Parting Breath (14 page)

‘At least,' said Marion Moleyns tonelessly, ‘he'd had his holiday before … before …'

‘Where did he go?'

‘All sorts of places,' she said vaguely. ‘Belgium … I know he went there because he told me they hadn't got any hedges.'

‘Poor little Belgium.' Now whereabouts in his subconscious had that come from?

‘And flat?'

‘Very flat, Belgium,' said Sloan. Or that?

‘Like Norfolk, Henry said it was.'

Of course. That was where that had come from.

‘Waterloo wasn't like what Henry had expected, though.'

‘Where else did he go?' asked Sloan, deciding that this was no occasion for quoting the Duke of Wellington.

‘I had a picture postcard from Cologne,' she said.

A young man going east, decided Sloan to himself.

‘It was of the Cathedral,' said Miss Moleyns. ‘Very pretty – quite English in a way.'

This, Sloan was aware, was praise indeed. ‘What did he say on the card?'

‘That I wouldn't like the food there,' she said simply.

Henry Moleyns, then, hadn't wasted his time on the ‘wish you were here' style of platitude. Nor his money on a Donald McGill-type card.

‘All that red cabbage,' she said.

‘Quite,' said Sloan. Of such stuff are xenophobes made.

‘Not,' she added literally, ‘that I would have liked a bicycle tour with a tent either but … but … but I would have liked to have had his last few weeks with him if only I'd known.'

Sloan nodded. It was a constant refrain where there was a sudden death. Perhaps the saving grace of terminal illness was that this feeling was spared those around the deceased.

Miss Marion Moleyns looked straight across the Bursar's desk at Sloan in that curious mixture of attitude compounded of the defensive and the aggressive of one for whom life has never been easy. ‘He was a good boy, you see, Inspector. And what I want to know,' she demanded, a harsher note creeping into her voice, ‘is why anyone would want to do a thing like this to him?'

‘And that,' answered Sloan in the same spirit, ‘I can't tell you yet – but I will, I can promise you. Just give me a little time.'

When Detective Inspector Sloan next saw Crosby he was approaching the fountain and the constable was crossing the Tarsus College quadrangle with a steaming jug of coffee in one hand and in the other two cups, one on top of the other, and balanced on top of those a plate with some sandwiches on it. The sandwiches were perilously crowned with a salt cellar.

Sloan regarded his subordinate for a long moment and then said sardonically, ‘And for your next trick?'

‘I wasn't absolutely sure what a College Buttery was,' said Crosby virtuously, ‘so I went to find out.' He cast an anxious glance at the salt cellar, which was wobbling as uncertainly as a Balkan throne. ‘Sir, do you think we could sit down by the fountain?'

As they settled themselves on the parapet Sloan looked at his watch. He would telephone his wife next to say that he wouldn't be home before morning. She wouldn't mind. Or if she minded she wouldn't say. It was one of the things she was used to. And if, when it came, the new baby cried in the night she knew she would have to soothe it alone. The first nursery rhyme that any detective's child learnt was ‘Bye, baby bunting, Father's gone a-hunting.…'

‘The man Colin Ellison,' said Crosby basely dividing the sandwiches on a purely mathematical basis and without any regard to rank, ‘says he doesn't know anything about anything.'

‘He was part of the great row in the library,' said Sloan, ‘his room was robbed, and for my money he was somewhere he shouldn't have been yesterday evening.'

‘He says he didn't even know Moleyns was dead until he got to the dining hall this evening.'

‘And,' added Sloan, ‘he was around here about the time Moleyns bought it. Or so Sneezy says.'

‘Sneezy, sir? Oh, yes, our Stephen Smithers.'

‘
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
,' said Sloan crisply. ‘Before your time, Crosby.'

‘Yes, sir.'

Now he came to think about it, you could get wallpapers with the nicer characters from the rich store of English fairy tales printed on them especially for children's nurseries. They, he and Margaret, would have to think about having that – nothing frightening, of course, but enough pictures for the baby to build fantasies of its own around.

‘Coffee,' said Crosby, unwittingly interrupting a vision which was a confusion of fairly-tale castles and knights in shining armour that would have greatly surprised him had he been able to share it. ‘They,' he went on, ‘were Colin Ellison's things all right, sir. He checked them through quite carefully for me just now.'

‘All present and correct?'

‘Nothing missing – he was sure about that – and nothing damaged that he could see.'

‘And no fingerprints either, I take it?'

‘No, sir. It doesn't make sense.'

‘It will,' said Sloan rather wearily, ‘in the end. So will Moleyns' wanting to see the Chaplain when we find out what all that caper was about.' He bit into a sandwich. ‘Tell me, Crosby, why should a man of that age want to see a chaplain?'

Crosby frowned. ‘About getting married, sir would you think?'

‘Married?' grunted Sloan. ‘I hadn't thought of that.'

‘It wouldn't be a christening,' continued the constable, in whose family circle the Church featured in Rites of Passage on wheels and nothing else, ‘would it, now?'

‘Why not?' asked Sloan, intrigued. ‘Even students …'

‘If it was a christening,' pronounced Crosby, ‘the mother would lay it on, wouldn't she?'

‘I wouldn't know about that,' murmured Sloan. And he didn't either. Not yet. But soon he would be learning. ‘And,' he added curiously, ‘how are you so sure?'

‘My sisters,' said Crosby bashfully. ‘Always making an uncle of me, they are.'

Sloan tried to visualize a neat and tidy Crosby standing near the font with a white bundle in his arms, failed – and helped himself to another sandwich. ‘Assuming,' he said with heavy irony, ‘that the marriage service is out and that christenings are women's work' – fatherhood was going to be a new experience for Sloan; he obviously had a lot to learn – ‘what else do you think Moleyns might have wanted to consult a chaplain about?'

‘I couldn't say, sir, I'm sure.'

‘What sort of problem would you consult a chaplain about?' asked Sloan, changing his tack slightly. After all, Crosby couldn't be that much older than all these undergraduates – and everyone couldn't be of the same simple faith as the Superintendent.

‘Getting married,' said Crosby without hesitation.

‘You've got a one-track mind,' snapped Sloan.

‘Yes, sir.' He coughed and tried again. ‘Perhaps Henry Moleyns had been and gone and done something that he shouldn't have done, then.'

‘Confession? That's a thought.' Sloan had seen many men weighed down with guilt in his time, a prison sentence a welcome expiation in spite of what the reformers said.

Crosby lifted his coffee cup. ‘You usually want to tell somebody if you've blotted your copy-book, sir, don't you?'

‘That's just as well, too,' said Sloan flatly, ‘otherwise there would be a sight fewer cases solved.'

‘Course, he might just have had a simple problem about what to do about something,' ventured Crosby.

‘He was going to see Professor Watkinson, too, and he's a historian.'

‘A historical problem, then,' said Crosby obligingly.

‘That reminds me.' Sloan flipped over the pages of his notebook. ‘The Professor said that he sent him a note.'

‘It's not in his room.'

‘Now, there's a thing,' said Detective Inspector Sloan absently. ‘Make a note about that.…'

‘I've got the Berebury and District General Hospital on the line,' announced Higgins, the porter, who was manning the Tarsus switchboard, ‘with a call for Detective Inspector Sloan. A Dr Dabbe.'

‘Put him through,' said Sloan.

The Bursar of Tarsus had found him a room at the opposite side of the quadrangle – ‘murder headquarters' seemed to Sloan an improbable description of it. The room belonged to a don of Tarsus presently enjoying a sabbatical year in the United States and was furnished with modern prints by De Chirico. He had only half an eye for them, which was just as well: he had a feeling that closer examination might not be a good thing. The bookcases, too, were full of books that Sloan would not have liked his wife to read.

But what worried him most of all was the white carpet. In Sloan's milieu carpets were for covering floors serviceably. This one was not only white but slightly fluffy and he didn't see how it could stay white for very long while the room doubled as a working place for a Scene of Crime Officer. The only comfort was that John Hardiman had assured him that the owner would not be back for a year.

‘That you, Sloan? Dabbe here.'

There wouldn't be any carpets where Dr Dabbe was ringing from, Sloan knew that. Only a stout composition floor hosed down a dozen times a day. And there were no prints hanging on the wall, except perhaps X-ray ones.

‘This post mortem,' began the pathologist.

‘Yes, Doctor.' Sloan pulled his notebook towards him.

‘The deceased was a young man of average build – about twenty years old – you've got his exact age, I expect – properly nourished.…'

Pathologists had hobby-horses, too, and obesity was one of Dr Dabbe's. He was always having a go at Sergeant Gelven – seventeen stone without his whistle – about his weight. ‘See you soon,' was his favourite form of greeting to the portly detective, ‘on my slab.' He would chide the too thin, also, but not so often.

‘… and quite muscular,' went on Dr Dabbe now.

‘He'd been on a bicycle tour,' Sloan informed him absently, ‘so he would be.'

‘Had he? Well, there were certainly no signs of disease present. The cause of death was a penetrating wound between the fourth rib and the fifth rib just to the left of the sternum.'

‘Missing the bone?' said Sloan.

‘It isn't bone there,' said Dabbe. ‘Only cartilage. Bony rib doesn't start until another inch each side of the breastbone.'

‘Missing the cartilage, then,' said Sloan patiently.

‘That sort of wound is almost always going to miss the cartilage,' said the pathologist. ‘Most things coming up against it are going to be deflected either above or below the rib and through the intercostal muscles.'

‘Are they?' said Sloan non-committally.

‘If you think of your ribs as being like Venetian blinds on edge you can see that anything pointed at them would stand a good chance of getting through, can't you?'

‘Yes,' said Sloan. ‘What we need to know, though, is –'

‘The wound,' went on the pathologist, equally undeflected, ‘extends through the pericardium and the anterior wall of the left ventricle.'

‘Which means …' said Sloan gamely.

‘I opened the pericardial sac, of course,' said Dr Dabbe, not listening.

‘Of course,' murmured Sloan.

‘Naturally it was full of blood.'

Noises of agreement seemed called for, so Sloan made them.

‘And the subject was standing up.'

‘Was he?' said Sloan. He didn't know how much that information was going to help him, but he wrote it down.

‘As Vespasian said,' remarked Dr Dabbe.

‘Who?'

‘Vespasian. He was a Roman emperor who held that emperors should die standing up.'

‘Did he?' said Sloan.

‘Vespasian? No, come to think of it, I don't believe he did. Died in his bed.'

Sloan took a deep breath. ‘And Henry Moleyns?'

‘He nearly did,' said Dr. Dabbe cheerfully. ‘There's a trickle of blood down the outside of the skin under the fourth intercostal space to prove it.'

‘That's something, I suppose,' said Sloan, who had not for one moment lost track of the things he wanted to know. ‘Now, Doctor, about the weapon.…'

‘Sharp, of course. It went through his clothes, too.'

‘Yes.'

‘Thin. Eight millimetres at the outside.'

Sloan wrote that down, too. Not that he liked metric measurements. Oh, he understood them all right, and in theory they made adding up easier, but he still couldn't – what was the word they used these days? – he couldn't conceptualise them. Now, inches and yards he could imagine, and if anyone mentioned miles he knew where he was at once. The new baby would be all right. He'd never learn anything else.

‘And not less than six point five,' continued the pathologist.

‘Six point five,' echoed Sloan.

‘Measure twice and cut once, as my old granny's dressmaker used to say, Sloan.'

‘Yes, Doctor.' Dr Dabbe always took an incorrigibly light-hearted view of his work. Perhaps it was the only way. Perhaps it was because pathologists were insulated from their patients in a way that other doctors weren't by death and – by custom – they never saw relatives anyway. That would have suited Sloan, too: It was when you saw the relatives that you saw crime as the pebble in the pond – the ripples reaching out further and further, lapping up the quiet by-waters of other people's lives. Drowning them sometimes, too.

‘The sizes of the holes in the clothes, the skin and the visceral and parietal edges of the pericardium are all very much the same,' carried on the pathologist, ‘so whatever the instrument was, it doesn't appreciably thicken up for the first part of its length.'

‘Amazing what you can tell from a hole,' remarked Sloan, ‘isn't it?'

‘I haven't finished,' said Dabbe. ‘There's something else.'

‘The angle?' hazarded Sloan after a quick think.