Slight Mourning (6 page)

“His sun went down while it was yet day,” she murmured.

All of the congregation were standing now, and Detective Constable Crosby was using his position at the very back of the church and his height—well above minimal police regulation—to survey the rest of the mourners. He studied the backs of their heads one by one so hard that, irritated, Sloan whispered to him.

“Is your middle name Lombroso, then, Crosby?”

“No, sir,” he whispered back. “Edward.” There was a pause. “Who's Lombroso?”

“An Italian chap who thought you could tell a bad 'un from the set of his ears.”

“Oh.” There was another pause. Then, “And can you?”

“Not that I know of,” sighed Sloan. “It's not as easy as that.”

He wished that he had Sergeant Gelven with him today instead of Constable Crosby. Gelven was a policeman to his finger-tips—to his finger-prints, you might say—and sturdy, reliable, and resourceful into the bargain. And, of course, it showed.

“First time I've looked for villains at a funeral, sir,” Crosby resumed his chatty whispering.

“They may not be here,” said Sloan, though he didn't believe that himself. Everyone who had had anything to do with the Fents' fatal dinner party was at the funeral—right down to the village grocer who supplied Strontfield Park and the neighbouring farmer who had called in at the house before the party.

“Sure to be, sir,” Crosby hissed back confidently. “It's always family or friends who do you in …”

Sloan grunted. Ninety per cent of the time it was, too.

“… and they'd be here anyway,” continued Crosby. “Up front.”

“All right, all right,” he said. “I promise we'll start with the kith and kin as usual.” Sloan allowed his gaze to travel to the pews nearest the coffin, his thoughts not so far removed from those of Miss Cynthia Paterson after all.

“Nearest and dearest, that's who it'll be, sir, I bet,” pronounced Crosby with all the airy assurance of the young.

“I'll make a note,” said Sloan solemnly. “A hundred to one?”

“Unless it was a pure accident,” qualified the constable quickly.

“There's no such thing as a pure accident, Crosby,” responded Sloan in a firm undertone, “and the sooner you get that idea into your head the better.”

It had been Inspector Harpe of Traffic Division who had taught Sloan that. There were only two sorts of accidents, the melancholy Harpe insisted after half a lifetime's study of every untoward incident and accident in the county of Calleshire. There were, Happy Harry always said, ignorance accidents and going-somewhere-to-happen accidents, but never, never simon-pure accidents.

“Besides, Crosby,” Sloan added for good measure, “whatever it was the deceased swallowed in the way of an injurious substance didn't affect anyone else, did it?”

“No, sir. Not that we know about.” It had been Crosby's job since Monday to cultivate Milly Pennyfeather who had been in the kitchen at Strontfield Park on Saturday, and to begin quietly to check the other guests and the family for disquieting symptoms.

They hadn't had any.

Sloan too had done a good deal of unobtrusive asking around since the pathologist's report had come in. Nothing he had established so far had been the slightest help …

There had not even been anything useful to be gleaned from the rector's funeral oration. Like Cynthia Paterson he'd been around too long to be influenced by them anyway. Unlike Cynthia Paterson he always remembered that bit about a man not being on oath when he rendered them. And clergymen were only men. That was something else you found out after a year or so in the wide world too.

Sloan didn't know what effect the rector's well-chosen words had had nearer the front. They had certainly made at least one back-bencher restive: the one standing next to him. It was just as well that the two policemen were right at the back of the church because Constable Crosby's hoarse whisper wasn't anything like quiet enough.

“We're like a couple of mosquitoes in a nudist colony, aren't we, sir?” he hissed cheerfully. “Our trouble is that we don't know where to begin.”

FIVE

“That's where you're wrong, my lad,” said Sloan, but he did not say it aloud.

As far as Sloan was concerned the case had already begun. It had started for him in Dr. Dabbe's Pathology Laboratory on Wednesday afternoon, the day that Dr. Writtle had been there and Crosby had turned queer. No wonder that the constable chose to forget it.

“The dead of night,” the pathologist had said. “What more did you want, Sloan?”

In the event Detective Inspector Sloan had wanted more—much more—from Fair Science than just the postulated time of William Fent's death without the intervention of the motor car.

“I need to know exactly what Fent took for a start,” he had replied, “and in what form.” By then he was glad to see that Crosby was beginning to sit up and take notice again.

“Here we are, Inspector.” Writtle, the Home Office analyst, tapped two smaller bottles and sent them scurrying down the laboratory bench to join the stomach and the liver which had so upset Constable Crosby. “These should tell us what could have done the damage.”

Both bottles were of dark-coloured glass. Sloan was relieved to see that they appeared to contain only some sort of powder. Even Crosby should be able to regard them with equanimity.

Dr. Dabbe grinned. “Whatever you like. Gog and Magog?” he suggested. “Or William-and-Mary—no, not William-and-Mary”—he peered round the shelves of specimens—“I've got a hermaphrodite worm here somewhere called that.”

“Mutt and Jeff,” croaked Crosby.

“He's feeling better,” said the pathologist kindly. “What about Tweedledum and Tweedledee?”

“Antimony and Cleopatra?” contributed Dr. Writtle with a sly smile.

“It wasn't, was it?” said Sloan. “Not antimony, I mean?”

“'Fraid not, Inspector,” said the analyst regretfully. “Nice pun if it had been, though. No, what we found was a barbiturate of a sort …”

“Ferdinand and Isabella,” interrupted Dabbe irrepressibly. “I'm sure they looked alike, too.”

“Tom and Jerry,” offered Crosby. He was back to his normal colour again now.

“One of the free barbiturates,” said Writtle. “That is to say, not a sodium derivative.”

Sloan waited for enlightenment.

The analyst pointed to the two bottles. “Those crystals have been extracted by ether and chloroform. If we make an aqueous solution of the residue of one of them …”

“Gog,” said Dr. Dabbe.

“And,” went on Writtle, “then add one drop of Millon's reagent we get a white gelatinous precipitate which is proof of the presence of a barbiturate.”

“Proof positive?” inquired Sloan. There was no word more loosely used than “proof”…

“It'll stand up in court,” said Writtle, “if that's what you mean. Especially with the other one.”

“Magog,” said Dr. Dabbe helpfully.

“When a trace of that one is dissolved in chloroform,” said the analyst, “and a one per cent solution of cobalt acetate added, you get a strong violet colour.”

“‘The dew that on the violet lies,'” murmured Dr. Dabbe poetically, “‘mocks the dark lustre of thine eyes.' Sir Walter Scott. A neglected poet.”

Crosby perked up upon the instant. “‘Roses are red, violets are blue, sugar is sweet and.…'”

Then he caught Sloan's eye and his voice died away.

“How,” inquired Sloan gamely of Dr. Writtle, “was the barbiturate administered?”

Crosby he could and would deal with later but there was absolutely nothing a mere detective inspector could do about a forensic pathologist with a bizarre sense of humour.

“In what chemical form, do you mean, Inspector? Probably in solution.” The Home Office analyst, at least, Sloan was glad to see, was still on the job. “It might just have been in a highly soluble uncoated tablet but we doubt it. The main thing is that it wasn't in a capsule.”

“We looked for one,” said Dr. Dabbe.

“There was no sign of there having been a capsule,” said Dr. Writtle. “There was no gelatine present anywhere in the alimentary canal.”

“And it couldn't have gone far anyway,” added Dabbe cheerfully. “Not in the time.”

“Ah, yes, gentlemen,” said Sloan. “The time. When …”

Writtle riffled through some papers. “It's not all that easy to say, Inspector, especially if the substance was administered in solution …”

“And perhaps in something he only sipped slowly,” interjected Dr. Dabbe, “from time to time—say a liqueur—over half an hour or more.”

“But we should be prepared to go so far as to say, Inspector,” said Dr. Writtle, “that it wasn't—er—taken much before eight o'clock or much later than eleven.”

Sloan wrote that down and noted the laboratory numbers from the bottles, and then turned over another page in his notebook. “The barbiturate—how much was there of it?”

“Good question,” said Dr. Dabbe.

“Enough,” replied Writtle, “to make sure that he didn't see morning. I'll let you have the full quantitative analysis on paper.”

“Thank you, Doctor.” Sloan looked from one to the other. “I think you've told me everything I need to know to begin with except one thing …”

“What's that?”

“Whether he took it himself or had it given to him.”

“Another good question,” observed Dabbe.

Writtle stroked his chin. “That's more difficult to say, Inspector.”

“Your department, anyway, Sloan,” said Dabbe mischievously. “Not ours. We're only the humble legmen, aren't we, Writtle? Hewers of detective wood and drawers of forensic water.”

“And,” went on Sloan crisply, refusing to be drawn, “whether, if he did take it himself, it was on purpose or by mistake.”

“Ah,” said Writtle thoughtfully.

“Or, come to that, gentlemen, if someone else gave it to him by mistake.”

“We don't know that either, Dabbe, do we?” said Writtle.

The pathologist turned a look of bland innocence in Sloan's direction. “We know hardly anything about anything.”

“I have heard,” said Sloan firmly, “of cases where a person having taken a sleeping tablet is a bit confused by its effect. Then he can't remember if he's had his tablet or not and so he takes another.”

“Automatism,” said Writtle. “That's the name for that.”

“And then he takes another tablet after that one,” agreed Dabbe, “to be quite sure he's had his dose. It happens.”

“Not as a rule until the patient is either in or near to going to bed,” pointed out Writtle. “And not before setting out on a drive.”

“He didn't know he was going to have to go out in the car,” Sloan informed him absently. “Do I take these bottles away with me now, Doctor?”

“These? Oh, no, Inspector. These are only half our workings. We're keeping the other half with these meantime.”

“For the Defence,” added Writtle.

Dr. Dabbe waved a hand at the collection of specimen jars on the laboratory bench. He was quite serious now. “But that barbiturate, Sloan …”

“Yes?”

“I should say that it could constitute ‘a destructive thing' within the meaning of the Act.” The doctor looked at him. “What you need now for a watertight case is the ‘malice aforethought' bit.”

It was half an hour after they left the church before the chief mourners got back to Strontfield Park. Half an hour in which the coffin had been lowered into the grave, the rector had spoken the words of the Committal, and the funeral cars had driven back through the village. As they passed, Herbert Kelway lifted the blinds of his shop-window and then got back to work.

Back at the house duty called, too.

If Mrs. Helen Fent wanted nothing more than to shut herself away in her room she did not say so. Instead she moved slowly around among those present, politely responding to well-meant condolences. Always pale-faced, she was now almost without colour at all. She had chosen to wear a loose-fitting linen dress in a shade of charcoal grey which went well with her raven hair but which also served to heighten her pallor. She wasn't tall but even so she stood out in the present company because people fell back a little as she moved. In deference to grief, no one's back was turned to her.

Like stage royalty, thought Annabel Pollock involuntarily, making her own escape to the dining-room. Cold luncheon had been set out there by Milly Pennyfeather for those who wanted it. Annabel busied herself twitching table napkins into shape, adjusting a fork here and there, and feverishly counting plates, even though there was really nothing more to be done.

After a while, though, duty called her, too, back to the drawing-room. There were relatives to be attended to, and Nanny Vickers to be comforted. Nanny Vickers did not like to see any of her charges—grown men or not—slipping through her fingers.

“Thought I'd lost him once with the croup,” she sniffed, “but I pulled him through. Then there was mumps and whooping cough. You were always a sickly one, too, Miss Annabel. Came of being born and brought up in India, I suppose.”

“I know.” Annabel was apologetic. “All those years in the heat.”

“He was a fine boy by the time I left.” In Nanny Vickers' view life's hazards were mostly over by the age of twelve. “I never thought to see him go like this.”

“No,” Annabel Pollock agreed. “We none of us did.”

“Cars!” snorted Nanny Vickers. “I wish they'd never been invented.”

“Amen to that,” said Annabel, passing on to speak to Great-Uncle George, a sprightly octogenarian, who'd left the sheltered comfort of the private hotel where he lived to come to Constance Parva for the funeral. Both Annabel's and Bill's mothers had been his nieces.