Last Respects

by Catherine Aird

  That was part of police routine too.

  ‘One, two, that’ll do,’ growled Leeyes.

  ‘Sir?’ Sloan had only heard of ‘One, two, buckle my shoe’ and even that had been a long time ago now.

  ‘It’s a saying in the game of Bridge,’ explained Leeyes loftily. ‘You wouldn’t understand, Sloan.’

  ‘No, sir.’ Sloan kept his tone even but with an effort. There was so much to do and so little time … and something so very nasty in the woodshed.

  ‘What happened this time?’ barked Leeyes. ‘Not, I may say, Sloan, that we really know yet what happened last time.’

  ‘I should say that he was killed on the spot. In an unlocked garden shed, that is.’ It was Sloan’s turn now to sit in the window-seat in the hall of Collerton House and use the telephone. A white and shaken Elizabeth Busby had led him there while Frank Mundill stayed with Crosby and Dr Tebot. ‘Hit on the head,’ said Sloan succinctly. ‘Hard.’

  Leeyes pounced. ‘That means you’ve got a weapon.’

  ‘There’s a spade there with blood on it,’ agreed Sloan.

  ‘But not fingerprints, I suppose,’ said Leeyes.

  ‘I doubt it, sir,’ said Sloan, ‘though the lab boys are on their way over now.’

  ‘Fingerprints would be too much to ask for these days.’

  Sloan was inclined to agree with him. Besides, there was a pair of gardening gloves sitting handy on the shelf beside the spade. Sloan thought that the gloves had a mocking touch about them—as if the murderer had just tossed them back on to the shelf where he had found them.

  ‘When did it happen?’ snapped Leeyes.

  ‘He’s quite cold,’ said Sloan obliquely, ‘and the blood has dried …’

  Congealed was the right word for the bloody mess that had been the back of the man’s head but he did not use it.

  A red little, dead little head …

  ‘Yesterday, then,’ concluded Leeyes.

  ‘That’s what Dr Tebot says,’ said Sloan, ‘and Dr Dabbe’s on his way.’ Too many things had happened yesterday for Sloan’s liking.

  ‘Yes, yes,’ said Leeyes testily. ‘I know he’ll tell us for sure but you must make up your own mind about some things, Sloan.’

  He had.

  ‘And don’t forget to get on to the photographers, Sloan, will you?’

  ‘I won’t forget,’ said Sloan astringently.

  ‘Who is he?’ asked the Superintendent. ‘Or don’t you know that either?’

  But Sloan did know that. ‘He’s lying on his face, sir, and we haven’t moved him, of course.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘But I think I know.’

  Leeyes grunted. ‘You’ll have to do better than that before you’ve done, Sloan.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’ Truth’s ox team had been Do Well, Do Better and Do Best. Sloan decided that he hadn’t even Done Well let alone Better or Best.

  ‘I think I’ve seen those clothes before, sir.’ And the body did look just like a bundle of old clothes. You wouldn’t have thought that there was a man inside them at first at all …

  ‘Ha!’

  ‘Yesterday afternoon,’ said Sloan.

  ‘That’s something, I suppose.’

  ‘I think it’s the man who found the body.’ Strictly speaking he supposed he should have said ‘the first body’ now.

  ‘The fisherman?’

  ‘Horace Boller,’ said Sloan.

  ‘The man in the boat,’ said Leeyes.

  ‘The doctor here thinks it’s him too, sir.’ Last seen, Sloan reminded himself, with Basil Jensen on board.

  ‘So there’s a link,’ said Leeyes.

  ‘There’s a link all right,’ responded Sloan vigorously. ‘He’s got a barbary head in his pocket too.’

  ‘What!’ bellowed Leeyes.

  Sloan winced. They said even a rose recoiled when shouted at, let alone a full blown detective-inspector.

  ‘At least,’ declared Leeyes, ‘that means we’re not looking for a psychological case.’

  ‘I suppose it does, sir.’ There was nothing the police feared so much as a pathological killer. When there was neither rhyme nor reason to murder then logic didn’t help find the murderer. You needed luck then. Sloan felt he could have done with some luck now.

  ‘Have you,’ growled Leeyes, ‘missed something that he found, Sloan?’

  ‘I hope not,’ said Sloan. But he had to admit that it had been his own first thought too.

  ‘If he was killed because he knew something, Sloan,’ persisted Leeyes, ‘then you can find out what it was too.’

  ‘I’m sure I hope so, sir.’

  ‘He’d have known about the Clarembald being found,’ said Leeyes. ‘A fisherman like him …’

  ‘He’d have known all the village gossip for sure, too, sir, a man like that.’

  ‘Dirty work at the cross-roads there,’ said Leeyes, even though he meant the sea.

  It had been highwaymen who waited at the cross-roads to double their chances of getting a victim. They used to hang felons at the cross-roads too in the bad old days. Perhaps the dirty work had sometimes come from hanging the wrong man. A police officer had an equal duty to the innocent and the guilty.

  Then and now.

  ‘Don’t tell me either,’ said Leeyes tartly, ‘that men explore valuable wrecks for the fun of it.’

  Sloan wasn’t so sure about that but he was concentrating on the bird in the police bush, so to speak.

  ‘Boller wasn’t a very attractive man,’ he said slowly. ‘Ridgeford said you had to watch him.’

  ‘Are you trying to suggest something, Sloan?’

  ‘If he knew something that we didn’t know he might have been—er—trying to put the pressure on a bit.’

  ‘Blackmail by any other name,’ trumpeted Leeyes, ‘smells just as nasty.’

  ‘And it’s always dangerous.’ The blow that had killed Boller had been bloody, bold and resolute. Even peering over the apple boxes Sloan could see that. That’s when he had seen the bulge in the man’s pocket that had been the barbary head. Boller’s own head hadn’t been a pretty sight. Wet red—the poet’s name for blood—it had been covered in.

  ‘Was he destined for a watery grave, too, Sloan?’

  ‘I’m sure I don’t know that, sir. All I do know is that it was merest chance that he was found. The girl—Elizabeth Busby, that is—said that she only had that step-ladder out once in a blue moon. She was going to clean the hall and that’s high, of course. Otherwise …’

  ‘Otherwise,’ interrupted Leeyes tartly, ‘in a couple of months’ time we’d have had an unidentified body on our hands, wouldn’t we? Another unidentified body, that is.’

  ‘I think someone would have reported this man as missing,’ said Sloan. Ridgeford had mentioned that Horace Boller had a son with them on their first trip. He cleared his throat. ‘That means whoever killed him was pretty desperate.’

  ‘The blackmailed usually are, Sloan,’ said Leeyes with unusual insight. ‘Because they’ve always got the two things to worry about they stop thinking straight.’

  ‘What they’ve done and what someone’s doing to them,’ agreed Sloan.

  ‘Did he get there by water?’ asked Leeyes.

  ‘What—? Oh, I hadn’t thought about that, sir. We’ll have to see.’ There were so many things to see to now …

  ‘We don’t want two dinghies on the loose, do we?’

  When Sloan got outside again Constable Crosby was standing on guard outside the shed door talking to a worried Frank Mundill.

  ‘What is going on, Inspector?’ said the architect wildly. ‘Why should this house be picked on for all these things?’

  ‘The real reason,’ said Sloan, ‘is probably because it’s big enough to have sheds and boathouses that don’t get used very often.’

  ‘That’s very little consolation, I must say.’ He shuddered. ‘Ought you to search everywhere else?’

  ‘No, sir, I don’t think that will be necessa
ry, thank you.’ Sloan had got some straight edges of his jigsaw on the board already. The death of Horace Boller—no, the killing of Horace Boller—was another piece. It might even prove to be one of the four most important pieces of all the puzzle—a cornerpiece.

  Mundill ran a finger round inside the collar of his white turtleneck sweater. ‘It’s an unnerving business, isn’t it?’

  ‘Nobody likes it, sir,’ agreed Sloan. He was glad about that. Sophisticated fraud sometimes wrung unwilling admiration from investigating officers but murder was a primitive crime and nobody liked it. The killing of a member of a tribe by another member of the same tribe was an offence against society. And it meant that no one in that society was safe. Perhaps that was the real reason why the murder charge accused the arrested person not so much of a killing but of an offence against the Queen’s Peace, because that was what it was …

  ‘That poor chap in there,’ said Mundill worriedly.

  ‘Yes, sir.’ Sloan spared some sympathy for the dead man lying in the shed. But he carefully kept his judgement suspended. Horace Boller might have been lured to his doom by the murderer in all innocence but Sloan did not think so. There was a certain lack of innocence in Boller both as reported by Constable Ridgeford and observed by Sloan himself that augured the other thing.

  ‘I could wish my niece hadn’t found him too,’ murmured Mundill. ‘She’s had a lot to put up with lately, poor girl. What with one thing and another I’ll be glad when her mother and father get here.’

  Sloan nodded sympathetically. The scientists said that a cabbage cried out when its neighbour in the field was cut down so it was only right and proper that one human being should feel for another. The unfeeling and the too-feeling both ran into trouble but that was something quite separate.

  ‘I hope Dr Tebot’s got her to go and lie down,’ said Mundill.

  ‘I hope,’ said Sloan vigorously, ‘that he’s done no such thing.’ Salvation lay in keeping busy and he said so, doctor or no.

  ‘All right,’ said Frank Mundill pacifically, ‘I’ll tell her what you said.’

  ‘And tell her,’ said Sloan, ‘that we’ll be wanting a statement from her too.’

  As Mundill went indoors Sloan advanced once more on the shed.

  Both policemen peered down at the body.

  ‘I’ll bet he never knew what hit him,’ averred Crosby.

  ‘No,’ agreed Sloan soberly.

  Horace Boller did not necessarily have to have been blackmailing anyone. He might simply have learned something to his advantage that the murderer didn’t want him to know about.

  And so, in the event, to his ultimate disadvantage.

  Something that a killer couldn’t afford for him to know. That alone might be enough for a man who had killed once. Appetite for murder grew—that was something else too primitive for words. Having offended against Society by one killing it seemed as if the next death was less important and the one after that not important at all. By then the murderer was outside the tribe and beyond salvation too.

  ‘We’d better get him identified properly,’ said Sloan mundanely.

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘What, Crosby,’ he asked ‘can he have known that we don’t know?’ That was the puzzle.

  Crosby brought his eyebrows together in a prolonged frown. ‘He could have seen that the boathouse had been broken into.’

  ‘And put two and two together after he found the body? Yes, that would follow …’

  Blackmail to be true blackmail had to be the accusing or the threatening to accuse any person of a real crime with intent to extort or gain any property or valuable thing from any person.

  Murder was a real crime.

  ‘But he can’t have known that the body in the water had been murdered, can he, sir?’ objected Crosby. ‘I mean, we didn’t know ourselves until Dr Dabbe said so. And we haven’t told anyone.’

  ‘A good point, that.’ Sloan regarded his figure on the shed floor and said absently ‘So he must have known something else as well …’

  ‘Something we don’t know?’ asked Crosby helpfully.

  ‘Or something that we do,’ mused Sloan. ‘He might have spotted that sandhopper thing too.’

  ‘He knew about the sparling,’ said Crosby, ‘didn’t he?’

  Sloan squared his shoulders. ‘What we want is a chat with Mr Basil Jensen.’

  Constable Brian Ridgeford was panting slightly. The cliff path—like life—had led uphill all the way and it hadn’t been an easy one either. He’d left his bicycle down in the village. Now he was nearly at the top of the headland. He turned his gaze out to sea but it told him nothing. There was just an unbroken expanse of water below him. Far out to sea there was a smudge on the horizon that might just have been a container ship. Otherwise the sea was empty.

  He settled himself down, conscious that he wasn’t the first man to keep watch on the headland. Men had waited here for Napoleon to come—and Hitler. They’d lit Armada beacons up here on the Cat’s Back too as well as wrecking ones. From here the inhabitants of Marby might have seen the Danish invasion on its way.

  ‘Keeping observation’ was what Ridgeford would put in the book to describe his morning.

  Watch and ward it used to be called in the old days.

  He settled himself down in a little hollow. It was much more windy up here than down in Marby village. He made himself as comfortable as he could in the long grass and turned his attention to Lea Farm. It was like a map come to life, farm and farmhouse printed on the landscape. He narrowed his gaze on the sheepfold. Far away as he was, he could see that the sheep-dipping tank was still full.

  Ridgeford spared a thought for old Miss Finch. Difficult and dogmatic she might be but she hadn’t been so silly after all. She probably had seen something happening on the headland. The theory of an accurate report book suddenly came to life. Write it down, they’d taught him … let someone else decide if what you’d written was valuable or not.

  He swung his glance back in the direction of the sea. This time there was something to see. Round the coast from Marby harbour was coming a small trawler. Ridgeford got to his feet and walked further up the headland to get a better view of it. As he did so he nearly tripped over a figure lying half hidden in the grass. It was a man. He was using a pair of binoculars and was looking out to sea so intently that he hadn’t seen the approach of the policeman.

  ‘Hullo, hullo,’ said Ridgeford.

  The man lowered his binoculars. ‘’Morning, Officer.’

  ‘Looking for something, sir?’

  ‘In a manner of speaking,’ he said, scrambling to his feet.

  The trawler was forging ahead. Ridgeford noticed that it was keeping close inshore and that the other man could not keep his eyes off it. Ridgeford asked him his name.

  ‘My name?’ said the man. ‘It’s Jensen. Basil Jensen. Why do you want to know?’

  The general practitioner, Dr Gregory Tebot, came out of Collerton House and joined Detective-Inspector Sloan outside the shed while the various technicians of murder were bringing their expertise to bear upon the body inside it.

  ‘She’ll be able to talk to you now, Inspector,’ Dr Tebot said. He was an old man and he looked both tired and sad.

  ‘Thank you, Doctor,’ said Sloan.

  ‘Shocking business,’ he said, pointing in the direction of the shed. ‘Are you going to tell the widow or am I?’

  Death, remembered Sloan, was part of the doctor’s daily business too. What he had forgotten was that Dr Tebot would know the Bollers. ‘Tell me about him,’ he said.

  ‘Horace? Not a lot to tell,’ said the doctor. ‘Didn’t trouble me much.’

  ‘A healthy type, then,’ said Sloan. Blackmail—if that was what he had been up to—was unhealthy in a different way.

  ‘Spent his life messing about in boats,’ Dr Tebot said. ‘Out of doors most of the time.’

  ‘Make much of a living?’

  ‘I shouldn’t think so. Picked up a lit
tle here and a little there, I should say. Mostly at weekends but you’d never know, not with Horace.’

  ‘Didn’t give anything away, then,’ said Sloan.

  ‘He was the sort of man, Inspector,’ said the old doctor drily, ‘who wouldn’t even tell his own mother how old he was.’ He nodded towards Collerton House. ‘Go easy with the girl if you can. She’s had a packet lately, what with the aunt dying and everything.’

  ‘The aunt,’ said Sloan. A packet was an old Army punishment. The ‘everything’ was presumably a young man who had gone away.

  ‘Hopeless case by the time I saw her,’ said Dr Tebot. ‘The other doctor said so and he was right.’

  ‘What other doctor?’

  ‘The one over in Luston. I forget his name now. Mrs Mundill was staying over there when she was first taken ill.’

  ‘I didn’t know that.’

  ‘Nice woman,’ he said. ‘Young to die these days. Pity. Still, it happens.’

  ‘It happens,’ agreed Sloan. Perhaps they were the saddest words in the language after all.

  ‘Pelion upon Ossa for the girl, though.’

  Life was like that, thought Sloan. The agony always got piled on.

  ‘She was very good with her aunt,’ said the doctor, ‘but she’s nearly at the end of her tether now.’

  ‘I’ll bear it in mind,’ said Sloan, but he made no promises. He had his duty to do.

  He found Elizabeth Busby fighting to keep calm. ‘It was horrible, horrible.’

  ‘Yes, miss.’

  ‘The poor man …’

  ‘He won’t have felt anything,’ said Sloan awkwardly. ‘Dr Tebot says he can’t have done.’

  She twisted a handkerchief between her fingers. ‘Who is he? Do you know?’

  ‘We think,’ said Sloan cautiously, ‘that it’s someone called Horace Boller.’

  She sat up quickly. ‘Horace? But I saw him only yesterday.’

  ‘You did?’

  ‘He rowed past while I was putting flowers on my aunt’s grave. It’s by the river, you see.’

  ‘You knew him, then?’

  ‘Oh yes, Inspector.’ Her face relaxed a little. ‘Everyone who lives by the river knows Horace.’

  ‘He was,’ suggested Sloan tentatively, ‘what you might call a real character, I suppose?’