Last Respects

by Catherine Aird

  As soon as she had taken in this evidence—before her very eyes, as the conjurors said—she had gone out on to 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 great-grandfather’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. ‘I 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 realize 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 said 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. Pressurized air travel didn’t suit a middle-aged woman suffering from Menière’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 more form it.


  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 are 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. ‘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.

  CHAPTER 6

  How can I support this sight!

  The pathologist to the Berebury District General Hospital Management Committee 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, Burns, worn down by listening, had retreated into a Trappist-like silence years ago. Detective-Constable Crosby, normally a talker, didn’t like attending postmortems. 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 dare say, 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 compa
tible with police pay either—but that was something different.

  ‘The wind doesn’t help,’ said Dabbe, stroking an imaginary beard in the manner of Joshua Slocum. ‘You get a real funnel effect out there in mid-channel.’

  ‘I can see that you might,’ agreed Sloan. ‘What with the cliffs to the north …’

  ‘And the headland above Marby to the south,’ completed the doctor. ‘That’s the real villain of the piece.’

  Sloan was thinking about something else that wasn’t going to help either and that was the official report. It would have to note that the subject was relatively undamaged but not well-preserved. It was the sort of incongruity that didn’t go down well with the Superintendent. Worse: it would undoubtedly have to be explained to him.

  By Sloan.

  ‘There’s the shingle bank, too,’ said the doctor.

  ‘Billy’s Finger.’ Sloan had looked at the map. ‘I’m going out there presently to have a look at the lie of the land …’

  ‘And the water,’ interjected Detective-Constable Crosby.

  Everyone else ignored this.

  ‘There’s always a fair bit of turbulence, too,’ remarked the pathologist sagely, ‘where the river meets the tide.’ It was Joshua Slocum who had sailed alone around the world but Dr Dabbe contrived to sound every bit as experienced.

  Immutable was the word that always came into Sloan’s mind when people started to talk about tides. He might have been talking about tides at that moment, but it was the face of the Superintendent which swam into his mental vision. He would be waiting for news.

  ‘Let’s get this straight, Doctor,’ he said more brusquely than he meant. ‘This man—whoever he is—has been in the water for a fair time.’

  ‘That is so,’ the pathologist agreed. ‘There is some evidence of adipocere being present,’ he supplemented, ‘but not to any great degree.’

  ‘But,’ said Sloan, ‘he hasn’t been out where the tides and currents and fish could get hold of him for all that long?’