Slight Mourning

by Catherine Aird

  “We—the police—for our sins—catch those who don’t keep ’em.”

  “Sometimes,” said Mr. Phillipps jovially. “Mostly I should say it’s catch-as-catch-can.”

  “Your lot,” continued Sloan, ignoring this, “decide if we did right and they did wrong, and by how much.”

  “Well …”

  “And the prison officers—Heaven help them—keep them out of sight and out of mind for as long as you tell them to.”

  “I suppose,” conceded Mr. Phillipps, “we each tend to forget the other three.”

  “Not always.” There was at least one officer in the Berebury Force who kept pinned up on his wall a motto which read: “Far from Court, Far from Care.” Found it in a history book, he said, but it did for today, too. “Well, thank you very much, Mr. Phillipps. That’s one loop-hole stopped up …”

  Mr. Phillipps didn’t seem quite so keen to ring off.

  “You know you mentioned jelly babies this morning,” he said uneasily.

  “Jelly babies—oh, yes?”

  “I always started with their feet. Does it mean anything?”

  “I expect so,” said Sloan cheerfully, “but I don’t know what.”

  He put the telephone down. That had been, he recognized, a diversion. Welcome, but a diversion for all that.

  Besides, it was being borne in upon his mind that there had been an incongruity in something someone—two people, it must have been—had said. A little thing—but significant.

  One had said one thing. The other had said something quite different.

  Crosby had said something too …

  The detective constable put his head round the door of Sloan’s room and said something now. “They’ve picked up Mr. Peter Miller stroke Fent at Ornum at the County Show. They’re bringing him over to Berebury as quickly as they can.”

  “Good,” said Sloan absently. The man was a piece in the jig-saw puzzle, he was sure about that, but there was more to the picture than just him—unless he had meant to kill Quentin Fent too, and then come in to his inheritance. The difficulty with this sort of jig-saw was knowing what was a piece and what wasn’t. Not all of them had neatly interlocking edges; not all had a straight side somewhere to give the picture the defined framework within which the patient solver—you did solve a jig-saw, didn’t you? like you solved a crossword—could work away. There was another thing about a real jig-saw. All the pieces fitted somewhere …

  “I’m going down to the canteen,” announced Crosby firmly. “My stomach’s beginning to think my throat’s cut. Tea and a bun?”

  “Please.”

  He didn’t even know if he had all the pieces, let alone what constituted a piece of this particular picture and what was irrelevant. Mrs. Fent’s faint—that was part of the whole and so was her shutting herself away and her running away now. But what about her not drinking the wine and her predilection for tinned peaches?

  And the development. That always seemed to be cropping up …

  Sloan paused. That always seemed to be cropping up. Now he came to think of it, there had been one person who always brought it into the conversation. He reached for his notebook to check. That could be a piece of his jigsaw—but it mightn’t be.

  There were other things, too, which might fit into the Grand Design. It was Napoleon who had had a Grand Design, wasn’t it? Well, Bill Fent’s murderer had had one too but Sloan was prepared to bet it hadn’t included the murder of Mrs. Marjorie Marchmont. And it hadn’t included that trip of Fent’s late at night over to Cleete with old Professor Berry. No, Bill Fent had been meant to go off to bed to die in his sleep.

  Idly Sloan followed through this train of thought. Then what would have happened? He’d have been found dead in bed in the morning, and there would still have been a post mortem unless … unless …

  The door opened. Crosby brought in two mugs of tea.

  There had been something, too, that the gardener woman, Miss Paterson, had said about the dinner party … the dinner party for the new Mrs. Washby. Something about a fertility rite. And then there was something Richard Renville had told him, too. That they had talked about blood donors after dinner, while the port was going round. A picture was beginning to take shape in Sloan’s mind. A different picture from the one they had all been looking at.

  That was it. They’d been trying to do the wrong puzzle with the right pieces. Oh, they’d got the pieces all right—all of them—they’d had them all the time, but put together differently they made a very different picture.

  “Tea, sir,” said Crosby, plonking down the mug.

  Sloan didn’t even see it. In his mind’s eye he was looking again at the broken statue of the God of Love, and hearing Dr. Dabbe’s ironic detached voice saying, “The devil was a fallen angel, Sloan …”

  Then it came to him.

  There was just one set of circumstances in which it was immaterial to the murderer whether it was Bill or Helen Fent who died.

  And then it was that he guessed why it was that Mrs. Marjorie Marchmont had had to die too.

  He reached for the telephone and dialled Mrs. Ursula Renville’s number. There was a question that he needed to put to her.

  “Who carved last Saturday, Inspector? Why, Bill Fent, of course. He always did. Prided himself on his carving, actually. Anyway, Helen was no good at it. We all knew that.”

  A murderer was making his way through the quiet streets of Constance Parva. He was going in the direction of the church but that was not where he was really making for. From over beyond the church where the village green was he could hear the inimitable sound—so dear to the cricket commentators—of leather on willow and every now and then the spatter of applause as one of the giants of the village team hit a boundary.

  He heard it but it didn’t interest him. Rugby had been his game. Not cricket. Definitely not cricket.

  He could hear all this because he was on foot. A car was no use to him now; besides, people recognized cars. There was no one much about just now to recognize him. It was merging from late afternoon to early evening and apart from the cricketers the village seemed to be at home at tea. Not that it mattered really if anyone did see him. He wasn’t carrying anything that might make the casual observer think he meant business. Actually, he’d got all he needed in his jacket pocket, but nobody was to know that. And he’d got a legitimate reason for his errand if, say, his victim was not alone.

  She was alone, though.

  He had reached his destination quite quickly—Miss Cynthia Paterson’s little cottage with its long cat-slide roof sloping down at the back over the kitchen. He pushed open the gate. Somewhere Rags, her dog, barked. He closed the gate carefully behind him and walked round the path.

  Miss Paterson was sitting outside on a garden seat, a pot of tea in front of her. She looked up as his shadow fell across her face.

  “Hullo, Doctor,” she said.

  Sloan came round the garden path just before the needle of the disposable syringe met Miss Paterson’s flesh. He did not allow the sight to check his stride but carried on at his full pace, flinging himself with all the momentum at his command at Dr. Washby. It wasn’t a text-book tackle by any means but it did the trick.

  The needle never went into Miss Paterson. Instead, the whole syringe fell on to the grass as the doctor reeled before Sloan’s weight. It knocked Washby off balance to begin with, but he recovered quickly enough and skipped behind Miss Paterson’s chair Crosby, rapidly bringing up the rear, dodged to one side while Sloan altered course for another charge from the other.

  That, at least, was how it seemed.

  Two other factors then conspired to alter the situation. One was a small Norfolk terrier, which, sensing that this was no formal tea-party but more of a wide game, joined in the mêlée with exacerbating barks and playful nibbles at any male ankle that might be to hand, so to speak. The other was an inexplicable piece of clumsiness on Sloan’s part, enacted just as Crosby was about to get a grip of the doctor. It uns
ighted the constable and diverted his attention for just long enough for Dr. Washby to slip past and make for the gate.

  No match in speed for the lighter man, the perspiring constable pounded after him.

  Sloan made no move to follow in spite of the fact that sometimes he doubted Crosby’s ability to catch anything except a cold.

  SEVENTEEN

  Sloan sat down on the garden seat beside Miss Paterson.

  “Thank you,” she said. “You were just in time.”

  “We should have got here sooner,” he said. “He even told me that he was coming to see you. Because of your bad heart.”

  “But,” indignantly, “he’s never listened to it.”

  “I know. That was when the penny dropped.”

  “He’s probably been looking for me all afternoon.” She shivered a little and waved a hand toward the Norman tower of St. Leonard’s. “I went into the church on my way home. I wanted to think a little after finding Marjorie.”

  “I think,” he said soberly, “that that may have saved your life.”

  “God moves in a mysterious way …”

  “Dr. Washby must have realized that you knew something.”

  “I guessed Bill’s part of it anyway.” She inclined her head. “Let us say after that I wondered about the rest and then I put two and two together.”

  “Quicker than I did,” said Sloan.

  “I knew something that you didn’t.”

  “Oh?”

  “I’m old-fashioned,” she said. “I still use a lectionary. Always have done.”

  Sloan waited. He didn’t mind people talking about things he didn’t understand as long as he didn’t have to explain them to Superintendent Leeyes.

  “That is to say,” she went on, “I always read the Lessons appointed for the day over to myself before the Morning Service. There’s a list of them published every year, you know.”

  “Yes?” he said encouragingly. Perhaps he wouldn’t put any of this in his report. That would be easier than trying to make the superintendent understand it.

  “Bill used to read the Lesson in church quite a lot on Sunday mornings,” said Miss Paterson. “The first one, usually.”

  “The squire’s job,” put in Sloan wryly.

  “About the only one left,” she agreed. “Well, one Sunday—it must have been a year or so ago—it was the Fifteenth after Trinity—I do remember that …”

  None of this would do for the superintendent, Sloan decided. Life was too short. “Yes, miss?”

  “He should have read Proverbs 17, verse 6.”

  “And he didn’t?” Clues were funny things. You couldn’t really begin to define them.

  “He read something quite different. I was curious, so when I got home I turned up what he should have read.”

  “I think I can guess what it was about.”

  “I don’t think he could bring himself to read it aloud—especially with Helen sitting just in front of him.”

  “No.”

  “If I remember rightly,” said the rector’s daughter, “it was a passage about one’s children’s children being the crown of old men—Revised Version, of course …”

  “Of course,” murmured Sloan.

  “… and a good man leaving an inheritance for his children’s children.” She paused delicately. “When I realized that he couldn’t bring himself to read any of that, I thought I understood why there were no children up at the Park.”

  “You were right,” said Sloan. She had to be right. It was the only explanation which fitted.

  She coughed. “Shakespeare had a word for it.”

  “He would.”

  “In Anthony and Cleopatra.”

  Sloan wasn’t surprised.

  “Being unseminar’d, he called it,” said Cynthia Paterson.

  “All right, Sloan, all right” brayed Leeyes. “I get the message. No need to rub it in.” The superintendent never played the nineteenth hole well, but at least he took his time about it and he was still there when Sloan telephoned. “You’ve lost Washby, and Bill Fent had had mumps at the wrong moment when young and so he couldn’t have any children.”

  “That’s what we think,” advanced Sloan cautiously. There was a great deal of checking still to be done.

  “That doesn’t mean that someone had to kill him.” Leeyes grunted. “Could happen to anyone,” he added as an afterthought.

  “It wouldn’t have mattered at all,” said Sloan, “if his wife hadn’t started to have a baby.”

  “What!”

  “That’s what we think,” repeated Sloan. “Only think, mind you.” A chat with Dr. Harriet Baird had produced the bland response that with either her patient’s consent or on the judge’s specific direction in a court of law and with his protection against proceedings arising out of doing so she would be willing to discuss her patient’s condition. Not without. Good afternoon. So he had rung Dr. Dabbe instead and asked him a different question. And got an answer.

  Leeyes grunted.

  “Everything adds up,” said Sloan, “to pregnancy.”

  “I always understood,” boomed Leeyes, “that in cases like Bill Fent’s there were—um—ways and means by which the wife could have a baby legally even if it wasn’t her husband’s.”

  “Science has made great strides,” agreed Sloan hastily. Goodness knows how many people were within earshot at the Golf Club. “But I don’t think in this case …”

  “All traditional, eh, Sloan?”

  “Very,” said Sloan shortly. Dr. Dabbe had been nearer the mark in asking if it was Love gone wrong. It was.

  “And someone knew Bill Fent would be likely to take exception.”

  “They did. Moreover, that someone stood to lose more than most if this all came out, being a doctor. I should have suspected something right in the beginning,” said Sloan, “when Washby told me he wasn’t Helen Fent’s doctor. He probably took the precaution of getting her to change doctors at the very beginning of the affair so that he couldn’t be charged with adultery with a patient.”

  Leeyes grunted. “We’ll need more evidence than that …”

  “They used to meet in the Folly,” said Sloan. “We should have cottoned on to that too. Old Fitch who lived in the Keeper’s Cottage down there had started to mutter about goings-on in the Folly. Nobody listened, of course. Everyone assumed he was senile and Washby got him put in a home. Easy, isn’t it, when you know how?”

  “I still don’t see how killing Bill Fent helps.”

  “If he’s dead,” said Sloan, “nobody’s to know that he isn’t the father.”

  “Mrs. Fent …”

  “Helen Fent isn’t going to say, is she? And if she is, how does she prove it’s Washby’s baby and not her husband’s or anyone else’s, for that matter?”

  “Blood groups,” said Leeyes. “You’ve forgotten them.”

  “No, I haven’t,” said Sloan.

  “They prove paternity.”

  “They disprove paternity,” said Sloan. “That’s all. Anyway, Bill Fent’s blood group wasn’t on record anywhere. He hadn’t been in the Army and he’d never given blood as a donor—that was what that little chat over the port was in aid of—to make sure.”

  “They could have got it at the post mortem.”

  “There wasn’t supposed to be a post mortem,” said Sloan, the case against Dr. Washby becoming clearer every minute. “He was meant to die in his bed, with Paul Washby giving the death certificate and nobody but Paul Washby knowing it wasn’t natural causes.”

  “Not even Mrs. Fent?” said Leeyes sharply.

  “I am prepared to bet that the first time she even wondered was when she heard that there were police at the funeral. It was only after that that she was so frightened.”

  “Of him,” said Leeyes. “Not us. Well, what went wrong with his masterly plan?”

  “It was the late call for the doctor to go to Cullingoak which dished Washby’s little scheme. Veronica, his wife, dialled the surgery answerin
g machine before Washby could get to it and she gave him the message to go to Cullingoak in front of everyone, so he couldn’t duck out of it. He had to go even though it meant Fent taking Berry home. The wife was another clue, by the way.”

  “Veronica Washby?”

  “The marriage. It was a whirlwind courtship, remember. Everyone said so. I reckon as soon as Helen told him she was pregnant Washby set out covering his own position. He had a lot to lose if any of this came out, you know. Doctors do. He consolidated things very well, really,” said Sloan reflectively, “except that he forgot that Marjorie Marchmont had been secretary to the late Dr. Whittaker. Someone must have reminded him.”

  “What about it?”

  “She would have known about Bill’s infertility from his medical records.”

  “So she had to go?”

  “Washby took his car right up to the Folly this afternoon after she had been found. Much nearer than he needed to have done. I didn’t think about that until later. Any traces that it left would explain any traces that he’d made there the night before. And any that she left inside the car he was busy washing off this morning with me watching him. And,” added Sloan with a wry twist of his lips, “he tried to con me into thinking he was cleaning his car because it was dirty. And into thinking about the development all the time. It was nothing to do with it.”

  Typically the superintendent went off at a complete tangent. “The Africans believe in a matrilinear society, Sloan—that’s inheriting through the female,” he added gratuitously, “on the grounds that you always know who your mother is.”

  “It’s a point,” said Sloan.

  “It was poured over the crémet, sir, that poison,” said Crosby going over Dr. Washby’s confession for the twentieth time, “and he did kill Marjorie Marchmont as well as Bill Fent but he doesn’t say why.”

  “I didn’t think he would,” said Sloan.

  “And now we can’t ask him.”

  “No.” The overdose that Dr. Washby had taken after shaking off Crosby had been of heroic proportions. His stunned widow had gone home to her mother.

  “And Mrs. Fent doesn’t seem able to help,” said Crosby.