Last Respects iscm-10 Read online

  “No,” said Sloan truthfully.

  “An ingot, then.”

  “Ah.”

  “It was the way they used to transport copper in the old days.”

  “I see.”

  Mr. Jensen pointed to the copper object. “You’d get tons and tons of it like this. A man could move it with a shovel, you see. Easier than shifting great lumps that needed two men to lift them.”

  “What sort of old days?” asked Sloan cautiously.

  “Let’s not beat about the bush,” said Mr. Jensen.

  Sloan was all in favour of that.

  “Mid-eighteenth century,” said the museum curator impressively.

  “Make a note of that, Crosby,” said Sloan.

  “Mid-eighteenth century,” repeated Mr. Jensen.

  “That would be about 1750, wouldn’t it, sir?” said Sloan. “Give or take a year or two.”

  “Or five,” said Mr. Jensen obscurely. He tapped the barbary head. “And at a guess…”

  “Yes?”

  “This has been in the water since then.” He thrust his chin forward. “If you don’t believe me, Inspector, take it to Greenwich. They’ll know there.” He suddenly looked immensely cunning. “There’s something else they’ll be able to tell you, too.”

  “What’s that, sir?”

  “Whether it’s been in salt water or fresh all these years.”

  Sloan said, “I think I may know the answer to that, sir.”

  The museum curator nodded and pointed to the piece of copper. “And I think, Inspector, that I know the answer to this.”

  “You do, sir?”

  “Someone’s found The Clarembald.” He spoke almost conversationally now. “She was an East Indiaman, you know…”

  Across the years Sloan caught the sudden whiff of blackboard chalk at the back of his nostrils and he was once again in the classroom of a long-ago schoolmaster. The man—a rather precise, dry man—had been trying to convey to a class of boys that strange admixture of trade, empire-building and corruption that had made the East India Company what it was. He’d been a “chalk and talk” schoolmaster but one rainy afternoon he’d made John Company and the investigation of Robert Clive and the impeachment of Warren Hastings all come alive to his class.

  “Someone’s found her,” said Jensen.

  They’d been all ears, those boys, especially when the teacher had come to that macabre incident in British history that everybody knows. It was strange, thought Sloan, that out of a crowded historical past “when all else be forgot” everyone always remembered the Black Hole of Calcutta.

  “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 them,” 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 daresay 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 daresay the East India Office will have something about it too.” 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 underwater,” 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 realise 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 archeology. Do you realise that everything that comes out of an underwater find should be kept underwater?”

  “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 unlicenced 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 Boiler 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 baulking 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 t
he 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. Cray 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 the 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. Cordon 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 upon 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 River 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 onto 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 paved road but what was time to her now?

  She slipped out of the little kissing gate that led from the churchyard onto 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 they put brush to canvas? Perhaps it was Millais? Not Baron 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 in 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 H
ouse came into view.

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

  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, there 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 post-mortem room. “I called him Charley because he travelled,” said the pathologist obscurely.