Last Respects (6 page)

‘In fact, Doctor,' concluded Sloan aloud, ‘he was a pretty ordinary sort of man.'

‘You want to call him John Citizen, do you?' Dr Dabbe raised a quizzical eyebrow. ‘There you would be barking up the wrong tree, Sloan.'

‘He seems ordinary enough to me,' persisted Sloan.

‘There's no such thing as an ordinary man,' responded Dr Dabbe instantly. ‘We're all quite different, Sloan. That's the beauty of the system.'

‘There doesn't appear,' Sloan said flatly, ‘to be anything out of the ordinary about this man.' One thing he wasn't going to do was to get into that sort of debate with the pathologist.

‘Ah, but I'm not finished yet, Sloan.'

Dr Dabbe had in some respects hardly started. He beckoned Sloan nearer to the post-mortem table and tilted an inspection lamp slightly. ‘You will observe, Sloan, that this man—whoever he is—has been in the water for quite a time.'

Sloan repressed a slight shudder. ‘Yes, Doctor.'

‘And,' continued the pathologist, ‘that in spite of this the body is scarcely damaged.'

Detective-Inspector Sloan obediently leaned forward and peered at the supine figure.

‘The lack of damage is interesting,' declared Dr Dabbe.

Sloan held his peace. If the pathologist wanted to be as oracular as Sherlock Holmes and start talking about dogs not barking in the night there was very little that he, Sloan, could do about it.

‘It isn't consistent with the length of time the body has been in the water, Sloan.'

So that was what was interesting the doctor.

Before Sloan could speak the pathologist had moved the shadowless overhead lamp yet again. This time the beam was thrown over the deceased's left hand.

‘There are a couple of grazes on what's left of the skin of the fingers,' he remarked in a detached way. ‘He might—only might, mind you, Sloan—have got them trying to save himself from falling.'

Sloan tightened his lips. For all his scientific objectivity, it wasn't a nice picture that the pathologist had just conjured up.

CHAPTER 5

For death is a debt
,

A debt on demand
.

Although Horace Boller had told his wife that he had seen nothing and nobody and had been nowhere he had, in fact, noticed that there had been someone in Collerton churchyard when he had rowed upstream past it. Whoever it was who was there had looked up as he drew level with the churchyard in his rowing-boat but Horace hadn't paused in his steady pulling at the oars as he went by. It didn't do to pause if you were rowing against the current. Coming downstream was different. You could even ship oars coming down on the current if you caught the river in the right place.

So Horace, although never averse to a little bit of a gossip with anyone—he collected sundry information in the same way that some men collected postage stamps—had pulled away at the oars and passed by without speaking. He hadn't gone on his way, though, without recognizing the figure tending the grave by the river. Most people who lived round about the shores of the estuary knew Mr Mundill's wife's niece, Elizabeth Busby, by sight. She'd been coming to Collerton House on and off for her school holidays ever since she was a little girl. She'd practically grown up by the river, in fact, and when her aunt, Mrs Celia Mundill, had fallen ill, it had seemed only right that she should give up her job and come back to Collerton to nurse her. Had been engaged to be married, too, Horace had heard, but not any longer.

By the time Horace Boller came down river on his return journey she had gone from the churchyard and all he could see from the river was a fine display of pale pink roses on the new grave.

Elizabeth Busby hadn't planned to visit the Collerton graveyard that afternoon at all. She had fully intended to finish spring-cleaning the guest-room and leave it all ready and waiting for the day—the welcome day—when her parents would arrive from South America. What had made her change her mind about finishing preparing the room was something so silly that she didn't even like to think about it. She'd swept and dusted the room and moved the furniture about and taken the curtains down before she even noticed that the picture over the bed had been changed.

She had stopped the vacuum cleaner in full flight so to speak and had stood stock still in the middle of the floor, staring.

There was no shortage of pictures in Collerton House. On the contrary, it had them everywhere. But every-where. Her grandfather, Richard Camming, had been an enthusiastic amateur artist and his efforts were hanging in every room of the house. He was not exactly an original … The painting that had hung over the bed in the guest-room ever since she could remember had been a water-colour of a composition owing a great deal to the works of the late Richard Parkes Bonington.

It had been replaced by an oil painting done in what his two daughters—her aunt Celia and her own mother—affectionately called their father's ‘Burne-Jones period'. Richard Camming had even called it ‘Ophelia' and Elizabeth knew it well. The portrayal of Ophelia's drowning in a stream usually lived on the upstairs landing not far from the top of the stairs.

‘He might have put it nearer the bathroom,' her own father used to say irreverently. ‘All that water going to waste …'

Elizabeth Busby had rested her hands on the vacuum cleaner in the same way as a gardener rested his on his spade while she considered this.

She was not in any doubt about the pictures having been changed: she knew them both too well. And if she had been in two minds about it a thin line of unfaded wallpaper under the new picture—hidden a little from the casual gaze by the frame—would have confirmed it. The size of the new picture didn't exactly match that of the old.

As soon as she had taken in this evidence—before her very eyes, as the conjurors said—she had gone out on to the landing to look there for the painting that usually hung over the head of the spare bedroom bed. It had been of a stretch of beach … When she got to the top of the stairs, though, to the spot where Grandfather's version of Ophelia usually hung, the painting of the beach—presumably at Edsway (after Bonington)—wasn't there in its stead.

There wasn't a gap there either, of course.

Elizabeth would have noticed a gap straightaway. Everyone would have noticed a gap. What was there in the place of Ophelia drowning among the lilies—it must have been a very slow-moving stream, she thought inconsequentially—was a water-colour of the estuary of the River Calle as seen from Collerton house. This owed nothing to any artist save Richard Camming himself and it was not very good. Moreover it was a view that he had painted many, many times—like Monet and the River Thames.

‘And not got any better at it,' decided Elizabeth judiciously. Unlike Monet.

There were at least a dozen efforts by Richard Camming at capturing on canvas the oxbow of the river as it swept down towards the sea at Collerton. This particular painting could have been any one of them. Elizabeth wasn't aware of having seen this one anywhere else in the house before but there were several piles of pictures stacked away in the attics of Collerton House and it could easily have been among them without her knowing.

She went back at once to the bedroom to check that only one picture had been changed. Over the fireplace there had hung throughout her lifetime a picture in which her grandfather had tried to capture the elusive gregariousness of the work of Sir David Wilkie—the Scottish Breughel. Richard Camming hadn't actually got a blind fiddler in the picture but there was a general feeling that the musician wasn't far away.

That picture was still there. Elizabeth was not surprised. She would have noticed much earlier in the day if there had been any change in the picture hanging over the fireplace. The head of the bed, though, was at an angle from the window and only got full sunshine in the afternoon.

She had tried after this to go back to her vacuum cleaning but her determined concentration on the mundane had been broken and suddenly her thoughts and carefully suppressed emotions were unleashed in unruly turmoil.

Abruptly she left the cleaner where it was standing in the middle of the floor and went out of the bedroom. As she looked over the landing balustrade she saw with approval the glass case reposing on a window-sill in the entrance hall. There was absolutely nothing amateur about her great-grandfather's legacy to posterity. What he had left behind him had been something much more useful than dozens and dozens of indifferent paintings. Gordon Camming—Richard Camming's father—had designed a valve that the marine engineering world of his day had fallen upon with delight and used ever since.

A Camming valve had been fitted into a model and stood for all the world to see in the house built by its designer with the proceeds of the patent. But it was really paintings and not patents that Elizabeth Busby had on her mind as she passed along the landing on her way to Frank Mundill's office. The studio with its mandatory north light added fifty years earlier by an indulgent father for his painter son, served now as the drawing office of Frank Mundill, architect. Elizabeth didn't usually disturb him there, although she'd done so once or twice when her aunt had taken a turn for the worse—not otherwise—but she didn't hesitate now.

And almost immediately she wished that she hadn't.

Another time she would make a point of not going to his office unheralded because Frank Mundill was not alone. Sitting in the client's chair in his room was a neighbour—Mrs Veronica Feckler.

‘Elizabeth, my dear,' said Mrs Feckler at once, ‘how nice to see you.'

‘I'm sorry,' said Elizabeth gruffly. ‘I didn't know there was anyone here.'

‘How could you?' asked Veronica Feckler blandly. ‘I crept round the back with my miserable little plans. I was sure that Frank was going to laugh at them and he did.'

‘I certainly did not,' protested Frank Mundill.

‘I'm sure I detected a twitch of the lips,' insisted Mrs Feckler. She was a widow who had come to live in the village of Collerton about three years ago, Elizabeth's aunt had not greatly cared for her.

‘It's just,' said the architect with professional caution, ‘that it's a long way from a quick sketch on the back of an envelope …'

‘A shopping-list, actually,' murmured Mrs Feckler.

‘… to the finished design that a builder can use.'

She turned to Elizabeth. ‘I had this brilliant idea while I was in the greengrocer's,' she said eagerly. ‘Dear old Mr Partridge was telling me about Costa Rican bananas—did you know that they grew bananas in Costa Rica?'

Elizabeth knew a great deal about Costa Rica, but Mrs Feckler hadn't waited for an answer.

‘I said I'd have three when I suddenly thought what about building out over my kitchen.'

‘I see,' said Elizabeth politely.

‘And it's an even bigger step from the plans to the finished building,' warned Frank Mundill. ‘Clients don't always realize that either.'

‘But I do.' She turned protestingly to Elizabeth. ‘Tell him I do, there's a darling.'

‘I was turning out a bedroom,' said Elizabeth obliquely, conscious that she must look more than a little scruffy. Mrs Feckler was wearing clothes so casual that they must have needed quite a lot of time to assemble.

‘And I was wasting your poor uncle's time,' said the other woman, sensitive to something in Elizabeth's manner. She rose to go. ‘But I do really want something doing to my little cottage now that Simon has said he's coming back home for a while.' She gave a little light laugh. ‘Mothers do have their uses sometimes.'

Elizabeth assented politely to this, silently endorsing the sentiment. She would be so thankful to see her own mother again. Mrs Busby hadn't come back to England from South America for her sister's funeral because she couldn't travel by air. Pressurized air travel didn't suit a middle-aged woman suffering from Menière's disease of the middle ear. Even now, though, both her parents were on the high seas on their way home from South America. They had been coming for a wedding …

Frank Mundill was still studying the piece of paper that Mrs Feckler had given him. ‘I'll have to think about this, Veronica, when I've had a chance to look at it properly.'

He was rewarded with a graceful smile.

‘Give me a day or so,' he said hastily, ‘and then come back for a chat. I'll have done a quick sketch by then.'

Mrs Veronica Feckler gathered up her handbag. ‘How kind …'

Elizabeth Busby waited until Frank Mundill returned to his drawing-office after showing her out. ‘I came about a picture,' she said.

He sank back into the chair behind his desk and ran his hands through his hair. ‘A picture?'

‘Three pictures, actually,' she said.

He looked up.

‘Three pictures,' she said, ‘that aren't where they were.'

‘I think I know the ones you mean,' he said uneasily.

‘Ophelia.'

‘It's been moved,' he said promptly.

‘I know,' she said. Frank Mundill wasn't meeting her eye, though. ‘And a river one and a beach scene.'

He didn't say anything in reply.

‘The beach one has gone,' she said.

‘I know.' He was studying the blotting-paper on his desk now.

‘Well?'

He cleared his throat. ‘Peter wanted it.'

‘Peter?' Her voice was up at high doh before she could collect herself.

He nodded. ‘I knew you wouldn't like that.'

‘Peter Hinton?' She heard herself pronouncing his name even though she had sworn to herself again and again that her lips would never more form it.

Frank Mundill looked distinctly uncomfortable. ‘He asked me if he could have it.'

‘Peter Hinton asked you if he could have the picture of the beach?' she echoed on a rising note of pure disbelief. He didn't even like pictures.'