Slight Mourning (15 page)

“Any particular chat?” inquired Sloan casually.

He knew how it was, all right. That was one of the things about the job. Once you were on it you could hardly talk about anything else. Not while you were at the police station anyway and half the time when you weren't either …

“Oh, just the usual …”

Crosby still hadn't caught the bee.

Miss Paterson waved a hand. “A post mortem on the village fête—that's always good for a bit of in-fighting—the Government—always something to talk about there …”

“Quite so,” said Sloan with the strict impartiality demanded of the Best Police Force in the World.

“And the Pennyfeather brothers,” recollected Miss Paterson. “They're our local bother boys. Somebody's usually got a story about them. Always on the look-out for trouble and finding it. Knock a man down as soon as look at him.”

“Do you hear that, Crosby?” said Sloan. “You'll have to watch your step.”

“Yes, sir.” Crosby sounded glum. The bee—still at large—sounded outraged.

Miss Paterson forged on. “Yet another baby at Fallow Farm Cottage—they'll soon have to sleep head to tail down there—oh, and Gregory Fitch's father.”

“What had he been up to?”

“Nothing. It's just that they managed to get him into an old folks' home at last, and Bill was telling us about it. Fitch'd been the Fents' gardener all his life—lived down in Keeper's Cottage beyond the old Folly but he'd reverted to stock a bit lately …”

Sloan, who grew roses for a hobby, nodded.

“Quite gone to seed,” said Cynthia Paterson briskly. “Started talking nonsense about goings-on in the Folly and so on. Nature taking over again and all that. Civilization's not really very deep, is it?”

“Thin as paint,” said the policeman feelingly. “Ask any man on the strength …”

“Anyway, in the end Paul Washby had to get him taken away. Well, they'd tidied the old chap up so much over at the hospital that Greg didn't know him on the Sunday when he went in to see him. He told Bill he walked right past the end of the bed. Never seen him with his teeth in before, he said.”

“Ah,” said Sloan, who was of an age now to be sympathetic about teeth. He was peering out of the greenhouse while she spoke to see if he could spot signs of the cultivation of rhubarb.

“Mind you,” said Miss Paterson showing an exemplary staying power with the original question, “being a mere woman I don't know what the gentlemen talked about when we left them.”

“You left them?”

“All alone,” she said solemnly, echoing his tone.

“All the men?” This added a new dimension to his inquiries about poisoning. “Why?”

“I shouldn't be surprised if it wasn't St. Paul,” said the old rector's daughter unexpectedly. “Someone who didn't like women must have started it, mustn't they? And he didn't like women, I mean. St. Paul.”

“Started what?” asked Sloan wildly.

“The custom. We're pretty backward out this way and we still leave 'em to it”

“Leave who to what, Miss Paterson?” The Mad Hatter's Tea Party sounded saner than this.

“The gentlemen to the port,” she said, splashing some water on a potted salpiglossis. “This is a good colour, isn't it?”

“Oh, the port …” Sloan rapidly tried to call to mind what he knew about port. It wasn't a lot. You had to pass it to the left or something—that was it. Left was the port side. The opposite of starboard. There was another thing he'd heard about port.

“Tawny?” he said tentatively.

“Vintage, I should think,” said Miss Paterson. “There.

“Just so,” said Sloan. On quite another plane from life at Strontfield Park there was Kitty, Kitty. She was a disreputable old soak down in the town at Berebury, who had never been known to touch anything but port and lemon. She always came when she was called, did Kitty, Kitty … Now there was somebody who must know all there was to know about port.

“But as to what they talked about while they were sipping it, Inspector, I couldn't begin to say.”

“I can see,” said Sloan ponderously, “that Women's Lib hasn't got very far in Constance Parva.”

Miss Paterson smiled thinly. “Too true. I only hope that Mrs. Washby isn't going to mind the change from London. The depths of the countryside aren't everyone's cup of tea.”

“The village might grow,” ventured Sloan.

He found a pair of alarmingly intelligent eyes fixed upon him. “Oh, you've heard about the new development, have you? Well, Inspector, that was one thing we didn't talk about—both sides being represented so to speak.”

“Very wise, madam.”

“And now it's not Bill's problem any more.”

“No.” Sloan cleared his throat. “Have you been up to the Park since—er—since …”

“No,” she said gruffly. “Nothing I could say, is there? Or do. The doctor will have given her something—not that I've any time for doctors myself. Don't trust all these things they give you these days. Besides, only your contemporaries can give you comfort. Haven't you discovered that yet, Inspector? The young can't imagine how you feel. The oldies—like me—have got over it all long ago. Peer groups or some such nonsense they call it now.” Abruptly Miss Paterson stooped down toward a cucumber plant and pinched something near the centre. “Always nip out the male flowers,” she said, “if you want good cucumbers.”

“Doesn't do anything for the bitterness, though,” murmured the gardener within the policeman, the philosopher within the man. His gaze drifted from the cucumbers to the bee. “You only want to find a bird to chat with now, Crosby,” he said pleasantly, “and then you'll know the lot.”

“Yes, sir, I—” The constable didn't finish the sentence. There was a sudden commotion near the door of the greenhouse, and Crosby shot outside into the open air, hotly pursued by an exceedingly irate bee.

“That,” observed Miss Paterson dryly, “seems to have done the trick. Thank you, Constable.”

“Died? Mr. Exley?” exclaimed Ursula Renville. “Oh, I am sorry. His poor wife! He'd got two children, too, hadn't he, Richard?”

“That's what I'd heard,” said Richard Renville, feeling for his pipe. “Bad luck.”

“We're just checking that nothing had happened to upset Mr. Fent at the dinner party.” Sloan said his party piece glibly. He and Crosby had moved down Constance Parva High Street from Miss Paterson's cottage to King's Tree House where the Renvilles lived. He wouldn't be surprised if the bee hadn't come too.

“Oh, no, it was a lovely evening.” Ursula Renville ushered the two policemen into chairs. “The table looked charming and the food was so nice. I don't know why a meal you haven't cooked yourself tastes so much nicer but it does.”

“What did you have?” asked Sloan encouragingly.

She told him and it tallied.

“An interesting pudding,” observed Sloan.

“Wasn't it?” she agreed happily. “French. A speciality of the Dauphinois district. That's where Bill and Helen went for their holidays. They had crémets there and that's why Helen wanted to try it herself. She was so taken with it that Bill bought her a set of the little dishes. She showed them to me once.”

“Special ones with holes,” said Crosby.

“Yes.” She smiled at him and nodded. “Heart-shaped.” Almost absent-mindedly she produced excellent coffee and set it before the policemen without asking. “You make a sort of milk curd, I think …”

“And drain it through muslin,” supplemented Crosby.

“How clever of you to know,” she beamed at the detective constable.

“Did they turn out well?” growled Sloan. Anyone listening to Crosby would think he was a Cordon Bleu cook, while Sloan knew for a fact that he couldn't even boil a kettle, let alone an egg.

“Except one,” said Mrs. Renville. “They were standing on the sideboard when we went into the dining-room and I did happen to notice that one had collapsed just the tiniest bit at one edge.”

“Who had that, I wonder?” murmured Sloan half-aloud. He couldn't himself think of anything better for pudding than one of his wife's apple pies—she hadn't needed those cookery books for wedding presents—but there was no accounting for taste, and anything—but anything—consumed that night at Strontfield might matter.

Richard Renville tapped his pipe against an ash-tray and said ruefully, “If it's anything like this house, Inspector, I can tell you straightaway who got the failure put in front of him. The host.”

“Nonsense, darling,” said his wife roundly. “The hostess always has the things that don't turn out right.” She smiled at the two policemen. “Men make such a fuss if you give them anything that isn't perfect, don't they? I bet poor Helen ate it.”

Renville shook his head. “Not that time. You can take it from me, Inspector, that it was Bill who had that collapsed crémet. I remember because I saw it on his tray and not on Helen's.”

“There were two trays, were there, sir?” prompted Sloan.

“That's right.” Renville nodded. “With six crémets on each. Bill served his end of the table and Helen hers. There was a bowl of raspberries at each end and cream if you wanted it. It was all nicely done, you know. No fuss.”

It was Sloan's turn to nod agreement. No, there had been no fuss.

And it had all been nicely done.

Someone had somehow seen to it that Bill Fent had had a potentially fatal dose of a soluble barbiturate in the presence of eleven other people, one of whom was presumably the murderer, though they couldn't even be sure about that yet, not with Peter Miller Fent in the offing. Very much in the offing, especially last Saturday night.

“The drink,” said Sloan, improving upon the shining hour.

Renville frowned. “Bill hadn't had too much or anything like that.”

“I understand, sir, that the gentlemen took some port.”

“We did indeed.” The man's frown vanished and his face lit up. “You know, Inspector, when I heard about poor Bill I was glad for him that that port was the last thing he had to drink.”

“Good, was it, sir?”

“Superb,” said Renville reverently. “Bill's father laid a pipe of it down the year Bill was born. A fine old English custom …”

“Like wetting the baby's head?” asked Crosby intelligently.

Renville blinked at him. “In a way, I suppose. No good, of course, if the baby comes in a bad year.”

“Naturally,” agreed Sloan gravely. “May we take it, then, that Mr. Fent was born in a good year?”

“According to the professor it was the last of the good years”—Renville grinned—“but the professor's like that, Getting on, you know, and a bit of a pessimist these days.”

It was Sloan's experience that the two often went together. “What year would it have been, sir?”

“'Thirty-five. Actually,” Renville said, “'forty-five was a good year too, but the professor wouldn't have it. Said 'thirty-one was better still. The good old days and all that.”

“Really, sir?” The only year—the only day—that Kitty, Kitty bothered about down in The Dog and Partridge was the current one.

“Bill said it was coming to the end of its drinkability but”—Richard Renville clenched his pipe between his teeth—“I must say it went down very well.”

So it did, Sloan was sure, in The Dog and Partridge in Railway Street.

Every night.

The burly businessman sighed. “Quite an occasion, really.”

“What did you talk about?”

He laughed. “Believe it or not we talked about blood donors. Washby was trying to enrol us all—except Marchmont. He was one already. There's some sort of team doing the county next month …”

“There now!” exclaimed his wife. “We thought you'd be talking about us.”

“Well,” challenged Renville, “what did you talk about?”

“Jam.”

“Well, then …”

Sloan said, “The port—I take it that all the gentlemen had some?”

“I should jolly well think so,” said Renville spiritedly. “Good Lord, Inspector, you wouldn't pass up vintage port at Strontfield—you'd be mad.”

“Sorry, sir,” said Sloan humbly. Kitty, Kitty would never have asked.

He had just one more question for them. Had either of the Renvilles been up to the Park to see Helen Fent since Bill had been killed.

Both shook their heads.

“Wait a minute, though,” Ursula put out a hand. “I do know who was going to go. Marjorie Marchmont. Yesterday evening. She mentioned that she intended to walk up to Strontfield to see Helen later. I remember that because she said that she thought people felt just as flat after a funeral as they did after a wedding …”

She paused. “I can't have got that the right way round, can I?”

“Yes, madam.” Some of the superintendent's Winter Evening Class on Sociology had rubbed off on them all at the Police Station. “They're both Rites of Passage.”

“Really?” The vague look had come back to Ursula's face.

A few minutes later Crosby pulled the police car out of the King's Tree House drive and turned back into Constance Parva High Street. As he did so a small green car slowed down, its indicator blinking its intention of turning off the village High Street and into the Renvilles' driveway.

“Well, what do you know?” drawled the constable phlegmatically. “Young Mr. Quentin Fent, the country landowner, coming to call upon Mr. Richard Renville, property company director.”

“And,” said Sloan, “they're growing beet-root in their cabbage patch.”

THIRTEEN

Detective Inspector Sloan's approach at the doctor's house was more business-like. There were no bees here and no coffee either. The action—as Crosby would have put it—was all at the side of the house: outside the garage. It was Saturday morning and the doctor, dressed in his oldest clothes, was cleaning his car. He straightened up as he saw the two policemen and tossed the wash-leather into a bucket of water.