Slight Mourning (20 page)

“You can say that again,” said Crosby. “Did you see Quentin's face when he saw that the car was gone?”

“It is Mrs. Fent's car,” said Sloan. Bill Fent's own car hadn't been fit to drive anywhere any more.

“She didn't waste any time, either. As soon as she heard about Mrs. Marchmont she was off.”

“She's running away,” said Sloan. “She's very frightened. She was frightened before—ever since we went to the funeral. She's even more frightened now that Mrs. Marchmont's dead.”

“Frightened of us?”

Sloan looked down not unkindly at his constable. “Probably not.”

“Then who …”

“If we knew that, then we'd know who did for her husband and for Marjorie Marchmont, wouldn't we?”

The radio interrupted them: “Message continues. The driver is believed to be Mrs. Helen Fent, height five foot five, small build, dark hair. If seen, please stop and question …”

“Change that,” snapped Sloan suddenly. “Change it to: ‘If seen, follow and keep under observation.'”

Crosby leaned over and flipped a switch on the desk. He relayed the message to the Headquarters radio room.

“Attention all vehicles,” the curiously nasal voice came out over the air a minute later. “There is a correction to the last ‘calling all cars' message …”

“If it isn't us she's frightened of,” persisted Crosby, “why doesn't she come to us?”

“Good question.” Perhaps he was learning after all. “Probably because she doesn't want to tell us the whole story. That's why some people in trouble give us a wide berth …”

There was something else Sloan had to do now and he wasn't looking forward to it.

He pointed to the telephone and sighed. “Get me the Golf Club, Crosby.”

This time the superintendent took the view that he could blame someone.

Not just someone.

Sloan actually.

“You let her escape?” he howled.

Several pithy rejoinders sprang to Sloan's mind. He rejected them all one by one. Patience might be a virtue. Prudence certainly was.

“We're looking for her now,” was all he said.

“Where?”

“Everywhere she could have got to in the time, sir. She can't have been gone long.”

“Long enough for her to get out of Calleshire?” the superintendent wanted to know.

Sloan looked at his watch and stopped to think. “If she slipped down to the motorway and put her foot on it I suppose she could be pretty well out of the county by now.”

“I hope not,” said Leeyes ominously, “that's all. I very much hope not. The assistant chief constable's been onto me about that.”

“About what, sir?”

“Overstepping the mark,” said Leeyes grandly. “Going over the bounds, if you like.”

“Sir?”

“Straying out of your own patch, then,” growled Leeyes, “and into the next chap's.”

“I'm sure, sir,” said Sloan stiffly, “that we should get all possible co-operation from adjacent Forces.”

“Well, I'm not,” said the superintendent. “Not if last time's anything to go by. The Enderby affair. Remember?”

“Oh, yes, of course … but that was different.” Sloan understood now. In the Enderby affair Superintendent Leeyes had caused a raiding party over the county boundary in the manner of a marauding Lowland chieftain engaged in a border foray. Calls of “A Percy” were practically audible.

Since patently This Would Not Do, the assistant chief constable had been detailed to reprimand the superintendent. That graceful gentleman had—à la Lady Bracknell—risen from the ranks of the aristocracy, and had taken his idiom from the hunting field.

“Well, I hope you understand now, Sloan,” carried on Superintendent Leeyes, “exactly how far you can go after this woman if she leaves Calleshire.”

“Yes, I think so, sir.”

“When the fox goes into the next hunt's land,” said Leeyes heavily, “you can follow it.”

“Yes, sir.”

“But you mayn't stop earths there.”

“No, sir.”

“And you mayn't dig.”

“No, sir.”

“You can kill, though,” he added in chilly tones. “That clear?”

“Perfectly, sir.”

“Then you're a better man than I am, Gunga Din,” said Leeyes frankly. “I thought he was off his rocker.”

“Mrs. Fent,” said Sloan desperately.

“If she didn't kill her husband …”

“We don't know that, sir, yet.” The paucity of what they did know was beginning to hit Sloan. “She's in the running, though.” She, at least, would have known exactly where Bill Fent was sitting and which crémet would have been his.

“And if she didn't kill this fat woman,” swept on Leeyes.

“Dr. Dabbe thinks it was a man who did that.”

He was undiverted. “Then she's not running away from us.”

“No, sir.”

“That means she's running away from somebody.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And that means,” said Leeyes, “she knows something we don't.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Like who killed her husband if she didn't.”

“Like that her husband had been killed by someone else,” said Sloan, a chink of light beginning to dawn. “You see, sir, she was perfectly all right until she was told we were at the funeral …”

“Told you it was a good idea to go,” said Leeyes complacently.

“It's only since then that she went funny and shut herself away.”

“That means,” said Leeyes, “that she knows who. You'd better find her, Sloan. And quickly.”

For a moment Sloan couldn't even remember who Mr. Phillipps was.

“He said you're expecting a call from him, sir,” said the policeman on the switchboard.

“Put him through,” said Sloan.

He placed the man as soon as he heard his thin reedy voice. It was his friend of the law and the pin-stripe trousers, the clerk to the Lampard Bench.

“You asked this morning, Inspector, if Mr. Fent had ever sentenced anyone who might have borne a grudge against him …”

“So I did.” Sloan blinked. It couldn't only have been this morning.

“We've been through our records …”

“Yes?”

“Not a thing.”

“Nobody swearing that they'd get him if it was the last thing they did?” Sloan didn't believe this himself now. Not since he'd seen Marjorie Marchmont lying dead on the Folly floor; but he had to ask.

“No.”

“Everybody happy?”

“They mostly thank us,” said the clerk defensively.

“So they should,” said Sloan briskly. Like most policemen he believed in retributive justice. Punishment should follow crime. People expected it. And punishment did follow crime in all the ordered societies he'd ever heard about. Those that were still going strong, anyway. Presumably those where it didn't had been sunk without trace. “Besides,” he added to Mr. Phillipps, “it's what they want.”

“I daresay it is,” said that worthy. “It's making it fit the crime that's the problem.”

“Ah,” said Sloan, “the third arm of the law. We're only the second.”

“The second?”

“Parliament in its wisdom,” said Sloan, “makes the laws. Agreed?”

“Agreed. And very silly some of them are …”

“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.