Slight Mourning

by Catherine Aird

  “She went quietly,” he said at last.

  Sloan was surprised and showed it. It didn’t sound like Marjorie Marchmont.

  “Never knew what hit her,” grunted Dabbe. “Taken unawares from behind, I should say. The plaits just crossed over in front and pulled tight. That’s all there was to it. Most vulnerable place in the body, of course. It doesn’t take much pressure there.” The doctor stooped and looked at the dead woman’s hands. “No signs of a struggle. Not so much as a broken finger-nail. Someone she knew, at a guess.” He straightened up again. “All right, Sloan, you can take her away. I’m finished here now.”

  Dr. Dabbe might have finished for the time being. Detective Inspector Sloan had only just started.

  He dialled the Berebury Golf Club for the fourth time from Strontfield Park. This time he was lucky. Or unlucky. Superintendent Leeyes had now finished his round and was back in the Club-house. The steward would call him to the telephone.

  “Can’t a man have a round of golf in peace …”

  Sloan told him about Marjorie Marchmont while he was still grumbling about being disturbed.

  “What!” he spluttered.

  Sloan said it all over again.

  “Dead?” he howled. “The fat woman? You’re sure, Sloan?”

  Sloan said he was sure. She was dead. She was the fat woman.

  “And she was one of your dinner party, wasn’t she?”

  “She was,” said Sloan. First Bill Fent, now Mrs. Marchmont.

  “One, two, that’ll do,” said Leeyes ominously.

  “Yes, sir,” said Sloan without comment. He was as bad as Crosby, really, with his nursery rhymes.

  “Somebody means business, all right,” said Leeyes. “All this and poison too.”

  “We’re checking on what everyone was doing last night.”

  “What they said they were doing,” put in Leeyes tartly. “One of them’s hardly likely to tell you he was doing for Mrs. Marchmont.”

  “The husband,” went on Sloan sturdily, “seems to be in the clear.”

  Leeyes grunted at that.

  “‘The Tabard’ in Bear Street, Calleford, say that Daniel Marchmont was there from six-thirty yesterday evening when he registered until after breakfast this morning.”

  “How do they know he was there all night?” countered Leeyes.

  Sloan coughed. “It seems to have been—er—a very short night as far as the hotel was concerned.”

  Leeyes grunted. “That won’t do for the Court. If we ever get to Court with this and I must say …”

  “The East Calleshires fought at Mallamby Ridge, sir.”

  “What about it?”

  “’Twas a famous victory.”

  “I know that,” snapped Leeyes irritably. “In ’44, wasn’t it? They stormed the ridge in the face of the enemy.”

  It had been flat at Walcheren.

  “I don’t know when they did it for the first time, sir. Apparently they—er—re-enacted it last night.”

  “In the hotel?”

  “At a late stage in the celebrations,” said Sloan, quoting a hollow-eyed hotel manager, “their old company commander had an argument with the brigade major about where an abutment had come on the ridge. He decided to prove his point by scaling the staircase well.”

  “He should have stuck to drawing on the table-cloth.”

  “Not only the brigade major but the entire company,” said Sloan steadily, “decided to pretend that the three flights of stairs were Mallamby Ridge.”

  “Good God.”

  “That wasn’t all, sir. When they were all off the ground some lunatic remembered that the battle had been fought in the dark and switched all the lights out.”

  “Where was the manager?” demanded Leeyes militantly.

  Sloan cleared his throat. “Unfortunately, sir, I understand that the—er—ploy required an enemy.”

  “Not …”

  “All the hotel staff.”

  “The waiter, the porter, and the upstairs maid, eh, Sloan?”

  “The porter went for reinforcements, the waiter hid up in the pantry …”

  “And the upstairs maid?”

  “I’m told the company commander tried to take her hostage but she wasn’t having any nonsense like that. She knocked him back a flight.”

  “And?”

  “He still got to the top first. He got the D.S.O. for it at Mallamby,” said Sloan, “but he was younger then.”

  “And our hero?”

  “Marchmont? Apparently he took a while to get started, but then he got going too. He made the top all right. Of course he hasn’t put the weight on that some of them have. The brigade major, now, he didn’t get off the ground at all. Been a pen pusher for thirty years, of course.”

  “And when this little war game was over?”

  “The night porter and the manager put them all to bed.”

  “That doesn’t mean that …”

  “They are prepared to state that it would have been physically impossible for Marchmont to have driven himself anywhere.”

  “Are they indeed?” said Leeyes. “Haven’t they heard of men pretending to be drunk?”

  “Those who actually got to the top,” said Sloan, nicely paraphrasing the manager’s choicer epithets for them, “celebrated with champagne. That was when the staff took all their shoes away. All of them. Spares and all.”

  “But …”

  “And made sure that no cars got out of the hotel yard. It’s an old coaching inn actually, so it was easy to lock up, and to make quite sure the manager drove his own car across the entrance.”

  “He’s had this little problem before then.”

  “He has.” In fact, the whole hotel still sounded in the grips of an almighty hang-over and the manager a bitter man.

  “That still leaves everyone except Marchmont, doesn’t it, Sloan?”

  Sloan agreed.

  “It adds up to a lot,” said Leeyes profoundly, “but I must say it doesn’t amount to much.”

  Sloan had waited by the Folly until the body of Mrs. Marjorie Marchmont had been borne away in an ambulance to Dr. Dabbe’s mortuary. If there was one thing more sinister than an ambulance with a flashing blue light and accompanying warble it was a silent ambulance without a flashing blue light that was travelling scarcely faster than a hearse.

  He had watched the vehicle bump its way back to the road and then given himself a mental shake. There was a lot to be done.

  He put the telephone down now and turned to his detective constable. “Now, I think, Crosby, we will ask Mrs. Helen Fent to see us.”

  This time Annabel Pollock agreed without demur. “I’ll show you up. This way, Inspector. I’ve told her about Mrs. Marchmont. I’m sure she’ll see you.” The girl stopped outside a door on the upstairs landing. She knocked. “Helen, I’ve brought the inspector up …”

  There was no response from inside the room.

  Annabel knocked again.

  “I’m afraid shell have to see us, miss, whether she likes it or not,” said Sloan.

  Annabel Pollock put her hand on the door knob with an uneasy laugh. “That’s something. It’s only shut. She has been keeping it locked … Helen, may we come in?”

  “Let me go first,” said Sloan quickly.

  The colour drained out of her face as she stood back and let Sloan enter the room ahead of her.

  There was no one there.

  SIXTEEN

  Sloan had come back to his own office. He doubted if he could have explained why. The proper place for him was undoubtedly the murder headquarters that he’d set up at Strontfield Park.

  In the dining-room.

  There was a nice irony about that.

  In the dining-room at Strontfield Park where the first murder had been perpetrated. That was a good word. As good as “ingested”: as good as “noxious substance.” Words that meant so much and no more.

  He’d wanted a good look at that dining-room anyway, though he was sorry that Ma
rjorie Marchmont had had to die before he had got it. It was Quentin Fent who’d suggested that they use that room as their H.Q. Sloan didn’t know whether that meant anything or not, but they’d wanted somewhere and that was where the young man had suggested.

  Anyway, Sloan had gone there quickly enough and told Police Constable Bargrave to fit it up as a murder room. But what he’d looked at himself first was the table and chairs. It was an oval table—long and rather narrow—with only room for one chair at the head and one at the foot.

  “Aye, there’s the rub,” he murmured when he looked at the chairs. There was nothing to indicate from the chairs which was the head and which the foot of the table.

  P.c. Bargrave, who was old and quiet, looked up but said nothing. If senior police officers chose to talk to themselves that was their affair. He hadn’t got where he had—one of the softest beats in the county—by drawing attention to the eccentricities of those further up the ladder.

  Sloan stood at one end of the long table and rested his hand on the back of the chair. “Mine host or mine hostess, I wonder?”

  This time Constable Bargrave kept his head down.

  Sloan moved over to the sideboard and tried to visualize two trays of six crémets each standing there. Surely there must have been something to indicate whether Bill Fent or Helen Fent—host or hostess—would pick up a certain tray and thus—in the ordered and polite society by which these sort of people set such store—have helped themselves to the fatal dish.

  The carving knives.

  That would be it.

  But not all men carved these days. Could the murderer have been sure enough to count on it? Or didn’t it really matter which of them died? And had the poison really been in one of the crémet dishes? It all seemed so very refined, somehow.

  Bargrave had continued to move methodically about the room seeing to the routine that was as inevitable an outcome of murder as of more humdrum transgressions of the law. A quiet dog usually made for a quiet flock—that was true of policemen and people too—but this time there had been a black sheep a bit too big for such a quiet dog to handle.

  Sloan had left him to it and come back to Berebury.

  Over the radio in his office he could hear the message he wanted going out to all police cars and stations in Calleshire.

  “Attention, all vehicles,” said the radio operator unemotionally. The radio gave her voice a nasal twang that it didn’t have in the canteen. “Attention, all vehicles. To look out for a green Austin Mini car, Registration Number Yankee Juliet Golf Two One. Believed being driven away from Strontfield Park, Constance Parva, within the last half an hour. Direction unknown.”

  “You can say that again,” said Crosby. “Did you see Quentin’s face when he saw that the car was gone?”

  “It is Mrs. Fent’s car,” said Sloan. Bill Fent’s own car hadn’t been fit to drive anywhere any more.

  “She didn’t waste any time, either. As soon as she heard about Mrs. Marchmont she was off.”

  “She’s running away,” said Sloan. “She’s very frightened. She was frightened before—ever since we went to the funeral. She’s even more frightened now that Mrs. Marchmont’s dead.”

  “Frightened of us?”

  Sloan looked down not unkindly at his constable. “Probably not.”

  “Then who …”

  “If we knew that, then we’d know who did for her husband and for Marjorie Marchmont, wouldn’t we?”

  The radio interrupted them: “Message continues. The driver is believed to be Mrs. Helen Fent, height five foot five, small build, dark hair. If seen, please stop and question …”

  “Change that,” snapped Sloan suddenly. “Change it to: ‘If seen, follow and keep under observation.’”

  Crosby leaned over and flipped a switch on the desk. He relayed the message to the Headquarters radio room.

  “Attention all vehicles,” the curiously nasal voice came out over the air a minute later. “There is a correction to the last ‘calling all cars’ message …”

  “If it isn’t us she’s frightened of,” persisted Crosby, “why doesn’t she come to us?”

  “Good question.” Perhaps he was learning after all. “Probably because she doesn’t want to tell us the whole story. That’s why some people in trouble give us a wide berth …”

  There was something else Sloan had to do now and he wasn’t looking forward to it.

  He pointed to the telephone and sighed. “Get me the Golf Club, Crosby.”

  This time the superintendent took the view that he could blame someone.

  Not just someone.

  Sloan actually.

  “You let her escape?” he howled.

  Several pithy rejoinders sprang to Sloan’s mind. He rejected them all one by one. Patience might be a virtue. Prudence certainly was.

  “We’re looking for her now,” was all he said.

  “Where?”

  “Everywhere she could have got to in the time, sir. She can’t have been gone long.”

  “Long enough for her to get out of Calleshire?” the superintendent wanted to know.

  Sloan looked at his watch and stopped to think. “If she slipped down to the motorway and put her foot on it I suppose she could be pretty well out of the county by now.”

  “I hope not,” said Leeyes ominously, “that’s all. I very much hope not. The assistant chief constable’s been onto me about that.”

  “About what, sir?”

  “Overstepping the mark,” said Leeyes grandly. “Going over the bounds, if you like.”

  “Sir?”

  “Straying out of your own patch, then,” growled Leeyes, “and into the next chap’s.”

  “I’m sure, sir,” said Sloan stiffly, “that we should get all possible co-operation from adjacent Forces.”

  “Well, I’m not,” said the superintendent. “Not if last time’s anything to go by. The Enderby affair. Remember?”

  “Oh, yes, of course … but that was different.” Sloan understood now. In the Enderby affair Superintendent Leeyes had caused a raiding party over the county boundary in the manner of a marauding Lowland chieftain engaged in a border foray. Calls of “A Percy” were practically audible.

  Since patently This Would Not Do, the assistant chief constable had been detailed to reprimand the superintendent. That graceful gentleman had—à la Lady Bracknell—risen from the ranks of the aristocracy, and had taken his idiom from the hunting field.

  “Well, I hope you understand now, Sloan,” carried on Superintendent Leeyes, “exactly how far you can go after this woman if she leaves Calleshire.”

  “Yes, I think so, sir.”

  “When the fox goes into the next hunt’s land,” said Leeyes heavily, “you can follow it.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “But you mayn’t stop earths there.”

  “No, sir.”

  “And you mayn’t dig.”

  “No, sir.”

  “You can kill, though,” he added in chilly tones. “That clear?”

  “Perfectly, sir.”

  “Then you’re a better man than I am, Gunga Din,” said Leeyes frankly. “I thought he was off his rocker.”

  “Mrs. Fent,” said Sloan desperately.

  “If she didn’t kill her husband …”

  “We don’t know that, sir, yet.” The paucity of what they did know was beginning to hit Sloan. “She’s in the running, though.” She, at least, would have known exactly where Bill Fent was sitting and which crémet would have been his.

  “And if she didn’t kill this fat woman,” swept on Leeyes.

  “Dr. Dabbe thinks it was a man who did that.”

  He was undiverted. “Then she’s not running away from us.”

  “No, sir.”

  “That means she’s running away from somebody.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And that means,” said Leeyes, “she knows something we don’t.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Like who
killed her husband if she didn’t.”

  “Like that her husband had been killed by someone else,” said Sloan, a chink of light beginning to dawn. “You see, sir, she was perfectly all right until she was told we were at the funeral …”

  “Told you it was a good idea to go,” said Leeyes complacently.

  “It’s only since then that she went funny and shut herself away.”

  “That means,” said Leeyes, “that she knows who. You’d better find her, Sloan. And quickly.”

  For a moment Sloan couldn’t even remember who Mr. Phillipps was.

  “He said you’re expecting a call from him, sir,” said the policeman on the switchboard.

  “Put him through,” said Sloan.

  He placed the man as soon as he heard his thin reedy voice. It was his friend of the law and the pin-stripe trousers, the clerk to the Lampard Bench.

  “You asked this morning, Inspector, if Mr. Fent had ever sentenced anyone who might have borne a grudge against him …”

  “So I did.” Sloan blinked. It couldn’t only have been this morning.

  “We’ve been through our records …”

  “Yes?”

  “Not a thing.”

  “Nobody swearing that they’d get him if it was the last thing they did?” Sloan didn’t believe this himself now. Not since he’d seen Marjorie Marchmont lying dead on the Folly floor; but he had to ask.

  “No.”

  “Everybody happy?”

  “They mostly thank us,” said the clerk defensively.

  “So they should,” said Sloan briskly. Like most policemen he believed in retributive justice. Punishment should follow crime. People expected it. And punishment did follow crime in all the ordered societies he’d ever heard about. Those that were still going strong, anyway. Presumably those where it didn’t had been sunk without trace. “Besides,” he added to Mr. Phillipps, “it’s what they want.”

  “I daresay it is,” said that worthy. “It’s making it fit the crime that’s the problem.”

  “Ah,” said Sloan, “the third arm of the law. We’re only the second.”

  “The second?”

  “Parliament in its wisdom,” said Sloan, “makes the laws. Agreed?”

  “Agreed. And very silly some of them are …”