Last Respects Read online

  ‘We knew it would happen one day,’ said the Museum Curator. ‘In fact,’ he admitted, ‘we’d heard a rumour. Nothing you could put your finger on, you know …’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘And people have been in making enquiries,’ said Jensen.

  Sloan leaned forward. ‘You wouldn’t happen to know which people, sir, would you?’

  ‘They don’t leave their names,’ said Jensen drily. ‘And we get a lot of casual enquirers, you know.’

  ‘Short, dark, and young?’ said Sloan.

  Jensen shook his head. ‘Tallish, brown hair and not as young as all that.’

  ‘This ship,’ said Sloan. ‘You know all about it, then?’

  ‘Bless you, Inspector, yes.’ Jensen started to pace up and down. ‘It’s perfectly well documented. And it’s all here in the Museum for anyone to look up. She was lured to her doom by wreckers in the winter of 1755 …’

  ‘The evil that men do lives after then,’ murmured Sloan profoundly.

  Jensen’s response was immediate. ‘Yes, indeed, Inspector. We see a lot of that in the Museum world.’

  Sloan hadn’t thought of that.

  Jensen waved a hand. ‘I dare say that I can tell you what the Clarembald was carrying too.’

  Quinquireme of Nineveh from distant Ophir …

  ‘We have a copy of the ship’s manifest here,’ said Jensen, jerking to a standstill. ‘I dare say the East India Office will also have something about it.’ He pointed to the barbary head and went on enthusiastically, ‘And if she wasn’t carrying a load of copper ingots I’ll eat my hat. Mind you, Inspector, that won’t have been all her cargo by a long chalk. She’ll have had a great many other good things on board.’

  Sloan motioned to Crosby to take a note.

  ‘A great many other things,’ said the Museum Curator, ‘that certain people would like to have today.’

  ‘Gold?’ suggested Sloan simply.

  Topazes and cinnamon, and gold moidores, it had been in the poem.

  Mr Jensen gave a quick frown. ‘Gold, certainly. Don’t forget it was used as currency then. But it won’t be so much the gold as the guns that they’ll be going for today.’

  ‘Guns?’ said Sloan. ‘Guns before gold?’ He was faintly disappointed. Pieces of eight had a swashbuckling ring to them.

  ‘They’re easier to find under water,’ said Jensen. ‘And if I remember rightly she had a pair of demi-culverin on board and some twelve-pounders.’

  Sloan was struck by a different thought. ‘Armed merchantmen were nothing new, then?’

  ‘If you worked in a Museum, Inspector, you’d realize that there is nothing new under the sun.’

  ‘Quite so,’ said Sloan.

  Mr Jensen came back very quickly to the matter in hand. ‘There are treasure-seekers, Inspector, who would blow her out of the water for her guns and not care that they were destroying priceless marine archaeology. Do you realize that everything that comes out of an underwater find should be kept under water?’

  ‘She doesn’t,’ observed Sloan moderately, ‘appear to have been blown out of the water yet.’

  ‘Matter of time,’ said Jensen, resuming his restless pacing. ‘Only a matter of time. Depends entirely on who knows she’s been found and how quickly they act.’

  ‘I can see that, sir.’ There were villains everywhere. You learned that early in the police force. ‘There must be something that can be done about stopping her being damaged.’

  ‘Done? Oh yes,’ said Jensen. ‘For those in peril in the sea, Inspector, we can get a Department of Trade protection order making it an offence to interfere with the wreck or carry out unlicensed diving or salvage.’ He turned on his heel suddenly and faced Sloan. ‘But we’d need to know where she was. How did you say you’d come by this barbary head?’

  ‘I didn’t,’ said Sloan quietly, ‘and I’m not going to.’

  Elizabeth Busby felt strangely relaxed and comforted after her cry at the graveside. She was sure that her aunt would have understood her need to leave the house and seek out a quiet spot in the out of doors. Celia Mundill would have understood the tears too—there was a marvellous release to be had in tears. And Collerton graveyard was certainly quiet enough—it was a fine and private place for tears, in fact.

  True, Horace Boller from Edsway had rowed past on his way upstream but he hadn’t disturbed her thoughts at all. Perhaps this was because those thoughts were still too inchoate and unformed to admit intrusion from an outside source. Perhaps it was only because—more mundanely—she hadn’t liked to lift a tear-stained face for it to be seen by the man who had been going by.

  She felt much better in the open air: she was sure about that. Collerton House had begun to oppress her since Celia Mundill had died—it wasn’t the same without her warm presence, ill as she had been. It wasn’t the same either—subconsciously she stiffened her shoulders—since Peter Hinton had so precipitately taken his departure. There was no use balking at the fact—no matter how hard she tried to think of other things in the end her thoughts always came back to Peter Hinton.

  She had felt at the time and she still felt now that a note left on the table in the hall was no way for a real man to break with his affianced. If he had felt the way he said he did, then the very least he could have done was to have told her so—face to face. A note left behind on the hall table beside the signet ring she had given him was the coward’s way.

  For the thousandth time she took the folded paper which Peter Hinton had written out of her pocket and—for the thousandth time—considered it. Its message was loud and clear. It could scarcely have been shorter or balder either.

  ‘It’s no go. Forgive me. P.’

  There was not a word of explanation as to why a man who had quite unequivocally declared that he wanted to marry her should suddenly leave a note like that. Time and time again she had turned it over to see if there had been more—anything—written on the back but there wasn’t.

  There still wasn’t.

  She had resolved not to keep on and on reading the note—and forgotten how many times she had made the resolution. She’d broken it every day. She didn’t know why she needed to look at it anyway. It wasn’t as if she didn’t know what it said. Sadly she folded it up again and put it away.

  She sat back on her heels then, more at peace with herself than she’d been all day. There was something very peaceful about the churchyard—you could begin to see what it was about a churchyard that had moved Thomas Gray to write his elegy and why her aunt hadn’t wanted to be cremated. There was something very soothing, too, about the sound of the water lapping away at the edge of the churchyard grass. Gray hadn’t had that at—where was it? Stoke Poges.

  Elizabeth reached over and picked out the flowers that she had brought with her on her last visit. They were fading now. That gave her something to do with her hands and that was soothing too. As she carefully started to arrange the roses in a vase she began to understand why it was that her aunt’s husband had been so insistent about his wife’s grave being within the sound of the water.

  ‘She’d spent all her life by the river,’ he’d said, immediately selecting the plot that was closest to the river’s edge.

  The sexton had murmured something about flooding.

  ‘But she loved the sound of the river,’ Frank Mundill had insisted.

  The sexton had hitched his shoulder. ‘You won’t like it in winter, Mr Mundill.’

  Architects spend at least half their working lives persuading recalcitrant builders to do what architect and client want and Frank Mundill had had to prove his skill in this field in the five minutes that followed.

  ‘It couldn’t be too near the river for her,’ he had said.

  ‘The first time the Calle comes up,’ sniffed the sexton obstinately, ‘you’ll be on to me. You see.’

  ‘I won’t,’ undertook Frank Mundill.

  ‘And there won’t be anything I can do then,’ said the man, as if he hadn’t spoken. />
  ‘I shan’t want you to do anything.’

  ‘It’ll be too late then,’ said the man obdurately. ‘Mark my words.’

  ‘My wife was born over there, remember.’ Frank Mundill had waved a hand in the direction of Collerton House. He introduced a firmer tone into his voice. ‘She loved this river.’

  His gesture had reminded Elizabeth Busby of something and she had taken herself off at that point to have a look at her grandparents’ grave. That was over by the church—not far from the west door. And next to it was the polished marble monument to her great-grandparents. Gordon Camming—he who had invented the Camming valve—had made it clear that he intended to found a dynasty too. He’d bought half a dozen plots around his own tomb: the sexton hadn’t hesitated to remind Frank Mundill of this.

  The word ‘dynasty’ had started up another unhappy train of thought in her mind at the time not unconnected with Peter Hinton and she had drifted back to the river’s edge where the exchange between Frank Mundill and the sexton was drawing to a close. By the time she had reached the two men the site of the plot for the grave of her aunt had been agreed and the sexton, if still not happy about it, at least mollified.

  ‘She’ll be content here,’ she heard Celia Mundill’s widower insisting as she drew closer.

  Elizabeth hoped then and hoped now as she tended the flowers on the grave that this was true. It was still summertime, of course, and flooding was a long way from her mind as she took away the last of the dead flowers from her previous visit. She sat back on her heels while she carefully picked out the best rose for the centre position. Her aunt had known she would never see this year’s Fantin-Latour roses on the bush—she’d told Elizabeth so in spite of all Dr Tebot had said—but there was no reason, she told herself fiercely, why she shouldn’t have them on her grave.

  As she placed each succeeding stem of the double blush-pink clusters of flowers in the grave’s special frost-proof vase she began to see why it was that this particular rose had been such a favourite—and not only of Celia Mundill but of Henri Fantin-Latour and the old Dutch flower-painters—of real artists, in fact.

  Involuntarily her lips tightened into a smile.

  There was a family joke about the word ‘artist’. Grandfather Camming had called himself an artist and filled canvas upon canvas to prove it. The family had tacitly agreed therefore that he must be known as an artist. Other artists—those who did improve as time went by, those whose pictures were fought over by art galleries—even those whose paintings were bought with an eye to the future—deserved to be distinguished from Richard Camming and his amateur efforts. They had been known—in the family and out of earshot of Richard Camming—as real artists.

  Poor Grandfather! she thought. Time and money weren’t what made a painter. Nor, she added fairly in her mind, was application. Grandfather Camming had certainly applied himself. She gave a little, silent giggle to herself. Richard Camming had cheerfully applied paint to every canvas in sight.

  As Elizabeth placed the roses in the vase she was conscious of how the lively shell-pink of the centre of the flower made a fine splash of colour against the newly-turned earth. She would have liked to have had that bare earth covered in stone or even grass but the sexton said it had to stay the way it was until it had settled. Frank Mundill didn’t seem worried about the bare earth either. When she had mentioned it to him later he had said he was still thinking about the right monumental design and so she had left the subject well alone.

  She sat back on her heels for a moment to consider her handiwork in flower arrangement. She hoped it wouldn’t flood in this corner of the churchyard but you never could tell with the Calle. The river seemed to have a will of its own. Way, way inland—above Calleford, and almost as far inland as the town of Luston—it was a docile stream, little more than a rivulet, in fact. By the time it got to Calleford itself it was bigger, of course, but it was tamed there by city streets and bridges, to say nothing of the odd sluice gate.

  Once west of the county town, though, and out on to the flat land in the middle of the county—those very same low-lying fields in which Grandfather Camming had painted during his Constable period—the River Calle broadened and steadily grew into a force of water to be reckoned with. The bends in its course through Collerton towards Edsway and the sea it seemed to regard as a challenge to its strength. In spring and autumn, that is.

  Her flowers arranged and her tears dried and forgotten for the time being, Elizabeth Busby rose to her feet and dusted off her knees. She decided that she would walk back to the house along the river bank. It was a slightly longer way back to Collerton House than by the metalled road but what was time to her now?

  She slipped out of the little kissing gate that led from the churchyard on to the river walk, feeling rather as if she had stepped out of a William Morris painting—or was it another of the Pre-Raphaelites who had been so fond of having girls stationed prettily beside a river as he put brush to canvas? Perhaps it was Millais? Not Lord Leighton, surely? She always felt a little self-conscious when she was walking along the river bank with a wooden gardening trug over one arm. At least she didn’t have a Victorian parasol on the other.

  It was while she was walking back along the path on the river bank and rounding the bend that matched the curve of the river that the boathouse at the bottom of the garden of Collerton House came into view.

  Someone, she noticed in a detached way, had left the door of the boathouse open.

  CHAPTER 9

  See my courage is out.

  Detective-Inspector Sloan and Detective-Constable Crosby made their way back to the pathologist’s mortuary. They found the pathologist in his secretary’s room talking to a squarish woman with shaggy eyebrows and cropped hair. Rita, the pathologist’s secretary, was there too. She was a slim girl whose eyebrows showed every sign of having had a lot of loving care and attention lavished upon them. Dr Dabbe introduced the older woman to the policemen as Miss Hilda Collins.

  ‘We’ve met before,’ she announced, acknowledging them with a quick jerk of her head.

  Sloan bowed slightly.

  ‘I never forget a face,’ declared Miss Collins.

  ‘It’s a gift,’ said Sloan: and he meant it. For his part Sloan remembered her too. Miss Collins was the Biology Mistress at the Berebury High School for Girls. ‘I wish we had more policemen who didn’t forget faces,’ he said—and he meant that too. What with Identikits, memory banks and computer-assisted this and that, the man on the beat didn’t really have to remember any more what villains looked like. It was a pity.

  At the other side of the room Constable Crosby was exhibiting every sign of trying to commit Rita’s face to memory. Sloan averted his eyes.

  ‘Miss Collins,’ said the pathologist easily, ‘is an expert.’

  ‘I see.’ Sloan remained cautious. If his years in the Force had taught him anything it was that experts were a breed on their own. Put them in the witness-box and you never knew what they were going to say next. They could make or mar a case, too. Irretrievably. There was only one thing worse than one expert and that was two. Then they usually differed. ‘May I ask on what?’ he said politely.

  ‘Good question,’ said Dr Dabbe. ‘I must say I’d rather like to know myself. It’s in the lab … this way.’ He led them through from his secretary’s room into the small laboratory that Sloan knew existed alongside the postmortem room. ‘I called him Charley because he travelled,’ said the pathologist obscurely.

  ‘With the body, I think you said,’ murmured Miss Collins gruffly.

  ‘It was my man Burns who said that,’ said Dr Dabbe. ‘He found it wriggling inside the man’s shirt. That was still very wet.’

  ‘He found what—’ began Sloan peremptorily: and then stopped.

  The pathologist was pointing to a wide-necked retort that was almost full of water. Swimming happily about in it was a small creature. ‘Burns said they call it a “screw” in Scotland,’ he said.

  As i
f to prove the point the creature wriggled suddenly sideways. It was a dull greenish-yellow colour and quite small.

  ‘It’s still alive,’ said Detective-Constable Crosby unnecessarily.

  ‘That proves something,’ said Miss Collins immediately. ‘What’s it in?’

  ‘Aqua distillata,’ said the pathologist who belonged to the old school which felt that the Latin language and the profession of medicine should always go together.

  Sloan made a mental note that sturdily included the words ‘distilled water’. Latin used where English would do always made him think of Merlin and spells.

  Miss Collins advanced on the specimen in the glass. ‘It’s one of the crustacea,’ she said.

  ‘That’s what I thought,’ said Dr Dabbe.

  ‘Amphipod, of course,’ announced Miss Collins. ‘The order is known as “Sandhoppers” although few live in the sand and even fewer still hop.’

  There were inconsistencies in law, too. Sloan had stopped worrying about them now but when he had been a younger man they’d sometimes come between him and a good night’s sleep.

  ‘You’ll find it demonstrates negative heliotropism very nicely,’ Miss Collins said.

  If she had been speaking in a foreign tongue Detective-Inspector Sloan would have been allowed to bring in an interpreter at public expense. And so far as Sloan was concerned she might as well have been.

  The pathologist must have understood her, though, because he pushed the jar half into and half out of the rays of sunlight falling on the laboratory bench. Whatever it was in the water—fish or insect—jerked quickly away from the part of the jar and scuttled off into such dimmer light as it could find.

  ‘We do that with the third form,’ said Miss Collins in a kindly way, ‘to teach them phototropism.’

  Dr Dabbe was unabashed while Miss Collins bent down for an even closer look. ‘The family Gammeridae,’ she pronounced.

  Detective-Constable Crosby abandoned any attempt to record this. He too bent down and looked at the creature. ‘Doesn’t it look big through the glass?’ he said.