Slight Mourning

by Catherine Aird

  “So,” said Sloan slowly, “the cold soup would have been on the table and with a bit of luck anyone knowing the setup and coming into the room beforehand would have worked out where nearly everyone was going to be asked to sit.”

  Mrs. Sloan shivered suddenly. “I hadn’t thought of it that way.”

  “Especially the host and hostess—if you knew the head and foot of the table.” He went back to his notebook. “After the soup the crown of lamb with its stuffing and its fancy potatoes and what else?”

  She paused for thought. “At this time of the year beans and peas, I should think, and then new potatoes—oh, and red currant jelly.”

  “That’s hardly letting the dog see the rabbit for trimmings,” he objected.

  “That,” said the prudent housewife, “is the whole idea. It makes the rabbit go further.”

  He looked at the clock and shut his notebook. “I’ll have to find out more about that pudding in the morning.”

  “She knew what she was doing, this Mrs. Fent of yours,” observed his wife. “That’s a clever meal to do for twelve.”

  “Clever?” That was something else he hadn’t thought of either. That Mrs. Helen Fent was a clever woman was something that he conscientiously made a note of.

  “Inexpensive, then,” amended Margaret Sloan. “I shouldn’t think you could do much for less.” She gathered up his empty coffee cup. “Mostly prepared the day before, easy to serve and nice to look at without being ostentatious.”

  “Neat but not gaudy,” agreed Sloan looking for the cat to put it out.

  “Helen! Helen, what on earth are you doing down here? And at this time of night …”

  Helen Fent started. “Oh, it’s only you, Annabel. You gave me quite a fright.”

  “And you gave me quite a fright,” countered the young nurse briskly. “I thought you were nicely tucked up in bed …”

  “I was …”

  “And then I find you pattering about downstairs in your night-dress. It’s a white one, too.”

  Helen gave a shaky little laugh. “I expect I do look a bit like a ghost.”

  “In the dark as well.” Annabel was reproachful. “You might have put a light on.”

  “Sorry,” she said penitently. “I didn’t think.”

  “I was just coming up to bed anyway,” said Annabel. “I would have come in to see if you needed anything for the night. Did you want another hot drink?”

  “Yes … no. No”—Helen took a deep breath—“thank you.”

  “Or a sleeping tablet? I’ve got some with me.”

  “No, thank you.” Helen shook her head. “It’s not that. I was just making quite sure we were all locked up for the night.”

  “We are tonight,” said Annabel. “I must admit that we weren’t last night. At least I found the garden door hadn’t been locked when I went by last thing. I locked it myself. I meant to tell you but this morning there didn’t seem time.”

  “No,” agreed Helen gravely. “It’s been quite a day.”

  “Quentin must have forgotten it.”

  Helen passed a hand in front of her eyes. “It was one of the things Bill always used to see to. It’s not Quentin’s fault—he’s got enough to think about as it is—it’s mine. I’ve just got to get used to doing things like that without Bill.”

  “Tonight,” said Annabel Pollock not unkindly, “all you’ve got to get used to is staying in bed.”

  “Sorry, Nurse”—Helen smiled faintly in the darkness—“but that’s not as easy as you might think.”

  “No,” agreed Annabel sympathetically, “but better get back to bed now all the same. Call me if you want anything—and do try to get some sleep.”

  “Where’s Quentin?”

  “In the study. He’s on the phone to Jacqueline. She rang ages ago and they’re still at it.”

  For Quentin Fent the course of true love never had run smooth so it was no more choppy than usual as he tried to explain to Jacqueline Battersby that he was the new owner of Strontfield Park.

  “Unless,” he finished, “anything happens to me in the next three weeks.”

  “Does that mean that Daddy will let us get married now?” she asked with feminine directness. Not for nothing had her father made his money by calling a spade a spade.

  “I hope so but”—Quentin was cautious—“it’s a real barn of a place.”

  “Strontfield Park.” She let the name roll around in her mind. “There have been Fents there for generations, haven’t there?”

  “Yes,” said Quentin rather shortly, “and between them they’ve used up what money they ever had.”

  “Daddy says property’s better than money.”

  “I daresay it is,” rejoined her fiancé with spirit, “when you’ve got both. One without the other’s a bit of a bind.”

  “All the same,” said Mr. Battersby’s daughter shrewdly, “Daddy will be pleased when he hears.”

  “He’ll probably change his mind when he’s seen the place,” said Quentin pessimistically.

  “Why? What’s wrong with it?”

  “Nothing. That’s the trouble. Don’t get the idea that it’s not very nice. It is. Too nice. With every preservation order, entail, covenant, and God knows what slapped on it and”—for a moment Quentin forgot his devotion to the world of fine art—“you can’t even alter a flipping window without asking the whole world.”

  “Didn’t you once tell us something about some development or other?” Miss Battersby was every inch her father’s daughter—and more.

  “I did,” said Quentin reluctantly. He thought it high time the conversation took a more romantic turn. “I shall have to go into all that now with the legal eagles, but in the meantime, my love …”

  “Daddy’ll want to know,” said Jacqueline practically.

  “Look here,” exploded Quentin hotly, “am I marrying you or asking planning permission?”

  “Both, I hope,” said his affianced sweetly. “Together. When?”

  “Name the day,” snarled Quentin.

  Miss Battersby drew breath. “Shall we say a month tomorrow?”

  “Making sure, aren’t you?” he said bitterly.

  “If you’re making an honest woman of me in a church,” said Jacqueline, “there’s something called banns which take three weeks.”

  “All right, all right,” said Quentin. “A month—if I live that long.”

  “You might if you keep out of Daddy’s way. He still hasn’t got his car back from the repairer’s.”

  Quentin winced. Usually he found Jacqueline’s forthrightness a refreshing contrast to the ambiguity of the conversation in the London art circles in which he moved. Today it had all the double-edged quality of a drawn broadsword. He said, “Right. A month tomorrow, then.”

  “It’s a date,” her voice came over the telephone faintly mocking.

  “And don’t forget that you’ve said yes,” he added crossly, “even if your precious father doesn’t change his mind.”

  “He will now,” she said, “don’t worry about that. Now, listen, darling …”

  The conversation between the engaged pair, business over, then got down to essentials and it was a good twenty minutes later when Quentin rang off and went to bed. He left Strontfield Park to darkness and the monotonous ticking of the Quare clock in the drawing-room.

  This room was never entirely dark, never entirely quiet.

  When all the other lights in the room had been extinguished for the night one always burned here. It was beside a bank of tiny flickering screens looking rather like a television shop-window which was showing the same programme on five different sets. Only an expert could have told that the five moving green and black outlines showed five different programmes.

  And that expert was sitting in front of the screens watching carefully.

  Her name was Nurse Joan Brown and this was the Intensive Care Unit of Berebury District General Hospital.

  Each of the five green lines recorded the beats of on
e ailing heart, each of the green dots that ran across the bottom of the screens monitored a highly irregular pulse.

  The noise—a susurration which never completely faded away—came from a ventilator. It was one of the mechanical aids with which the doctors were trying to keep Mr. Tom Exley alive. His wife, who was still by his bedside, didn’t know by now whether she loved or hated its faint monotonous “suff-suff” sound which had become part of the background to her life since last Saturday night. One thing she had learned by now was that the delicate pink flush on her husband’s cheeks owed everything to the machine and nothing to the healthy processes of natural life.

  It was just after two o’clock in the morning when a new sound disturbed the little ward.

  Nurse Brown looked up.

  The monitor representing Mr. Exley’s pulse had emitted a warning bleep. She reached for the telephone. Even as she did so the green dot on the monitor screen trailed disconsolately downward and disappeared.

  Mrs. Tom Exley’s vigil was over now.

  Nurse Brown led her away.

  TEN

  Sloan had begun his day—the Saturday—over toward Calleford—in Lampard, to be exact.

  The clerk to the Lampard Bench of Magistrates was called Phillipps. He expressed himself delighted to be of any assistance to the inspector.

  “From one arm of the Law to another,” he put it felicitously.

  “Er—quite,” said Sloan hastily before the clerk could go on to their being brothers under the skin which he didn’t feel they were. Not with the clerk in pin-stripe trousers and black jacket anyway. “It’s just a few inquiries about your Bench …”

  “They’re quite good,” said Mr. Phillipps in the manner of a modest ringmaster. “Of course,” he added as one professional to another, “like all lay people they’re a bit wayward at times. There’s one in particular that’s a bit mettlesome …”

  “A lady, I expect,” said Sloan, who had had his fill of lady magistrates before being promoted to sergeant let alone inspector.

  “She can be handled, of course.” The ringmaster had been succeeded by the lion tamer.

  “And a do-gooder into the bargain?” He still hadn’t made up his mind whether or not they did the most harm.

  The clerk nodded. “Can’t see the wood for the trees and never will. But on the whole, justice is done.”

  “I’m glad to hear it,” said Sloan. And he was.

  “Of course,” went on the clerk, paternal now, “they none of them sleep the night after they sentence a man to prison for the first time.”

  “No.” It would be, thought Sloan, like making one’s first arrest. Aloud he said, “Mr. William Fent …”

  “A sad loss,” intoned Mr. Phillipps at once. “The pick of the bunch, you might say. A good man and a good magistrate, too. He’d been chairman for the last couple of years, you know. Like his grandfather.”

  “Did he,” asked Sloan, “sentence harshly?”

  “Not him,” said the clerk. “On the contrary, I should say, thanks to Mr. Wilkins.”

  “Mr. Wilkins?”

  “He’s the probation officer.”

  “Ah,” said Sloan understanding immediately and putting the police point of view from force of habit. “We knock ’em off and he gets ’em off.”

  Mr. Phillipps straightened his tie. “He’s—er—very persuasive, Inspector. Makes them bend over backward to help every time.”

  A lion tamer but a better lion tamer, in fact.

  Sloan, who belonged to the school of thought which favoured bending over forward more often, merely said, “Much crime over your way?”

  “Not crime exactly,” said the clerk expansively, “but we’re the back door of Society’s stables and that’s where you see the breeder’s mistakes, isn’t it?”

  “The misfits,” agreed Sloan, wondering just how much of a misfit you’d have to be to hand a man a dollop of poison and wait for him to die. Selfish, for a start, to need to do it anyway; conceited to think you could do it and get away with it; clever to do it and get as far as he had done; cruel not to care how and when a man died; calculating, to weigh the pros and cons, because if there was one thing which stood out like a sore thumb about this case it was that it was no eleventh hour job. There wasn’t a single sign of blind panic or urgent fear anywhere about that careful dose of soluble barbiturate in crowded company …

  “Sorry,” apologized Sloan, coming to with a jerk. “I didn’t quite catch that …”

  “Mostly motoring and matrimonial these days,” repeated the clerk regretfully. “A drunk or two. Nothing exciting.”

  “Wine, women, and cars,” said Sloan, considering how the persuasive Mr. Wilkins would account for the man who had tried to murder William Fent, justice of the peace. There was no telling of course—perhaps his mother had formed an alliance with a carpet-bag, perhaps he’d seen something nasty in the woodshed, perhaps he’d been born crippled—psychologically crippled, that is, or perhaps it was only because his dad hadn’t lammed the difference between right and wrong into him the very first time he’d strayed over that invisible line …

  “A bit of poaching, of course,” continued the clerk. “Always a bit of that in the country.”

  “Since Shakespeare and before,” agreed Sloan. “Was he hard on it?”

  “Not particularly.” The clerk shook his head. “You can’t do a lot with gypsies, you know.”

  “Not even Mr. Wilkins?”

  Mr. Phillipps acknowledged this with a quick smile. “Not even Mr. Wilkins. They pay their fines and go and do it again. Almost instead of paying rates and taxes, you might say.”

  “‘The lesser breeds without the Law’ and all that,” murmured Sloan absently, his mind elsewhere. Come to think of it, law was a privilege, whatever the convicted said. “It’s hardly a Newgate Calendar, is it?” He frowned. “Was there anything he did come down on, your Mr. Fent?”

  “Guns,” responded the clerk without hesitation. “Firearms certificates and so forth. Everyone’s a bit nervous about fire-arms these days.”

  Sloan was glad to hear it. He himself was nervous about fire-arms all the time. Especially in the line of duty. The firing line, you might say.

  “Was there,” he carried on patiently with his questions, “anyone whom he had it in for in a big way?”

  “Mr. Fent? Oh, no, Inspector. He wasn’t that sort of man. He would never have taken advantage of his position like that, and he wouldn’t have let anyone else on the Bench either, and neither would I.”

  “Male or female?” suggested Sloan slyly.

  “Male or female,” said Mr. Phillipps with emphasis.

  “Well,” said Sloan doggedly, “could there have been anyone gunning for him?”

  Mr. Phillipps looked puzzled. “Someone he’d sentenced, you mean?”

  “People do bear grudges,” said Sloan, “especially those people who have been sentenced against those people who sentence them.”

  Mr. Phillipps’ brow cleared. “There’s no one that I can call to mind, Inspector.”

  “What about some boys called Pennyfeather?”

  “Not them,” said the clerk emphatically. “Always very friendly, not to say comic.”

  “Laughter in court?” suggested Sloan.

  “Frequently. Always plenty to say for themselves. The press love it. They have a field-day when the Pennyfeathers come up.”

  “And not in love with their rocking-horses?”

  “Definitely not. Cheerful lads. No ill will there.”

  “I wonder,” said Sloan thoughtfully, “which end of their jelly babies they ate first.”

  Mr. Phillipps started. “Pardon, Inspector?”

  “There was a psychiatrist we had once over in Berebury who always wanted to know.”

  Mr. Phillipps subsided. “The Pennyfeather brothers are all quite normal, anyway. There are four of them—like a blessed row of Toby jugs. They’ll be all right when they grow up. They lead each other on, of course, and they’ve
got quite a following among the smaller fry. That always makes them worse, you know.”

  Sloan did know. It was the first thing that they taught young constables—that most offences were committed by young males in groups. He didn’t know why they bothered. It was something the man on the beat found out for himself on his first day in uniform.

  Mr. Phillipps added the ultimate accolade to the family: “Never ask for time to pay either.”

  Sloan dismissed the Pennyfeather brothers from his mind—and the case. Somehow, cheerful acceptance of rough justice didn’t accord with murder. He tried another tack with the magistrate’s clerk. “What about in the past?”

  “Back a bit, you mean?” He looked at Sloan curiously.

  “I mean,” he said, “someone who might have gone in some time ago but who might have come out recently with an outsize chip on his shoulder.”

  “I see what you’re getting at now, Inspector.” The clerk looked suddenly grave. “I can’t call anyone to mind at all but I’ll go through my records straightaway.”

  Detective Constable William Edward Crosby, English right down to his last entrenched Anglo-Saxon attitude, stepped inside the Post Office in the Calleshire village of Cullingoak, walked up to the counter, pulled out his warrant card and said out of the corner of his mouth in the best precinct-style the one word “Police.”

  He always announced himself this way when he was out on duty alone. As wiser men have discovered, there is a Walter Mitty in us all, and Constable Crosby’s secret life had transatlantic overtones. Kill the fantasy, though, and something in the man dies too. (Crosby hadn’t yet discovered that it is one of life’s little ironies that when the fantasy comes true it is so like something happening to someone else as to be barely credible.)

  In this instance the reaction of the postmistress, Mrs. MacArthur, brought Crosby down to earth with a bump.

  “’Bout time, too,” she snapped, continuing to assault a parcel with a date-stamp. “Here you are, Jim.” She turned and tossed the parcel through a doorway to someone at the back. Having thus made it clear that—in her canon—policemen were small beer compared with postmen, she turned back to Crosby and demanded, “When are they going to do something about my kiosk—that’s what I want to know. I’ve been on to them until I’m blue in the face.”