Last Respects (16 page)

‘Yes, sir, I'm sure.'

‘So you have to store them under water 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 under water?'

‘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 Boller 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 than that he should come to Gordon 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.

CHAPTER 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 unrecognizable knows what they're doing. Do you realize, sir,' he added energetically, ‘that if that man Horace Boller 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.