Last Respects (11 page)

Poor Grandfather! she thought. Time and money weren't what made a painter. Nor, she added fairly in her mind, was application. Grandfather Camming had certainly applied himself. She gave a little, silent giggle to herself. Richard Camming had cheerfully applied paint to every canvas in sight.

As Elizabeth placed the roses in the vase she was conscious of how the lively shell-pink of the centre of the flower made a fine splash of colour against the newly-turned earth. She would have liked to have had that bare earth covered in stone or even grass but the sexton said it had to stay the way it was until it had settled. Frank Mundill didn't seem worried about the bare earth either. When she had mentioned it to him later he had said he was still thinking about the right monumental design and so she had left the subject well alone.

She sat back on her heels for a moment to consider her handiwork in flower arrangement. She hoped it wouldn't flood in this corner of the churchyard but you never could tell with the Calle. The river seemed to have a will of its own. Way, way inland—above Calleford, and almost as far inland as the town of Luston—it was a docile stream, little more than a rivulet, in fact. By the time it got to Calleford itself it was bigger, of course, but it was tamed there by city streets and bridges, to say nothing of the odd sluice gate.

Once west of the county town, though, and out on to the flat land in the middle of the county—those very same low-lying fields in which Grandfather Camming had painted during his Constable period—the River Calle broadened and steadily grew into a force of water to be reckoned with. The bends in its course through Collerton towards Edsway and the sea it seemed to regard as a challenge to its strength. In spring and autumn, that is.

Her flowers arranged and her tears dried and forgotten for the time being, Elizabeth Busby rose to her feet and dusted off her knees. She decided that she would walk back to the house along the river bank. It was a slightly longer way back to Collerton House than by the metalled road but what was time to her now?

She slipped out of the little kissing gate that led from the churchyard on to the river walk, feeling rather as if she had stepped out of a William Morris painting—or was it another of the Pre-Raphaelites who had been so fond of having girls stationed prettily beside a river as he put brush to canvas? Perhaps it was Millais? Not Lord Leighton, surely? She always felt a little self-conscious when she was walking along the river bank with a wooden gardening trug over one arm. At least she didn't have a Victorian parasol on the other.

It was while she was walking back along the path on the river bank and rounding the bend that matched the curve of the river that the boathouse at the bottom of the garden of Collerton House came into view.

Someone, she noticed in a detached way, had left the door of the boathouse open.

CHAPTER 9

See my courage is out
.

Detective-Inspector Sloan and Detective-Constable Crosby made their way back to the pathologist's mortuary. They found the pathologist in his secretary's room talking to a squarish woman with shaggy eyebrows and cropped hair. Rita, the pathologist's secretary, was there too. She was a slim girl whose eyebrows showed every sign of having had a lot of loving care and attention lavished upon them. Dr Dabbe introduced the older woman to the policemen as Miss Hilda Collins.

‘We've met before,' she announced, acknowledging them with a quick jerk of her head.

Sloan bowed slightly.

‘I never forget a face,' declared Miss Collins.

‘It's a gift,' said Sloan: and he meant it. For his part Sloan remembered her too. Miss Collins was the Biology Mistress at the Berebury High School for Girls. ‘I wish we had more policemen who didn't forget faces,' he said—and he meant that too. What with Identikits, memory banks and computer-assisted this and that, the man on the beat didn't really have to remember any more what villains looked like. It was a pity.

At the other side of the room Constable Crosby was exhibiting every sign of trying to commit Rita's face to memory. Sloan averted his eyes.

‘Miss Collins,' said the pathologist easily, ‘is an expert.'

‘I see.' Sloan remained cautious. If his years in the Force had taught him anything it was that experts were a breed on their own. Put them in the witness-box and you never knew what they were going to say next. They could make or mar a case, too. Irretrievably. There was only one thing worse than one expert and that was two. Then they usually differed. ‘May I ask on what?' he said politely.

‘Good question,' said Dr Dabbe. ‘I must say I'd rather like to know myself. It's in the lab … this way.' He led them through from his secretary's room into the small laboratory that Sloan knew existed alongside the postmortem room. ‘I called him Charley because he travelled,' said the pathologist obscurely.

‘With the body, I think you said,' murmured Miss Collins gruffly.

‘It was my man Burns who said that,' said Dr Dabbe. ‘He found it wriggling inside the man's shirt. That was still very wet.'

‘He found what—' began Sloan peremptorily: and then stopped.

The pathologist was pointing to a wide-necked retort that was almost full of water. Swimming happily about in it was a small creature. ‘Burns said they call it a “screw” in Scotland,' he said.

As if to prove the point the creature wriggled suddenly sideways. It was a dull greenish-yellow colour and quite small.

‘It's still alive,' said Detective-Constable Crosby unnecessarily.

‘That proves something,' said Miss Collins immediately. ‘What's it in?'

‘
Aqua distillata
,' said the pathologist who belonged to the old school which felt that the Latin language and the profession of medicine should always go together.

Sloan made a mental note that sturdily included the words ‘distilled water'. Latin used where English would do always made him think of Merlin and spells.

Miss Collins advanced on the specimen in the glass. ‘It's one of the crustacea,' she said.

‘That's what I thought,' said Dr Dabbe.

‘Amphipod, of course,' announced Miss Collins. ‘The order is known as “Sandhoppers” although few live in the sand and even fewer still hop.'

There were inconsistencies in law, too. Sloan had stopped worrying about them now but when he had been a younger man they'd sometimes come between him and a good night's sleep.

‘You'll find it demonstrates negative heliotropism very nicely,' Miss Collins said.

If she had been speaking in a foreign tongue Detective-Inspector Sloan would have been allowed to bring in an interpreter at public expense. And so far as Sloan was concerned she might as well have been.

The pathologist must have understood her, though, because he pushed the jar half into and half out of the rays of sunlight falling on the laboratory bench. Whatever it was in the water—fish or insect—jerked quickly away from the part of the jar and scuttled off into such dimmer light as it could find.

‘We do that with the third form,' said Miss Collins in a kindly way, ‘to teach them phototropism.'

Dr Dabbe was unabashed while Miss Collins bent down for an even closer look. ‘The family Gammeridae,' she pronounced.

Detective-Constable Crosby abandoned any attempt to record this. He too bent down and looked at the creature. ‘Doesn't it look big through the glass?' he said.

‘You get illusory magnification from curved glass with water in it,' the pathologist informed him absently.

Both Miss Collins and Crosby were still peering, fascinated, at the glass retort and its contents. Some dentists, Sloan was reminded, had tanks with goldfish swimming in them in their waiting-rooms. The theory was that patients were soothed by watching fish move about. ‘In a cool curving world he lies'… no, that was the river in Rupert Brooke's ‘Fish' but no doubt the principle was the same. There were insomniacs, too, who had them by their beds. The considering of fish swimming was said to lower tension all round.

He looked across at Detective-Constable Crosby. He didn't want his assistant's tension lowered any more.

‘Have you got a note of that, Crosby?' he barked unfairly.

Miss Collins said, ‘It can't osmoregulate, you know, Inspector.'

Sloan didn't know and said so.

‘True estuarine species can,' declared Miss Collins.

Sloan did not enjoy being blinded with Science.

‘
Gammarus pulex
, Inspector, is a good example of a biological indicator.'

Sloan said he was very glad to hear it.

The pathologist leaned forward eagerly and said, ‘So Charley here …'

‘I'm not at all sure that I can tell you its sex,' said Miss Collins meticulously. She raised her head from considering the water creature and asked clearly, ‘Is sex important?'

Sloan stiffened. If Crosby said that sex was always important then he, Detective-Inspector Sloan, his superior officer, would put him on report there and then … murder case or not. Detective-Constable Crosby, however, continued to be absorbed by half an inch of wriggling crustacean and it was Sloan who found himself answering her.

‘No,' he said into a silence.

He felt that sounded prim and expanded on it.

‘Not as far as I know,' he added.

That sounded worse.

He lost his nerve altogether and launched into further speech.

‘In this particular case,' he added lamely.

Miss Collins looked extremely scientific. “
Gammarus pulex
enjoys a curious sort of married life.'

As a quondam bobby on the beat Sloan could have told her that that went for quite a slice of the human population too.

‘But,' she carried on, ‘you don't get the really intricate sex reversal as in—say—the epicarids.'

Sloan was glad to hear it. If there was one thing that the law had not really been able to bend its mind round yet it was sex reversal.

‘Can you eat it?' asked Detective-Constable Crosby.

Miss Collins gave a hortatory cough while Sloan had to agree to himself that food did come a close second to sex most of the time. She shook her head and said, ‘Its common name of fresh water shrimp is a complete misnomer.'

In the end it was Sloan who cut the cackle and got down to the horses. ‘What you're trying to tell us, miss, is that this … this … whatever it is … is a fresh water species, not a sea one.'

‘That's what I said, Inspector,' she agreed patiently. ‘
Gammarus pulex
can't live in sea water and that's what makes it a good biological indicator.'

‘So,' said Sloan slowly and carefully, ‘the body didn't come in from the sea.'

‘I don't know about the body,' said the biologist with precision, ‘but I can assure you that
Gammarus pulex
didn't.'

‘Are you telling me,' asked Sloan, anxious to have at least one thing clear in his mind, ‘that it—this thing here—would have died in sea water, then?'

‘I am,' she said with all the lack of equivocation of the true scientist on sound territory covered by natural laws.

A little hush fell in the laboratory.

Then Sloan said heavily, ‘We'd better get our best feet forward then, hadn't we?'

Perhaps in their own way policemen were amphipods too. Or amphiplods.

Gammarus pulex
scuttled sideways across the bottom of the glass vessel as he spoke.

He'd have to prise Crosby away from that jar if he watched it much longer. He was practically mesmerized by it as it was.

‘We'll have to go up river,' Sloan announced to nobody in particular. He turned. ‘Come along, Crosby.'

Detective-Constable Crosby straightened up at last. ‘We might find some Dead Man's Fingers, too, sir, mightn't we?'

‘
Alcyonium digitatum
,' said Dr Dabbe.

‘Not in fresh water,' said Miss Collins promptly. ‘Dead Man's Fingers are animals colonial that like the sea shore.'

Sloan didn't say anything at all.

Police Constable Brian Ridgeford was confused. He had duly reported the finding of the ship's bell to Berebury Police Station and had in fact brought it back to his home with him. Home in the case of a country constable was synonymous with place of work. His wife was less than enchanted when he set the bell down on the kitchen table.

‘Take that out to the shed,' commanded Mrs Ridgeford immediately.

Ridgeford picked it up again.

‘What is it anyway?' she asked. ‘It looks like a bell to me.'

‘It is a bell,' he said. That sounded like one of those childhood conundrums that came in Christmas crackers.

Question: When is a door not a door?

Answer: When it's ajar.

When was a bell not a bell?

When it was Treasure Trove. Or was it only that when it—whatever it was—had been hidden by the original owner with the intention of coming back for it? Not lost at sea. He would have to look that up. He felt a little self-conscious anyway about using the words Treasure Trove to his wife.

‘It's a ship's bell,' he said lamely.

‘I can see that.'

‘It's stolen property too, I think.' He cleared his throat and added conscientiously, ‘Although I don't rightly know about that for sure.' Unfortunately when he'd telephoned the police station he'd been put through to Superintendent Leeyes. This had compounded his confusion.

‘Dirty old thing,' she said, giving it a closer look.

‘I think it could be lagan as well.'

‘I don't care what it is, I'm not having anything like that in my clean kitchen.' She looked up suspiciously. ‘What's lagan anyway?'

‘Goods or wreckage lying on the bed of the sea.'

She sniffed. ‘I'm still not having it in here.'

‘Mind you,' he said carefully, ‘in law things aren't always what they seem.' Being in the police force gave a man a different view of the legal system. ‘In law an oyster is a wild animal.'