Last Respects (20 page)

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 his 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 sandhopper 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.

He settled himself down in a little hollow. 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 sheepfold. 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 further 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 Bollers. ‘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 Luston. 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 Boller.'

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 door so would Horace Boller. 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 hear 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 Boller 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 …'

CHAPTER 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 him 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 Boller, were visited by a police motorcyclist. 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 might 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 of 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.'