Last Respects

School was over for the day but the head teacher was still there. “Have you got any boys called Terry?”

“The trouble,” said Miss Blandford, “is that we’ve got more than one.”

“Tell me,” invited Ridgefbrd, undaunted.

She opened the school register. “There’s Terry Waters…”

“And what sort of a lad is Terry Waters?”

“Choirboy type,” she said succinctly.

Ridgeford frowned.

“The ‘butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth’ sort of boy,” amplified the teacher.

Ridgeford’s frown cleared.

She waved a hand. “If you know what I mean?”

Ridgeford knew what she meant. The manner of boy to whom benches of magistrates in juvenile courts—who should know better—almost automatically gave the benefit of the doubt…

“You probably passed him on your way here,” said Miss Blandford. “He only lives down the road.”

Ridgeford shook his head. “Not Terry Waters then.”

He wasn’t expecting Terry or his friend to be Edsway boys. Mrs. Boiler would have recognised Edsway boys when they had brought the ship’s bell into her shop. Children from all the other villages roundabout, though, came into Edsway school every day by bus. “What about the others?” he asked.

“There’s Terry Wilkins.”

Ridgeford got out his notebook. “Where does he hail from?”

“Collerton.” She hesitated. “He’s not a bad boy but easily led.”

Ridgeford knew that sort. A boy who wouldn’t take to crime unless the opportunity presented itself. There was a whole school of academic thought that saw crime as opportunity. Remove the opportunity, they said, and you removed the crime. If that didn’t work you removed the criminal and called it preventive detention.

Miss Blandford said, “With Terry Wilkins it would depend on the temptation.”

Constable Ridgeford nodded sagely. Who said Adam and Eve was nonsense? Temptation had had to begin somewhere. It didn’t matter that it had only been an apple to begin with. It was the principle of the thing. “Go on,” he said.

“There’s Terry Goddard.” The head teacher’s face became as near to benign-looking as Ridgeford had seen it. “He’s a worker.”

“Ah.”

“Not clever, mind you, but a worker.”

Everyone liked a worker. Being a worker evidently exonerated Terry Goddard in Miss Blandford’s eyes from any activity the police were likely to be mixed up in. Perhaps being a worker meant you weren’t idle and that removed you a stage farther from temptation. Ridgeford tried to think of some industrious criminals.

Henri Landru must have been quite busy.

In the nature of things eleven murders took time.

Dr. Marcel Petiot couldn’t have been much of a layabout either. He hadn’t kept a stroke record of the murders he had committed but the French police thought sixty-five—give or take a few.

“That the lot, miss?” he said aloud. “I’d been hoping for someone from Marby.”

“There’s Terry Dykes.” She looked Brian Ridgeford straight in the eye and said, “I don’t know what you want your Terry for, Constable, but I wouldn’t put anything past this one.”

Ridgeford put the name down in his notebook. There was no point in asking expert opinion if you didn’t take account of it. He took down a Marby address with a certain amount of satisfaction, then he asked Miss Blandford if Terry Dykes had got a sidekick.

“I beg your pardon, Constable?”

Ridgeford searched in his mind for the right expression. “A best friend, miss.” Bosom chum sounded distinctly old-fashioned but that was what he meant.

“Oh, yes.” Her brow cleared. “Melvin Bates.”

Ridgeford wrote that name down too.

“Melvin Bates hangs on Terry Dykes’s every word, so,” she gave a quick nod and said realistically, “I daresay that’s two of them up to no good.”

Police Constable Brian Ridgeford took his leave of the head teacher and applied himself to his bicycle and another journey to the fishing village beside the open sea. Judicious questioning of Marby natives led the policeman to the harbour. He’d find his quarry there for sure, he was told. They were always there, messing about in boats. Or just messing about. But as sure as eggs they’d be there.

So they were.

Two boys.

There had been something that Brian Ridgeford dimly remembered in his training that advised against the questioning of juveniles by a police officer in uniform. Because of the neighbours. Brian Ridgeford squared his shoulders. There weren’t any neighbours on the eastern arm of the harbour wall.

Just two boys.

They saw him coming and at the same time saw that there was no point in retreating. They stood their ground as he approached, one standing against a capstan and the other with one foot on a coil of rope.

“About that ship’s bell,” began Ridgeford generally.

“Wasn’t worth nothing,” said the boy by the capstan.

“The old woman said so,” chimed in the other.

“Load of old iron,” said the first boy, kicking the capstan with his foot.

“Waste of time going over there,” said his friend.

“She wouldn’t give us nothing for it,” said the boy who was kicking the capstan. “You ask her.”

“Where did you get it?” asked Ridgeford.

“Up on the Cat’s Back,” replied the first boy glibly. “Didn’t we, Mel?”

“Up on the Cat’s Back,” agreed Melvin. “Like Terry said.”

“Did you now?” said Ridgeford evenly. “Suppose you tell me exactly where.”

“By an old tree,” said Terry.

“Near the hut,” said Melvin at the same time.

“By an old tree near the hut,” said Terry promptly.

Constable Ridgeford decided that Terry Dykes already had the makings of a criminal mentality.

“I suppose,” said the policeman heavily, “that it fell off the back of a lorry up there.”

“No,” began Melvin, “it was in…”

“There’s only a footpath,” Terry Dykes cut in quickly.

Any resemblance to the tableau formed by the three of them to Sir John Millais’s famous painting “The Boyhood of Raleigh” was purely coincidental. True, there was more than one beached rowing boat on the shore in the background and there were certainly two boys and an adult in the composition but there any likeness ended. In Millais’s picture the two boys had been hanging, rapt, on the words of the ancient mariner as he pointed out to sea and described the wonders he had seen. In the present instance the tales were being told by the boys and Brian Ridgeford wasn’t pointing anywhere. He was, however, projecting extreme scepticism at what he heard.

“So it didn’t fall off the back of a lorry then,” he said.

“No,” said Terry Dykes defensively, “it didn’t.”

“Just lying there then, was it?”

“Yes… No… I don’t know.”

“You must know.”

Terry Dykes shut his lips together.

“Make up your mind, boy,” said Ridgeford not unkindly. “Was it or wasn’t it?”

“No,” said Terry sullenly, “it wasn’t just lying there.”

“Well, then, where was it?” demanded Ridgeford. When there was no reply from Dykes he suddenly swung round on Melvin Bates. “All right, you tell me.”

Melvin Bates started to stutter. “I… I… it was in…”

“Shut up,” said Dykes, unceremoniously cutting off his henchman.

“All right,” said Ridgeford flatly, “I’ve got the message. The bell was inside somewhere, wasn’t it?” He drew breath. “Now then, let me see if I can work out where. Over here in Marby?” They were known as “constraint questions”; those whose answers limited the area of doubt. The best-known constraint question was “Can you eat it?” Ridgeford allowed his voice to grow a harder note. “And you found it inside somewhere, didn’t you?”

It took him another ten minutes to find out exactly where.

Constable Ridgeford was not the only policeman whose immediate quarry lay in Marby. As soon as Sloan and Crosby left Collerton House they too made for the fishing village by the sea.

“We’ll pick up Ridgeford over there,” predicted Sloan, “and he can take us to have a look at this dinghy he’s reported.”

They’d left Basil Jensen still making his way upstream.

“To see if it’s Tugboat Annie,” completed Crosby, engaging gear.

“It would figure if it were.” He paused and then said quietly, “I think something else figures, too, Crosby.”

“Sir?”

“I think—only think, mind you—that we just may have an explanation for a body decomposed but not damaged.”

“Sir?”

“You think, too,” adjured Sloan. The road between Collerton and Marby was so rural that not even Crosby could speed on it. He could use his mind instead.

“The boathouse?” offered the detective constable uncertainly.

“The boathouse,” said Sloan with satisfaction. “It’s early days yet, Crosby, but I think that we shall find that our chap—whoever he is—was parked in the water in the boat-house after he was killed.”

“Why in the water, though, sir?”

“The answer to that,” said Sloan briskly, “is something called mephitis.”

“Sir?”

“Mephitis,” spelled out Sloan for him, “is the smell of the dead.”

Crosby assimilated this and then said, “So he was killed by a fall from a height first somewhere else…”

“Somewhere else,” agreed Sloan at once.

“But…”

“But left in the water afterwards, Crosby.”

“Why?”

Sloan waved a hand. “As I said before graves for murder victims don’t come easy.”

“Yes, sir,” Crosby nodded. “Besides, he might have been killed on the spur of the moment and whoever did it needed time to think what to do with the body.”

It was surprising how the word “murderer” hung outside speech.

“He might,” agreed Sloan. He hoped that it had been a hotblooded affair. Murder had nothing to be said for it at any time but heat-of-the-moment murder was always less sinister than murder plotted and planned. “He would need time and opportunity to work out what to do.”

“And then,” postulated Crosby, “the body was just pushed out into the water?”

There is a tide in the affairs of men, which, taken at the flood, leads on… No, that wouldn’t do. It wouldn’t have been like that at all. It would have been the furtive opening of the boathouse doors during the hours of darkness, and after the furtive opening the silent shove of a dead body with a boat-hook while the River Calle searched out every cranny of the river bank and picked up its latest burden and bore it off towards the sea.

“Unless I’m very much mistaken,” said Sloan austerely, “the body left the boathouse at night.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Probably,” he added, “in time to catch an ebb-tide.” He, Sloan, would have to look at a tide table as soon as he got back to the police station but darkness and an ebb-tide made sense.

“Do we know when, sir?” asked Crosby, who was perforce driving at a speed to satisfy his passenger.

“Some time before he was found,” said Sloan dourly, “but not too long before.”

That was a lay interpretation of what Dr. Dabbe had said in longer words.

Long enough to pick up gammarus pulex.

Long enough to become unrecognisable.

Long enough to be taken by the river to the sea.

Not so long as to be taken by that same sea and laid on Billy’s Finger.

Not so long as to disintegrate completely.

That would have been something that an assassin might have hoped for, that the body would fall to pieces.

Or that it would reach the open sea and be seen no more…

“Why did the boat go too?” Crosby was enquiring.

“I think,” reasoned Sloan aloud, “that if a boat is found adrift and a body is found in the water simple policemen are meant to put two and two together and make five.”

That was something else a murderer might have hoped for.

“It might have happened too,” said Crosby, “mightn’t it? He’d only got to get a bit farther out to sea and he wouldn’t have been spotted at all.”

Sloan stared unseeingly out of the car window. “I wonder why he was put into the river exactly when he was.”

On such a full sea are we now afloat…

“Well, you wouldn’t choose a weekend, would you, sir?” said Crosby.

Never on Sunday?

“The whole estuary’s stuffed with sailing boats at the weekend,” continued the constable. “You should see it, sir.”

“I probably will,” said Sloan pessimistically, “unless we’ve got all this cleared up by then.”

The detective constable slowed down for a signpost. “This must be the Edsway to Marby road we’re joining.”

“Something,” said Sloan resolutely, “must have made it important for that body to be got out of that boathouse when it was.”

The car radio began to chatter while he was speaking. “The gentlemen from the press,” reported the girl at the microphone, “would like to know when Detective Inspector Sloan will see them.”

“Ten o’clock tomorrow morning,” responded Sloan with spirit, “and not a minute before.” He switched off at his end and turned to his companion. “And Crosby…”

“Sir?”

“While you’re about it,” said Sloan, “you’d better find out about the niece. And what Mrs. Mundill died from too. We can’t be too careful.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Now, where did Ridgeford say this dinghy was?”

“According to his report,” said Crosby, “it’s beyond the Marby lifeboat station. To be exact, to the north of it. We’re to ask for a man called Farebrother.”

12

But hark! I hear the toll of a bell.

« ^ »

Farebrother was quite happy to indicate the stray dinghy to the two policemen. And to tell them that Ridgeford was down on the harbour wall.

“Fetch him,” said Sloan briefly to Crosby. He turned to Farebrother and showed him the copper barbary head. “Ever seen one of these before?”

“Might have,” said the lifeboatman. “Might not.”

“Lately?”

“Might have,” said the lifeboatman again.

“How lately?”

“I don’t hold with such things,” he said flatly.

“No,” said Sloan.

“ ’Tisn’t right to disturb places where men lie.” Farebrother stared out to sea.

Sloan said nothing.

“Mark my words,” said Farebrother, “no good comes of it.”

Sloan nodded.

“ ’Tisn’t lucky either.”

“Unlucky for some, anyway,” said Sloan obliquely, bingo-style.

“Didn’t ought to be allowed, that’s what I say.”

“Quite so,” said Sloan.

“They say there was the bones of a man’s hand still clutching a candlestick down there.”

“Down where?” said Sloan softly.

Farebrother’s mouth set in an obstinate line. “I don’t know where. No matter who asks me, be they as clever as you like.”

“Who asked you?”

“Never you mind that. I tell you I don’t know anything…”

“Neither do I,” said Sloan seriously, “but I intend to find out.”

“That’s your business,” said Farebrother ungraciously, “but I say things should be let alone with, that’s what I say.” He turned on his heel and crunched off over the shingle.

Crosby came back with Ridgeford while Sloan was still examining the old fishing boat. Sloan pointed to Farebrother’s retreating back. “The Old Man and the Sea,” he said neatly to the two constables. They both looked blank. He changed his tone. “This bell, Ridgeford…”

“Taken, sir, from a farm up on the Cat’s Back,” said Hidgeford. “Or so the two boys who took it into Mother Hopton’s say. I don’t think they were having me on but you never can tell.” Ridgeford had learned some things already. “Not with boys.”

“Not with boys,” agreed Sloan.

“The farmer’s called Manton,” said Ridgeford. “Alec Manton of Lea Farm.”

“Do you know him?”

Ridgeford shook his head. “Not to say know. I’ve heard of him, that’s all, sir.”

“Heard what?”

“Nothing against.”

Sloan nodded. “Right, then you can stay in the background. Crosby, you’re coming with me to Manton’s farm. Now, Ridgeford, whereabouts exactly did you say this sheep tank was that the boys told you about?”

Few farmers can have been fortunate enough to see as much of their farm laid out in front of them as did Alec Manton. The rising headland was almost entirely given over to sheep and the fields were patterned with the casual regularity of patchwork. Because of the rise in the land the farmland and its stock were both easily visible. The farmhouse, though, was nestled into the low ground before the headland proper began, sheltered alike from sea and wind. It was in the process of being restored and extended. Sloan noticed a discreet grey and white board proclaiming that Frank Mundill was the architect, and made a note.

Alec Manton was out, his wife told them. She was a plump, calm woman, undismayed by the presence of two police officers at the form. Was it about warble fly?

“Not exactly,” temporised Sloan, explaining that he would nevertheless like to look at the sheep-fold on the hill.

“Where they dip?” said Mrs. Manton intelligently. “Of course. You go on up and I’ll tell my husband to come along when he comes home. He shouldn’t be long.”

In the event they didn’t get as far as the sheep tank before the farmer himself caught up with them.

“Routine investigations,” said Sloan mendaciously.

“Oh?” said Manton warily. He was tallish with brown hair.

“We’ve had a report that something might have been stolen from the farm.”

“Have you?” said Alec Manton. He was a man who looked as if he packed a lot of energy. He looked Sloan up and down. “Can’t say that we’ve missed anything.”

“No?” said Sloan.

“What sort of thing?”

“A ship’s bell.”

“From my farm?” Alec Manton’s face was quite expressionless.

“Boys,” said Sloan sedulously. “They said it came from where you keep your sheep.”

“Did they?” said Manton tightly. “Then we’d better go and see, hadn’t we? This way…”

Their goal was several fields away, set in a faint hollow in the land, and built against the wind. In front of the little bothy was a sheep-dipping tank. Set between crush pen and drafting pen, it was full of murky water. Alec Manton led the way into the windowless building and looked round in the semidarkness. Sloan and Crosby followed on his heels. There was nothing to see save bare walls and even barer earth. The place, though, did show every sign of having been occupied by sheep at some time. Sloan looked carefully at the floor. It had been pounded by countless hooves to the consistency of concrete.

“This bell,” began Sloan.

“That you say was found…” said Manton.

“In police possession,” said Sloan mildly.

“Ah.”

“Pending enquiries.”

“I see.”

“Of course,” said Sloan largely, “the boys may have been having us on.”

“Of course.”

“You know what boys are.”

“Only too well,” said Manton heartily.

“We’ll have to get on to them again,” said Sloan, “and see if we can get any nearer the truth, whatever that may be.”

“Of course,” said the farmer quickly. “Did they—er—take anything else, do you know?”

“Not that we know about,” said Sloan blandly. “Would there have been anything else in there for them to steal?”

Alec Manton waved an arm. “You’ve seen it for yourself, haven’t you? Give or take a sheep or two from time to time it looks pretty empty to me.”

“Of course,” said Sloan casually, “the owner of this bell may turn up to claim it.”

“That would certainly simplify matters,” agreed the farmer. “But in the meantime…”

“Yes, sir?”

“It’s quite safe in police custody?”

“Quite safe,” Sloan assured him.

“Crosby!” barked Sloan.

“Sir?”

“What was odd about all that?”

“Don’t know, sir.”

“Think, man. Think.”

“The place was empty.”

“Of course it was empty,” said Sloan with asperity. “The bell must have been tucked away in the corner when those two boys found it. Only boys would have looked there…”

Murderers who thought that they had hidden their victims well reckoned without the natural curiosity of the average boy at their peril. Many a well-covered thicket had been penetrated by a boy for no good reason…

“Yes, sir,” said Crosby.

“What wasn’t empty, Crosby?”

Crosby thought for a long moment. “Sir?”

“What was full, Crosby?”

“Only the sheep-dipping thing.”

“Exactly,” breathed Sloan. “Do you know what month it is, Crosby?

“June, sir,” said Crosby stolidly.

“You don’t,” said Sloan softly, “dip sheep in Calleshire in June.”

“Left over from when you did, then,” suggested Crosby.

“No,” said Sloan.

“No?”

“You dip sheep a month after shearing. Manton’s sheep weren’t shorn,” said Sloan. Policemen, even town policemen, knew all about the dipping of sheep and its regulations. “Besides, you wouldn’t leave your sheep-dip full without a good reason. It’s dangerous stuff.”

“What sort of reason?” said Crosby.

“If,” said Sloan, “you have been conducting a secret rescue of the parts of an old East Indiaman you acquire items which have been underwater for years.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Taking them out of the water causes them to dry up and disintegrate. Mr. Jensen at the museum said so.”

“Yes, sir, I’m sure.”

“So you have to store them underwater or else.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Wooden things, that is.”

Crosby nodded, not very interested. “Wooden things.”

“Metal ones,” said Sloan, “aren’t so important.”

“What about rust?”

“Bronze doesn’t rust,” said Sloan.

“The Clarembald’s bell?”

“Bronze,” said Sloan. “Or so Ridgeford said.”

“It didn’t need to stay underwater?”

“No,” said Sloan. “It could stand in the corner of the sheep building quite safely.” He amended this. “Safe from everything except boys.” He drew breath and carried on. “There was another thing about what was in that sheep-dipping tank.”

“Sir?”

“Think, Crosby.”

“It was dirty, sir. You couldn’t see if there was anything in there or not.”

“That and something else,” said Sloan, and waited.

Dull, a constable.

That had been in Shakespeare.

He’d thought of everything, had the bard.

The detective inspector cleared his throat and said didactically, “A good policeman uses all his senses.”

Crosby lifted his nose like a pointer. “But it didn’t smell, sir.”

“Precisely,” said Sloan grimly. “Like the dog that didn’t bark in the night, it didn’t smell. Believe you me, lad, sheep-dip isn’t by any manner of means the most fragrant of fluids.”

“No, sir.”

“But I’m prepared to bet that there was something in that tank besides dirty water.”

Crosby scuffed his toe at a pebble. “I still don’t see what it’s got to do with the body in the water.”

“Neither do I, Crosby, neither do I. What I wonder is if Mr. Basil Jensen does.”

Elizabeth Busby just couldn’t settle. She was like a bee working over a flower-bed already sucked dry of all its nectar. She couldn’t settle to anything at all, not to finishing off spring-cleaning the spare bedroom and not to any other household chores either.

She met Frank Mundill in the hall as he came back from the boathouse. He dropped the key back into the drawer in the hall table.

“I don’t know why I bothered to lock it, I’m sure,” he said. “Anyone who wanted to could get into the boathouse as easy as wink.”

“Tea?” she suggested.

“That would be nice.” He looked unenthusiastically at the flight of stairs that led up to his studio. “I don’t think I’ll go back to the drawing board this minute.”

“No,” she agreed with the sentiment as well as the statement. Getting on with anything just now was difficult enough. Going back to something was quite impossible.

Presently Mundill said, “I’ll have to go along and have a word with Ted Boiler about getting the river doors fixed up.”

She nodded.

“It’ll have to be something temporary.” He grimaced. “The police want the damage left.”

“Evidence, I suppose,” she said without interest.

“They’re sending a photographer.”

“I’ll keep my ears open,” she promised. She would hear the bell all right when they came. She had always heard her aunt’s bell and her ear was still subconsciously attuned to listening for it. At the first tinkle she’d been awake and on her way to the bedroom…

“I may be a little while,” said Mundill, elaborately casual.

She looked up, her train of thought broken.

“While I’m about it,” he said, “I might as well go on down to Veronica Feckler’s cottage and see exactly what it is that she wants doing there.”

“Might as well,” agreed Elizabeth in a desultory fashion.

“You might keep your ear open for the telephone…”

She nodded. His secretary was going to be away all the week. “I will. There might be a call for me too.”

“Of course,” he agreed quickly.

Too quickly.

She’d practically lived on the telephone while Peter Hinton was around. When he wasn’t at Collerton House he was at the College of Technology at Luston. His landlady—well versed in student ways—had a pay telephone in the hall. Peter Hinton had spent a great deal of time on it. Elizabeth’s eyes drifted involuntarily to the instrument in the hall of Collerton House. It was by a window-seat and Elizabeth had spent a similar amount of time curled up on that window-seat enjoying those endless chats. Politicians and business negotiators had a phrase which covered young lovers as well. They often began either their alliances or their confrontations with what they called “exploratory talks.”

So it had been with Elizabeth Busby and Peter Hinton. Their talks had been exploratory too, as they each searched out the recesses of mind and memory of the other, revealing—as the politicians and businessmen found to their cost—a little of themselves too in the process. In some ways these preliminaries of a courtship had been like playing that old pencil-and-paper parlour game of Battleships. Sometimes a tentative salvo fell in a square that represented the empty sea. Sometimes it fell where the opponent’s battleship was placed and then there was a hit—a palpable hit. After that it was an easy matter to find and sink the paper battleship and win the game.

So it was with young people getting to know each other.

One thing they found they had in common was parents abroad. His were tea planters in Assam.

What they didn’t share was an interest in crime. Peter Hinton knew most of the Notable British Trials series of books by heart and took an interest in villainy. Elizabeth shied away from the unpleasant like a nervous horse.

And then suddenly she’d found she hadn’t known Peter Hinton at all…

Exploratory talks didn’t always lead on to treaties and alliances. Sometimes—the news bulletins said so—they broke down, foundering upon this or that rock uncovered in the course of those very talks. So it must have been with Peter Hinton. Only she didn’t know what it was that had been laid bare that had been such a stumbling block between the two of them that they couldn’t even discuss it. He’d come into her life out of the blue and as precipitately he’d gone out of it again.

She brought the tea tray back into the hall for them both. There was a little occasional table there and Frank Mundill pulled it over to the window-seat. The only trouble with being in the window-seat was that whoever was sitting there could not avoid the full impact of the picture hanging on the wall opposite. It had been quite one of Richard Camming’s most ambitious paintings.

“We think,” Celia Mundill used to say to visitors to the house seeing it for the first time, “that it’s meant to be Diana the Huntress.”

“But we never liked to ask,” Marion Busby would add tremulously if she were there.

“Up to something, of course.”

“But we don’t quite know what.”

They had both been fond of their father but they had loved him without illusion.

Elizabeth was able to pour out the tea without thinking about Diana the Huntress. As always when she was sitting in the hall her eyes drifted to the model of the Camming valve. It was the Camming valve on which the family fortunes had been founded. It was the Camming valve which had brought Peter Hinton into her life. He’d come from Luston College of Technology with a dissertation to do. He’d chosen the Camming valve and its influence on the development of the marine engine. What more natural that he should come to Cordon Camming’s house in the course of writing it? True, Gordon Camming had actually designed his valve in the back kitchen of some Victorian artisan’s cottage, demolished long ago in a vigorous council slum clearance scheme, but Collerton House was what he had built. It was a monument to his success and as near to a museum as there was.

Frank Mundill had sunk his tea with celerity. “I’ll be going now,” he said, getting to his feet.

She nodded, her train of thought scarcely disturbed this time. In her mind’s eye she was seeing Peter Hinton bending over the model as he had done the first day he came.

“We’ve got a drawing of it at the college,” he said when he saw it, “but not a model.”

“It’s a working model,” she had said eagerly, anxious to be helpful. “Grandfather used to make it work for me when I was little. I can’t do it, though.”

He had come…

She remembered now his tiny smile as he had said, “I can. Would you like to see it working again?”

He had seen…

“Oh, please.”

He had conquered…

He’d come back again, of course, another day. And another day. And another.

What she couldn’t understand was why he had gone and not come back.

She sat in the window-seat now, taking her tea in thoughtful sips. She sat there so long that the cushion became less comfortable. She shifted her position slightly, almost without thinking. To her surprise this made for less comfort rather than more. Something was sticking into her. The fact took a moment or two to penetrate her consciousness. When it did she put her hand down between the cushions. It encountered something oblong and unyielding. She stood up abruptly and snatched the cushions away. All doubt ended when she set eyes on the object.

It was Peter Hinton’s slide rule and she knew it well.

13

’Tis what we must all come to.

« ^ »

Some savage breasts cannot be soothed. That of Superintendent Leeyes came into this category.

“What I want, Sloan,” he snapped, “are results.”

Detective Inspector Sloan was reporting to him in the superintendent’s office at Berebury. “Yes, sir, but…”

“Not theories.”

“No, sir.” Actually Sloan didn’t have any theories either but this seemed to have escaped the superintendent’s notice.

“Have you any idea at all what’s going on over there?”

“Finding The Clarembald comes into it,” said Sloan slowly, “though where the dead man fits in with that I really don’t know.”

“Don’t forget that he had that copper thing…”

“Barbary head.”

“In his pocket.”

“Yes, sir, so he did.” Sloan cleared his throat. “But there are a lot of other things we don’t know.”

“Who he is,” trumpeted Leeyes. “You haven’t got very far with that, have you, Sloan?”

“We have one lead, sir. The girl at Collerton House had a boy-friend who’s not around any more. Crosby’s chasing him up now just to be on the safe side.”

“There’s another thing we don’t know besides who the body is.”

“Why he was set out into the mainstream when he was,” said Sloan before the superintendent could say it for him.

“Exactly,” growled Leeyes.

This was one of the things that was puzzling Sloan too. “There must have been a reason,” he agreed. “After all he’d been dead for quite a while and in the water too. Dr. Dabbe said so.”

“And then suddenly someone…”

“The murderer,” said Sloan. That was something he felt sure about.

“The murderer decides to punt him into the river.”

“There’ll be a reason,” said Sloan confidently. “We’re dealing with someone with brains.”

Leeyes grunted again.

“Anyone,” said Sloan feelingly, “who can kill someone without them being reported missing has got brains.”

“It doesn’t happen often,” conceded Leeyes.

“And anyone who can find somewhere as clever as a boathouse to park a body until it’s unrecognisable knows what they’re doing. Do you realise, sir,” he added energetically, “that if that man Horace Boiler hadn’t been out there fishing that body might well have just drifted out to sea and never been seen again?”

“A perfect murder,” commented Leeyes.

“Exactly, sir.” Though for the life of him Sloan didn’t know why murder done and not known about should be called perfect…

“The dinghy,” said Leeyes. “What about the dinghy?”

“I think that went just in case the body was picked up,” said Sloan.

“A touch of local colour, eh?” said Leeyes grimly.

“We’ve examined it,” said Sloan, “and it answers to Mr. Mundill’s description. I don’t think there’s any doubt that it’s the one from his boathouse but we’ll get him over in the morning to identify it properly.”

“That’s all very well, Sloan, but where does The Clarembald come in?”

“I don’t know, sir. The things from the ship,” he couldn’t bring himself to use the word “artefacts” to the superintendent, “that have been coming ashore…”

“Treasure trove,” said Leeyes, never one to split hairs on precise meanings.

“Perhaps, sir. I don’t know about that yet.”

“These things then…” said Leeyes impatiently.

“Indicate that someone has found the East Indiaman.”

“Don’t forget the diver, eh, Sloan, don’t forget the diver.”

“No, sir, I haven’t. This farmer—Alec Manton—has been hiring a local trawler. Ridgeford saw it going out at low tide.”

“Did he indeed?” There was a pause while Superintendent Leeyes considered this and then he abruptly started on quite a different tack. “This height that Dr. Dabbe says he fell from…”

“I’ve been thinking about that, sir,” said Sloan. Every case was like solving a jigsaw and some pieces of that jigsaw had straight edges. A piece of jigsaw puzzle that had a straight edge helped to define the puzzle. So it was in a murder case. He always thought of the forensic pathologist’s report as so many pieces of straight edge of a jigsaw puzzle. And the pathologist had said that the man had fallen to his death. That became fact…

“Well?”

“Apart from the cliffs…”

“Which are too high.”

“There isn’t very much in the way of a drop round Collerton and Edsway.” Inland from the cliffs the rest of the Calleshire littoral was—like Norfolk—very flat.

“He fell from somewhere,” said Leeyes, who had taken Dr. Dabbe’s report for gospel too.

“A dying fall,” said Sloan, conscious that it had been said before.

“But where from?” asked Leeyes irritably. “Would a church tower have done?”

“It’s the right sort of height,” agreed Sloan, “but it’s not exactly what you could call private, is it, sir? I mean, would you climb a church tower after dark with a murderer?”

“No,” said Leeyes robustly. “And I wouldn’t buy a secondhand car from one either.”

“I’ll get Crosby to check at Collerton Church anyway,” said Sloan, “but what I think we’re looking for is a sort of hidden drop. Remember he would have had to have been pushed from the top and then stayed at the bottom…”

“Dead or dying.”

“Until whoever pushed him came down and picked up the body.”

“Darkness or privacy,” agreed Leeyes.

What was it that Crosby had said?

Pussy’s down the well.

It would have had to have been somewhere where murderer and victim could have gone together without comment.

Then the lonely push…

“And,” said Leeyes, “then the body had to be got from wherever it fell to the boathouse. Have you gone into the logistics, Sloan?”

“The boot of a car would have done.”

“And then?”

“For the last part? A wheelbarrow,” said Sloan. “That would have done too. It’s the easiest way to carry a body that I know. And there are several around the house.”

“Not one of these plastic affairs, Sloan. You mean a good old-fashioned metal one.”

“Yes, sir.” When a man came automatically to put the word “good” together with the word “old-fashioned,” it was time for him to retire. He coughed. “The trouble, sir, is that there is a perfectly good asphalt path to the boathouse that doesn’t show any extra marks. We’ve looked.”

Leeyes grunted. “So what you’re saying is that he could have been killed anywhere and brought to Collerton.”

“By land or water,” said Sloan flatly. “With a barbary head in his pocket.” That barbary head was a puzzle. Was it a pointer to The Clarembald or was it to point them away from someone else?

“It’s what you might call wide open still, isn’t it, Sloan,” said Leeyes unencouragingly. “You’ll have to look on it as a challenge,” he added.

“I’m starting with a search warrant for Lea Farm at Marby,” said Sloan flatly. “There’s something funny going on there.”

Landladies didn’t always come up middle-aged and inquisitive. Sometimes they were young and indifferent.

“Pete?” said Ms. Cheryl Watson, shrugging her shoulders. “He was around.”

“When?” asked Detective Constable Crosby.

She opened her hands expressively. “Don’t ask me. He’ll be back.”

“When?” asked Crosby.

“When he feels like it. He’ll settle up for his room all right, don’t worry.”

Crosby did not say that that was not what was worrying the county constabulary.

“What about his gear?” he said instead.

“Still around,” she said largely. “And his mail. He’ll be back for them.”

“Why did he go?”

Her eyes opened wide. “He had exams, didn’t he?”

“You think he chickened out?”

“A man has to be himself,” said the self-appointed representative of a different way of life, “hasn’t he?”

“I wouldn’t know about that,” said Crosby.

“Examinations are the sign of a decadent culture,” pronounced the young woman. ‘Always making you prove yourself.”

“A sort of initiation rite, you mean?” suggested Crosby.

“That’s right,” she said eagerly.

The course at the Police Training College made a man prove himself. Or leave. It was a sort of initiation rite too. A police constable was let into the mysteries of the service at the same time as he was being sorely tried by his instructors.

Ms. Watson looked Detective Constable Crosby up and down with unattractive shrewdness. “Is Pete in trouble then?”

“Not that we know about,” said Crosby truthfully.

“There was something else besides examinations.”

“Was there?” he murmured.

“He had a bird.”

“Ah.”

“Don’t say that.” She looked at him. “No, Pete was hell-bent on marriage.”

“Was he?”

“No less,” she said. “He was real old-fashioned about it.”

Crosby gave the absent Mr. Hinton a passing thought.

“He often said he wasn’t going to settle for anything less than marriage.”

“Makes a change,” said Crosby. The beat made a man philosophical about some things.

“She’d got money, you see,” said Ms. Watson simply. “Or would have one day. I think that’s what he said.”

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man seeking good fortune must be in want of a wife in possession of one…

“Anyway,” she said, “don’t you worry. Pete Hinton is old enough to take care of himself.”

Crosby said he was sure he hoped so too, but he came away with a disturbing description.

Elizabeth Busby sat alone in the empty house. She sat quite still at one end of the window-seat staring at that which she had found at the other.

Peter Hinton’s slide rule.

It must have slipped out of his pocket the last time he had sat there. It couldn’t have been before that because he would have missed it and then—for sure—a search on a grand scale would have been instituted. If it hadn’t been found, then St. Anthony’s aid would have been invoked. A practical young man like Peter Hinton hadn’t really believed in St. Anthony, but Elizabeth had done so, and gradually Peter Hinton had begun to call upon him too for lost things.

Or said he had done.

His precious slide rule would have been missed very early on. It was never out of his pocket—it was almost his badge of office. His course at Luston was a sandwich affair—so much time at his studies, so much time on the shop floor. His shop floor employment had been with Punnett and Punnett, Marine Engineers, Ltd., and it was after that when he went to the College of Technology. And much as very young doctors flaunted their stethoscopes, so the slide rules of embryo engineers were frequently in evidence.

She cast her mind back yet again to his last visit. In fact she had already gone over it in her mind a hundred times or more—searching every recollection for pointers of what was to come. She hadn’t found any—their only disagreement had been about her aunt—and now she couldn’t recollect either any indication that the famous slide rule hadn’t been around. She screwed up her eyes in concentrated memory recall and came up with something that surprised her. Surely they hadn’t been near the window-seat on Peter’s last visit at all?

He’d come over from Luston to see her—it had had to be like that since Celia Mundill had begun to be so ill after Easter—on one of her aunt’s really bad days. Elizabeth had been dividing her time between the bedroom and the kitchen. There had been no spare time for sitting together on the window-seat or anywhere else. In fact she hadn’t had a great deal of time to spare for Peter Hinton at all but that had been simply because of her aunt’s illness. She had wondered for a moment if it had been this which had so miffed him that he had taken his departure, but what manner of man would begrudge her time spent with the dying?

Because her aunt had been dying. Elizabeth had known that ever since Celia’s X-ray at Easter when Frank Mundill had taken her to one side and told her that that was what the doctor over at Calleford had said. He’d brought a letter back with him for Dr. Tebot, Celia Mundill’s own doctor at Collerton—dear old Dr. Tebot who looked like nothing so much as the doctor in Luke Fildes’s famous picture—but he had enjoined secrecy on Dr. Tebot as well as on Elizabeth. Celia Mundill had an inoperable cancer of the stomach but she wasn’t to know.

“Not ever,” Frank Mundill had said at the time.

“But the doctor…”

“The doctor,” said Mundill, “said she need never know.”

“I don’t see how.”

“They call it ‘stealing death,’ ” Frank Mundill had told her.

Come away, come away, death…

“Dr. Tebot said it’s not as difficult as it sounds, Elizabeth, because the patient always wants to believe that they’re getting better.”

“A sort of conspiracy,” Elizabeth remembered saying slowly at the time.

“A conspiracy of silence,” Mundill had said firmly. “You don’t need to lie. Anyway, Elizabeth, she won’t ask you.”

“No…”

“She’ll ask the doctor and he’ll know what to say, I’m sure.”

“I’m sure, too,” she’d said then with a touch of cynicism beyond her years.

And she had proceeded to watch her aunt decline. Severe vomiting had been accompanied by loss of weight. Abdominal pain had come, too, until the doctor had stopped it with a hefty pain-killer. It had needed injections though to stop the pains in her arms and legs. The district nurse had come to give her those and Elizabeth had been glad of the extra support.

Nothing though had stopped the vomiting or the burning pain in the patient’s throat.

Or her loss of weight.

Frank Mundill had been marvellously attentive. At any moment of the night or day when Celia had said she could eat or drink he’d been on hand with something. Gradually though she’d sunk beyond that.

“She may get jaundiced,” Dr. Tebot had warned them one day.

So she had. Soon after that her skin took on a yellow, jaundiced look. Celia Mundill had died too with the brown petechiae of premature age on her skin. One day she’d slipped into a merciful coma.

That, when it happened, though, was too late for Peter Hinton. He’d taken himself off by the time Celia Mundill had breathed her last. Perhaps, Elizabeth had thought more than once, he couldn’t stand the atmosphere of illness—there were some men, she knew, who couldn’t. Thank goodness Frank Mundill hadn’t been one of them or she would never have coped. He’d been marvellous.

She sat quite still now in the window-seat, increasingly confident that the last time that Peter Hinton had come to the house they had not sat together there. They’d only met in the kitchen. Elizabeth had been waiting and watching for the district nurse while Frank Mundill was taking his turn in the bedroom beside the patient. She remembered now how difficult she had found it to think or speak of anything but her aunt’s illness.

True, they’d nearly quarrelled but not about themselves.

About Celia Mundill.

“She looks so awful now,” Elizabeth had cried. That had been the worst thing of all. Celia Mundill was just a ghastly parody of the woman she had been a few short months ago.

“What about her going into hospital?” Peter had urged. “Don’t you think she ought to be in hospital? I do.”

“No!” She’d been surprised at her own fierceness. She must have caught it from Frank Mundill. “We want her to die at home in her own bed. Besides,” she said illogically, “she’s far too poorly to go into hospital.”

“Do her eyes water?” asked Peter suddenly.

“Yes, they do. Why?”

“I just wondered.”

“There’s nothing more they could do for her if she was in hospital,” said Elizabeth, still het up over his suggestion. “We’re doing all anybody could. Dr. Tebot says so.”

“I’m sure you are,” he said soothingly. “It was only a thought. But don’t you go and knock yourself up, will you?”

“I’m young and strong,” she had said, and she meant it.

Now—since Peter had gone and her aunt had died—she wasn’t sure how strong she was. She wasn’t as young as she had been either.

She stared at the slide rule.

It hadn’t been missing that last evening that Peter Hinton had come. She was certain about that. He would undoubtedly have mentioned the fact and gone hunting for his instrument. And he hadn’t lost it that evening because they hadn’t sat in the hall at all.

She shivered involuntarily.

That only left the time that he had come over—the time which she had never been able to fathom—when he had left the note and the ring on the hall table. In spite of herself her eyes drifted over in the direction of the hall table, seeing in her mind’s eye the piece of paper and the circlet of metal lying there again—just as she had done the first time. She’d been carrying her aunt’s tray down the stairs at the time…

She looked round the hallway. Surely he wouldn’t have sat on the window-seat to compose the note? Congés deserved to have more time spent on them than that. Besides she might have come down the stairs at any time and found him sitting there and that would never have done. She rejected the notion almost as soon as she had thought of it. No, that note and the ring had been slipped on the table at a very opportune moment.

And the slide rule?

She couldn’t imagine exactly when the slide rule had slipped out of its proud owner’s pocket and fallen deep down between the cushions. But it had been after the last time she had seen him—and it meant that when he had last come to the house he had sat on the window-seat long enough for it to work its way out of his pocket. She sat there quite motionless for a long time while she thought about it.

14

Soften the evidence.

« ^ »

The lecturer at Luston College of Technology rolled his eyes at his first visitor the next morning and said, “Hinton? He was another drop out, that’s all, officer. We get them all the time.”

“Do you know why?” asked Detective Constable Crosby.

“This isn’t a kindergarten.”

“No, sir, I’m sure.”

“Hinton wasn’t any different from all the others,” he said irritably.

Crosby said he was sure he hoped not. “Did you make enquiries at the time, sir?”

“I didn’t but the registrar will have done. He’ll have had a grant, you know, and that will have had to be signed for.”

“Quite so, sir.” In an uncertain world the accounting profession was more certain than most. “Examinations, do you think it was, sir?”

“Examinations?” snorted the lecturer. “It’s not examinations that they’re afraid of. It’s hard work.”

“Can you tell me when he was last here?”

“That’s not difficult. It’ll be here in the register.” He ran his thumb down a list. “Hinton, E R., was here for the first two weeks of the summer term and not after that.”

“Thank you, sir, you’ve been most helpful.”

The courtesy appeared to mollify the lecturer. He opened up slightly. “He was supposed to be doing a dissertation, too, but he never handed it in. His home address? You’ll have to ask the registrar for that too. I have an idea his family were abroad…”

Detective Inspector Sloan intended to concentrate first of all on the Mundill ménage. He began sooner than he expected when he bumped into Inspector Harpe of Traffic Division crossing the police station yard.

“Mundill?” Harry Harpe frowned. “I know the name.”

“Demon driver?”

“No, it wasn’t that.” He frowned. “Mundill—let me think a minute.” He slapped his thigh. “Got it!”

“Inner guidance?” suggested Sloan, not that Mundill had looked a drinker.

“Not that either.” Harpe knew all the heavy drinkers for miles around. “He’s an architect, isn’t he?” Harpe nodded to himself with satisfaction. “Then he designed the multi-storey car park last year. He got some sort of architectural award for it. I met him at the official opening. You remember, Sloan, the mayor’s car was the first one in.”

Sloan had a vague memory of bouquets and mayoral chains and speeches and photographs in the local paper.

Harpe emitted a sound that for him was a chuckle. “But he couldn’t understand the principle it was built on. I heard Mundill trying to explain it to him. The mayor couldn’t see why the cars going up never met the cars going down.”

“Two spirals,” said Sloan immediately, “one within the other.”

“Mundill gave it some fancy name and that didn’t help the mayor one little bit.”

“Double helix,” supplied Sloan.

“That was it,” agreed Harpe. “Mundill told him there was a well in Italy—at Orvieto, I think he said it was—that was built on the same principle. The donkey going down never met the donkey coming up. Clever chap. Not the mayor,” he added quickly. “Mundill.”

“It’s a good car park,” said Sloan.

And it was.

“Keeps the cars off the streets,” agreed Harpe.

Sloan left Harpe while he was still thinking about the apotheosis of Traffic Division’s dreams—totally empty roads.

When he got to his room Sloan picked up the telephone and made an appointment with Frank Mundill to go over to Marby during the morning to identify the boat on the beach.

He sat in front of the telephone for a long moment after that and then he dialled the County Police Headquarters at Calleford.

“I want a police launch,” he said to the officer at the other end.

“Speak on.”

“Strictly for observation.”

“If you want the drug squad you’ve got the wrong number.”

“I don’t.”

“That makes a change,” said the voice equably.

“At least,” said Sloan, “I don’t think I do.”

“Myself, I wouldn’t put anything past the drugs racket.”

“No.” That was something he would have to think about. There was probably no one at greater risk than an addict—unless it was a pusher who double-crossed his supplier. Then revenge was simple and swift.

“This launch you want—where and when?”

“Off Marby. Round the headland. I shall be sending a constable up on the Cat’s Back there to keep watch as well.”

“Belt and galluses,” remarked the voice. “When do you want this observation kept?”

“Low tide,” said Sloan without hesitation.

“Right you are. By the way,” asked the voice, “what are they to observe?”

“A small fishing trawler called The Daisy Bell,” said Sloan, replacing the receiver.

Then, unable to put it off any longer, he knocked on the door of Superintendent Leeyes’s office.

“Ha, Sloan! Any progress?”

“A little, sir.” Intellectuals were not the only people to be troubled by the vexed relationship between truth and art. “Just a little.”

“Know who he is yet?”

“Not for certain,” said Sloan. He could have delivered a short disquisition, though, on the phrase “growing doubts.”

Superintendent Leeyes waved a hand airily. “Find out what happened first, Sloan, and look for your evidence afterwards.”

That wasn’t what they taught recruits of Training School.

“We haven’t got a lot of evidence to consider,” said Sloan.

But it was too subtle a point for the superintendent.

“You’ve got a body,” boomed Leeyes.

“Yes, sir.” Dr. Dabbe’s full post-mortem report had been on Sloan’s desk that morning, too. It didn’t tell him anything that the pathologist hadn’t already told him, except that the young man had had a broken ankle in childhood, which might help.

In the end.

“With a piece of copper on it,” Leeyes reminded him.

“Yes, sir.” There were those who would call that an obol for Charon but they were not policemen. Sloan had a search warrant for Alec Manton’s farm now. And he’d have to find out what Mr. Jensen at the museum had been up to. Things were obviously moving in the archeological world. Jensen had been out when he rang the museum.

“This ship under the water,” said Leeyes abruptly. “Who does it belong to?”

“Strictly speaking,” said Sloan, “the East India Company, I suppose.”

“Ha!”

“But…”

“Not findings, keepings, eh, Sloan?”

“No, sir.” Not even a bench of magistrates in the Juvenile Court would go along with that piece of childhood lore and faulty law. A roomful of lost property at the police station testified to the opposite too. He cleared his throat, and carried on, “Under the Merchant Shipping Act of 1894…”

“Been at the books, have you, Sloan?”

“A wreck is deemed to belong to the owner…”

Come back, Robert Clive, all forgiven.

“And if the owner isn’t found?” asked Leeyes.

“The wreck becomes the property of the state in whose waters she lies.”

Full fathom five…

“And, sir, the goods discovered in a wreck…”

“Yes?”

“Can be auctioned.”

“Who benefits?” asked Leeyes sharply. “Or does the Crown take?”

“The finder gets most of the proceeds.” The superintendent’s phrase reminded Sloan of a move on the chessboard.

The superintendent looked extremely alert. “That’s different.”

“Salvage,” added Sloan for the record, “is something quite separate.”

Leeyes’s mind was running along ahead. “You’re going to track this farmer down, aren’t you, Sloan?”

“Oh, yes, sir.” Alec Manton was high on his list of people to be seen.

So was a man called Peter Hinton.

Before that there was still some routine work to be done at the police station. He picked up the phone and quickly dialled a number.

“Rita, this is Detective Inspector Sloan speaking. I’d like to talk to Dr. Dabbe if he’s not too busy.”

“He isn’t doing anyone now, Inspector, if that’s what you mean.”

That was what Sloan did mean.

“Hang on,” said Rita, “and I’ll put you through straightaway.”

If a girl wasn’t overawed by death, then neither doctors nor police inspectors were going to carry much weight…

“Dabbe here,” said the pathologist down the telephone.

“We may,” said Sloan circumspectly, “repeat may—just have a possible name for yesterday’s body.”

“Ah.”

“There’s a man called Peter Hinton who was last seen alive about two months ago at his lodgings in Luston.”

“You don’t,” said the pathologist temperately, “get a great hue and cry from lodgings.”

“If,” advanced Sloan cautiously, “we had reason to believe that he might be our chap—your chap, that is—what would be needed in the way of proof?”

“His dentist,” replied Dr. Dabbe promptly, “his dental records and a forensic odontologist. You’d be half-way there then.”

“And the other half of the way?”

“A good full-face photograph that could be superimposed on the ones that have been taken here.”

“I’ll make a note of that,” said Sloan.

He could hear the pathologist leafing through his notes. “Wasn’t there a broken ankle in childlood, too, Sloan?”

“So you said, Doctor.”

“Everything helps,” said Dr. Dabbe largely, “and when they all add up, why then—well, there you are, aren’t you?”

Which was scarcely grammar but which did make sense.

Detective Constable Crosby reported back to the police station with what he had gleaned about Peter Hinton and the death of Mrs. Mundill.

“I checked on her death certificate like you said, sir.”

“Yes?” said Sloan. You couldn’t be too careful in this game.

“Cachexia,” spelt out Crosby carefully.

“And?” said Sloan. Cachexia was a condition, not a disease.

“Due to carcinoma of the stomach,” continued Crosby. “It’s signed by Gregory Tebot—he’s the general practitioner out there.”

Crosby made Collerton sound like Outer Mongolia.

Sloan assimilated his information about Peter Hinton too.

Soon he was telling the reporter from the county newspaper that he couldn’t have a photograph of the dead man.

“We might get an artist’s impression done for you,” he said, “but definitely not a photograph.”

“Like that, is it?” said the reporter, jerking his head.

“It is,” said Sloan heavily. “But you can say that we would like to have any information about anyone answering to this description who’s been missing for a bit.”

“Will do,” said the reporter laconically. He shut his notebook with a snap. If there was no name, there was no story. It was sad but true that human interest needed a name.

“So,” he said, “there’s just the widower…”

“Frank Mundill.”

“And a niece…”

“Elizabeth Busby.”

“And there was a boy-friend,” said Sloan.

“Peter Hinton.”

“It wouldn’t do any harm,” said Sloan slowly, “to check on Celia Mundill’s will.”

Crosby made an obedient note.

“Though,” said Sloan irascibly, “what it’s all got to do with the body in the water I really don’t know.”

“No, sir.”

“And Crosby…”

“Sir?”

“While you’re about it, we’d better just check that Collerton House wasn’t where our body fell from. I don’t think it’s quite high enough. And there are shrubs under nearly all the windows. They wouldn’t have healed.”

In time Nature healed all scars but even Nature took her time…

Frank Mundill was ready and waiting at Collerton House when Sloan and Crosby arrived at the appointed time.

“We’ve just heard about the body that they’ve found in the estuary,” he said. “Someone in one of the shops told my niece this morning.”

Sloan was deliberately vague. “We don’t know yet, sir, if there is any connection with it and the boat that was taken.”

The architect shuddered. “I hope not. I wouldn’t like to think of anyone coming to any harm even if they had broken in.”

“The inquest will be on Friday,” Sloan informed him. “We may know a little more by then.”

Once over at Marby the architect confirmed that the boat beached beside the lifeboat had come from Collerton House.

“No doubt about that at all, Inspector,” he said readily. “It’s been in that boathouse ever since I was married and for many a long year before that, I daresay.”

Crosby made a note in the background.

Mundill gave the bow a light tap. “She’s good enough for a few more fishing trips, I should say. She’s hardly damaged at all, is she?”

It was true. The boat had dried out quite a lot overnight and in spite of its obvious age looked quite serviceable now.

“I suppose,” said Mundill, “that I can see about getting it back to Collerton now?”

“Not just yet, sir,” said Sloan. “Our scientific laboratory people will have to go over it first.”

Mundill nodded intelligently. “I understand. For clues.”

“For evidence,” said Sloan sternly.

There was a world of difference between the two.

“Then I can collect it after that?”

“Oh,” said Sloan easily, “I daresay they’ll drop it back to the boathouse for you.”

“When?”

“Is it important?”

“No, no, Inspector, not at all. I just wondered, that’s all. It doesn’t matter a bit…”

Elizabeth Busby had hardly slept at all that night. And when she had at last drifted off, sleep had not been a refreshment from the cares of the day but an uneasy business of inconclusive dreams.

Waking had been no better.

She came back to consciousness with her mind a blank and then suddenly full recollection came flooding back and with it the now familiar sensation that she was physically shouldering a heavy burden. The strange thing was that this burden seemed not only to extend to an area just above her eyes but to weigh her down from all angles. At least, she thought, Christian in The Pilgrim’s Progress only had a burden on his back—not everywhere.

Propped beside her bedside lamp was Peter Hinton’s slide rule. She had considered this again in the cold light of day. And got no further forward than she had done the evening before. It really was very odd that Peter should have taken a water-colour painting of a beach and left his slide rule behind him.

As she had got dressed she viewed the prospect of another day ahead of her without relish. It wasn’t that she wanted to spend her whole life wandering in the delicate plain called Ease, just that she could have done without its being spent so much in the Slough of Despond. She had eventually got the day started to a kind of mantra of her own. It was based on Rudyard Kipling’s poem If and concentrated on filling the unforgiving minute with sixty seconds’ worth of distance run…

The whole day stretched before her like a clean page.

True, there were the finishing touches to be put to the spring-cleaning of the spare room and today was the day that the dustbin had to be put out, but otherwise there were no landmarks in the day to distinguish it from any others in an endless succession of unmemorable days.

By the time Frank Mundill had gone off in the police car to Marby she found herself with the spare room finished and the dustbin duly put out. That still left a great deal of the day to be got through and she turned over in her mind a list of other things that might be done.

For some reason—perhaps subconsciously to do with the finding of the slide rule—she was drawn back to the hall. Perhaps she would tackle that next in her vigorous spring-cleaning campaign. She stood in the middle of the space assessing what needed to be done. Quite a lot, she decided. This year’s regular cleaning had completely gone by the board because of Celia Mundill’s illness.

She stiffened.

She had resolved not to think about that…

Mop, duster, vacuum cleaner, step-ladder, polish… a list of her requirements ran through her mind before she went back to the kitchen to assemble them. All she needed was there save the big step-ladder. That lived in the shed and she would need it to reach the picture rail that ran round high up on the hall wall.

She dumped all her equipment in the middle of the floor and went off to the shed to get the step-ladder. It was leaning up against the wall in its accustomed place, standing amongst a conglomeration of gardening tools and old apple boxes. She moved the lawn-mower first and then a wheelbarrow. That left her nearer the steps but not quite near enough. She bent down to shift a pile of empty apple boxes…

It was curious that when she first caught sight of the shoe it didn’t occur to her that there would be a foot in it. It was an old shoe and a dirty one at that and her first thought was that it was one of a pair kept there for gardening. That had been before she saw a piece of dishevelled sock protruding from it.

With dreadful deliberation she bent down and moved another layer of apple boxes.

A second shoe came into view.

It, too, had a foot in it.

Unwillingly her eyes travelled beyond the shoes to the grubby trousers above them. She could see no more than that because of the apple boxes. Driven by some nameless conception of duty to the injured, she lifted another round of apple boxes. The full figure of a man came into view then. He was lying prone on the floor. And she needn’t have worried about her duties to the injured.

This man was dead.

15

This is death without reprieve.

« ^ »

Unlike the sundial, Superintendent Leeyes did not only record the sunny hours. There were some stormy ones to be noted too.

“Dead, did you say, Sloan?”

“I did, sir.”

“That means,” he gobbled down the telephone, “that we’ve got two dead men on our hands now.”

“It does, sir,” admitted Sloan heavily. “There’s no doubt about it either, sir. The local general practitioner confirms death.”

After death, the doctor.

That was part of police routine too.

“One, two, that’ll do,” growled Leeyes.

“Sir?” Sloan had only heard of “One, two, buckle my shoe” and even that had been a long time ago now.

“It’s a saying in the game of bridge,” explained Leeyes loftily. “You wouldn’t understand, Sloan.”

“No, sir.” Sloan kept his tone even but with an effort. There was so much to do and so little time… and something so very nasty in the woodshed.

“What happened this time?” barked Leeyes. “Not, I may say, Sloan, that we really know yet what happened last time.”

“I should say that he was killed on the spot. In an unlocked garden shed, that is.” It was Sloan’s turn now to sit in the window-seat in the hall of Collerton House and use the telephone. A white and shaken Elizabeth Busby had led him there while Frank Mundill stayed with Crosby and Dr. Tebot. “Hit on the head,” said Sloan succinctly. “Hard.”

Leeyes pounced. “That means you’ve got a weapon.”

“There’s a spade there with blood on it,” agreed Sloan.

“But not fingerprints, I suppose,” said Leeyes.

“I doubt it, sir,” said Sloan, “though the dabs boys are on their way over now.”

“Fingerprints would be too much to ask for these days.”

Sloan was inclined to agree with him. Besides there was a pair of gardening gloves sitting handy on the shelf beside the spade. Sloan thought that the gloves had a mocking touch about them—as if the murderer had just tossed them back onto the shelf where he had found them.

“When did it happen?” snapped Leeyes.

“He’s quite cold,” said Sloan obliquely, “and the blood has dried…”

Congealed was the right word for the bloody mess that had been the back of the man’s head but he did not use it.

A red little, dead little head…

“Yesterday, then,” concluded Leeyes.

“That’s what Dr. Tebot says,” said Sloan, “and Dr. Dabbe’s on his way.” Too many things had happened yesterday for Sloan’s liking.

“Yes, yes,” said Leeyes testily. “I know he’ll tell us for sure but you must make up your own mind about some things, Sloan.”

He had.

“And don’t forget to get on to the photographers, Sloan, will you?”

“I won’t forget,” said Sloan astringently.

“Who is he?” asked the superintendent. “Or don’t you know that either?”

But Sloan did know that. “He’s lying on his face, sir, and we haven’t moved him, of course.”

“Of course.”

“But I think I know.”

Leeyes grunted. “You’ll have to do better than that before you’ve done, Sloan.”

“Yes, sir.” Truth’s ox team had been Do Well, Do Better and Do Best. Sloan decided that he hadn’t even Done Well let alone Better or Best.

“I think I’ve seen those clothes before, sir.” And the body did look just like a bundle of old clothes. You wouldn’t have thought that there was a man inside them at first at all…

“Ha!”

“Yesterday afternoon.” said Sloan.

“That’s something, I suppose.”

“I think it’s the man who found the body.” Strictly speaking he supposed he should have said “the first body” now.

“The fisherman?”

“Horace Boiler,” said Sloan.

“The man in the boat,” said Leeyes.

“The doctor here thinks it’s him too, sir.” Last seen, Sloan reminded himself, with Basil Jensen on board.

“So there’s a link,” said Leeyes.

“There’s a link all right,” responded Sloan vigorously. “He’s got a barbary head in his pocket too.”

“What!” bellowed Leeyes.

Sloan winced. They said even a rose recoiled when shouted at let alone a full-blown detective inspector.

“At least,” declared Leeyes, “that means we’re not looking at a psychological case.”

“I suppose it does, sir.” There was nothing the police feared so much as a pathological killer. When there was neither rhyme nor reason to murder, then logic didn’t help find the murderer. You needed luck then. Sloan felt he could have done with some luck now.

“Have you,” growled Leeyes, “missed something that he found, Sloan?”

“I hope not,” said Sloan. But he had to admit that it had been his own first thought too.

“If he was killed because he knew something, Sloan,” persisted Leeyes, “then you can find out what it was too.”

“I’m sure I hope so, sir.”

“He’d have known about The Clarembald being found,” said Leeyes. “A fisherman like him…”

“He’d have known all the village gossip for sure, too, sir, a man like that.”

“Dirty work at the crossroads there,” said Leeyes, even though he meant the sea.

It had been highwaymen who waited at the crossroads to double their chances of getting a victim. They used to hang felons at the crossroads too in the bad old days. Perhaps the dirty work had sometimes come from hanging the wrong man. A police officer had an equal duty to the innocent and the guilty.

Then and now.

“Don’t tell me either,” said Leeyes tartly, “that men explore valuable wrecks for the fun of it.”

Sloan wasn’t so sure about that but he was concentrating on the bird in the police bush, so to speak.

“Boiler wasn’t a very attractive man,” he said slowly. “Ridgeford said you had to watch him.”

“Are you trying to suggest something, Sloan?”

“If he knew something that we didn’t know he might have been—er—trying to put the pressure on a bit.”

“Blackmail by any other name,” trumpeted Leeyes, “smells just as nasty.”

“And it’s always dangerous.” The blow that had killed Boiler had been bloody, bold and resolute. Even peering over the apple boxes Sloan could see that. That’s when he had seen the bulge in the man’s pocket that had been the barbary head. Boiler’s own head hadn’t been a pretty sight. Wet red—the poet’s name for blood—it had been covered in.

“Was he destined for a watery grave, too, Sloan?”

“I’m sure I don’t know that, sir. All I do know is that it was merest chance that he was found. The girl—Elizabeth Busby, that is—said that she only had that step-ladder out once in a blue moon. She was going to clean the hall and that’s high, of course. Otherwise…”

“Otherwise,” interrupted Leeyes tartly, “in a couple of months’ time we’d have had an unidentified body on our hands, wouldn’t we? Another unidentified body, that is.”

“I think someone would have reported this man as missing,” said Sloan. Ridgeford had mentioned that Horace Boiler had a son with them on their first trip. He cleared his throat. “That means whoever killed him was pretty desperate.”

“The blackmailed usually are, Sloan,” said Leeyes with unusual insight. “Because they’ve always got the two things to worry about they stop thinking straight.”

“What they’ve done and what someone’s doing to them,” agreed Sloan.

“Did he get there by water?” asked Leeyes.

“What—oh, I hadn’t thought about that, sir. We’ll have to see.” There were so many things to see to now…

“We don’t want two dinghies on the loose, do we?”

When Sloan got outside again Constable Crosby was standing on guard outside the shed door talking to a worried Frank Mundill.

“What is going on, Inspector?” said the architect wildly. “Why should this house be picked on for all these things?”

“The real reason,” said Sloan, “is probably because it’s big enough to have a shed and a boathouse that don’t get used very often.”

“That’s very little consolation, I must say.” He shuddered “Ought you to search everywhere else?”

“No, sir, I don’t think that will be necessary, thank you.” Sloan had got some straight edges of his jigsaw on the board already. The death of Horace Boiler—no, the killing of Horace Boiler—was another piece. It might even prove to be one of the four most important pieces of all the puzzle—a cornerpiece.

Mundill ran a finger round inside the collar of his white turtleneck sweater. “It’s an unnerving business, isn’t it?”

“Nobody likes it, sir,” agreed Sloan. He was glad about that. Sophisticated fraud sometimes wrung unwilling admiration from investigating officers, but murder was a primitive crime and nobody liked it. The killing of a member of a tribe by another member of the same tribe was an offence against society. And it meant that no one in that society was safe. Perhaps that was the real reason why the murder charge accused the arrested person not so much of a killing but of an offence against the Queen’s Peace because that was what it was…

“That poor chap in there,” said Mundill worriedly.

“Yes, sir.” Sloan spared some sympathy for the dead man lying in the shed. But he carefully kept his judgement suspended. Horace Boiler might have been lured to his doom by the murderer in all innocence but Sloan did not think so. There was a certain lack of innocence in Boiler both as reported by Constable Ridgeford and observed by Sloan himself that augured the other thing.

“I could wish my niece hadn’t found him too,” murmured Mundill. “She’s had a lot to put up with lately, poor girl. What with one thing and another I’ll be glad when her mother and father get here.”

Sloan nodded sympathetically. The scientists said that a cabbage cried out when its neighbour in the field was cut down so it was only right and proper that one human being should feel for another. The unfeeling and the too-feeling both ran into trouble but that was something quite separate,

“I hope Dr. Tebot’s got her to go and lie down,” said Mundill.

“I hope,” said Sloan vigorously, “that he’s done no such thing.” Salvation lay in keeping busy and he said so, doctor or no.

“All right,” said Frank Mundill pacifically, “I’ll tell her what you said.”

“And tell her,” said Sloan, “that we’ll be wanting a statement from her too…”

As Mundill went indoors Sloan advanced once more on the shed.

Both policemen peered down at the body.

“I’ll bet he never knew what hit him,” averred Crosby.

“No,” agreed Sloan soberly.

Horace Boiler did not necessarily have to have been blackmailing anyone. He might simply have learned something to his advantage that the murderer didn’t want him to know about.

And so, in the event, to his ultimate disadvantage.

Something that a killer couldn’t afford for him to know. That alone might be enough for a man who had killed once. Appetite for murder grew—that was something else too primitive for words. Having offended against society by one killing it seemed as if the next death was less important, and the one after that not important at all. By then the murderer was outside the tribe and beyond salvation too.

“We’d better get him identified properly,” said Sloan mundanely.

“Yes, sir.”

“What, Crosby,” he asked, “can he have known that we don’t know?” That was the puzzle.

Crosby brought his eyebrows together in a prolonged frown. “He could have seen that the boathouse had been broken into.”

“And put two and two together after he found the body? Yes, that would follow…”

Blackmail, to be true blackmail, had to be the accusing or the threatening to accuse any person of a real crime with intent to extort or gain any property or valuable thing from any person.

Murder was a real crime.

“But he can’t have known that the body in the water had been murdered, can he, sir?” objected Crosby. “I mean we didn’t know ourselves until Dr. Dabbe said so. And we haven’t told anyone.”

“A good point, that.” Sloan regarded the figure on the shed floor and said absently, “So he must have known something else as well…”

“Something we don’t know?” asked Crosby helpfully.

“Or something that we do,” mused Sloan. “He might have spotted that sand-hopper thing too.”

“He knew about the sparling,” said Crosby, “didn’t he?”

Sloan squared his shoulders. “What we want is a chat with Mr. Basil Jensen.”

Constable Brian Ridgeford was panting slightly. The cliff path—like life—had led uphill all the way and it hadn’t been an easy one either. He’d left his bicycle down in the village. Now he was nearly at the top of the headland. He turned his gaze out to sea but it told him nothing. There was just an unbroken expanse of water below him. Far out to sea there was a smudge on the horizon that might just have been a container ship. Otherwise the sea was empty.

He settled himself down, conscious that he wasn’t the first man to keep watch on the headland. Men had waited here for Napoleon to come—and Hitler. They’d lit armada beacons up here on the Cat’s Back too as well as wrecking ones. From here the inhabitants of Marby might have seen the Danish invasion on its way.

“Keeping observation” was what Ridgeford would put in the book to describe his morning.

Watch and ward it used to be called in the old days.

It was much more windy up here than down in Marby village. He made himself as comfortable as he could in the long grass and turned his attention to Lea Farm. It was like a map come to life, farm and farmhouse printed on the landscape. He narrowed his gaze on the sheep-fold. Far away as he was he could see that the sheep-dipping tank was still full.

Ridgeford spared a thought for old Miss Finch. Difficult and dogmatic she might be but she hadn’t been so silly after all. She probably had seen something happening on the headland. The theory of an accurate report book suddenly came to life. Write it down, they’d taught him… let someone else decide if what you’d written was valuable or not.

He swung his glance back in the direction of the sea. This time there was something to see. Round the coast from Marby harbour was coming a small trawler. Ridgeford got to his feet and walked farther up the headland to get a better view of it. As he did so he nearly tripped over a figure lying half hidden in the grass. It was a man. He was using a pair of binoculars and was looking out to sea so intently that he hadn’t seen the approach of the policeman.

“Hullo, hullo,” said Ridgeford.

The man lowered his binoculars. “Morning, officer.”

“Looking for something, sir?”

“In a manner of speaking,” he said, scrambling to his feet.

The trawler was forging ahead. Ridgeford noticed that it was keeping close inshore and that the other man could not keep his eyes off it. Ridgeford asked him his name.

“My name?” said the man. “It’s Jensen. Basil Jensen. Why do you want to know?”

The general practitioner, Dr. Gregory Tebot, came out of Collerton House and joined Detective Inspector Sloan outside the shed while the various technicians of murder were bringing their expertise to bear upon the body inside it.

“She’ll be able to talk to you now, Inspector,” Dr. Tebot said. He was an old man and he looked both tired and sad.

“Thank you, Doctor,” said Sloan.

“Shocking business,” he said, pointing in the direction of the shed. “Are you going to tell the widow or am I?”

Death, remembered Sloan, was part of the doctor’s daily business too. What he had forgotten was that Dr. Tebot would know the Boilers. “Tell me about him,” he said.

“Horace? Not a lot to tell,” said the doctor. “Didn’t trouble me much.”

“A healthy type then,” said Sloan. Blackmail—if that was what he had been up to—was unhealthy in a different way.

“Spent his life messing about in boats,” Dr. Tebot said. “Out of doors most of the time.”

“Make much of a living?”

“I shouldn’t think so. Picked up a little here and a little there, I should say. Mostly at weekends but you’d never know, not with Horace.”

“Didn’t give anything away then,” said Sloan.

“He was the sort of man, Inspector,” said the old doctor drily, “who wouldn’t even tell his own mother how old he was.” He nodded towards Collerton House. “Go easy with the girl if you can. She’s had a packet lately, what with the aunt dying and everything.”

“The aunt,” said Sloan. A packet was an old army punishment. The “everything” was presumably a young man who had gone away.

“Hopeless case by the time I saw her,” said Dr. Tebot. “The other doctor said so and he was right.”

“What other doctor?”

“The one over in Calleford. I forget his name now. Mrs. Mundill was staying over there when she was first taken ill.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“Nice woman,” he said. “Young to die these days. Pity. Still, it happens.”

“It happens,” agreed Sloan. Perhaps they were the saddest words in the language after all.

“Pelion upon Ossa for the girl though.”

Life was like that, thought Sloan. The agony always got piled on.

“She was very good with her aunt,” said the doctor, “but she’s nearly at the end of her tether now.”

“I’ll bear it in mind,” said Sloan, but he made no promises. He had his duty to do.

He found Elizabeth Busby fighting to keep calm. “It was horrible, horrible.”

“Yes, miss.”

“The poor man…”

“He won’t have felt anything,” said Sloan awkwardly. “Dr. Tebot says he can’t have done.”

She twisted a handkerchief between her fingers. “Who is he? Do you know?”

“We think,” said Sloan cautiously, “that it’s someone called Horace Boiler.”

She sat up quickly. “Horace? But I saw him only yesterday.”

“You did?”

“He rowed past while I was putting flowers on my aunt’s grave. It’s by the river, you see.”

“You knew him then?”

“Oh, yes, Inspector.” Her face relaxed a little. “Everyone who lives by the river knows Horace.”

“He was,” suggested Sloan tentatively, “what you might call a real character, I suppose?”

“He was an old rogue,” she said a trifle more cheerfully.

Perhaps, thought Sloan to himself, that was the same thing…

“What did he say, miss?” he asked.

“Oh, he didn’t say anything,” she said. “He just rowed up river.”

If Elizabeth Busby had noticed the broken boathouse doors so would Horace Boiler. It was beginning to look as if he had taken the matter up with someone and that it had been a dangerous thing to do.

“You didn’t see him again after that, miss?”

She shook her head.

“Nor near anything last night?” That was a forlorn hope. The garden shed was at the back of the house.

“No.”

“Yesterday evening you and Mr. Mundill were both here?”

“I was,” she said. “Frank wasn’t. He’d gone to see someone about doing some measurements for an alteration to a house.”

Sloan wrote down Mrs. Veronica Feckler’s name and address.

“He went at tea time and stayed on a bit,” she said.

“And you, miss?”

An abyss of pain yawned before her as she thought about the slide rule. “Me? I stayed in, Inspector. I didn’t do anything very much.” An infinite weariness came over her. “I just sat.”

“And Mr. Mundill? When did he get back?”

“It must have been about eight o’clock. We had supper together.” She looked up and said uncertainly, “When… when did…”

“We don’t know for certain ourselves yet, miss,” said Sloan truthfully. It was, he knew, the refuge of the medical people too. They professed that they did not know when they did not really want to say. There was no comeback then from the patient. And it was true sometimes that they did not know, but the great thing was that the point at which they did know was not the one at which they told the patient…

“Not, I suppose,” she said dully, “that it’s all that important, is it? What’s important is that someone killed him.”

“Probably,” said Sloan with painful honesty, “what is important is why someone killed him.”

He was rewarded with a swift glance of comprehension.

“For the record, miss,” he went on, “I take it that to your knowledge Horace Boiler did not come to the house?”

She shook her head.

“And that you heard and saw nothing?”

“Not a thing, Inspector.” She lifted her face. “Not a thing.”

“Thank you,” he said quietly. “Now, miss, there are one or two things I want to ask you about a man called Peter Hinton…”

16

Her tryal comes on in the afternoon.

« ^ »

At first it was impossible for Detective Inspector Sloan, to tell if Elizabeth Busby was understanding the import of his questions.

She answered them readily enough.

She showed him Peter Hinton’s note.

“It’s in his handwriting, miss, I take it?”

“I hadn’t thought it wasn’t,” she said uncertainly. “But I couldn’t swear to it.”

“Did he usually sign his name in full?”

“He hadn’t—that is we didn’t—write much. There was the telephone, you see.”

“I see, miss.”

“It was written with his pen,” she said quickly. “He always wrote with a proper nib.”

Later she showed him what was really troubling her. The slide rule.

Sloan regarded it in silence.

“He must have come back,” she said, “and sat here after that last time.”

“Could he be sure you wouldn’t appear?” said Sloan.

“Towards the end,” she said, a tremor creeping into her voice, “we never left Aunt Celia alone.”

“So,” said Sloan slowly, “if Mr. Mundill was down here in the hall you would be certain to be upstairs.”

“Yes, that’s right. We took it in turns.”

“I see,” said Sloan. Disquiet was the word for what he was feeling about Peter Hinton. “And you’re sure your only disagreement the last time he was here was over whether your aunt should be in hospital?”

“Disagreement is too strong a word, Inspector.” She’d recounted all the details of the last time she’d seen Peter Hinton. “Hospital was just something we talked about, that’s all. Peter kept on suggesting it and we didn’t want it. You can see that, can’t you?”

“Yes, miss.” He cleared his throat. “You don’t happen to know if he ever broke his ankle, do you?”

“When he was seven,” she said immediately. “He fell off a swing. Why do you ask?”

It is an undoubted fact that, once set in motion, routine gathers a momentum all of its own.

That was how it came about that Detective Inspector Sloan and Detective Constable Crosby, standing by a dead Horace Boiler, were visited by a police motor-cyclist. He drew up before them, coming to a standstill with the inescapable flourish of all motor-cyclists, and handed over an envelope. Crosby tore it open.

“It’s a copy of Celia Mundill’s will, sir.”

Routine took more stopping than did initiative. Surely there was a moral to be drawn there…

“Well?”

Crosby scanned it quickly.

Routine, thought Sloan, took on a certain strength too. Perhaps that was because it wasn’t challenged often enough.

“It’s short and sweet,” said Crosby.

It seemed a very long time ago that Sloan had asked for it.

“She left,” read out the constable, “a life interest in all her estate to her husband.”

It occurred to Sloan that Mrs. Celia Mundill may very well have been in that delicate situation for a woman of being rather richer than the man she married. Certainly they had been living in her old family home and her husband’s profession was conducted from her father’s old studio.

“With everything,” carried on Crosby, “to go to her only niece at his death.”

“Including her share in the Camming patents,” concluded Sloan aloud. Mrs. Mundill, then, had seen her role as a fiduciary one—a trustee for the past, handing down the flame to the future.

“And if the niece dies before the husband, then,” said Crosby, “her sister collects.”

“What else?”

“Nothing else,” said Crosby.

“Date?” said Sloan peremptorily. There was a time to every purpose, the Bible said. The time for writing a will might be important.

Crosby looked at the paper. “April this year, sir.”

The time had mattered then.

In olden days men would begin their last will and testament with their name and then add the prescient words “and like to die.” The practice of medicine might not have amounted to very much in those days but at least then patients knew where they stood in relation to death, the great reaper. He wondered if Mrs. Celia Mundill had been “like to die” in April. If so she must have known it, too, and made her will.

And presumably her peace with the world.

Crosby started to fold up the paper again.

“Nothing,” enquired Sloan appositely, “about remarriage?”

Wills were funny things. They lay dormant for years—like the seeds of some plants—and then something would stir their testators into activity again. Old wills would be torn up and new wills would be written. Or the testator died.

Crosby checked the will. “Nothing about the remarriage of the widower.”

A time to get, and a time to lose, as Ecclesiastes had it.

No, not that.

A time to keep, and a time to cast away.

That was more like it.

Crosby folded the will neatly away. “Nothing for us in that.”

“It doesn’t appear to change anything,” agreed Sloan cautiously.

That was the important thing with testamentary dispositions and crime.

“The widower’s income doesn’t change anyway,” said Crosby.

“His death would matter to the girl,” said Sloan. “That’s all.”

Crosby frowned. “Then she would scoop the pool, wouldn’t she?”

“One day,” said Sloan moderately, “she’s going to be worth quite a lot of money.” It didn’t weigh against a bruised heart; he was old enough to know that.

“I wonder if that boy-friend of hers knew how rich before he ditched her,” said Crosby.

In an ordinary man it would have been an unworthy thought; it was a perfectly proper one in a police officer.

“He didn’t ditch her,” said Sloan absently. He was sure about that now. “Somebody did for him. And put him in the river.”

“Poor little rich girl,” commented Crosby. He waved the will in the air. “What’s this got to do with it all then, sir?”

“Probably nothing at all,” said Sloan. The widower’s income was assured, the niece’s long-term future secure. “Money isn’t everything, though,” Sloan reminded the constable. It had been one of his mother’s favourite sayings. It applied—with a certain irony—to some crime too.

“Comes in handy, though, doesn’t it, sir. Money…”

“It’s only one currency,” insisted Sloan. “There are others.”

There was fear—and hate.

With Horace Boiler now it looked very much as if someone had been trading in silence. From the dead man’s point of view it had been dearly bought. Sloan turned his attention back to the old fisherman. Not that looking at him was going to tell the police anything. What Sloan needed was a view into the man’s mind before he had been killed.

“He found the body,” mused Sloan aloud.

“He took us up river afterwards,” said Crosby.

“He took Ridgeford out too,” said Sloan, “to collect it.”

“And that Mr. Jensen from the museum. Don’t forget him.”

“I haven’t,” said Sloan drily. “And I haven’t forgotten The Clarembald either.”

“He could have seen the boathouse doors, too,” said Crosby. “We did.”

“He did see Elizabeth Busby by the grave,” said Sloan. “She said so.”

“But,” reiterated Crosby, “Boiler didn’t know that the man in the water…”

“Peter Hinton,” said Sloan with conviction. He was sure of that now.

“Peter Hinton then had been pushed over the edge of somewhere, did he, so what was there for him to get so excited about?”

“Your guess, Crosby,” said Sloan solemnly, “is as good as mine.”

Interviewing Mrs. Boiler had been an unrewarding business in every way, and now Sloan and Crosby were with Mrs. Veronica Feckler. It was impossible to tell whether she knew that she was being asked to provide an alibi for a man.

“Yesterday evening?” she said vaguely. “Yes, Mr. Mundill was here yesterday evening.”

Detective Constable Crosby made a note.

“He came down after tea,” she said.

“I see, madam.”

Sloan was favoured with a charming smile. She was a personable woman and she knew it. “To measure up my cottage, you know.”

“So we gather, madam.”

She sketched an outline with a graceful hand. “I need another room building on. Frank—Mr. Mundill—he’s an architect, you know…”

“Yes, madam.” That much Sloan did know by now. Of the fire station, of the junior school, of Alec Manton’s farmhouse and of a multi-storey car park.

And a multi-storey car park.

That was funny.

Frank Mundill hadn’t mentioned that to Sloan. It had been Inspector Harpe who had told him about that multistorey car park. Not Mundill. Even though he had got an award for designing it.

Mrs. Feckler said, “He’s going to do my extension for me.”

“How long was he with you, madam?” A thought was beginning to burgeon in Sloan’s mind.

“Until just before supper.” She wasn’t the sort of woman who frowned but she did allow herself a tiny pucker of the forehead. “He left about half past seven. Is it important?”

It was strange, decided Elizabeth Busby, how heavy one’s body could feel. She had almost to drag one leaden foot after the other. And yet she weighed the same—rather less, if anything—as she had done the day before.

When the inspector had left the house to go back to the shed she tidied away the cleaning things that she had brought out into the hall. There would be no more work done in Collerton House that day. She went into the kitchen and set about making coffee. That, at least, would be something useful to do and all those men out there would be glad of something to drink.

Time—even the most leaden-footed time—does eventually pass. And in the end the body of Horace Boiler was borne away, the tumult and the shouting died and the photographers and the police—the captains and the kings—departed.

Frank Mundill came back indoors looking years older. “I’ll be in my office,” he said briefly, going upstairs.

She nodded. There suddenly didn’t seem anything to say any more. She went and sat in the window-seat, her shoulders hunched up and unable to decide whether or not to take the tablets Dr. Tebot had left for her. He really did look as if a frock coat would have suited him, but he had been kind.

Even the hunching on the window-seat seemed symbolic. There was no leisurely resting in a chair for her today while she waited for Inspector Sloan to come back. The inspector had hinted—ever so delicately—but hinted all the same that he might have some more news for her later on and that he would return if he had.

“About Horace Boiler?” she had asked.

“Not about Horace,” he had replied.

Now she understood why Dante had had a place called Limbo in his portrayal of Hell…

It was quite a long time after that that she picked up the morning paper. It had been lying unregarded on the hall table since it had been delivered. It wasn’t that she wanted to read it particularly, just that after a certain length of time she needed to do something with her hands. Not her head. That didn’t take in any of what she was reading. Not at first, that is.

There is a certain state of alertness rejoicing in the grand name of thematic apperception which describes the attraction to eye and ear of items that the owner of that eye and ear is interested in. It explained how it was that Elizabeth Busby was able to read almost the whole paper without taking any of it in at all—until, that is, she turned to that page of the daily paper which dealt in—among other things—short items of news from the sale rooms.

“Bonington Sells Well” ran the headline.

“This previously known beach scene,” ran the text underneath it, “thought to be of the Picardy coast and authenticated as being by Richard Parkes Bonington (1802-28), fetched the top price in a sale of nineteenth-century water-colours yesterday…”

Above the report was an illustration of the painting. It was the same one that had hung over the bed in the spare bedroom of Collerton House as long as Elizabeth could remember. It was the same one that Frank Mundill had said that Peter Hinton had asked for and been given.

She heard the tiniest sound on the stair and looked up quickly. Frank Mundill was standing there.

“Frank,” she said at once, “you know that picture that Peter took…”

“What about it?” he said.

“It wasn’t by Grandfather at all. Look!” She pointed to the newspaper. “It’s here in the paper.”

He strode over. “Let me see.”

“There’s a picture of it. It was worth a lot of money.”

He said, “Well, it stands to reason that your grandfather had some good paintings, doesn’t it? To copy.”

That wasn’t what was bothering Elizabeth. “Peter asked for it, you said.”

Mundill frowned. “He did. It’s the same one all right. Look, Elizabeth, I think there’s an explanation for all this but there’s something I would have to show you first.”

“He hasn’t been seen,” she said dully. “The police said so. And they’ve asked me for a photograph.”

“Come along with me,” said Mundill. “I want you to see something. Something to do with Peter.”

“There’s no one here,” said Detective Constable Crosby. “Nonsense, man. Try again.”

“I’ve tried,” insisted Crosby. “The front door and the back. There’s no answer.”

“Mundill’s car…”

“Not in the garage,” said Crosby.

Detective Inspector Sloan took a swift look round the outside of Collerton House. There was no sign of life there at all.

“They’ve gone,” said Crosby superfluously.

“Where?” barked Sloan.

“And why?” added Crosby. “I thought they knew we were coming back.”

“They did,” said Sloan gravely.

“Something’s happened then.”

“But what?” Sloan scanned the blank windows of Collerton House as if they could provide him with an answer. “And where the devil have they gone?”

“The river?”

“Not by car,” said Sloan, adding under his breath a brief orison about that. The River Calle was too near for comfort. He would rather conduct searches on dry ground… “No, they’ve gone somewhere by car. Get on to Control, Crosby, and get that car stopped.”

Crosby picked up the hand microphone in the police car and gave his message. Seconds later it came back to him and to every other police car in the county. “Calling all cars, calling all cars… Attention to be given to a dark blue Ford Zephyr, registration number…”

“It may be too late,” said Sloan, although he didn’t know for what.

“If seen,” chattered the speaker, “stop and detain for questioning.”

Frank Mundill drove over Billing Bridge and then gently along the Berebury road. He was quite quiet and Elizabeth didn’t press him into speech. He drove carefully, glancing now and then into his rear-view mirror. What he did—or did not—see there evidently caused him a certain amount of satisfaction because he went on driving with unimpaired concentration.

She tried once to draw him out about the picture.

“Wait and see,” he said.

“Where are we going?” she asked presently. .

“Berebury,” was all he said to that.

She tried once more to draw him out about the picture. “All in good time, my dear.”

Thus they came to Berebury. Reassured by yet another glance in his rear-view mirror, Frank Mundill steered the car towards the centre of the town.

“Frank, I don’t understand…”

“You will. I’ve just got to park the car. It won’t be difficult. It’s early closing day.”

He made for the multi-storey car park. Entrance was by ticket from a machine. He took the ticket and the entrance barrier automatically rose to let them through. He placed the ticket on the dashboard and nosed the car up to the first level. There were plenty of parking spaces there but he did not stop. Nor at the second level. It being a quiet afternoon there were no cars at all above the third level. The fourth level was empty too.

“Frank, where are we going? Why are we going right to the top? You must tell me.”

“Upward and ever onward,” he said, a smile playing on his lips now.

The car swept round the elliptical corner at the end of the building and up onto the highest level of all.

“Frank…”

“Soon be there,” he said, accelerating. There were no other cars in sight now—just the bare ramps and parking places. He gave a swift tug at the steering wheel and soon they were in the open air again on the very top of the car park. He pulled the car neatly into a parking bay and got out.

Elizabeth followed him.

“This way,” he said. “Do you know that on a clear day you can see Calleford?”

“I don’t want to see Calleford,” she said. “I want to know why the picture you said Peter wanted has been sold.”

“You shall,” he said softly. “You shall know everything soon. But first come this way…”

He walked away from the edge of the car park to the very centre.

“Follow me, Elizabeth. I designed this place, remember. I know what to show you…”

“Faster,” said Sloan between gritted teeth.

Crosby changed up through the gears with demonic speed. “Which way?”

“Berebury,” said Sloan. There was just the one hope that he was right about that.

The constable raced the car through the gates of Collerton House. With dressage and horses it was walk, trot, canter. With a souped-up police car it was a straightforward gallop from a standing start.

“Humpty-Dumpty sat on a wall,” said Crosby. “Humpty-Dumpty had a great fall.”

“Let’s hope that we find the right wall,” said Sloan tersely.

Crosby concentrated on keeping one very fast car on the road. He took Billing Bridge faster than it had ever been taken before, narrowly avoiding caroming off the upper reaches of one of its stanchions.

“The car park in Berebury,” said Sloan in a sort of incantation. “The multi-storey car park. It must be.”

“What about it?” asked Crosby, cutting round a milk-float. The milkman was used to imprecations from faster drivers but not to being overtaken at that speed.

“It’s the right height,” said Sloan.

“So are a lot of things,” said Crosby, crouching over the wheel as if he were a racing driver but in fact looking more like Jehu than any denizen of the race-track.

“Mundill designed it,” said Sloan. “Two spirals round a central well. Come on, man, get a move on.”

Crosby put his foot down still farther and the car ate up the miles into Berebury. They shot through the main street and swung round into the entrance of the car park. It did nothing for Sloan’s blood pressure that they had to pause at the entrance like any shopping housewife to collect a ticket and allow the automatic barrier to rise.

“Hurry, man,” urged Sloan. “Hurry!”

Crosby raced through the gears as fast as he could; the slope of the ramp needed plenty of power. The corner at the end, though, was tighter than any at Silverstone. He took it on two wheels.

“And again,” commanded Sloan at the next level.

But they had lost speed on the way up. Crosby took the next bend more easily but at a slower rate.

“Keep going,” adjured Sloan. He had his hand on the door catch.

They reached the top floor and came out into the sunshine. The sudden glare momentarily distracted both men but there was no disguising the dark blue Ford Zephyr standing in solitary state on the top platform or the two figures standing by the parapet of the central well. One of them had his arm round the other who appeared to be resisting.

“Stop!” shouted Sloan as he ran.

The man took a quick look over his shoulder and standing away from the other—a girl—vaulted lightly over the parapet.

17

Here ends all dispute.

« ^

I suppose,” snorted Superintendent Leeyes, who was a sound-and-fury man if ever there was one, “that you’re going to tell me that everything makes sense now.”

“The picture is a little clearer, sir,” said Detective Inspector Sloan. He was reporting back to Superintendent Leeyes the next morning, the morning after Frank Mundill’s spectacular suicide over the edge of the parapet at the top of the multi-storey car park.

“Perhaps, then, Sloan, you will have the goodness to explain what has been going on.”

“Murder, sir.”

“I know that.”

“More murder than we knew about, sir.”

“Sloan, I will not sit here and have you being enigmatic.”

“No, sir,” said Sloan hastily. “The first murder wasn’t of Peter Hinton at all. It was of Celia Mundill.”

“The wife?” said Leeyes.

“The wife,” said Sloan succinctly. “Frank Mundill wanted to marry Mrs. Veronica Feckler.”

“Ha!” said Leeyes.

“So,” said Sloan, “he set about disposing of his wife.”

“He made a very good job of it,” commented Leeyes.

“He nearly got away with it,” said Sloan warmly. “He would have done but for Peter Hinton putting two and two together.”

“So that’s what happened, is it?”

“Elizabeth Busby tells me that Hinton was something of a student of criminology, sir. His favourite reading was the Notable British Trials series.”

“He suspected something?”

“We think so. Hinton wanted Mrs. Mundill in hospital.”

“That wouldn’t have done for a murderer,” said Leeyes.

“No.”

“So Peter Hinton had to go?” grunted Leeyes.

“Exactly.” Sloan cleared his throat. “I—that is, we—think that he came back one day and challenged Mundill.”

“And that was his undoing?”

“It was. He was a threat, you see, to the successful murder of Mrs. Mundill.”

Talk of successful murders always upset the superintendent. “Do you mean that, Sloan?”

“I do, sir,” said Detective Inspector Sloan seriously. “It was as near perfect as they come. We would never have known about the murder of Mrs. Mundill if he hadn’t killed the young man too.”

Leeyes didn’t like the sound of that. “How perfect?”

“Arsenic, at a guess.”

“You can’t have a perfect murder with arsenic.”

“You can if it’s diagnosed and treated as cancer of the stomach,” said Sloan.

“But what doctor would…”

“An old doctor who has had a letter from another doctor saying that that was what was wrong.”

Leeyes whistled. “Clever.”

“Very clever,” said Sloan. “Each year the Mundills went at Easter to housekeep for a locum tenens. Mundill’s sister is married to a single-handed general practitioner in Calleford. While Mrs. Mundill was there she had her first attack of sickness. The locum—a Dr. Penthwin—arranged for her to have an X-ray at Calleford Hospital.”

“But it would be normal,” objected Leeyes at once.

“Of course it would, sir,” said Sloan, “but that doesn’t matter.”

“No?”

“All that matters is the letter that the Mundills bring back from Dr. Penthwin to their own doctor at Collerton, Dr. Gregory Tebot.”

“A forgery?” said Leeyes.

“From start to finish,” said Sloan who had seen it now.

“Mundill writes it himself in the locum’s name on professional writing paper. His brother-in-law knows nothing about it—neither does the locum, for that matter. Anyway Dr. Penthwin’s soon gone. Dr. Tebot gets the letter which he thinks is from Dr. Penthwin and starts treating Mrs. Mundill for an unoperable cancer of the stomach.”

“Most doctors would,” agreed Leeyes reluctantly.

“Mundill sees that the doses of arsenic follow the course of the disease,” said Sloan. “Peter Hinton spotted it was arsenic, I’m sure about that. He’d asked if her eyes kept on watering. That’s what put us onto it too.”

Leeyes grunted. “Mundill had long enough to look it all up in the books while he was over there.”

“He’d even,” said Sloan, “had long enough to go through the patients’ medical records until he finds a letter with the wording pretty nearly the same as he wants.”

“Clever,” said Leeyes again. A whole new vista of medical murder opened up before him. “Has it been done before, do you think?”

“Who can say?” said Sloan chillingly. “Anyway, Dr. Tebot isn’t going to start on fresh X-rays or anything like that, is he? He wouldn’t see any need for them.”

“The nearly perfect murder,” said Leeyes.

“There was something else going for him, too, sir.”

“What was that?”

“Celia Mundill didn’t want to be cremated.”

“And that suited the husband, I’m sure,” said Leeyes.

“Cremation requires two medical certificates,” said Sloan. “Burial only one.” He’d leetured Crosby on the burial of victims of murder. A grave was the best place of all.

“The nearly perfect murder,” said Leeyes again.

“He almost spoilt it, sir.”

“How come?”

“Gilding the lily.” It was surprising how often that happened with murderers. They wouldn’t—couldn’t—leave well alone.

“What lily?”

“The grave, sir. Mundill insisted on his wife being buried by the water’s edge where the river floods.”

“To help wash the arsenic away,” said Leeyes. He cast his mind back. “That’s been done before, hasn’t it?”

“And to aid decomposition,” completed Sloan. “I don’t know how much it would have helped but I daresay he thought that if anyone got any bright ideas after he married Mrs. Feckler…”

Leeyes grunted. “He was going to marry her, was he?”

“He was,” said Sloan. “On his wife’s money. Financially he had nothing to lose by her death and a lot to gain.”

“That’s always dangerous,” said the voice of experience.

“Mundill had a life interest in his wife’s estate,” said Sloan, “but he wanted a little capital too.”

“Don’t we all,” said Leeyes.

“That,” said Sloan manfully, “is why he sold a picture that wasn’t his to sell.”

“Ha.”

“And blamed its disappearance on Peter Hinton.”

“An opportunist if ever there was one,” commented Leeyes.

“What put the girl’s life in danger,” said Sloan, “was her spotting the report of the sale in the daily paper.”

It had been a close thing yesterday.

“If it hadn’t been for that, eh, Sloan, Mundill might have got away with murder.”

“I’m sure I hope not, sir,” said Sloan.

“And the fisherman,” said Leeyes. “Why did he have to go?”

“We think,” said Sloan slowly, “that Boiler must have been trying to apply a little pressure to Mundill.”

“Why?”

“He wasn’t a nice man,” said Sloan obliquely. “He could easily have known all about Mundill’s visits to Mrs. Feckler’s cottage. He was about at all hours remember and not very scrupulous.”

“He could have spotted that sand-hopper creature.” Leeyes had seen the report on gammarus pulex.

“That was probably what took him up river the first time,” said Sloan, “but I think it may have been his cousin Ted who gave him the real clue.”

“Cousin Ted? You’ll have to do better than that for the coroner, Sloan.”

“Ted Boiler is the village undertaker.”

“What about it?”

“Mundill wouldn’t have the coffin screwed down.” The exhumation of Celia Mundill had begun that morning. A loose coffin lid had been the first thing that they had found.

“Ted Boiler didn’t give it much thought but he did happen to mention it to his cousin.”

“Horace Boiler.”

“Precisely, sir. It probably didn’t mean anything to Horace either until he saw the girl beside her aunt’s grave on Tuesday afternoon and realised how near the water it was.”

“And so he put two and two together?”

“He probably just thought he would tackle Mundill about it.”

Leeyes nodded. “By then, of course, Mundill will have got an appetite for murder.”

“It grows,” said Sloan. That was one area where policemen and psychologists were at one. An appetite for murder grew on itself. “Besides, sir, he couldn’t risk Boiler raising any doubts about Celia Mundill just when he was concentrating on keeping suspicion away from the body in the water.”

“Talking of the body in the water, Sloan, what I can’t understand is why Mundill broke the boathouse doors open. That just drew attention to the place.”

“If,” said Sloan, “anyone had found that body in there at any time without the outer boathouse doors having been prised open, they would know that Mundill had put the body there.”

“And why not leave it there, Sloan, safely in the boat-house? Tell me that.”

“Because, sir,” said Sloan, “the girl’s father was expected back from South America and he liked his little bit of fishing. The boathouse would be the first place he’d make for. We were told that right at the beginning.”

They’d been told almost everything; it was just a matter of sorting it all out. That was all…

“There’s another thing, Sloan.”

“Sir?”

“Those copper things that were found in their pockets…”

Brenda Ridgeford said, “I still don’t understand about those copper things in their pockets, Brian.”

“They were meant to put us off the scent,” said her husband in a lordly fashion, “but they didn’t.”

“You mean The Clarembald wasn’t anything to do with the murders?”

“Nothing,” said Brian Ridgeford.

“But…”

“Mundill”—yesterday Brian Ridgeford wouldn’t have dreamed of calling the architect anything except Mr. Mundill, but today the man was reduced to the ranks of common criminals—“simply took them from Mr. Manton’s farm when he was over there.”

Alec Manton was still entitled to be called “Mr.”

Alec Manton and his amateur underwater research group had been investigating the trailings caught up by a trawler. That was how, explained Ridgeford, they had come on The Clarembald. They had proceeded to excavate the wreck.

In good faith and secrecy.

It had been the secrecy which had baffled Basil Jensen. When news of the great discovery was brought to the notice of an excited archeological world the name of the curator would be nowhere to be found.

“The biggest ever find on his patch,” said Ridgeford, “and he wasn’t being allowed a hand in it.” He searched about in his mind for a parallel. “It would be like not letting me in on an armed raid in Edsway, Brenda.”

“I don’t want you in on any armed raids anywhere,” said his wife. “Professional death comes in two ways, you know.”

“They’d got a load of those copper ingots ashore,” said the constable, “and we reckon Mundill spotted them one day at the farm. They didn’t need keeping underwater, you see.”

The sheep-dipping tank at Lea Farm had yielded a bizarre collection of wooden objects—a sea chest, a fid bound with lead, a table and something called a dead-eye.

“Used for extending the shrouds,” Alec Manton had explained helpfully.

Brian Ridgeford had been no wiser.

“Poor Mr. Jensen,” said Brenda Ridgeford. “Left out in the cold like that.”

“Yes,” said Brian Ridgeford uneasily. Far from leaving the museum curator out in the cold, he’d very nearly taken him into custody yesterday. “He’s waving a protection order at Mr. Manton now.”

“A piece of paper isn’t going to save anything,” said Mrs. Ridgeford.

Constable Ridgeford wasn’t so sure about that. “With the strong arm of the law behind it…”

“There’s ways round the strong arm of the law, Brian Ridgeford,” she said provocatively, “I can tell you.”

“That’s as may be, my girl,” he said with dignity, “but only when the law allows it.”

“I suppose, Inspector,” said Elizabeth Busby shakily, “that I have to thank you for saving my life.”

“No, miss, you don’t.” Sloan was sitting on the window-seat in the hall of Collerton House again.

“He was going to kill me,” she said, “because I knew about the picture.”

“Murder’s a dangerous game,” said Sloan sententiously, “especially once the novelty’s worn off.”

“Poor, poor Aunt Celia.”

Detective Inspector Sloan bowed his head in a tribute to a woman he had never seen alive. Dr. Dabbe was doing another post-mortem now—to make assurance doubly sure. Inquest-sure, too.

“The old, old story,” she said bitterly.

“The eternal triangle,” agreed Sloan. He’d read something once that put it very well… “The actors are, it seems, the usual three. Husband, wife and lover.” It practically amounted to a prescription for murder. Aloud he went on, “And then murder once done…”

“Peter… poor Peter, too.”

“He’d stumbled on your aunt’s murder,” said Sloan.

“He’d always been fascinated by crime,” she said. “He read a lot about it.”

“It was very clever of him.”

“So he had to go, too,” she said tightly.

“He had to be silenced,” said Sloan. He coughed. “I take it that he’d have gone easily enough to have a look at the multi-storey car park if invited?”

“I did, didn’t I?” She shuddered. “Frank sounded so reasonable and I really did think he had something there to show me. And there’s no one up there on early closing day.”

Sloan nodded. He could imagine Frank Mundill being plausible. “It was a perfect place,” he said. “A double helix round a central light well, with a parapet at the top and a door at the bottom.”

“A door with a key,” she said.

“Mundill had a key, all right,” he said. “And to the car park exit gate. He had done the original specification, remember. He had no problems in that direction. He had access to everything he wanted. He could come back at night for the body.”

“It all fits, doesn’t it?” she said.

All the pieces of the jigsaw were there now. Sloan would have to lock them together for his report but they were there. Elizabeth Busby didn’t have to know about all of them. There was no point, for instance, in her being told about the blood that they’d found inside the light well of the car park, blood that wasn’t Frank Mundill’s. He did need to tell her about a photograph of Peter Hinton that had been superimposed on a photograph of a dead young man in Dr. Dabbe’s mortuary.

And about a sure and certain dentist.

Sloan said nothing into the silence that followed his telling her.

Presently she said, “And Horace Boiler?”

“He put two and two together about your aunt.” Perhaps it hadn’t been such a perfect murder after all. “He couldn’t have known what really happened. Just that there was something wrong.”

“And he paid the price.”

“He knew what he was doing, miss.” For Horace Boiler anyway Sloan didn’t feel too much pity…

Detective Constable Crosby was waiting in the car for him outside Collerton House. Sloan climbed into the passenger seat and shut the door with quite unnecessary vigour.

“A nasty case,” he said.

Crosby started up the engine.

“Three murders,‘ said Sloan. The only saving grace had been that a wicked man’s cupidity had not succeeded…

“Mr. Basil Jensen,” said Detective Constable Crosby, “wants us to meet him over at Marby.”

Detection demanded many things of a man. A working knowledge of eighteenth-century ships was obviously going to be called for.

“All right,” growled Sloan. “Get going then.”

Crosby pulled the car away from the front door of Collerton House and settled himself at the wheel. He put a respectable distance behind him before he spoke.

“Sir…”

“What is it now?”

“What sits at the bottom of the sea and shivers?”

In the grip of powerful emotion and with an awful fascination Sloan heard himself saying, “I don’t know what sits at the bottom of the sea and shivers.”

“A nervous wreck.”

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Catherine Aird had never tried her hand at writing suspense stories before publishing The Religious Body—a novel which immediately established her as one of the genre’s most talented writers. A Late Phoenix, The Stately Home Murder, His Burial Too, Some Die Eloquent, Henrietta Who?, A Most Contagious Game, Parting Breath and Last Respects have subsequently enhanced her reputation. Her ancestry is Scottish, but she now lives in a village in East Kent, near Canterbury.

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