Slight Mourning (2 page)

What had struck her then about the intensive care unit had had nothing to do with the magnificent chromium and electronic equipment of which they all seemed so inordinately proud. It had been a matter of words. The words hadn't even been on a door. Just on the plan, and in very small print at that.

The non-recovery theatre.

She'd thought about those words since. There was one thing to be said for gardening as an occupation: it left the gardener with plenty of time for thought.

The non-recovery theatre was where they took the organs for transplanting from the patients who hadn't got better. It was medicine which was mealy-mouthed. Not the Church. The Church didn't go in for euphemisms. On the contrary. It rejoiced in plain words. There was nothing equivocal about those in the Order of Service for the Burial of the Dead in front of her now.

On the other hand, thought Cynthia fairly, it was medicine not the Church which went in for daring innovations like transplants—it wasn't all that long ago that the Church had stood in the way of medical progress. She—true gardener that she was—was all in favour of transplant surgery. Lilac onto privet had been her own first success …

The church door creaked again.

It was all a bit like compost. Cynthia Paterson's train of thought was getting confused now but she knew what she meant. One of her own cardinal gardening principles was that anything that had lived once—be it paper, cotton, leather, wool—could live again as compost.

The creaking door had meant that someone else had entered the church. It was a woman and she found her way to a pew somewhere at the back of the church; but this time—for a wonder—Miss Cynthia Paterson, who knew everyone in the village, did not recognize who it was who had come in.

Detective Inspector C. D. Sloan recognized her.

Her name was Mrs. Mary Exley and Detective Inspector Sloan knew who she was because he had seen her before—the day before yesterday, to be exact. She had been at the inquest on William Fent and so had Detective Inspector Sloan. She had been sitting inconspicuously at the back, then, too. Part but not parcel of the proceedings, so to speak.

She was present at both the inquest and the funeral out of a strange courtesy. That was the only way of putting it. It was her husband, Tom Exley, who was lying at death's door in the intensive care unit at the Berebury District Hospital.

Inspector Sloan didn't need a second look at her to know that the poor woman could hardly have eaten or slept since last Saturday night when it all happened. He'd been in at too many deaths and bad accidents not to recognize the signs and symptoms—even if he hadn't already known that the inquest and funeral were the only two occasions that she'd left the bedside of the bandaged and betubed man—almost, so very nearly, a lay figure—that was her husband.

Detective Inspector C. D. Sloan (Christopher Dennis to his wife and parents, “Seedy” to his friends) was head of Berebury Division's tiny Criminal Investigation Department and in this capacity he didn't have to attend many funerals.

“You'd better go to this one, though, Sloan,” his superior officer, Superintendent Leeyes, had advised. “You never know …”

“Yes, sir.”

“Fire a shot across their bows and all that.” Once upon a time, a long time ago, the superintendent had travelled briefly in a naval landing craft. From that day forward he had used the Navy's idiom as if he had been born to the sea.

“Yes, sir.”

“And take Constable Crosby with you. He doesn't look like a policeman. Nobody would ever guess that he was”—Leeyes, normally dogmatic beyond the point of contradiction, looked up in need of reassurance—“would they?”

“No, sir.” Sloan had been quite firm about that. “Never. He doesn't look in the least like a policeman.”

The trouble, of course, with Detective Constable Crosby was that he was inclined not to behave like a policeman either, and this was a worry to his colleagues in the Force.

“The funeral might fill you in on the background a bit more, Sloan.” The superintendent had rubbed his hands together like an undertaker. “Nothing like a funeral for finding out who's related to who.”

“No, sir.”

“A Will's better, of course. We haven't seen that, have we, Sloan?”

“Not yet, sir.”

“Nothing on the books about him?”

“Just that he had a fire-arms certificate, sir. All in order. I checked. The local constable says he was a pillar of society down their way. Old Calleshire family, too …”

Superintendent Leeyes had snorted gently at that. “Doesn't mean a thing these days. When they're bad, Sloan, they're very bad indeed.”

Gregor Mendel, the monk of Brünn, might have seen fit to agree with the superintendent. Sloan certainly didn't.

He shook his head. “No, sir. Our chap out in the village—P.c. Bargrave—was quite happy about him. He was on the Bench, too, you know …”

Leeyes's snort hadn't been quite so gentle that time. “All right, Sloan, all right, have it your own way. Either the deceased led a blameless life or death wiped the slate clean. Now, where does that get us?”

So far it had got Detective Inspector Sloan and Detective Constable Crosby precisely as far as the very back pew of St. Leonard's church, Constance Parva, just before noon on the morning of Friday, August 27th, for the funeral of one William Fent of Strontfield Park in the county of Calleshire.

The church door creaked again and again—and again. People were coming in more quickly now. Sloan caught a glimpse of the faintly familiar face of a local magistrate here and there, though he himself didn't ever have to appear before the particular Bench on which William Fent had sat—that was the Lampard one.

There were touches of decent black everywhere and a due solemnity about everyone's behaviour. All orders of society, noted Sloan, were represented—even, he thought ironically, the police.

Officially as far as the funeral was concerned they came in the person of Superintendent Bream of Calleford, who, if he recognized two plain-clothes members of the detective branch sitting at the back of the church, didn't reveal the fact by so much as the bat of an eyelid. Resplendent in the police equivalent of full canonicals—ceremonial uniform, gloves, cane and all—he too had come to pay a last tribute to one of Her Majesty's justices of the peace, dead upon the midnight the Saturday before.

Dr. Dabbe, consultant pathologist to the Berebury Group Hospital Management Committee, took a noticeably jaundiced view of road traffic accidents upon the midnight any night of the week but especially on Saturday nights.

“As bad as Tam O'Shanter's old grey mare, the lot of 'em after a drink or two,” he had grumbled, mixing up his verse too. “Ready to see anything but the road. What happened this time?”

That had been—in the first instance, anyway—Inspector Harpe's province. He was in charge of Berebury Division's Traffic Department.

“Difficult to say exactly, Doctor,” he said in his usual melancholy way. Inspector Harpe was known throughout the Force as Happy Harry on account of his never having been seen to smile. On his part he maintained that so far there had never been anything in Traffic Division at which to smile. “We reckon he took Tappet's Corner too wide.”

The pathologist had nodded.

Inspector Harpe flipped over a report. “He hit another car coming the other way and ended up upside down in a ditch. The other chap's pretty bad but still alive.”

“Was he alone?” The pathologist was used to multiple casualties nowadays. Motorways did that for you.

“What? Oh, yes. He was on his way back home to Constance Parva. They'd had some sort of dinner party at Strontfield Park and Fent had just taken one of the guests home to Cleete. A Professor Berry. An old boy. Retired. Terribly put out that it was because of him that Bill Fent was on the road at all at that time of night.”

The consultant pathologist had nodded, scooped up the necessary papers, and gone over to the mortuary.

And he'd done a routine test for alcohol in the deceased's blood and found some but not a lot.

And done a routine post mortem to establish the exact cause of death and found poison as well.

TWO

“He won't actually call it poison, though,” Police Superintendent Leeyes had informed Sloan when he had had Dr. Dabbe's report.

That had been on the Monday.

“Oh, no,” he went on. “Poison's too strong a word for our precious pathologist so he doesn't use it.”

“What,” inquired Sloan cautiously, “does he say then?”

“A potentially injurious substance,” trumpeted Leeyes scornfully. Never a man to mince words himself he could never understand anyone else doing it either.

“Ah.”

“He says,” continued Leeyes unappeased, “that during his examination he found evidence that the deceased had ingested … ingested … now there's another damn silly word …”

“Eaten or drunk,” supplied Sloan, “and he doesn't know which.”

Leeyes glared at him. “I know that.” He straightened out the paper in front of him. “Now, where was I?… oh, yes … had ingested a compound which he believes may have had strong sedative qualities.”

“Dope,” said Sloan simply. He waved a hand expressively. “The stuff you give horses and neurotic women. When you're not giving them pep pills,” he added.

“Either way,” responded Leeyes tartly, “winner or loser, will do in a motor car.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Dr. Dabbe says,” went on Leeyes, still consulting the report, “that it may have been taken thera … thera … therapeutically …”

“As medicine.”

“Or in excessive quantity.”

“An overdose,” translated Sloan, like all policemen and doctors more familiar with overdoses than he used to be.

“Or in a normal dose but with its effect potentiated—why the devil can't the man write decent English—by alcohol.”

“Very likely.” Sloan's experience was that alcohol potentiated everything—but especially motorists.

“But,” Leeyes waved the report in front of him in Sloan's face, “driving under the influence isn't going to stick and it doesn't get us anywhere anyway because he wasn't.”

“No, sir?”

“He says the blood level of alcohol as analysed by the gas chromatographic method is well below the legal limit. Nowhere near it, in fact. And that's without any playing about.”

Sloan nodded. He understood that bit all right. No blowing into little bags, no little tubes turning colour, no engineered delays, no prevarication about taking blood—and, above all, no argument.

He coughed. “What about under the influence of drugs, sir?”

The superintendent slammed Dr. Dabbe's report down on the desk. “He won't say that for sure, either.”

“Not until they've done a bit more analysing, I suppose …”

“Listen, Sloan. Quote: ‘I cannot say with any degree of exactitude and without further examination'”—Leeyes savagely mimicked the precise language of the police pathologist—“‘the quantified effect of a substance alien to the body whose chemical and pharmacological properties have not yet been established.'”

“So that, sir …”

“Wait for it, Sloan. Wait for it.” Leeyes might have been a sergeant on the parade ground. “That's not all. Listen to this bit …” He resumed his reading: “‘… or the effect of a synergic or catalystic agent should either or both have been present in the body at or immediately previous to death.'”

There was a small silence.

“Either,” said Sloan flatly, “he knows but he's not saying …”

“Or”—Leeyes glared across his desk at him—“he doesn't know and doesn't want to say so.”

“There'll be things to analyse, won't there?”

“He's pickled some bits and pieces,” agreed Leeyes graphically, “and put them in jars. It's all written down here. Stomach, liver, kidneys, and spleen. Anyway Constable King told us that much.”

Police Constable King acted as coroner's officer and routinely represented the Division at post mortems ordered by the coroner.

“The coroner …” began Sloan.

“The inquest …” said Leeyes at the same instant.

The two policemen regarded each other for a long moment.

Then …

“I'll leave you to talk to the coroner,” said Leeyes basely. “This half-baked stuff isn't evidence …”

Miss Cynthia Paterson could see at a glance how upset old Professor Berry was.

And no wonder.

He practically tottered into the church for the funeral, his gnarled veins standing out, knotted and blue, on his shaky old hands.

She felt very sorry for him. Not that any of all this could be said to be his fault. Bill Fent always took him home after a dinner party at Strontfield Park if no one else was going toward Cleete—just as he and Helen always asked her to come to dinner when the professor was invited.

He was a theologian and an old friend of her late father's rather than of hers, but she knew him well and in any case she'd long ago reached an age that was socially ageless. Just as, equally long ago, she'd reached a status that was socially neutral. She was just the old rector's daughter—everything and nothing, so to speak. She dined at the Park—to keep their numbers right—and took tea with the district nurse; she had the travelling county librarian to luncheon and gave the peripatetic teacher for the deaf a bed from time to time—and earned her living in almost everyone's garden.

The Washbys followed the professor in.

They, decided Cynthia Paterson, had probably brought him over from Cleete today. They had been going to take him home on Saturday night but at the last minute Dr. Paul Washby had had a call. He was the only doctor in the village—had been ever since he had succeeded old Dr. Whittaker—and Veronica was his new wife.