance didn’t affect anyone else, did it?”

  “No, sir. Not that we know about.” It had been Crosby’s job since Monday to cultivate Milly Pennyfeather who had been in the kitchen at Strontfield Park on Saturday, and to begin quietly to check the other guests and the family for disquieting symptoms.

  They hadn’t had any.

  Sloan too had done a good deal of unobtrusive asking around since the pathologist’s report had come in. Nothing he had established so far had been the slightest help …

  There had not even been anything useful to be gleaned from the rector’s funeral oration. Like Cynthia Paterson he’d been around too long to be influenced by them anyway. Unlike Cynthia Paterson he always remembered that bit about a man not being on oath when he rendered them. And clergymen were only men. That was something else you found out after a year or so in the wide world too.

  Sloan didn’t know what effect the rector’s well-chosen words had had nearer the front. They had certainly made at least one back-bencher restive: the one standing next to him. It was just as well that the two policemen were right at the back of the church because Constable Crosby’s hoarse whisper wasn’t anything like quiet enough.

  “We’re like a couple of mosquitoes in a nudist colony, aren’t we, sir?” he hissed cheerfully. “Our trou
ble is that we don’t know where to begin.”

  FIVE

  “That’s where you’re wrong, my lad,” said Sloan, but he did not say it aloud.

  As far as Sloan was concerned the case had already begun. It had started for him in Dr. Dabbe’s Pathology Laboratory on Wednesday afternoon, the day that Dr. Writtle had been there and Crosby had turned queer. No wonder that the constable chose to forget it.

  “The dead of night,” the pathologist had said. “What more did you want, Sloan?”

  In the event Detective Inspector Sloan had wanted more—much more—from Fair Science than just the postulated time of William Fent’s death without the intervention of the motor car.

  “I need to know exactly what Fent took for a start,” he had replied, “and in what form.” By then he was glad to see that Crosby was beginning to sit up and take notice again.

  “Here we are, Inspector.” Writtle, the Home Office analyst, tapped two smaller bottles and sent them scurrying down the laboratory bench to join the stomach and the liver which had so upset Constable Crosby. “These should tell us what could have done the damage.”

  Both bottles were of dark-coloured glass. Sloan was relieved to see that they appeared to contain only some sort of powder. Even Crosby should be able to regard them with equanimity.

  Dr. Dabbe grinned. “Whatever you like. Gog and Magog?” he suggested. “Or William-and-Mary—no, not William-and-Mary”—he peered round the shelves of specimens—“I’ve got a hermaphrodite worm here somewhere called that.”

  “Mutt and Jeff,” croaked Crosby.

  “He’s feeling better,” said the pathologist kindly. “What about Tweedledum and Tweedledee?”

  “Antimony and Cleopatra?” contributed Dr. Writtle with a sly smile.

  “It wasn’t, was it?” said Sloan. “Not antimony, I mean?”

  “’Fraid not, Inspector,” said the analyst regretfully. “Nice pun if it had been, though. No, what we found was a barbiturate of a sort …”

  “Ferdinand and Isabella,” interrupted Dabbe irrepressibly. “I’m sure they looked alike, too.”