Amendment of Life (8 page)

Chapter Eight

Sharon Gibbons took one look at David Collins's expression as he came through the door of Double Felix and disappeared back into her own office, murmuring, ‘Coffee coming up, pronto.'

‘I must say I could use it,' admitted Collins, slumping down at his desk and running his hands through his hair. ‘It's been one hell of a morning, Eric.'

‘What news?' asked his partner, never a man to waffle.

‘Margaret wasn't at the hospital,' said Collins, pushing a pile of notebooks to one side with a hand that was not entirely steady.

‘Wasn't she?' Paterson said absent-mindedly.

Collins shook his head. ‘She hasn't been there since yesterday afternoon.'

‘That's bad.'

‘I did wonder to begin with if she'd gone over to her mother's—'

‘But she hadn't?' Eric finished for him.

‘No.' He took a deep breath and said thickly, ‘The good news is that Mr Beaumont, the consultant at the hospital, seems happy enough with James for the time being, but there's no sign of Margaret.'

‘None?'

‘None anywhere, Eric.'

‘And no word?'

Collins shook his head. ‘Not a dicky bird. The hospital think she slipped away from the ward sometime yesterday afternoon, but they're not exactly sure when. Not that they're likely to have noticed especially, anyway, they're so pressed on the children's ward – particularly at the weekend.'

‘No letter?' asked Eric Paterson swiftly.

‘That's the first thing the police asked, too,' said David Collins wearily. ‘And the answer is not that I could see. I don't suppose I'd have noticed anything when I got back from the Minster last night, but I had a damned good look when I went home from the hospital this morning after I found out that she hadn't been there all night and before I went to the police.'

‘Nothing?'

‘Not a thing.' He opened his hands in a gesture of despair. ‘No note, nothing missing from the house, no message on the answerphone—'

‘People don't just disappear into thin air,' frowned Paterson.

‘Coffee,' announced Sharon Gibbons.

‘What? Oh, thanks.' He turned and absently picked up the mug.

Usually the secretary hung about in the partners' room as long as she could to catch whatever gossip was going, but there was something in the atmosphere today that made her retreat to her own office as soon as she could.

‘What about James?' asked Eric, exercising as usual his unerring eye for essentials.

‘The hospital is keeping him, thank goodness, until Margaret's mother gets here,' said David. ‘She's on her way over now.'

‘That'll help,' said Eric Paterson.

‘The going was tough enough as it was without Margaret taking off, I can tell you.' Collins sank his face towards the mug of coffee. ‘God, I needed that. Thirsty work, talking to the police.'

‘What did they say?'

David Collins essayed a tired smile. ‘They asked all the questions you just have, Eric, but in a different order. They wanted to know how Margaret had been lately, too.'

‘Naturally.' Eric Paterson did not add that he could see how the police mind was working.

‘Well, how would you be if your only child was suffering in the way our little James has been?'

‘In a very poor way,' said Eric Paterson immediately. It had always been hard work to get him near even a doctor, let alone a hospital.

‘They wanted to know if she'd been showing any signs of stress.' He snorted. ‘Stress! I ask you, Eric! Of course, she was stressed out. We both are.'

‘Sleepless?'

‘I don't suppose we've had a good night since James was first diagnosed. Either of us.' He paused and said awkwardly, ‘It wasn't only James we had to worry about either.' He went on obliquely ‘It's all very well for the doctors to talk in percentages but statistics aren't everything—'

‘As the chap said who was drowned in a river whose average depth was six inches,' said Eric with an attempt at lightness. ‘Sorry, David, go on.'

‘Hereditary diseases don't only affect the next generation, you know.' He plunged his face into the coffee mug. ‘We had a lot to think about, both of us.'

Eric Paterson looked distinctly uncomfortable. ‘Did you tell the police that you'd been snipped?'

‘I didn't think my vasectomy was anything to do with them,' David Collins said with dignity. ‘Besides, Margaret was all in favour of my having it done. She said she couldn't go through all this again with another child, and I know I couldn't.'

‘No, no,' Eric agreed hastily, changing the subject. ‘So what are you going to do now?'

For the first time a quiver crept into the other man's voice. ‘I couldn't bear to go home and just sit and wait for news, Eric. I said to the police that I'd come back here and get on with some work.'

‘Only if you really want to,' said his partner. ‘We can manage, you know.'

‘But I shan't be able to manage if I haven't anything to do,' said Collins, strain showing in every line of his face.

‘Well, they'll know where to find you,' agreed Paterson gruffly.

‘In fact, I might just nip over to the Minster and finish off last night's job. That'll give me something to do.'

‘Good idea. They want you back over there anyway.' Eric Paterson pawed through the pile of files on his desk. ‘There's a message here from them somewhere. They've got more trouble there this morning.'

His partner didn't respond directly. Instead he said, ‘You know, Eric, I could have sworn I heard a goat bleating while I was working in the slype yesterday evening.'

‘I expect the Dean had separated it from the sheep,' Eric said solemnly. ‘Isn't that what the clergy are for?'

*   *   *

‘Thought you'd be back, Inspector,' observed Miss Daphne Pedlinge with patent satisfaction. She lowered her binoculars and gave her wheelchair a quarter-turn in Sloan's direction. ‘Well?'

He had his notebook open in an instant. ‘I need some timings from you.'

‘Nothing like having good anchor bearings, is there?' she said.

‘Or a reliable witness,' said Sloan, not at all sure what anchor bearings were.

That pleased the old lady. ‘The gates close to those visitors coming in at five pip emma,' she responded without prompting. ‘And I hoist the all-clear signal for the maze as soon as possible after that.'

‘How exactly?' He wouldn't have been overwhelmingly surprised to find a flagpole protruding from her window.

Miss Pedlinge pointed to a long cord hanging down from a window blind. ‘I lower that curtain – they can see that from the gate. They know then that everyone's out of the grounds as well as the maze and that they can shut up shop for the day.'

‘Therefore you yourself can't see anything from here afterwards unless you pull the window blind up again,' he concluded aloud, indicating the broad sweep of the grounds visible from her eyrie.

‘True.' She gave a little shrug. ‘But then, Inspector, in the ordinary way there's usually nothing to see and so I stand down.' She gave him a shrewd look. ‘But we aren't in the ordinary way today, are we?'

He shook his head.

‘Thought not,' she said. ‘I still know a dead body when I see one. That war poet was wrong, you know, when he shook a soldier friend awake in his dugout because when he slept he reminded him of the dead.'

‘Poetic licence,' said Sloan.

‘Siegfried Sassoon, that was,' she said reminiscently. ‘Mind you, he must have known really.'

‘Like you did,' Sloan reminded her.

‘You can usually tell—'

‘With practice,' said the policeman.

‘Yes, indeed.' She sighed.

‘But that also means,' he got back to the point, leaving her concurrence in the matter of the easy recognition of death unexplored for the time being, ‘that until you lower the window blind you yourself can always tell if there is anyone still in there – after closing time or not.'

‘Oh, yes, Inspector, you can be sure of that.' She gave a sardonic chuckle. ‘And quite often there is. You'd be quite surprised at what the young think they can get away with these days.'

Detective Inspector Sloan, working policeman, didn't think he would – or could – any longer be surprised by anything that today's young got up to, but he didn't say so. Instead he said, ‘And you didn't see anyone – or anything – out of the ordinary at all over there yesterday evening?'

‘Not after closing time,' she said without hesitation.

‘Even though it wasn't dark until much later?'

‘Not a thing after five pip emma,' she repeated, adding with the altered values of the old, ‘Besides, it was my teatime.'

‘Does anyone – Captain Prosser, for instance – report to you at the end of the day?'

She gave a grim chuckle. ‘Inspector, the only person who reports to me after that is Milly Smithers and she only comes in to give me my supper and put me to bed.'

Sloan made a note.

She patted the arms of her wheelchair. ‘Don't grow old, Inspector. It's not worth it.'

‘There are those, miss, who think that the alternative is worse.' Some there were who didn't, of course. Unfortunately some of those who thought death preferable to an impaired life were working in the caring professions. From time to time this became a worry to Sloan and his Criminal Investigation Department, not to say to some relatives of those whose quality of life was debatable.

But not all relatives, which was a worry of another sort altogether.

‘At least,' offered Daphne Pedlinge philosophically, ‘that young woman lying out there dead now knows for certain which is better, even if we don't.'

‘Perhaps,' he said. ‘Or perhaps not.' Either way, there was a certain nursing home in one of the villages in which he wouldn't like his own mother ever to be a patient. ‘Tell me, how long has the Captain worked here?'

‘A year, perhaps. Almost, anyway.'

‘And before that?'

She waved a hand. ‘He was with the Ornums over at Almstone, but they had to retrench and we needed someone here at the time.'

‘We?'

‘My great-nephew and I. For better or worse Bevis appointed him.' She pursed her lips. ‘I agreed on the old principle of better the devil you know—'

‘So you knew him anyway?'

‘I didn't. Bevis did – he's a neighbour of his at Nether Hoystings.'

‘Near Calleford,' said Sloan.

‘Near the main railway line,' said Miss Pedlinge. ‘Bevis has to go up to town every day to earn his crust. Until I die, that is. In the meantime—'

‘Yes?' Detective Inspector Sloan's Criminal Investigation Department had a vested interest in all situations that were changed by death.

‘Bevis has to help keep this place going – and his wife and children,' she added by way of an afterthought. ‘They cost too, of course, and perhaps in the end more than they should.'

‘I see.' He would cause enquiries to be made later at Almstone and Nether Hoystings about Captain Prosser, who had not only recognized the deceased but had seen fit not to tell the police that he had. And find out whether a wife and children costing more than they should was the natural reaction to domesticity of an elderly spinster with a small stately home to keep going.

‘Of course, he'll live here when I'm dead,' said Miss Pedlinge with equanimity, ‘and, God and government willing, his sons and grandsons, too.'

‘And does – Bevis, did you say? – come over here at weekends?' Sloan had no idea how wide a net he would have to cast to embrace all who knew their way into the centre of the maze at Aumerle Court, but presumably a younger Bevis Pedlinge would have worked his way round it as a boy. And, once mastered, could have remembered the layout.

‘Often enough,' she said ambiguously. She gave her wheelchair a sudden turn away from him and looked out of the window. ‘Sundays, usually.'

‘Like yesterday?'

‘He was here in the afternoon,' she said, turning her head. ‘Did you know, Inspector, that there's someone else trying to get into the maze? Tall, grey-haired, proper suit, with a man carrying a big black bag following him.' She grinned. ‘And Kenny Prickett isn't letting him in—'

‘The pathologist!' exclaimed Sloan.

‘That was quick.'

‘Fastest driver in Calleshire, bar none,' said Sloan. ‘I must go.'

*   *   *

‘But you
did
hear a goat, Mr Collins,' said the Bishop, as David Collins began to load some of his electrical equipment on to his van in the Close. ‘It's still in Canon Shorthouse's garden. And still bleating, too.'

The lighting expert gave an uneasy laugh. ‘It was quite creepy enough, anyway, I can tell you, sir, in the slype in the half dark, without odd noises in the middle distance.'

Bertram Wallingford nodded. ‘You know, sometimes when I'm sitting in my own garden and looking across at the Minster I can get quite overcome by the weight of the past myself.'

‘The Dean thought it was high time the slype was lit properly,' put in Barry Wright, the Clerk of Works carefully. Strictly speaking, the Minster building was no concern of the Bishop of Calleford, even though it was the focal point of his diocese. A practical man himself, Barry Wright had no time for fanciful ideas about the past either. What mattered to him about days gone by was whether the medieval craftsmen had done their work in the Minster and the Close well or not. If they hadn't – or if it was time-expired – then that just meant more work for him now: historical romance didn't come into it.

‘It was quite a relief to see you, sir, and the Dean go by after the service yesterday evening,' admitted Collins to the Bishop, oblivious to the finer points of ecclesiastical law.