Amendment of Life Read online

  ‘No, Doctor.’ Category jokes were now out at the police station.

  ‘Well, they were all out duck-shooting together and when one flew over, the physician spent so much time debating what tests he should do to make sure that it was a duck that he lost it … Spencer-Wells, please, Burns … thank you. When the next duck came over the psychiatrist wasn’t sure that it was a duck and not repressed anxiety over whether his mother had loved him enough…’ He stopped and peered down intently at something in the cadaver that had caught his eye. ‘Retractor, please, Burns, while I take a look at the liver.’

  ‘Out for a duck,’ said Crosby.

  ‘What’s that, Constable?’ said the doctor. ‘Where was I?’

  ‘Shooting ducks,’ said Crosby.

  ‘Oh, yes. Then another duck appeared. The surgeon shot it and turned to the pathologist and asked what it was.’

  ‘I don’t see…’, began Crosby.

  But the whole atmosphere in the mortuary changed suddenly as Dr Dabbe stooped further over. ‘I think we may have found the cause of death, Sloan – can’t be sure, of course, until we’ve done some more tests – but I should say that some noxious substance had been ingested.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Detective Inspector Sloan, glad he’d instituted a search of the maze for a drinking vessel of any sort at all.

  ‘Can’t tell you what it was yet, Sloan, but the good news from our point of view is that there’s some of it left in the stomach contents.’

  ‘Which should help,’ said Detective Constable Crosby, getting ready to go.

  The pathologist shrugged. ‘Not all that much, I’m afraid. The noxious substance – if that’s what it was – may have killed her, but I reckon someone moved her after she’d had it.’ His tone hardened. ‘And they either banged her face on the stone as they arranged her there or her head fell forwards accidentally.’ He straightened up. ‘If that’s what happened then you could be dealing with murder dressed up as suicide…’ He grinned. ‘Nearly as unattractive as mutton dressed as lamb, eh, gentlemen?’

  Chapter Eleven

  It was difficult to know who was the more upset in the Close at Calleford, the Bishop or his wife.

  ‘You did what?’ exploded Bertram Wallingford on a rising note, his much advertised commitment to non-aggressive behaviour seriously at risk.

  ‘Oh, Bertie, that poor man,’ said Mary, a wife as skilled in deploying diversionary tactics as any other woman. ‘I know that that young Constable couldn’t tell us anything when he came for David Collins, but we all know what being asked to identify a body means, don’t we?’

  ‘You gave my favourite dressing gown to the goat?’ thundered the Bishop, a man renowned on his diocesan committees for sticking to the matter in hand.

  ‘Your only dressing gown,’ pointed out his wife unapologetically. ‘The police must have been fairly sure it was Margaret Collins, mustn’t they, to have come here for her husband like that?’

  ‘Has the goat eaten it all?’ he asked, still undeflected.

  ‘It was very hungry,’ said Mary Wallingford. She reverted to David Collins. ‘As if having his son so ill wasn’t enough…’

  ‘Pelion upon Ossa,’ agreed the Bishop, finding as he often did that the Greeks had a better phrase than he could conjure up. He sought for an equally suitable quotation from the Book of Job, but soon gave up. He found, as usual, even to think about Job depressing beyond measure and immediately turned back to his own troubles. ‘I was very fond of that dressing gown, Mary…’

  She sighed. ‘That poor little family. I sometimes wonder, Bertie, if the good Lord knows what he’s about.’

  Bertram Wallingford took a deep breath and was about to launch into a carefully prepared piece, often delivered from his pulpit, about the ways of the Lord being truly mysterious as well as being hidden from the sight of mere mortals, but thought better of it and closed his mouth without saying anything.

  ‘Apparently David thought his wife was staying at the hospital with little James, which was why he came over here and carried on working yesterday evening,’ said Mary.

  ‘I know Double Felix have got as much work as they can handle,’ said the Bishop, momentarily diverted from his grievance. ‘They’re a clever pair. They say there’s no one to touch them in Calleshire in their own speciality. Did you know that they can conjure up an image just from light?’

  Mary Wallingford was not and never had been interested in the sciences. ‘I wish now I’d spent more time with Margaret when I went into the nursery, but we all knew how worried she was and you can’t just go on about an illness, can you?’

  ‘No,’ said the Bishop firmly. ‘That only makes it worse.’

  ‘I wonder what will happen to that poor little boy now? Margaret Collins has a mother somewhere, I know.’

  ‘Then she’ll cope,’ said her husband confidently. ‘In my experience grandmothers always do.’

  She gave a little laugh. ‘It’s funny how a big trouble soon drives out a little one, isn’t it? I’d almost forgotten about that dead rabbit and the pentagram.’

  ‘I hadn’t,’ said the Bishop seriously. ‘Whichever way you look at it, Mary, it means trouble.’

  * * *

  ‘Aye, Inspector,’ agreed Dr Angus Browne without hesitation, ‘I gave Margaret Collins a prescription for some sleeping tablets called Crespusculan … let me see now … it must have been a month or more ago.’

  ‘If we could just have the date, please, doctor…’ said Sloan. In his experience, coroners liked firm figures of whatever nature.

  ‘It was the night before the infant’s first operation,’ said the general practitioner, handing over a scribbled note on which was spelled the name of the sedative. ‘I can tell you that.’

  ‘Understandable,’ said Sloan.

  The doctor peered at the two policemen over the top of his spectacles. ‘Mrs Collins would no’ be reassured that the operation itself presented no danger to her son James.’

  That was quite understandable in Sloan’s view if not that of the medical profession, but he did not say so.

  Dr Browne sighed. ‘Besides, both husband and wife had stopped sleeping since the child’s condition was diagnosed.’

  ‘I’m not surprised,’ said Crosby stoutly.

  ‘Mercifully, it’s a rare condition,’ said the doctor.

  ‘And the quantity of these tablets?’ asked Sloan. Someone would have to be detailed to search the Collinses’ house for any that might be left. Somehow he didn’t think there would be many.

  ‘Aye,’ said the doctor. ‘I take your point. He glanced down at his notes. ‘Enough, I suppose, to do her a serious injury if she took the lot. I didn’t think that likely, of course.’

  ‘Why not?’ asked Crosby.

  The general practitioner turned to him. ‘When a child is ill, Constable, motherhood usually triumphs over a depression, however deep.’

  Detective Inspector Sloan nodded his agreement. ‘Especially when their infant’s at real risk, which seems to have been the case here.’

  ‘Mind you, gentlemen, the child’s illness was no’ the only thing the parents had to worry about.’

  Detective Inspector Sloan’s head came up in a purely police reflex. ‘No?’

  ‘There was the question of the risk of further children suffering from the same condition. Not high, but sufficiently quantifiable – in statistical terms, that is – for David and Margaret Collins to have taken some action that might or might not have been strictly indicated to be on the safe side.’

  What came into Sloan’s mind while the doctor was going through these circumlocutions about sterilization was a mock sword slipping in a mock fight on stage in a school play. One of the combatants had gasped, ‘Alas, I am unmanned,’ and the whole class had fallen about in unseemly laughter.

  ‘Done, was he?’ asked Detective Constable Crosby informally.

  ‘Quite so,’ said Dr Browne. ‘Coming back to the point, I can tell you that, as a rule, it isn’t th
e needed who take overdoses. In my experience it’s those who fear themselves to be unwanted who tend to make away with themselves.’

  Detective Inspector Sloan waited until he was back in the police car before he extended that thought. ‘And it’s those who are unwanted who tend to be made away with, Crosby. Let’s go and see Milly Smithers next.’

  * * *

  ‘Sit yourselves down,’ said Milly Smithers comfortably. ‘Tea?’

  ‘Please,’ said Sloan, settling himself at the kitchen table of a cottage just outside the gardens of Aumerle Court. ‘Only a few questions, that’s if you’ve got a moment.’

  ‘No hurry on my account,’ said Milly Smithers, turning to the sideboard. ‘I’m home for the afternoon. I give Miss Daphne her lunch early in the summer. Then she can have a little nap before the visitors come in, while I come home and get on.’

  ‘I gather she likes to keep her eye on them,’ said Sloan, grateful for the steaming mug of tea she had put in front of him. At this stage he didn’t know whether Miss Pedlinge qualified as a good witness of what went on in the maze or not. She just might have been someone who was thought to be a reliable witness but actually, like the child in Kipling’s poem, had been well advised to ‘Watch the wall, my darling, while the gentlemen go by’. Given sufficient motive, she would have been good at that, he thought.

  ‘Gives her something to do, poor dear,’ said Milly, sawing away at a large loaf. ‘She gets a bit bored, sitting there all day in that wheelchair.’

  ‘I don’t wonder,’ said Crosby, who was still young enough to think stillness synonymous with death.

  Milly Smithers plonked a plate of ham on the table, pushed an opened packet of butter alongside it, and followed it with a breadboard on which stood a pile of roughly sliced bread. She invited the two policemen to help themselves. ‘I go back in later to give her some supper and put her to bed. We have a coffee together and bit of a chat, then I tuck her up for the night and come home.’

  ‘Last night no different?’ asked Sloan, while Crosby eyed the ham.

  ‘Same as usual,’ said Milly. ‘I left at about half-nine…’

  ‘And locked up?’

  ‘Like always,’ she said without hesitation. ‘I’ve got the key to the back gate. Saves me walking all the way round, for one thing. And I’m first back at the Court in the mornings, anyway, for all that Captain Prosser thinks he works the hardest.’

  ‘You don’t say?’ murmured Sloan disingenuously.

  She sniffed. ‘You can’t say that being in the Army doesn’t do something for you because you’ve only got to remember that Miss Daphne was in it, too. But it doesn’t seem to have taught him a lot.’

  ‘Captain Prosser must have a key, too, surely?’ said Sloan.

  ‘I couldn’t say, I’m sure,’ said Milly Smithers. ‘He doesn’t communicate much.’

  ‘And Mr Bevis?’ Sloan introduced the name as he reached for a slice of bread, properly described as cut like a doorstep. ‘Has he got a key?’

  ‘I ’spect so,’ said Milly. ‘He only comes Sundays these days…’

  ‘These days?’

  ‘He used to bring his wife and children over at weekends, but they don’t come any more.’

  ‘Fallen out with Miss Daphne?’

  ‘Fallen out with each other,’ said the carer. ‘That’s what’s worrying Miss Daphne.’

  ‘Oh, dear,’ said Sloan in as neutral a tone as he could muster.

  ‘You may say, “Oh, dear,” like that,’ responded Millie Smithers strenuously, ‘but it’s important where somewhere like the Court is concerned. A big divorce settlement could upset Miss Daphne’s plans.’

  ‘I see.’ He thought he could, too. ‘And it’s on the cards, is it?’

  Milly sniffed. ‘Seems that his wife thinks that some woman who’s no better than she ought to be has been throwing herself at Mr Bevis—’

  ‘And Mrs Pedlinge doesn’t like it?’

  ‘Well, would you?’ asked the woman forthrightly. ‘Mind you, he’s a good-looking man, I will say that for him. Very. And charming with it. Always was since he was a boy, but he’s got a wife and children to think of now—’

  ‘And great expectations,’ said Sloan, policeman first, last, and all the time.

  ‘It’s not his expectations that would be the problem,’ Milly Smithers came back smartly. ‘It would be his wife’s.’

  ‘How come?’ asked Crosby, his mouth full.

  ‘In the event of a divorce…’

  ‘I see,’ said Detective Inspector Sloan, doing a rapid mental review of who was known to have been at Aumerle Court the day before with something on their mind. The field seemed to be widening.

  ‘Could upset the applecart, that, couldn’t it?’ observed Detective Constable Crosby, turning to Milly. ‘Would you happen to have any mustard handy?’

  ‘So he should be being careful with Miss Daphne as well,’ said Milly, ‘instead of going ahead with this sound and light performance that he’s written and he wants to put on and she doesn’t.’ Milly Smithers grimaced as she put the mustard jar on the table. ‘Fancies himself as a bit of a playwright does our Mr Bevis, and the Captain’s no better. The pair of them are in it together, no matter what Miss Daphne says.’

  ‘She doesn’t think they are?’ said Sloan, thinking quickly. An unholy alliance between the heir and the agent could lead anywhere. Anywhere at all. And cover anything up, too.

  ‘He’s a dark horse is the Captain,’ said Milly obliquely. ‘And Miss Daphne forgets that Mr Bevis wanted him to have the job pretty badly. Spoke up for him in a big way when he got the shove from the Ornums, Mr Bevis did, I heard.’

  ‘He did, did he?’ Sloan made another mental note and included in it the fact that Milly Smithers seemed to hear most things. Someone would have to check out exactly why Captain Prosser had lost his job.

  ‘Mr Bevis and the Captain are neighbours over at Nether Hoystings,’ said Milly. ‘I expect that’s why.’

  ‘This sound and light play…’

  ‘The Captain thinks something like that’ll boost visitor numbers, but does he say so to Miss Daphne?’

  ‘No?’ said Sloan, watching Crosby pile ham on to bread and butter as if famine loomed.

  ‘No, he doesn’t. It’s all “Yes, Miss Pedlinge” and “No, Miss Pedlinge”,’ she said. ‘Not that it washes with her. She may be old but she’s not silly yet.’

  ‘Perhaps he’s just diplomatic,’ said Sloan.

  ‘Deceitful,’ countered Milly. ‘But, take it from me, all the Captain thinks about is visitor numbers and leaning on the staff.’ She turned to Crosby. ‘I gotta nice jar of pickle, young man, if you fancy that. Made it myself.’

  ‘It’s very good ham,’ the Constable said appreciatively.

  ‘I cook it myself,’ she said, pleased. ‘I take a bit in for Miss Daphne’s supper from time to time. She likes it, too.’

  But the ready provision to members of the constabulary of home-cooked ham and pickle and lashings of tea did not automatically eliminate witnesses from police enquiries: especially when those witnesses held keys to gates and were spear-carriers for other important witnesses. Detective Inspector Sloan reminded himself to make this quite clear to Detective Constable Crosby on their way back to the police station at Berebury.

  And that the fact that Bevis Pedlinge clearly came of a good family had no bearing on the matter either.

  Cain had belonged to a good family, too.

  Chapter Twelve

  ‘We wanted to interview Captain Prosser as well, sir,’ explained Detective Inspector Sloan to Superintendent Leeyes back at the police station, ‘but we were told he had gone over to Calleford to talk to his solicitor.’

  Leeyes brightened immediately. ‘That’s a hopeful sign, Sloan. Innocent men don’t need solicitors to advise them to keep their mouths shut.’

  This was not everybody’s view, but all Sloan said was that they were also waiting to talk to Mr Bevis Pedlinge and would do so as soon
as his train from London arrived at Calleford station. ‘He, David Collins and Captain Prosser, sir, were all in the maze yesterday afternoon.’

  ‘And is it to be a case of “Eenie, meanie, miney, mo”?’ enquired the Superintendent acidly, ‘or have you got a favourite in the murder stakes – if it is murder?’

  ‘Not yet, sir,’ said Sloan, manfully refraining from making a retort based roughly on the principle of it being at this stage more of a case of ‘you pays your money and takes your choice’. He hastened on. ‘I have had a message from the SOCO stating that a polystyrene cup has been found stuffed in the yew hedge not far from the deceased.’ He had given full marks to the scene of crime officer for spotting it so quickly, keeping to himself the unworthy thought that she might have been meant to do just that by the person who had placed it so that it would be found – but not too easily.

  ‘Ah…’

  ‘It’s gone over to forensic to see what can be made of the dregs.’

  ‘Not drained to the last drop, then, Sloan, eh?’ He grimaced. ‘My middle name isn’t Patsy, you know.’

  ‘No, sir – I mean, yes, sir.’ There was no denying that, despite all his idiosyncrasies, Superintendent Leeyes still had an eye for essentials. ‘It had been placed in the hedge the right way up.’

  ‘Someone trying to make fools of us, do you think?’ He scowled.

  ‘Could be,’ admitted Sloan. He didn’t know yet, but he would find out. In due course. He didn’t like the idea of being anyone’s patsy any more than did the Superintendent.

  ‘Can’t be having that,’ said the Superintendent combatively.

  ‘Forensic are doing an analysis of the liquid left in the cup for us as a matter of priority, sir. Then it can be compared with the stomach contents and the sedative prescribed by the deceased’s doctor.’

  ‘Any of that left at the bedside by any remote chance or am I being cynical?’

  ‘Not even a bottle, sir.’

  David Collins had willingly acceded to a police request to go round his house. He had left them to it, sitting in the kitchen by himself, his head sunk in his hands, while Sloan and Crosby had examined the Collinses’ matrimonial bedroom.