Last Respects

by Catherine Aird

  ‘You get illusory magnification from curved glass with water in it,’ the pathologist informed him absently.

  Both Miss Collins and Crosby were still peering, fascinated, at the glass retort and its contents. Some dentists, Sloan was reminded, had tanks with goldfish swimming in them in their waiting-rooms. The theory was that patients were soothed by watching fish move about. ‘In a cool curving world he lies’… no, that was the river in Rupert Brooke’s ‘Fish’ but no doubt the principle was the same. There were insomniacs, too, who had them by their beds. The considering of fish swimming was said to lower tension all round.

  He looked across at Detective-Constable Crosby. He didn’t want his assistant’s tension lowered any more.

  ‘Have you got a note of that, Crosby?’ he barked unfairly.

  Miss Collins said, ‘It can’t osmoregulate, you know, Inspector.’

  Sloan didn’t know and said so.

  ‘True estuarine species can,’ declared Miss Collins.

  Sloan did not enjoy being blinded with Science.

  ‘Gammarus pulex, Inspector, is a good example of a biological indicator.’

  Sloan said he was very glad to hear it.

  The pathologist leaned forward eagerly and said, ‘So Charley here …’

  ‘I’m not at all sure that I can tell you its sex,’ said Miss Collins meticulously. She raised her head from considering the water creature and asked clearly, ‘Is sex important?’

  Sloan stiffened. If Crosby said that sex was always important then he, Detective-Inspector Sloan, his superior officer, would put him on report there and then … murder case or not. Detective-Constable Crosby, however, continued to be absorbed by half an inch of wriggling crustacean and it was Sloan who found himself answering her.

  ‘No,’ he said into a silence.

  He felt that sounded prim and expanded on it.

  ‘Not as far as I know,’ he added.

  That sounded worse.

  He lost his nerve altogether and launched into further speech.

  ‘In this particular case,’ he added lamely.

  Miss Collins looked extremely scientific. “Gammarus pulex enjoys a curious sort of married life.’

  As a quondam bobby on the beat Sloan could have told her that that went for quite a slice of the human population too.

  ‘But,’ she carried on, ‘you don’t get the really intricate sex reversal as in—say—the epicarids.’

  Sloan was glad to hear it. If there was one thing that the law had not really been able to bend its mind round yet it was sex reversal.

  ‘Can you eat it?’ asked Detective-Constable Crosby.

  Miss Collins gave a hortatory cough while Sloan had to agree to himself that food did come a close second to sex most of the time. She shook her head and said, ‘Its common name of fresh water shrimp is a complete misnomer.’

  In the end it was Sloan who cut the cackle and got down to the horses. ‘What you’re trying to tell us, miss, is that this … this … whatever it is … is a fresh water species, not a sea one.’

  ‘That’s what I said, Inspector,’ she agreed patiently. ‘Gammarus pulex can’t live in sea water and that’s what makes it a good biological indicator.’

  ‘So,’ said Sloan slowly and carefully, ‘the body didn’t come in from the sea.’

  ‘I don’t know about the body,’ said the biologist with precision, ‘but I can assure you that Gammarus pulex didn’t.’

  ‘Are you telling me,’ asked Sloan, anxious to have at least one thing clear in his mind, ‘that it—this thing here—would have died in sea water, then?’

  ‘I am,’ she said with all the lack of equivocation of the true scientist on sound territory covered by natural laws.

  A little hush fell in the laboratory.

  Then Sloan said heavily, ‘We’d better get our best feet forward then, hadn’t we?’

  Perhaps in their own way policemen were amphipods too. Or amphiplods.

  Gammarus pulex scuttled sideways across the bottom of the glass vessel as he spoke.

  He’d have to prise Crosby away from that jar if he watched it much longer. He was practically mesmerized by it as it was.

  ‘We’ll have to go up river,’ Sloan announced to nobody in particular. He turned. ‘Come along, Crosby.’

  Detective-Constable Crosby straightened up at last. ‘We might find some Dead Man’s Fingers, too, sir, mightn’t we?’

  ‘Alcyonium digitatum,’ said Dr Dabbe.

  ‘Not in fresh water,’ said Miss Collins promptly. ‘Dead Man’s Fingers are animals colonial that like the sea shore.’

  Sloan didn’t say anything at all.

  Police Constable Brian Ridgeford was confused. He had duly reported the finding of the ship’s bell to Berebury Police Station and had in fact brought it back to his home with him. Home in the case of a country constable was synonymous with place of work. His wife was less than enchanted when he set the bell down on the kitchen table.

  ‘Take that out to the shed,’ commanded Mrs Ridgeford immediately.

  Ridgeford picked it up again.

  ‘What is it anyway?’ she asked. ‘It looks like a bell to me.’

  ‘It is a bell,’ he said. That sounded like one of those childhood conundrums that came in Christmas crackers.

  Question: When is a door not a door?

  Answer: When it’s ajar.

  When was a bell not a bell?

  When it was Treasure Trove. Or was it only that when it—whatever it was—had been hidden by the original owner with the intention of coming back for it? Not lost at sea. He would have to look that up. He felt a little self-conscious anyway about using the words Treasure Trove to his wife.

  ‘It’s a ship’s bell,’ he said lamely.

  ‘I can see that.’

  ‘It’s stolen property too, I think.’ He cleared his throat and added conscientiously, ‘Although I don’t rightly know about that for sure.’ Unfortunately when he’d telephoned the police station he’d been put through to Superintendent Leeyes. This had compounded his confusion.

  ‘Dirty old thing,’ she said, giving it a closer look.

  ‘I think it could be lagan as well.’

  ‘I don’t care what it is, I’m not having anything like that in my clean kitchen.’ She looked up suspiciously. ‘What’s lagan anyway?’

  ‘Goods or wreckage lying on the bed of the sea.’

  She sniffed. ‘I’m still not having it in here.’

  ‘Mind you,’ he said carefully, ‘in law things aren’t always what they seem.’ Being in the police force gave a man a different view of the legal system. ‘In law an oyster is a wild animal.’

  ‘Get away with you, Brian Ridgeford.’

  ‘It’s true. A judge said so.’

  ‘Oh, a judge.’ Brenda Ridgeford hadn’t been a policeman’s wife for very long but long enough to be critical of judges and their judgements.

  ‘Sat for a day in court they did, to decide.’

  ‘The law’s an ass, then,’ she giggled.

  ‘An ass is a domestic animal,’ said her husband promptly.

  She gave him a very sly look indeed. ‘So’s a wife or have you forgotten?’

  In the nature of things it was a little while before the ship’s bell was moved out to the shed and Brian Ridgeford was able to concentrate on his duties again. These centred on finding the two boys who had taken the bell into the ships’ chandler’s in Edsway.

  To Mrs Hopton ‘boy’ was a species, not an individual.

  Of their age she had been uncertain.

  Of their appearance she could tell him nothing beyond that they had been scruffy—but then these days all boys were scruffy, weren’t they?

  But she was convinced, and Hopton—even with him being the way he was—agreed with her, that they had been up to no good.

  On being pressed to describe them she had advanced the view that one had been taller than the other.

  Brian Ridgeford had received this gem of
observation in silence.

  Mrs Hopton had cogitated still further and eventually disgorged the fact that one of them had called the other ‘Terry’.

  As he picked up his helmet and made for the door Constable Ridgeford reflected that it wasn’t a lot to go on. On the other hand, with Jack the Ripper they hadn’t even had a name.

  ‘The boathouse?’ said Frank Mundill when Elizabeth Busby met him in the hall.

  ‘You’d better go down and have a look,’ she said, putting her flower trug down on the settle.

  ‘What about the boat? Has that gone?’

  ‘I didn’t look inside.’ Her hands fell helplessly to her sides. ‘I’m sorry, Frank. I should have done, shouldn’t I? The trouble is that I’m still not thinking straight.’

  ‘Don’t worry.’ He gave a jerky nod. ‘I’ll go down there now and see what’s happened.’

  ‘Anyway,’ recollected Elizabeth, pulling herself together with an effort, ‘I didn’t have a key to the little door on the garden side.’

  He turned to the drawer in the hall table over which hung Richard Camming’s venture into the style of David Allan, the Scottish Hogarth. ‘That should be here somewhere.’ He rummaged about until he found it. ‘Here we are.’

  ‘I couldn’t see if there was a lot of damage,’ said Elizabeth.

  He essayed a small smile. ‘Let’s hope the boat’s all right, anyway. Your father likes his fishing, doesn’t he?’

  ‘He’ll be looking forward to it,’ she said. That was quite true. Her father would go straight down to the river with rod and line as soon as he arrived.

  In the end Elizabeth walked down through the grounds of Collerton House to the river’s edge with him.

  ‘Vandals,’ Frank Mundill said bitterly, regarding the damaged door from the river bank. ‘They must have taken a bar to the lock.’

  Elizabeth nodded.

  ‘Someone had a go at it last year, too, when we were at my sister’s,’ he said. ‘I’ve already had it repaired once.’

  ‘I remember,’ she said, although what she chiefly remembered about the visits of Frank and Celia Mundill to Calleford had been that this year’s one had marked the beginning of her aunt’s last illness. Frank Mundill’s sister was married to a doctor in single-handed general practice there. The architect and his wife Celia had made a habit over the years each Easter of looking after a locum tenens for the Calleford couple while the doctor and his wife had a well-earned holiday. Celia Mundill hadn’t been well then—that was when she had had a really bad attack of stomach pain and vomiting, though it hadn’t been her first. Then she’d had an X-ray at Calleford Hospital. She’d gone steadily downhill after that …

  ‘Let’s go inside,’ said Mundill.

  He unlocked the landward door of the boathouse and led the way in. His footsteps echoed eerily on the hard standing inside while the water lapped at its edge. The only light came from a small fanlight and the open door. There was quite enough light, though, in which to see that the boat was gone.

  ‘Thieves as well as vandals,’ said Mundill, regarding the empty water.

  ‘Nothing’s safe these days, is it?’ commented Elizabeth Busby, conscious even as she said it that the remark was both trite and beyond her years. She must be careful. At this rate she’d be old before her time.

  ‘And where do you suppose the fishing-boat’s got to?’ asked Mundill.

  ‘Edsway?’ she suggested.

  ‘More likely the open sea,’ he said gloomily.

  ‘Unless it’s fetched up on Billy’s Finger.’

  ‘We’d have heard,’ he said.

  ‘So we would.’

  ‘No,’ he said, shaking his head, ‘we shan’t see that boat again.’

  ‘Pity.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘your father won’t be pleased.’ He sighed. ‘And neither will the insurance company.’

  Her eyes turned automatically to the walls of the boathouse. Along them rested the family’s collection of fishing rods. ‘Is there anything gone from there too?’

  He looked up and then shook his head. ‘Doesn’t look like it, does it? No, I dare say the boat went for a joy-ride.’

  ‘When?’ She very nearly added, ‘Before or after?’ but she stopped herself in time. In her mind she was still dating everything that happened as before or after that dreadful week of the death of her aunt and the departure of Peter Hinton.

  Frank Mundill shook his head yet again. ‘I don’t know when. I don’t use the river path all that often. I usually go the other way.’

  ‘So do I.’

  He gave the boathouse a last look round. ‘There’s not a lot that we can do about it now anyway. Come along back to the house and I’ll ring the constable at Edsway. Not that that’ll do a lot of good. Can’t see the police being interested, can you?’

  CHAPTER 10

  To be hang’d with you.

  What at this moment was interesting the police—the police as personified by Superintendent Leeyes, that is—was something quite different.

  ‘Ridgeford rang in,’ said Leeyes to Detective-Inspector Sloan across his office desk, ‘excited as a schoolgirl.’

  ‘What about?’ It wouldn’t do, of course. Sloan was agreed about that. Being as excited as anybody wouldn’t do at all if Ridgeford was going to make a good policeman. Sometimes the very calm of the police officer was the only thing going for him in a really tight situation.

  ‘The wreck off Marby,’ said Leeyes.

  Sloan’s head came up with a jerk. If a certain copper ingot had come from there too then Sloan was prepared to be interested in it as well.

  ‘The Clarembald,’ said Leeyes, ‘wrecked by the people of Marby in olden times.’

  ‘At least,’ said Sloan, ‘that’s one crime we don’t have to worry about now.’ Idly he wondered what the exact wording of the charge against the wrecker would have been. There hadn’t been a lot of call for it down at the station since sail went out and steam came in. Perhaps it wasn’t even in the book any more. ‘Lighting beacons with intent to deceive’ didn’t quite seem to fit the gravity of the crime.

  ‘The ship’s bell has come ashore,’ Leeyes told him.

  ‘Has it indeed?’ said Sloan. ‘Well, well.’

  ‘As well as that brass weight you said was on the dead body …’

  ‘Copper ingot,’ murmured Sloan, his mind on other things. ‘How long ago do you suppose the Clarembald was found?’

  ‘I wouldn’t know about that,’ responded Leeyes irritably. ‘All I can tell you is that Ridgeford’s only just come across the bell.’

  ‘I should have thought,’ said Sloan slowly, ‘that we should have heard, sir, if it wasn’t very lately.’

  Leeyes grunted. ‘Good news gets about.’

  ‘We mostly do hear,’ said Sloan. It was true. The police usually heard about good fortune as well as bad. For one thing, good fortune could be as dangerous to the recipient as the reverse … Sloan pulled himself up with a jerk. He was beginning to think like a latter-day Samuel Smiles now.

  Leeyes grunted again.

  ‘Besides, sir, presumably the Coroner would have had to know if anything had been found, wouldn’t he?’

  ‘Coroners,’ pronounced Leeyes obscurely, ‘only know what they’re told.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘And all I know,’ said Leeyes flatly, ‘is what my officers choose to tell me.’

  ‘Quite so, sir.’

  ‘And that’s not a lot, Sloan, is it?’

  ‘The young man’s body was put into the river where the water is fresh,’ responded Sloan absently, answering the implication rather than the question.

  ‘And if that’s not enough,’ continued Leeyes aggrieved, ‘we’ve got Ridgeford playing pirates.’

  ‘He’s having quite a day for a beginner, isn’t he?’ said Sloan. ‘A body and buried treasure.’

  ‘Hrrrumph,’ said Leeyes.

  ‘He’ll have to remember today, won’t he,’ said Sloan, ‘when the ro
utine begins to bite.’

  Leeyes sniffed. ‘He’d have me out there, Sloan, if he could.’

  Sloan didn’t say anything at all to that.

  ‘Mind you, Sloan, with my background I’ve always been interested in the sea.’

  Sloan could see where this was leading.

  ‘Did I,’ said Leeyes, ‘ever tell you how we got ashore at Walcheren?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Sloan with perfect truth. Nobody had been spared that story. Recitals of the Superintendent’s wartime experiences were well known and were to be avoided at all costs. He didn’t even ‘stoppeth one in three’. Every officer on station got them.

  ‘Bit of a splash,’ said Leeyes, with the celebrated British understatement favoured by men of action in a tight corner.

  Detective-Inspector Sloan could see where this was leading, too. In another two minutes Superintendent Leeyes would have constituted himself Berebury’s currently ranking expert on underwater archaeology. And then where would they be?

  ‘I’ll see Ridgeford presently, sir,’ Sloan said firmly, ‘and find out about the ship’s bell too.’

  ‘And this fishing-boat that he keeps on about over at Marby,’ said Leeyes. ‘You won’t forget that, will you, Sloan?’

  ‘No, sir, I’ll see about that as soon as I can.’ But before that, come wind, come weather, he had every intention of going up the River Calle.

  A little later a police car with Detective-Constable Crosby at the wheel and Detective-Inspector Sloan in the front passenger seat swept out of the police station at Berebury for the second time that afternoon. The driver negotiated the traffic islands with impatience and then steered past the town’s multi-storey car park. Eventually he swung the car on to the open road and out into the Calleshire countryside. In a wallet on the back seat of the police car was a hastily drawn up list of everyone who lived beside the River Calle on both sides of the river east of Billing Bridge.

  ‘There’s a note of the riparian owners, too, sir,’ said Detective-Constable Crosby, ‘whoever they are when they’re at home.’

  ‘The fishing rights belong to them,’ said Sloan.

  ‘Oh, the fishing …’ said Crosby, putting his foot down.

  ‘There’s no hurry,’ said Sloan as the car picked up speed.