Last Respects (19 page)

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 other 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.

CHAPTER 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 gabbled 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 lab 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 on to 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 Boller,' 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 for 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 cross-roads there,' said Leeyes, even though he meant the sea.

It had been highwaymen who waited at the cross-roads to double their chances of getting a victim. They used to hang felons at the cross-roads 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.

‘Boller 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 Boller 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. Boller'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 Boller 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 sheds and boathouses 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 Boller—no, the killing of Horace Boller—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 Boller 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 Boller 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 Boller 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.