Last Respects

by Catherine Aird

  Detective-Constable Crosby jerked his head dismissively. ‘Oh, he’s a foreigner then, is he?’

  ‘Not necessarily, Constable.’ The doctor grinned. ‘We’re all Caucasians here, you know.’ He waved a hand at his assistant, Burns, who had just entered the office. ‘Even Burns here, and he’s a Scotsman.’

  ‘Ready when you are, Doctor,’ said Burns impassively.

  The pathologist led the way through to the postmortem room.

  CHAPTER 4

  To die a dry death on land,

  Is as bad as a watery grave.

  Horace Boller had never been a man to let the grass grow under his feet. Nor was he one to share confidences—not even with his own son. Certainly not with Mrs Boller. After he had got back from Edsway with the body of the unknown man he saw it off in his cousin Ted’s hearse and then stumped along to his own cottage where he proceeded to sink a vast mug of steaming hot tea at speed.

  ‘That’s better,’ he said, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. Almost immediately he got up to go out again, pushing his chair back as he did so. It scraped on the floor.

  Had he known it, the dialogue he then embarked upon with his wife strongly resembled that between many a parent and their adolescent child.

  ‘Where are you going then, Horace?’ she asked, casting an eye in the direction of a saucepan on the cooking stove.

  ‘Out,’ he rasped.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Nowhere.’

  ‘When will you be back?’

  ‘Don’t know.’

  Horace was nearer sixty than sixteen but saw no more need to amplify what he said than did a rebellious teenager. Mrs Boller sniffed and turned down the flame under the saucepan.

  ‘You’ll have to wait for your supper then.’

  From the cottage doorway all he said was, ‘Expect me when you see me.’

  And that was said roughly. His mind was on something else.

  If that was too soon for Mrs Boller she did not say.

  There were some homes that were entirely maintained on the well-established premise that the husband and father was ‘a saint abroad and a devil at home’: or it may have been that Mrs Boller had just given up the unequal struggle.

  Horace, on the other hand, hadn’t given up anything and was soon back at the shore pushing his rowing-boat out again. The agglomeration of buoys, hard-standing and wooden rafts was too informal to be dignified with the name of marina but that was its function. Horace poked about this way and that, and then, calculating that anyone watching his movements from the village would by now have lost interest in his activities, he steered his prow in a seaward direction and bent his back to the oars.

  He was as subconsciously aware of the state of the tide as a farmer was aware of the weather and a motorist of other vehicles on the road. With a nicely judged spurt of effort he moved with the last of the tide before he turned distinctly up-river and into fresh water. After a little time in the middle of the stream he let the boat drift inshore again towards the south shore—the same side of the river as Edsway but further up river.

  It was a compound of long experience and the river-lore of generations that kept Horace Boller from grounding his boat on the mud banks. He seemed to know by instinct how to pick his way up river and which channel had deep water in it, and which only looked as if it had. It wasn’t only the apparent depths of the channels that were deceptive. Some of those which looked the most promising led only to the shallows. Horace Boller, however, seemed also to know where each one went. Daedalus-like, he selected one channel and passed by another with the sureness of much practice.

  Presently he found himself in relatively deep water in spite of being near the shore. This was where the river cut alongside the edge of the parish of Collerton. The churchyard came right down to the river bank and as it had got more and more full over the years so the land towards the river side had been used for graves.

  It was undoubtedly picturesque and in the summertime holidaymakers would come to stroll along the bank and through the churchyard exclaiming at the fine views of the estuary to be had from the little promontory. They seldom came in the winter and never in the spring and autumn when the grand alliance of wind and water almost always flooded the whole bank and part of the churchyard.

  The land was dry now and from where he was in his boat Horace could see someone tending one of the graves near the river. He bent to his oars though and carried on upstream without looking up. Presently he passed Collerton House too. Like the churchyard, its land—in this case, lawn—came down to the river’s edge. There was a little landing-stage by the water and beyond that a small boathouse. After that there were no more dwellings, only open fields. The main street of Collerton was set back from the church. Those who professed to understand the English rural landscape were in the habit of speaking knowledgeably about the devastation of the Black Death.

  ‘That’s when all the little hovels round the church decayed,’ they would say, ‘and a later medieval village grew up some distance away from the old diseased houses.’

  Horace Boller, who said ‘It stands to reason’ almost as often as Wurzel Gummidge, knew perfectly well why the church stood in lonely splendour apart from the village. It had been built on the only patch of remotely high ground in the parish. The houses had been built well back from the river’s edge for the elementary—and elemental—reason that the other land was liable to flooding. Horace was a fisherman. He knew all about the elements.

  He rowed steadily up river for purposes of his own. He didn’t stop in his progress until he rounded the last bend before Billing Bridge. Only then did he turn his craft and allow the current to help carry him along and back to the estuary and Edsway. On his way home he looked in on Ted Boller, back in his carpenter’s shed after his trip to Berebury. When he got back indoors his wife asked him where he’d been.

  ‘Nowhere,’ he said.

  ‘Did you see anyone?’

  ‘No one better than myself,’ he said obscurely.

  ‘What have you been doing then?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  All of which was—in its own way—perfectly true.

  Detective-Inspector Sloan entered the mortuary and took his first reluctant look at the unknown male of Caucasian stock aged about twenty-three years. A decomposing body was not a pretty sight.

  ‘He’s not undernourished,’ said Dr Dabbe, who had led the way.

  Burns, his assistant, who had brought up the rear, said, ‘I’ve got a note of his exact weight and height for you, Doctor.’

  Deadweight, thought Sloan to himself, was a word they used about ships, too. He took a look at the man for himself, automatically noting that there was nothing about him to show that he had been a seaman.

  ‘He’s not overweight either, Doctor,’ he said aloud. That was something to be noted too, these days. Would historians of the future call this the Age of Corpulence?

  ‘Average,’ agreed Dr Dabbe. ‘Dark hair and brown eyes … are you making a note of that, Constable?’

  ‘Short back and sides,’ observed Sloan. That, in essence, would tell Superintendent Leeyes what he wanted to know. For the Superintendent the length of a man’s hair divided the sheep from the goats as neatly as that chap in the Bible had sorted out the men whom he wanted in his army by the way in which they had drunk at the edge of the water. He’d forgotten his name …

  ‘Short back and sides,’ agreed the pathologist. ‘What’s left of it.’

  Gideon, thought Sloan to himself: that’s who it was. He’d beaten the army of the Midianites with his hand-picked men, had Gideon.

  ‘I’ve been looking for occupational signs for you,’ said Dr Dabbe.

  “That would help,’ said Sloan warmly. ‘In fact, Doctor, anything would help at this stage. Anything at all.’

  ‘You haven’t got anyone like him on the books as missing, then,’ said the doctor, correctly interpreting this.

  ‘Not in Calleshire,’ said Sloan. ‘N
ot male.’

  Detective-Constable Crosby hitched a shoulder in his corner. ‘Plenty of girls missing, Doctor. All looking older than they are. All good home-loving girls,’ he added, ‘except that they’ve left home.’

  The White Slave Trade mightn’t be what it had been but it kept going. It wasn’t, however, Sloan’s immediate concern. He kept his mind on the matter in hand: an unknown body. ‘What sort of occupational signs, Doctor?’

  ‘Well, he’s quite muscular, Sloan. You can see that for yourself. I’d say he wasn’t a man used to sitting at a desk all day. Or if he was, he went in for some strenuous sport too.’

  Sloan wondered what the masculine equivalent of housemaid’s knee was.

  ‘Actually,’ said Dabbe, ‘there’s no specific sign of a trade about him at all.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Sloan non-committally.

  ‘He didn’t have cobbler’s knee or miller’s thumb,’ said the pathologist, ‘and I can’t find any other mark on his person that’s come from using the same tool day after day.’

  Sloan wondered what sort of occupational mark the police force made on a man—day after day. Varicose veins, probably.

  ‘And he isn’t covered in oil,’ said Dr Dabbe.

  Oil wouldn’t have come off in the water, Sloan knew that.

  As a possible cause of death shipwreck after a fall on board receded a little from the front of his mind.

  ‘There’s something else that isn’t there,’ said the pathologist.

  ‘What’s that, Doctor?’ All that came into Sloan’s mind was that ridiculous verse of everyone’s childhood: ‘I met a man who wasn’t there …’

  ‘Nicotine stains,’ replied Dr Dabbe prosaically. ‘I should say he was a non-smoker.’

  ‘We don’t know at this stage what will be a help.’

  ‘Well, I hope you aren’t counting on a fingerprint identification because this chap’s skin’s more than a bit bloated over now.’

  Even the deceased’s physical identity was taking a little time to put together.

  ‘Fingernails—what’s left of them—appear to have been clean and well-cared for,’ continued Dabbe.

  ‘Make a note of that, Crosby,’ commanded Sloan. Manners might maketh man but appearance mattered too.

  ‘As far as I can say,’ said the pathologist, ‘he was clean generally.’

  That, too, ruled out a whole sub-culture of the voluntarily dirty. The involuntarily dirty didn’t have well-cared for fingernails and they weren’t well-nourished as a rule either.

  ‘And he’s not a horny-handed son of the soil,’ concluded Sloan aloud. ‘Is that all you can tell us, Doctor, from the—er—outside, so to speak?’

  ‘Bless you, no, Sloan,’ said the pathologist cheerfully. ‘That’s only half of my superficial examination. I, of course, use the word “superficial” in its purely anatomical connotation of appertaining to the surface, not in its pejorative one.’

  ‘Naturally,’ murmured Sloan pacifically. The doctor wasn’t in court now. He didn’t have to choose his words so carefully.

  ‘And for the record,’ added the pathologist breezily, ‘he hasn’t any distinguishing marks within the meaning of the Act.’

  Detective-Inspector Sloan nodded, any vision he might have had of easy identification fading away. Even with what the Passport Office engagingly called ‘special peculiarities’ listed just for that very reason—to help identify a particular person—it wasn’t always easy. Without them it could be very difficult indeed. ‘Anything else, Doctor?’

  ‘He wasn’t mainlining on drugs …’

  Times had certainly changed. Once upon a time drug-taking hadn’t been one of the characteristics of dead young men that pathologists looked for and—having found them—echoed Housman’s parodist ‘What, still alive at twenty-two …?’

  ‘There are no signs of repeated injections anywhere,’ said Dr Dabbe smoothly, ‘and no suspicous “spider’s web” tattoos on the inside of the forearm to cover up those signs.’

  An old art put to a new use.

  ‘No tattooing at all, in fact,’ said Dr Dabbe, proceeding in an orderly manner through the fruits of his superficial examination.

  Detective-Constable Crosby made a note of that.

  ‘His ears haven’t been pierced either,’ remarked the pathologist.

  Times had certainly changed. Detective-Inspector Sloan decided that he was getting old. Unpierced ears were a feature that he should have noticed for himself. The Long John Silver touch was something that had grown up since he was a boy. When Sloan saw ear-rings on a man he was still old-fashioned enough to look beyond them for the wooden leg.

  ‘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 onl
y 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.