Slight Mourning (19 page)

“Interesting, though,” said the pathologist in the tone of a true enthusiast adding a rare species to his collection.

Sloan didn't find it interesting. The dead woman represented to him failure by any yardstick you cared to choose.

“All done, sir,” sang out Crosby. He'd finished his crablike progression over the floor and now he had his back to the inside wall of the Folly. He still wasn't looking at the body on the floor. Sloan didn't blame him. It wasn't a pretty sight. Strangulation never was.

“Thank you,” said Sloan. At least Crosby wasn't a converted ghoul. That was something to be thankful for. Inspector Hawkins over at Kinnisport had one of those on his hands. The fellow had fished so many bodies out of the harbour down there that he'd actually got to like it—become a bit of a specialist, so to speak. A defence mechanism, Sloan supposed, but his colleagues still didn't like him for it.

“Why,” grumbled Dr. Dabbe, “does this sort of thing always have to happen on a Saturday afternoon?”

“I couldn't say, sir, I'm sure,” responded Sloan. And he couldn't, either.

“I couldn't pick on Burns anywhere.” Burns was Dr. Dabbe's lugubrious assistant.

Dyson, the police photographer, and his assistant, Williams, had been drummed up, though, and at a signal from Sloan advanced to take their pictures. Behind them an ambulance bumped its way across the Park. The pathologist continued to squint at the body.

“Dead some time, Sloan, I should say.”

“Last seen alive toward the end of yesterday afternoon, Doctor.” That was something else that would have to be gone into, and soon.

“Could be last night.” Dabbe waved a hand at the sadly livid face. “And not poisoning this time.”

“Not poisoning,” agreed Sloan soberly.

“I wonder why not poisoning,” mused the pathologist.

“I think I know why not poisoning,” said Sloan. He wasn't sure what he really knew but he was fairly sure about this. “There wasn't time for poisoning to work.”

“Ah,” Dr. Dabbe lifted his eyebrows. “Time was of the essence, was it?”

“She was going up to the house last night,” said Sloan, “to see Mrs. Fent. Or so I'm told.”

“And someone didn't want her to?”

“I think that's about the measure of it,” agreed Sloan. “Mind you, Mrs. Fent might not have seen her. She's playing hard to get.”

“But,” Dabbe pointed a finger at the body, “whoever embarked on this might not have known that.”

“Might not have been able to count on it,” amended Sloan. “The deceased was of—er—a forceful personality. Not over-sensitive, either, from all accounts.”

“Ah, I see. Fools rush in where angels fear to tread.”

A flash bulb suddenly cast a bright light into the shadows of the Folly. “Now one that way,” called Dyson to Williams. “Then I'll take one from floor level.” He crouched down and focused his camera on Marjorie Marchmont's head and neck. “I don't think I've ever seen anyone strangled with their own hair before.”

“Neither have I,” said Sloan, gritting his teeth. If anyone else said that to him he'd …

“I took a few of the outside of this place while we were waiting,” said Dyson amiably. “Want anything else doing while I'm here?” He gestured toward the fallen statue. “I could do you a nice one of Crosby with his foot on old Nick here. Call it ‘Down with All Traitors' and I'd get ten-pence a go for it back at the station.”

“Not today, thank you,” said Sloan. The pathologist, a clear field at last, had already advanced toward the body. He stood for a long moment, silent, considering: a specialist in death and all the thousand ills the flesh is heir to.

“She went quietly,” he said at last.

Sloan was surprised and showed it. It didn't sound like Marjorie Marchmont.

“Never knew what hit her,” grunted Dabbe. “Taken unawares from behind, I should say. The plaits just crossed over in front and pulled tight. That's all there was to it. Most vulnerable place in the body, of course. It doesn't take much pressure there.” The doctor stooped and looked at the dead woman's hands. “No signs of a struggle. Not so much as a broken finger-nail. Someone she knew, at a guess.” He straightened up again. “All right, Sloan, you can take her away. I'm finished here now.”

Dr. Dabbe might have finished for the time being. Detective Inspector Sloan had only just started.

He dialled the Berebury Golf Club for the fourth time from Strontfield Park. This time he was lucky. Or unlucky. Superintendent Leeyes had now finished his round and was back in the Club-house. The steward would call him to the telephone.

“Can't a man have a round of golf in peace …”

Sloan told him about Marjorie Marchmont while he was still grumbling about being disturbed.

“What!” he spluttered.

Sloan said it all over again.

“Dead?” he howled. “The fat woman? You're sure, Sloan?”

Sloan said he was sure. She was dead. She was the fat woman.

“And she was one of your dinner party, wasn't she?”

“She was,” said Sloan. First Bill Fent, now Mrs. Marchmont.

“One, two, that'll do,” said Leeyes ominously.

“Yes, sir,” said Sloan without comment. He was as bad as Crosby, really, with his nursery rhymes.

“Somebody means business, all right,” said Leeyes. “All this and poison too.”

“We're checking on what everyone was doing last night.”

“What they said they were doing,” put in Leeyes tartly. “One of them's hardly likely to tell you he was doing for Mrs. Marchmont.”

“The husband,” went on Sloan sturdily, “seems to be in the clear.”

Leeyes grunted at that.

“‘The Tabard' in Bear Street, Calleford, say that Daniel Marchmont was there from six-thirty yesterday evening when he registered until after breakfast this morning.”

“How do they know he was there all night?” countered Leeyes.

Sloan coughed. “It seems to have been—er—a very short night as far as the hotel was concerned.”

Leeyes grunted. “That won't do for the Court. If we ever get to Court with this and I must say …”

“The East Calleshires fought at Mallamby Ridge, sir.”

“What about it?”

“'Twas a famous victory.”

“I know that,” snapped Leeyes irritably. “In '44, wasn't it? They stormed the ridge in the face of the enemy.”

It had been flat at Walcheren.

“I don't know when they did it for the first time, sir. Apparently they—er—re-enacted it last night.”

“In the hotel?”

“At a late stage in the celebrations,” said Sloan, quoting a hollow-eyed hotel manager, “their old company commander had an argument with the brigade major about where an abutment had come on the ridge. He decided to prove his point by scaling the staircase well.”

“He should have stuck to drawing on the table-cloth.”

“Not only the brigade major but the entire company,” said Sloan steadily, “decided to pretend that the three flights of stairs were Mallamby Ridge.”

“Good God.”

“That wasn't all, sir. When they were all off the ground some lunatic remembered that the battle had been fought in the dark and switched all the lights out.”

“Where was the manager?” demanded Leeyes militantly.

Sloan cleared his throat. “Unfortunately, sir, I understand that the—er—ploy required an enemy.”

“Not …”

“All the hotel staff.”

“The waiter, the porter, and the upstairs maid, eh, Sloan?”

“The porter went for reinforcements, the waiter hid up in the pantry …”

“And the upstairs maid?”

“I'm told the company commander tried to take her hostage but she wasn't having any nonsense like that. She knocked him back a flight.”

“And?”

“He still got to the top first. He got the D.S.O. for it at Mallamby,” said Sloan, “but he was younger then.”

“And our hero?”

“Marchmont? Apparently he took a while to get started, but then he got going too. He made the top all right. Of course he hasn't put the weight on that some of them have. The brigade major, now, he didn't get off the ground at all. Been a pen pusher for thirty years, of course.”

“And when this little war game was over?”

“The night porter and the manager put them all to bed.”

“That doesn't mean that …”

“They are prepared to state that it would have been physically impossible for Marchmont to have driven himself anywhere.”

“Are they indeed?” said Leeyes. “Haven't they heard of men pretending to be drunk?”

“Those who actually got to the top,” said Sloan, nicely paraphrasing the manager's choicer epithets for them, “celebrated with champagne. That was when the staff took all their shoes away. All of them. Spares and all.”

“But …”

“And made sure that no cars got out of the hotel yard. It's an old coaching inn actually, so it was easy to lock up, and to make quite sure the manager drove his own car across the entrance.”

“He's had this little problem before then.”

“He has.” In fact, the whole hotel still sounded in the grips of an almighty hang-over and the manager a bitter man.

“That still leaves everyone except Marchmont, doesn't it, Sloan?”

Sloan agreed.

“It adds up to a lot,” said Leeyes profoundly, “but I must say it doesn't amount to much.”

Sloan had waited by the Folly until the body of Mrs. Marjorie Marchmont had been borne away in an ambulance to Dr. Dabbe's mortuary. If there was one thing more sinister than an ambulance with a flashing blue light and accompanying warble it was a silent ambulance without a flashing blue light that was travelling scarcely faster than a hearse.

He had watched the vehicle bump its way back to the road and then given himself a mental shake. There was a lot to be done.

He put the telephone down now and turned to his detective constable. “Now, I think, Crosby, we will ask Mrs. Helen Fent to see us.”

This time Annabel Pollock agreed without demur. “I'll show you up. This way, Inspector. I've told her about Mrs. Marchmont. I'm sure she'll see you.” The girl stopped outside a door on the upstairs landing. She knocked. “Helen, I've brought the inspector up …”

There was no response from inside the room.

Annabel knocked again.

“I'm afraid shell have to see us, miss, whether she likes it or not,” said Sloan.

Annabel Pollock put her hand on the door knob with an uneasy laugh. “That's something. It's only shut. She has been keeping it locked … Helen, may we come in?”

“Let me go first,” said Sloan quickly.

The colour drained out of her face as she stood back and let Sloan enter the room ahead of her.

There was no one there.

SIXTEEN

Sloan had come back to his own office. He doubted if he could have explained why. The proper place for him was undoubtedly the murder headquarters that he'd set up at Strontfield Park.

In the dining-room.

There was a nice irony about that.

In the dining-room at Strontfield Park where the first murder had been perpetrated. That was a good word. As good as “ingested”: as good as “noxious substance.” Words that meant so much and no more.

He'd wanted a good look at that dining-room anyway, though he was sorry that Marjorie Marchmont had had to die before he had got it. It was Quentin Fent who'd suggested that they use that room as their H.Q. Sloan didn't know whether that meant anything or not, but they'd wanted somewhere and that was where the young man had suggested.

Anyway, Sloan had gone there quickly enough and told Police Constable Bargrave to fit it up as a murder room. But what he'd looked at himself first was the table and chairs. It was an oval table—long and rather narrow—with only room for one chair at the head and one at the foot.

“Aye, there's the rub,” he murmured when he looked at the chairs. There was nothing to indicate from the chairs which was the head and which the foot of the table.

P.c. Bargrave, who was old and quiet, looked up but said nothing. If senior police officers chose to talk to themselves that was their affair. He hadn't got where he had—one of the softest beats in the county—by drawing attention to the eccentricities of those further up the ladder.

Sloan stood at one end of the long table and rested his hand on the back of the chair. “Mine host or mine hostess, I wonder?”

This time Constable Bargrave kept his head down.

Sloan moved over to the sideboard and tried to visualize two trays of six crémets each standing there. Surely there must have been something to indicate whether Bill Fent or Helen Fent—host or hostess—would pick up a certain tray and thus—in the ordered and polite society by which these sort of people set such store—have helped themselves to the fatal dish.

The carving knives.

That would be it.

But not all men carved these days. Could the murderer have been sure enough to count on it? Or didn't it really matter which of them died? And had the poison really been in one of the crémet dishes? It all seemed so very refined, somehow.

Bargrave had continued to move methodically about the room seeing to the routine that was as inevitable an outcome of murder as of more humdrum transgressions of the law. A quiet dog usually made for a quiet flock—that was true of policemen and people too—but this time there had been a black sheep a bit too big for such a quiet dog to handle.

Sloan had left him to it and come back to Berebury.

Over the radio in his office he could hear the message he wanted going out to all police cars and stations in Calleshire.

“Attention, all vehicles,” said the radio operator unemotionally. The radio gave her voice a nasal twang that it didn't have in the canteen. “Attention, all vehicles. To look out for a green Austin Mini car, Registration Number Yankee Juliet Golf Two One. Believed being driven away from Strontfield Park, Constance Parva, within the last half an hour. Direction unknown.”