His Burial Too

by Catherine Aird

  The welders looked relieved and trundled their oxygen and acetylene cylinders away. Sloan beckoned with his finger and Dyson, the official police photographer, and his assistant, Williams, both moved forward, cameras at the ready.

  “A nasty accident?” enquired Dyson cheerfully. None of the pictures which Dyson took so professionally was ever pretty, but he didn’t let the fact get him down.

  “A nasty incident,” Sloan corrected him.

  Dyson nodded and took his first picture. After the penetrating flame of the welding plant the flash of his camera’s bulb seemed tame stuff indeed. He jerked his thumb. “How did Fred get under that little lot?”

  “Richard,” responded Sloan automatically. “His name’s Richard.”

  He was more than ever sure now that it was.

  “I don’t suppose,” remarked Dyson, who was an incorrigible looker on the bright side, “he knew what hit him. Can’t have done.”

  “No. Now, what I want,” said Sloan, getting down to business, “are a couple of shots of the height of the marble piled up against the outside door over there. That one …”

  “The west door?” Dyson obediently started to focus.

  “The coffin door,” supplied Dr Dabbe ghoulishly from the sidelines.

  The camera clicked, recording the marble heaped up against the door.

  “Now what?” asked Dyson.

  “I want some of that window up there. The little one above the door,” said Sloan, “from the inside and the outside.”

  “No one could get through that, Inspector.”

  “No,” agreed Sloan, “but it’s been opened and the ladder taken outside to do it with, I daresay.”

  Dyson obligingly hitched his camera up and photographed the little window, while his assistant, Williams, rigged up a tripod in the nave.

  “Been reading Sherlock Holmes, then, have you, Inspector?” he asked with a deceptively straight face.

  “No,” said Sloan shortly. “I haven’t. Why?”

  The photographer pointed up at the tiny window.

  “It’s a bit like in The Speckled Band, isn’t it? No one could get through that window there, could they, and both doors were bunged up to the eyebrows with marble, so nobody could get out through them either.”

  “We’d got as far as that,” said Sloan, though he wasn’t sure if Crosby had actually worked that much out yet …

  “But something knocked that thing down on the poor chap and then vamoosed somehow. Stands to reason, doesn’t it?”

  “If,” promised Sloan, “it turns out to have been a deadly Indian swamp adder, I’ll let you know.”

  It was common knowledge in the Force that Dyson would have gone a long way on the uniform side if only he’d had the sense to keep his mouth shut at the right moment. Perhaps that was better, though, than Crosby who didn’t seem to have opened his sensibly at all so far.

  “Unless he went upwards,” continued the police photographer logically, taking some pictures of the narrow stairway—more of a catwalk really—which climbed up round the tower and was lost to sight somewhere among the bells.

  “If he went up that way,” said Sloan, following his gaze, “I should like to know how he got down afterwards. It’s too high for a ladder and it’s a long drop without one. I don’t know how you get back to earth from that sort of height …”

  “Rapunzal,” suggested Dr Dabbe, who was still waiting on the sidelines to be able to examine the dead man.

  “Batman,” offered Crosby, suddenly coming to life at last.

  Sloan took a deep breath. He couldn’t very well bawl Crosby out; not if the doctor was making dotty suggestions, too.

  “Rapunzal?” he said, injecting the word with just enough of a note of polite enquiry as not to jeopardise the traditionally good relations between police and medicine.

  “In reverse, of course,” explained the pathologist. “You remember, Sloan, she was a maiden who was shut up in a tower by her father.”

  “Really, sir?” It sounded quite a good idea to him. If more fathers shut up their maiden daughters in towers more often there would be a lot less work and worry for some members of the police force.

  “She grew her hair long,” added the doctor, “and a knight in shining armour climbed up it.”

  Sloan choked.

  “Grimm’s Fairy Tales,” said Dr Dabbe gravely.

  “With Batman …” began Crosby.

  Sloan rounded on him. “If that’s your only suggestion, Constable …”

  He stopped and gritted his teeth. Was this what was called the Generation Gap? The difference between Rapunzal and Batman?

  He stopped because it wouldn’t be any good saying anything.

  He knew that.

  He sighed. He would just have to have more help, that was all.

  Real help.

  Not just Constable Crosby standing two paces behind him, looking bored and making absurd suggestions, and a police photographer who was a detective manqué.

  “This lady who let her hair down,” said Dyson interestedly.

  “If you’ve quite finished photographing that stairway, Dyson,” snapped Sloan, “Crosby here can start getting it checked for footprints. Just in case.”

  It would be a waste of time. Sloan could see that from where he was standing. The treads were too clean. Either someone had deliberately dusted them down or they were kept that way.

  By whoever wound the church clock, perhaps?

  He could hear the machinations of the clock overhead as it gathered strength to strike the quarter hour above them.

  There were some more flashes and then Dyson stood back and said: “That’s the lot inside, Inspector. I’ll come back and take a few bird’s-eye views from up top when you’ve finished with the stairway.”

  Sloan nodded and exchanged glances with the pathologist, by now gloved and gowned.

  There was a sudden change of mood inside the church tower as Dr Dabbe advanced, totally absorbed now in the arm.

  They started to wade through the piled marble towards it. There was some writing on a piece of marble at Sloan’s feet. He looked down and read it. “Defunctae …”

  He must have said it aloud because the pathologist who had at last reached the arm, said, “So’s our chap, I’m afraid. Very.”

  I AM ACQUAINTED WITH SAD MISERY.

  8

  The Dower House at Cleete was no more empty now than it had been half an hour ago. There were exactly three people in it. The same number and the same people as there had been before. Fenella herself, Mrs Turvey, and Police Constable Hepple.

  It was true that the Constable had gone through into the kitchen to talk to Mrs Turvey, but the complement of people within the house was still the same.

  But it felt emptier.

  Somehow her father’s presence seemed to have left it.

  Fenella hadn’t quite grasped all that Police Constable Hepple had tried to tell her. Her ears had heard all right—there was no avoiding his slow, burred Calleshire speech—but her bemused and bewildered mind somehow hadn’t picked up the messages from her ear. Her brain was a confused jumble of disconnected words—sculpture—crushed—arm—button—church.

  If she had been seven years old again and at a children’s party—not the sort of children’s party which children had nowadays but the sort of children’s party which they still had when she was a little girl—then the whole of Hepple’s ghastly rigmarole could have been resolved in a hilarious game of consequences.

  Sculpture—crushed—arm—button—church.

  Someone in turn would then have added the ultimate incongruity—father. Then there would have been shrieks of laughter and everyone would have gone on to the next game. Or a kind, motherly hostess would have handed out lemonade all round.

  She sat quite still.

  This was no game.

  And there wasn’t going to be any laughter.

  Not now.

  Not for a long time.

  She could have don
e with the lemonade though. Her mouth was dry and she seemed to have too much tongue. There would be some tea coming soon. The Constable had said so. That was what he had gone through into the kitchen for.

  A cup of tea.

  The police panacea.

  And to tell Mrs Turvey about her father. That was nice of him. She hadn’t wanted to—didn’t feel she could—start on about the sculpture and the arm and the button to Mrs Turvey just now.

  At least Mr Gordon Cranswick of Cranswick (Processing) Limited or whatever it was would know now why it was that her father couldn’t see him this morning. She had known—she knew—he wasn’t a breaker of promises … not her father.

  It was because Police Constable Hepple was in the kitchen that Fenella Tindall got to the telephone first. She picked it up automatically without thinking almost as soon as it started to ring.

  A deep male voice asked for Richard Tindall.

  “He’s not here,” she said falteringly. “Who is this?”

  “Where is he, then?”

  “Who is this speaking?” countered Fenella.

  “Wellow,” boomed a voice that was practically basso profundo. “Digby Wellow of United Mellemetics of Luston.”

  “Oh …”

  “I require to speak to him,” announced the caller magisterially, “as soon as possible.”

  “I’m afraid you can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “Something’s happened,” she said helplessly. “Something terrible’s happened.”

  “What?” howled a suddenly anguished voice at the other end of the line. “Tell me …”

  But this was something that Fenella found she could not do. She stood by the telephone, her mouth working soundlessly, tears beginning to chase themselves quietly down her cheeks as she attempted to convert tragedy into words. She was making the painful discovery—as many another before her—that to comprehend bad news was one thing: to convey it to someone else quite another. Perhaps it was because to formulate the words might somehow seem to endorse the very worst …

  This was where the kindly Hepple found her when he came back with a cup of tea a minute or so later. He lifted the telephone receiver from her nerveless fingers, listened intently for a moment, heard nothing but the dialling tone, and then replaced it.

  When Paul Blake rang from Struthers and Tindall’s offices a few minutes later to speak to Fenella, Police Constable Hepple answered the call himself.

  In the church tower they—Dr Dabbe and his assistant, Burns, Inspector Sloan, and Constable Crosby—began uncovering the body attached to the visible arm. It was a slow, painstaking business, each piece of marble being marked and then laid in the aisle. Little by little a crumpled figure began to emerge from under the debris of the Fitton Bequest.

  Incredibly, the operation was not without its lighter moments.

  “Is this an angel, Inspector?”

  Sloan looked up. Crosby was cradling a curvaceous marble infant, undamaged save that it lacked an arm. Its other arm—chubby to a degree—seemed to be toying playfully with the detective constable’s lapel.

  Sloan gave a sigh of pure exasperation.

  Crosby gave the marble a friendly pat. “Or is it a cherub, sir?”

  “Neither,” said Sloan shortly. “It’s one of the ten Fitton children. Now, give me a hand with this bit, will you? It’s too heavy for one.”

  In fact, it took all four of them to lift the largest piece of all from the top of the body on the floor.

  “Multiple fractures, for a start,” decided Dr Dabbe, who had reached his quarry at last. “And a ruptured spleen, I should say.”

  Sloan waited. To him the man just looked like a rag doll with the stuffing gone.

  “She’s broken his back, all right, too,” announced the pathologist a moment or two later.

  “Who has?” asked Sloan considerably startled.

  “The widow.”

  “Oh.” His brow cleared. “Mrs Fitton.”

  The doctor bent over the body again and Sloan had time to take his first good look round the inside of the tower itself.

  It was a very high one and open right up to the bells. He could just make them out in the dimness some seventy feet above his head. Sundry ropes hung down from the bell loft. Those from the bells were neatly moored against the wall opposite where the sculpture had been parked on its plinth. A single rope secured them to the wall near a brass plaque.

  Sloan picked his way across the floor to read the inscription.

  “To call the folk to Church in time,

  WE CHIME

  When joy and pleasure are on the wing,

  WE RING

  When the body parts the Soul,

  WE TOLL.”

  “Nice, that, sir, isn’t it?” said Crosby over his shoulder.

  “He could have rung one of the bells,” said Sloan, looking back to the body, “if he thought there was any danger. There was nothing to stop him doing that.”

  Crosby said, “So he wasn’t worried, sir.”

  “Not about the Fitton Bequest, anyway.”

  “He could have walked out, too,” added Crosby, “if he hadn’t been happy. The tower door wasn’t locked, was it, sir?”

  “Between eleven last night and eight this morning it was.”

  “We don’t know,” said Crosby going off on a fresh tack, “why he came here either.”

  “There’s a lot we don’t know,” Sloan reminded him with gloomy relish, “yet.”

  The pathologist straightened up from the prone body. “There’s one thing we do know, Sloan …”

  “Yes, Doctor?”

  “He was hit twice.”

  “Twice?”

  “Once to make him unconscious, the second time by all the marble. That’s what killed him. He didn’t bleed after that.”

  “How do you …”

  “He bled the first time,” said the doctor succinctly. “He was lying on his face then. You can see how the blood trickled down the sides of his head and dried there. Some of it dropped on the ground from his head. I can confirm that for you presently …”

  Crosby’s head came up in a challenging fashion.

  “… from the shape of the drop,” said the pathologist, answering the unspoken gesture. “If it’s a short distance then you can work it out. The shape of the drop varies with the height it has fallen.”

  “Then?” said Sloan hastily.

  “Then the marble came down on top of him. After that, Sloan, all the King’s Horses and all the King’s Men couldn’t have put him together again.”

  “How much later?” Why was it that fairy tales and nursery rhymes were all so sinister? Tales for children. Tales you brought children up on. Never mind the violence they saw on television later on.

  “Good question.” The pathologist waved an arm. “I’ll see what I can do for you there. He was hit from behind the first time and from above the second. No doubt about that.” Dr Dabbe stooped and lifted the last of the marble—a small chip—from the back of the dead man’s neck and murmured, “Pelium upon Ossa.”

  Burns gave a short sharp laugh, rather like a seal barking.

  Sloan, who was never sure about the doctor’s medical jokes, turned his attention back to the tower wall.

  It was unexceptional enough. Beside the bell ropes were various little framed cards commemorating past bell-ringing triumphs—marathon rings of Double Norwich Court Bob Major and Treble Bob Maximus. Above them a dark, time-stained board recorded some ancient parish charity.

  There was no message scratched on any of the walls that Sloan could see. If the tower had been a temporary prison Richard Tindall did not seem to have appreciated the fact to the extent of writing on the walls.

  Nor was there anything remotely resembling a weapon.

  He said so.

  “Ha,” remarked the pathologist neatly, “if not malice aforethought then malice afterthought.”

  Sloan translated this for Crosby’s benefit. “Whoever hit him took away w
hatever they hit him with.”

  Dabbe considered the man’s head. “Something blunt and not very big, Sloan. That’s what you should be looking for.”

  Crosby, in fact, wasn’t paying attention anyway. He had found a small mirror and, stooping, was regarding himself in it.

  “If, Constable,” remarked Sloan nastily, “it’s a question of who is the fairest of us all …” Now he was catching the nursery rhyme habit, too.

  “They’ve hung it a bit low, sir,” complained Crosby.

  “Spotty choirboy height,” said Dr Dabbe without looking up. He never missed anything, did the doctor. “Now, Sloan, about the time of death …”

  The pathologist looked at his watch. Driven by an inner compulsion which comes over everyone who sees someone else look at a watch, Sloan looked at his, too. It was almost eleven o’clock. The time struck a faint chord in his memory. Eleven o’clock. Now why had eleven o’clock mattered today?

  The Mayor.

  That was it. The Mayor was due to leave the Town Hall at eleven o’clock this morning. To do something or other that had seemed important to him, if not to the police force. Sloan tried to visualise the message he had seen for only a brief moment before he had hurried out to Cleete. It wasn’t the Flower Show. He knew that was next Saturday all right because of holding Princess Grace back. If it wasn’t the Flower Show, what could it have been …

  It came to him.

  The Water Works.

  The Mayor had been due to leave for the new Water Works at eleven o’clock this morning to declare it open and cut a ribbon or turn on a tap or something. Well, the Mayor would have to take his chance at the Water Works today.

  “Just over the twelve hours, I should say,” the pathologist broke into his thoughts. “Give or take an hour or so either way. I might even be able to calculate the interval between the two blows. I’ll get nearer the time for you later on anyway when I’ve done the post-mortem. Brain tissue’s all the thing for timing these days.”

  “That won’t be difficult to get,” offered Crosby.

  “We think,” intervened Sloan swiftly, “we know where he was yesterday evening—if his daughter’s telling the truth, and if he’s Richard Tindall, of course.”

  “Not my department, old chap, his name.” Dr Dabbe started to take his gown off. “The post-mortem’ll tell you practically everything else about the poor fellow—no secrets there—but not his name. Not yet. I expect we’ll come to it in time. When babies are branded at birth with a computer number, God help us all.” He tossed his gown over to Burns. “I’m finished here now, Sloan. Done all I can. It’s all yours …”