Last Respects iscm-10

by Catherine Aird

  By the time Horace Boiler 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 everywhere. 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  It had been replaced by an oil painting done in what his two daughters—her aunt Celia and her own mother—affectionately called their father’s “Burne-Jones period.”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.

  As soon as she had taken in this evidence—before her very eyes, as the conjurers said—she had gone out onto the landing to look there for the painting that usually hung over the head of the spare bedroom bed. It had been of a stretch of beach… When she got to the top of the stairs, though, to the spot where Grandfather’s version of Ophelia usually hung the painting of the beach—presumably at Edsway (after Bonington)—wasn’t there in its stead.

  There wasn’t a gap there either of course.

  Elizabeth would have noticed a gap straightaway. Everyone would have noticed a gap. What was there in the place of Ophelia drowning among the lilies—it must have been a very slow-moving stream, she thought inconsequentially—was a water-colour of the estuary of the River Calle as seen from Collerton House. This owed nothing to any artist save Richard Camming himself and it was not very good. Moreover it was a view that he had painted many, many times—like Monet and the River Thames.

  “And not got any better at it,” decided Elizabeth judiciously.

  Unlike Monet.

  There were at least a dozen efforts by Richard Camming at capturing on canvas the oxbow of the river as it swept down towards the sea at Collerton. This particular painting could have been any one of them. Elizabeth wasn’t aware of having seen this one anywhere else in the house before but there were several piles of pictures stacked away in the attics of Collerton House and it could easily have been among them without her knowing.

  She went back at once to the bedroom to check that only one picture had been changed. Over the fireplace there had hung throughout her lifetime a picture in which her grandfather had tried to capture the elusive gregariousness of the work of Sir David Wilkie—the Scottish Breughel. Richard Camming hadn’t actually got a blind fiddler in the picture but there was a general feeling that the musician wasn’t far away.

  That picture was still there. Elizabeth was not surprised. She would have noticed much earlier in the day if there had been any change in the picture hanging over the fireplace. The head of the bed, though, was at an angle from the window and only got full sunshine in the afternoon.

  She had tried after this to go back to her vacuum cleaning but her determined concentration on the mundane had been broken and suddenly her thoughts and carefully suppressed emotions were unleashed in unruly turmoil.

  Abruptly she left the cleaner where it was standing in the middle of the floor and went out of the bedroom. As she looked over the landing balustrade she saw with approval the glass case reposing on a window sill in the entrance hall. There was absolutely nothing amateur about her greatgrandfather’s legacy to posterity. What he had left behind him had been something much more useful than dozens and dozens of indifferent paintings. Gordon Camming—Richard Camming’s father—had designed a valve that the marine engineering world of his day had fallen upon with delight and used ever since.

  A Camming valve had been fitted into a model and stood for all the world to see in the house built by its designer with the proceeds of the patent. But it was really paintings and not patents that Elizabeth Busby had on her mind as she passed along the landing on her way to Frank Mundill’s office. The studio, with its mandatory north light added fifty years earlier by an indulgent father for his painter son, served now as the drawing office of Frank Mundill, architect. Elizabeth didn’t usually disturb him there, although she’d done so once or twice when her aunt had taken a turn for the worse—not otherwise—but she didn’t hesitate now.

  And almost immediately she wished that she hadn’t.

  Another time she would make a point of not going to his office unheralded because Frank Mundill was not alone. Sitting in the client’s chair in his room was a neighbour—Mrs. Veronica Feckler.

  “Elizabeth, my dear,” said Mrs. Feckler at once, “how nice to see you.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Elizabeth gruffly. “I didn’t know there was anyone here.”

  “How could you?” asked Veronica Feckler blandly. “1 crept round the back with my miserable little plans. I was sure that Frank was going to laugh at them and he did.”

  “I certainly did not,” protested Frank Mundill.

  “I’m sure I detected a twitch of the lips,” insisted Mrs. Feckler. She was a widow who had come to live in the village of Collerton about three years ago. Elizabeth’s aunt had not greatly cared for her.

  “It’s just,” said the architect with professional caution, “that it’s a long way from a quick sketch on the back of an envelope…”

  “A shopping list, actually,” murmured Mrs. Feckler.

  “… to the finished design that a builder can use.”

  She turned to Elizabeth. “I had this brilliant idea while I was in the greengrocer’s,” she said eagerly. “Dear old Mr. Partridge was telling me about Costa Rican bananas—did you know that they grew bananas in Costa Rica?”

  Elizabeth knew a great deal about Costa Rica, but Mrs. Feckler hadn’t waited for an answer.

  “I said I’d have three when I suddenly thought what about building out over my kitchen.”

  “I see,” said Elizabeth politely.

  “And it’s an even bigger step from the plans to the finished building,” warned Frank Mundill. “Clients don’t always realise that either.”

  “But I do.” She turned protestingly to Elizabeth. “Tell him I do, there’s a darling.”

  “I was turning out a bedroom,” said Elizabeth obliquely, conscious that she must look more than a little scruffy. Mrs. Feckler was wearing clothes so casual that they must have needed quite a lot of time to assemble.

  “And I was wasting your poor uncle’s time,” said the other woman, sensitive to something in Elizabeth’s manner. She rose to go. “But I do really want something doing to my little cottage now that Simon has s
aid he’s coming back home for a while.” She gave a little light laugh. “Mothers do have their uses sometimes.”

  Elizabeth assented politely to this, silently endorsing the sentiment. She would be so thankful to see her own mother again. Mrs. Busby hadn’t come back to England from South America for her sister’s funeral because she couldn’t travel by air. Pressurised air travel didn’t suit a middle-aged woman suffering from Ménière’s disease of the middle ear. Even now, though, both her parents were on the high seas on their way home from South America. They had been coming for a wedding…

  Frank Mundill was still studying the piece of paper that Mrs. Feckler had given him. “I’ll have to think about this, Veronica, when I’ve had a chance to look at it properly.”

  He was rewarded with a graceful smile.

  “Give me a day or so,” he said hastily, “and then come back for a chat. I’ll have done a quick sketch by then.”

  Mrs. Veronica Feckler gathered up her handbag. “How kind…”

  Elizabeth Busby waited until Frank Mundill returned to his drawing office after showing her out. “I came about a picture,” she said.

  He sank back into the chair behind his desk and ran his hands through his hair. “A picture?”

  “Three pictures, actually,” she said.

  He looked up.

  “Three pictures,” she said, “that aren’t where they were.”

  “I think I know the ones you mean,” he said uneasily.

  “Ophelia.”

  “It’s been moved,” he said promptly.

  “I know,” she said. Frank Mundill wasn’t meeting her eye, though. “And a river one and a beach scene…”

  He didn’t say anything in reply.

  “The beach one has gone,” she said.

  “I know.” He was studying the blotting paper on his desk now.

  “Well?”

  He cleared his throat. “Peter wanted it.”

  “Peter?” Her voice was up at high doh before she could collect herself.

  He nodded. “I knew you wouldn’t like that.”

  “Peter Hinton?” She heard herself pronouncing his name even though she had sworn to herself again and again that her lips would never form it ever more.

  Frank Mundill looked distinctly uncomfortable. “He asked me if he could have it.”

  “Peter Hinton asked you if he could have the picture of the beach?” she echoed on a rising note of pure disbelief. “He didn’t even like pictures.”

  He nodded. “He asked for it, though.”

  “That sloppy painting?” She would have said that detective stories were more Peter’s line than paintings.

  “Let’s say ‘sentimental,’ ” he murmured.

  “That’s what I meant,” she said savagely. “And you’re sitting there and telling me that Peter wanted it?”

  “So he said.” Frank Mundill was fiddling with a protractor lying on his desk now. He gazed longingly at the drawing board over in the window.

  “It wasn’t something to remember me by, I hope?” All the pent-up bitterness of the last few weeks exploded in excoriating sarcasm.

  “He didn’t say.”

  “St. Bernard dogs aren’t a breed that are faithful unto death, are they?” she said, starting to laugh on a high, eerie note. “If so, he should have taken the imitation Landseer.”

  “Not that I know of,” said the architect coldly.

  “That would be too funny for words,” she said in tones utterly devoid of humour.

  “I’m sorry if you think I shouldn’t have given it to him…”

  “Why shouldn’t he have a picture?” she said wildly. “Why shouldn’t he have all the pictures if he wanted them? Why shouldn’t everybody have all the pictures?”

  “Elizabeth, my dear girl…”

  “Well? Why not? Answer me that!”

  “If you remember,” Frank Mundill said stiffly, “I wasn’t aware of the provisions of your aunt’s will at the time he asked me for it.” He gave his polo-necked white sweater a little tug and said, “Strictly speaking I suppose the picture wasn’t mine to give to him.”

  That stopped her all right.

  “I didn’t mean it that way, Frank,” she said hastily. “You know that. That side of things isn’t important.” She essayed a slight smile. “Besides, there’s plenty more pictures where that one came from.”

  “You can say that again,” said Frank Mundill ruefully.

  “Sorry, Frank,” she said. “It’s just that I’m still a bit upset…” Her voice trailed away in confusion. Collerton House and all its pictures—in fact the entire Camming inheritance—had come from Richard Camming equally to his two daughters—his only children—Celia Mundill and Elizabeth’s mother, Marion Busby. Celia and Frank Mundill had had no children and Marion and William Busby, only one, Elizabeth.

  When she had died earlier in the year Celia Mundill had left her husband, Frank, a life interest in her share of her own father’s estate. At his death it was to pass to her niece, Elizabeth…

  “There’s no reason why Peter shouldn’t have had a painting if he wanted one,” she said, embarrassed. “It isn’t even as if they’re worth anything.”

  Mr. Hubert Cresswick of Cresswick Antiques (Calleford) Ltd. had confirmed that when he had done the valuation after her aunt’s death. Very tactfully, of course. It was when he praised the frames that she’d known for certain.

  “It’s just,” she went on awkwardly, “that I never thought that his having that particular one would be the reason why it wasn’t there on the wall, like it always was.”

  “I should have mentioned it before,” he mumbled. “Sorry.”

  “No reason why you should have done,” she said more calmly.

  What she really meant was that there were a lot of reasons why he shouldn’t have done. Peter Hinton’s name hadn’t been mentioned in Collerton House since he’d left a note on the hall table—and with it the signet ring she’d given him. A “Keep off the grass” ring was what he’d said as he slipped it on his finger.

  It didn’t matter any longer, of course, what it was called. Elizabeth had returned the ring he’d given her—in the springtime, “the only pretty ring time”—the one with “I do rejoyce in thee my choyce” inscribed inside it, to Peter’s lodgings in Luston.

  That devotion hadn’t lasted very long either.

  Frank Mundill picked up the sketch Mrs. Veronica Feckler had left on his desk and appeared to give it his full attention. He said, “I suppose I’ll have to go down and look at her timbers…”

  “You will,” she agreed, her mind in complete turmoil.

  Elizabeth Busby hadn’t known whether to laugh or to cry. On impulse she had gone out into the garden, swept up a bunch of her aunt’s favourite roses—Fantin-Latour—and walked down to the churchyard by the river’s edge.

  She cried a little then.

  6

  How can I support this sight!

  « ^ »

  The pathologist to the Berebury District Hospital Group was a fast worker. Nobody could complain about that. He was also a compulsive talker—out of the witness box, that is. His subjects were in no position to complain about this or, indeed, anything else. His assistant, Burns, was not able either—but for different, hierarchical, reasons—to voice any complaints about the pathologist’s loquacity. Should he have been able to get a word in edgeways, that is.

  In fact, Bums, worn down by listening, had retreated into a Trappist-like silence years ago. Detective Constable Crosby, normally a talker, didn’t like attending post-mortems. He had somehow contrived to drift to a point in the room where, though technically present, he wasn’t part of the action. It fell, therefore, to Detective Inspector Sloan to maintain some sort of dialogue with Dr. Dabbe.

  “You’ll be wanting to know a lot of awkward things, Sloan,” said the pathologist, adjusting an overhead shadowless lamp.

  “We’ll settle for a few facts to begin with, Doctor,” said the detective inspector
equably.

  “Like how long he’d been in the water, I suppose?”

  “That would be useful to know.”

  “And damned difficult to say.”

  “Ah…”

  “For sure, that is.”

  Sloan nodded. In this context, “for sure” meant remaining sure and certain “under determined and sustained cross-examination by a hostile Queen’s Counsel.

  And under oath.

  The pathologist ran his eyes over the body of the unknown man. “He’s been there—in the water, I mean—longer than you might think, though,” he said.

  “I don’t know that I’d thought about that at all,” said Sloan truthfully.

  “I have,” responded Dr. Dabbe, “and I must say again that I would have expected rather more damage to the body. Something doesn’t tie up.”

  Detective Inspector Sloan brought his gaze to bear on the post-mortem subject because it was his duty to do so but without enthusiasm. The body looked damaged enough to him. Detective Constable Crosby was concentrating his gaze on the ceiling.

  “The degree of damage,” pronounced the pathologist, “is not consistent with the degree of decomposition.”

  “We’ll make a note of that,” promised Sloan, pigeonholing the information in his mind. By right, Crosby should have been regarding his notebook, not the ceiling.

  “There’s plenty of current in the estuary, you see, Sloan,” said the doctor. “That’s what makes the sailing so challenging. But current damages.”

  “Quite so,” said Sloan, noting that fact—perhaps it was a factor, too—in his mind as well.

  “To say nothing of there being a good tide,” said Dr. Dabbe, “day in, day out.”

  “I daresay, Doctor,” said Sloan diffidently, “that the tide’ll still be pretty strong opposite Edsway, won’t it?”

  “If you’d tacked against it as often as I have,” replied the pathologist grandly, “you wouldn’t be asking that.”

  “No, Doctor, of course not.” Sloan wasn’t a frustrated single-handed Atlantic-crossing yachtsman himself. Growing roses was his hobby. It was one of the few relaxing pursuits that were compatible with the uncertain hours and demands of detection. Owning a sailing boat, as the doctor did, wasn’t compatible with police pay either—but that was something different.