Last Respects (10 page)

‘I don't believe it,' declared Mr Jensen with academic ferocity. ‘Not between Edsway and Collerton.'

‘No,' said Sloan consideringly, ‘I can see that you might not. What's a barbary head?'

‘Now, if you'd said the sea, Inspector …'

‘Yes?'

‘That would have made more sense.'

Anything that made sense suited Sloan. Crosby was concentrating more on his surroundings. The Museum Curator's room was stuffed with improbable objects standing in unlikely juxtaposition. Two vases stood on his desk—one clearly Chinese, one as clearly Indian. Even Sloan's untutored eye could see the difference between them—two whole civilizations summed up in the altered rake of the lip of a vase …

‘What's a barbary head?' asked Sloan again. Crosby was staring at an oryx whose head—a triumph of the taxidermist's art—was at eye level on the wall. The oryx stared unblinkingly back at him.

‘A single head of barbary copper,' said Basil Jensen authoritatively, ‘moulded into a circular shape.' He blinked. ‘Any the wiser?'

‘No,' said Sloan truthfully.

‘An ingot, then.'

‘Ah.'

‘It was the way they used to transport copper in the old days.'

‘I see.'

Mr Jensen pointed to the copper object. ‘You'd get tons and tons of it like this. A man could move it with a shovel, you see. Easier than shifting great lumps that needed two men to lift them.'

‘What sort of old days?' asked Sloan cautiously.

‘Let's not beat about the bush,' said Mr Jensen.

Sloan was all in favour of that.

‘Mid-eighteenth century,' said the Museum Curator impressively.

‘Make a note of that, Crosby,' said Sloan.

‘Mid-eighteenth century,' repeated Mr Jensen.

‘That would be about 1750, wouldn't it, sir?' said Sloan. ‘Give or take a year or two.'

‘Or five,' said Mr Jensen obscurely. He tapped the barbary head. ‘And at a guess …'

‘Yes?'

‘This has been in the water since then.' He thrust his chin forward. ‘If you don't believe me, Inspector, take it to Greenwich. They'll know there.' He suddenly looked immensely cunning. ‘There's something else they'll be able to tell you, too.'

‘What's that, sir?'

‘Whether it's been in salt water or fresh all these years.'

Sloan said, ‘I think I may know the answer to that, sir.'

The Museum Curator nodded and pointed td the piece of copper. ‘And I think, Inspector, that I know the answer to this.'

‘You do sir?'

‘Someone's found the
Clarembald
.' He spoke almost conversationally now. ‘She was an East Indiaman, you know …'

Across the years Sloan caught the sudden whiff of blackboard chalk at the back of his nostrils and he was once again in the classroom of a long-ago schoolmaster. The man—a rather precise, dry man—had been trying to convey to a class of boys that strange admixture of trade, empire-building and corruption that had made the East India Company what it was. He'd been a ‘chalk and talk' schoolmaster but one rainy afternoon he'd made John Company and the impeachment of Robert Clive and the trial of Warren Hastings all come alive to his class.

‘Someone's found her,' said Jensen.

They'd been all ears, those boys, especially when the teacher had come to that macabre incident in British history that everybody knows. It was strange, thought Sloan, that out of a crowded historical past ‘when all else be forgot' everyone always remembered the Black Hole of Calcutta.

‘We knew it would happen one day,' said the Museum Curator. ‘In fact,' he admitted, ‘we'd heard a rumour. Nothing you could put your finger on, you know …'

‘Ah.'

‘And people have been in making enquiries,' said Jensen.

Sloan leaned forward. ‘You wouldn't happen to know which people, sir, would you?'

‘They don't leave their names,' said Jensen drily. ‘And we get a lot of casual enquirers, you know.'

‘Short, dark, and young?' said Sloan.

Jensen shook his head. ‘Tallish, brown hair and not as young as all that.'

‘This ship,' said Sloan. ‘You know all about it, then?'

‘Bless you, Inspector, yes.' Jensen started to pace up and down. ‘It's perfectly well documented. And it's all here in the Museum for anyone to look up. She was lured to her doom by wreckers in the winter of 1755 …'

‘The evil that men do lives after then,' murmured Sloan profoundly.

Jensen's response was immediate. ‘Yes, indeed, Inspector. We see a lot of that in the Museum world.'

Sloan hadn't thought of that.

Jensen waved a hand. ‘I dare say that I can tell you what the
Clarembald
was carrying too.'

Quinquireme of Nineveh from distant Ophir …

‘We have a copy of the ship's manifest here,' said Jensen, jerking to a standstill. ‘I dare say the East India Office will also have something about it.' He pointed to the barbary head and went on enthusiastically, ‘And if she wasn't carrying a load of copper ingots I'll eat my hat. Mind you, Inspector, that won't have been all her cargo by a long chalk. She'll have had a great many other good things on board.'

Sloan motioned to Crosby to take a note.

‘A great many other things,' said the Museum Curator, ‘that certain people would like to have today.'

‘Gold?' suggested Sloan simply.

Topazes and cinnamon, and gold moidores, it had been in the poem.

Mr Jensen gave a quick frown. ‘Gold, certainly. Don't forget it was used as currency then. But it won't be so much the gold as the guns that they'll be going for today.'

‘Guns?' said Sloan. ‘Guns before gold?' He was faintly disappointed. Pieces of eight had a swashbuckling ring to them.

‘They're easier to find under water,' said Jensen. ‘And if I remember rightly she had a pair of demi-culverin on board and some twelve-pounders.'

Sloan was struck by a different thought. ‘Armed merchantmen were nothing new, then?'

‘If you worked in a Museum, Inspector, you'd realize that there is nothing new under the sun.'

‘Quite so,' said Sloan.

Mr Jensen came back very quickly to the matter in hand. ‘There are treasure-seekers, Inspector, who would blow her out of the water for her guns and not care that they were destroying priceless marine archaeology. Do you realize that everything that comes out of an underwater find should be kept under water?'

‘She doesn't,' observed Sloan moderately, ‘appear to have been blown out of the water yet.'

‘Matter of time,' said Jensen, resuming his restless pacing. ‘Only a matter of time. Depends entirely on who knows she's been found and how quickly they act.'

‘I can see that, sir.' There were villains everywhere. You learned that early in the police force. ‘There must be something that can be done about stopping her being damaged.'

‘Done? Oh yes,' said Jensen. ‘For those in peril in the sea, Inspector, we can get a Department of Trade protection order making it an offence to interfere with the wreck or carry out unlicensed diving or salvage.' He turned on his heel suddenly and faced Sloan. ‘But we'd need to know where she was. How did you say you'd come by this barbary head?'

‘I didn't,' said Sloan quietly, ‘and I'm not going to.'

Elizabeth Busby felt strangely relaxed and comforted after her cry at the graveside. She was sure that her aunt would have understood her need to leave the house and seek out a quiet spot in the out of doors. Celia Mundill would have understood the tears too—there was a marvellous release to be had in tears. And Collerton graveyard was certainly quiet enough—it was a fine and private place for tears, in fact.

True, Horace Boller from Edsway had rowed past on his way upstream but he hadn't disturbed her thoughts at all. Perhaps this was because those thoughts were still too inchoate and unformed to admit intrusion from an outside source. Perhaps it was only because—more mundanely—she hadn't liked to lift a tear-stained face for it to be seen by the man who had been going by.

She felt much better in the open air: she was sure about that. Collerton House had begun to oppress her since Celia Mundill had died—it wasn't the same without her warm presence, ill as she had been. It wasn't the same either—subconsciously she stiffened her shoulders—since Peter Hinton had so precipitately taken his departure. There was no use balking at the fact—no matter how hard she tried to think of other things in the end her thoughts always came back to Peter Hinton.

She had felt at the time and she still felt now that a note left on the table in the hall was no way for a real man to break with his affianced. If he had felt the way he said he did, then the very least he could have done was to have told her so—face to face. A note left behind on the hall table beside the signet ring she had given him was the coward's way.

For the thousandth time she took the folded paper which Peter Hinton had written out of her pocket and—for the thousandth time—considered it. Its message was loud and clear. It could scarcely have been shorter or balder either.

‘It's no go. Forgive me. P.'

There was not a word of explanation as to why a man who had quite unequivocally declared that he wanted to marry her should suddenly leave a note like that. Time and time again she had turned it over to see if there had been more—anything—written on the back but there wasn't.

There still wasn't.

She had resolved not to keep on and on reading the note—and forgotten how many times she had made the resolution. She'd broken it every day. She didn't know why she needed to look at it anyway. It wasn't as if she didn't know what it said. Sadly she folded it up again and put it away.

She sat back on her heels then, more at peace with herself than she'd been all day. There was something very peaceful about the churchyard—you could begin to see what it was about a churchyard that had moved Thomas Gray to write his elegy and why her aunt hadn't wanted to be cremated. There was something very soothing, too, about the sound of the water lapping away at the edge of the churchyard grass. Gray hadn't had that at—where was it? Stoke Poges.

Elizabeth reached over and picked out the flowers that she had brought with her on her last visit. They were fading now. That gave her something to do with her hands and that was soothing too. As she carefully started to arrange the roses in a vase she began to understand why it was that her aunt's husband had been so insistent about his wife's grave being within the sound of the water.

‘She'd spent all her life by the river,' he'd said, immediately selecting the plot that was closest to the river's edge.

The sexton had murmured something about flooding.

‘But she loved the sound of the river,' Frank Mundill had insisted.

The sexton had hitched his shoulder. ‘You won't like it in winter, Mr Mundill.'

Architects spend at least half their working lives persuading recalcitrant builders to do what architect and client want and Frank Mundill had had to prove his skill in this field in the five minutes that followed.

‘It couldn't be too near the river for her,' he had said.

‘The first time the Calle comes up,' sniffed the sexton obstinately, ‘you'll be on to me. You see.'

‘I won't,' undertook Frank Mundill.

‘And there won't be anything I can do then,' said the man, as if he hadn't spoken.

‘I shan't want you to do anything.'

‘It'll be too late then,' said the man obdurately. ‘Mark my words.'

‘My wife was born over there, remember.' Frank Mundill had waved a hand in the direction of Collerton House. He introduced a firmer tone into his voice. ‘She loved this river.'

His gesture had reminded Elizabeth Busby of something and she had taken herself off at that point to have a look at her grandparents' grave. That was over by the church—not far from the west door. And next to it was the polished marble monument to her great-grandparents. Gordon Camming—he who had invented the Camming valve—had made it clear that he intended to found a dynasty too. He'd bought half a dozen plots around his own tomb: the sexton hadn't hesitated to remind Frank Mundill of this.

The word ‘dynasty' had started up another unhappy train of thought in her mind at the time not unconnected with Peter Hinton and she had drifted back to the river's edge where the exchange between Frank Mundill and the sexton was drawing to a close. By the time she had reached the two men the site of the plot for the grave of her aunt had been agreed and the sexton, if still not happy about it, at least mollified.

‘She'll be content here,' she heard Celia Mundill's widower insisting as she drew closer.

Elizabeth hoped then and hoped now as she tended the flowers on the grave that this was true. It was still summertime, of course, and flooding was a long way from her mind as she took away the last of the dead flowers from her previous visit. She sat back on her heels while she carefully picked out the best rose for the centre position. Her aunt had known she would never see this year's Fantin-Latour roses on the bush—she'd told Elizabeth so in spite of all Dr Tebot had said—but there was no reason, she told herself fiercely, why she shouldn't have them on her grave.

As she placed each succeeding stem of the double blush-pink clusters of flowers in the grave's special frost-proof vase she began to see why it was that this particular rose had been such a favourite—and not only of Celia Mundill but of Henri Fantin-Latour and the old Dutch flower-painters—of real artists, in fact.

Involuntarily her lips tightened into a smile.

There was a family joke about the word ‘artist'. Grandfather Camming had called himself an artist and filled canvas upon canvas to prove it. The family had tacitly agreed therefore that he must be known as an artist. Other artists—those who did improve as time went by, those whose pictures were fought over by art galleries—even those whose paintings were bought with an eye to the future—deserved to be distinguished from Richard Camming and his amateur efforts. They had been known—in the family and out of earshot of Richard Camming—as real artists.