Last Respects Part 17

"He had a bird."

"Ah."

"Don't say that." She looked at him. "No, Pete was h.e.l.l-bent on marriage."

"Was he?"

"No less," she said. "He was real old-fashioned about it."

Crosby gave the absent Mr. Hinton a pa.s.sing thought.

"He often said he wasn't going to settle for anything less than marriage."

"Makes a change," said Crosby. The beat made a man philosophical about some things.

"She'd got money, you see," said Ms. Watson simply. "Or would have one day. I think that's what he said."

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man seeking good fortune must be in want of a wife in possession of one...

"Anyway," she said, "don't you worry. Pete Hinton is old enough to take care of himself."

Crosby said he was sure he hoped so too, but he came away with a disturbing description.

Elizabeth Busby sat alone in the empty house. She sat quite still at one end of the window-seat staring at that which she had found at the other.

Peter Hinton's slide rule.

It must have slipped out of his pocket the last time he had sat there. It couldn't have been before that because he would have missed it and then-for sure-a search on a grand scale would have been inst.i.tuted. If it hadn't been found, then St. Anthony's aid would have been invoked. A practical young man like Peter Hinton hadn't really believed in St. Anthony, but Elizabeth had done so, and gradually Peter Hinton had begun to call upon him too for lost things.

Or said he had done.

His precious slide rule would have been missed very early on. It was never out of his pocket-it was almost his badge of office. His course at l.u.s.ton was a sandwich affair-so much time at his studies, so much time on the shop floor. His shop floor employment had been with Punnett and Punnett, Marine Engineers, Ltd., and it was after that when he went to the College of Technology. And much as very young doctors flaunted their stethoscopes, so the slide rules of embryo engineers were frequently in evidence.

She cast her mind back yet again to his last visit. In fact she had already gone over it in her mind a hundred times or more-searching every recollection for pointers of what was to come. She hadn't found any-their only disagreement had been about her aunt-and now she couldn't recollect either any indication that the famous slide rule hadn't been around. She screwed up her eyes in concentrated memory recall and came up with something that surprised her. Surely they hadn't been near the window-seat on Peter's last visit at all?

He'd come over from l.u.s.ton to see her-it had had to be like that since Celia Mundill had begun to be so ill after Easter-on one of her aunt's really bad days. Elizabeth had been dividing her time between the bedroom and the kitchen. There had been no spare time for sitting together on the window-seat or anywhere else. In fact she hadn't had a great deal of time to spare for Peter Hinton at all but that had been simply because of her aunt's illness. She had wondered for a moment if it had been this which had so miffed him that he had taken his departure, but what manner of man would begrudge her time spent with the dying?

Because her aunt had been dying. Elizabeth had known that ever since Celia's X-ray at Easter when Frank Mundill had taken her to one side and told her that that was what the doctor over at Calleford had said. He'd brought a letter back with him for Dr. Tebot, Celia Mundill's own doctor at Collerton-dear old Dr. Tebot who looked like nothing so much as the doctor in Luke Fildes's famous picture-but he had enjoined secrecy on Dr. Tebot as well as on Elizabeth. Celia Mundill had an inoperable cancer of the stomach but she wasn't to know.

"Not ever," Frank Mundill had said at the time.

"But the doctor..."

"The doctor," said Mundill, "said she need never know."

"I don't see how."

"They call it 'stealing death,' " Frank Mundill had told her.

Come away, come away, death...

"Dr. Tebot said it's not as difficult as it sounds, Elizabeth, because the patient always wants to believe that they're getting better."

"A sort of conspiracy," Elizabeth remembered saying slowly at the time.

"A conspiracy of silence," Mundill had said firmly. "You don't need to lie. Anyway, Elizabeth, she won't ask you."

"No..."

"She'll ask the doctor and he'll know what to say, I'm sure."

"I'm sure, too," she'd said then with a touch of cynicism beyond her years.

And she had proceeded to watch her aunt decline. Severe vomiting had been accompanied by loss of weight. Abdominal pain had come, too, until the doctor had stopped it with a hefty pain-killer. It had needed injections though to stop the pains in her arms and legs. The district nurse had come to give her those and Elizabeth had been glad of the extra support.

Nothing though had stopped the vomiting or the burning pain in the patient's throat.

Or her loss of weight.

Frank Mundill had been marvellously attentive. At any moment of the night or day when Celia had said she could eat or drink he'd been on hand with something. Gradually though she'd sunk beyond that.

"She may get jaundiced," Dr. Tebot had warned them one day.

So she had. Soon after that her skin took on a yellow, jaundiced look. Celia Mundill had died too with the brown petechiae of premature age on her skin. One day she'd slipped into a merciful coma.

That, when it happened, though, was too late for Peter Hinton. He'd taken himself off by the time Celia Mundill had breathed her last. Perhaps, Elizabeth had thought more than once, he couldn't stand the atmosphere of illness-there were some men, she knew, who couldn't. Thank goodness Frank Mundill hadn't been one of them or she would never have coped. He'd been marvellous.

She sat quite still now in the window-seat, increasingly confident that the last time that Peter Hinton had come to the house they had not sat together there. They'd only met in the kitchen. Elizabeth had been waiting and watching for the district nurse while Frank Mundill was taking his turn in the bedroom beside the patient. She remembered now how difficult she had found it to think or speak of anything but her aunt's illness.

True, they'd nearly quarrelled but not about themselves.

About Celia Mundill.

"She looks so awful now," Elizabeth had cried. That had been the worst thing of all. Celia Mundill was just a ghastly parody of the woman she had been a few short months ago.

"What about her going into hospital?" Peter had urged. "Don't you think she ought to be in hospital? I do."

"No!" She'd been surprised at her own fierceness. She must have caught it from Frank Mundill. "We want her to die at home in her own bed. Besides," she said illogically, "she's far too poorly to go into hospital."

"Do her eyes water?" asked Peter suddenly.

"Yes, they do. Why?"

"I just wondered."

"There's nothing more they could do for her if she was in hospital," said Elizabeth, still het up over his suggestion. "We're doing all anybody could. Dr. Tebot says so."

"I'm sure you are," he said soothingly. "It was only a thought. But don't you go and knock yourself up, will you?"

"I'm young and strong," she had said, and she meant it.

Now-since Peter had gone and her aunt had died-she wasn't sure how strong she was. She wasn't as young as she had been either.

She stared at the slide rule.

It hadn't been missing that last evening that Peter Hinton had come. She was certain about that. He would undoubtedly have mentioned the fact and gone hunting for his instrument. And he hadn't lost it that evening because they hadn't sat in the hall at all.

She shivered involuntarily.

That only left the time that he had come over-the time which she had never been able to fathom-when he had left the note and the ring on the hall table. In spite of herself her eyes drifted over in the direction of the hall table, seeing in her mind's eye the piece of paper and the circlet of metal lying there again-just as she had done the first time. She'd been carrying her aunt's tray down the stairs at the time...

She looked round the hallway. Surely he wouldn't have sat on the window-seat to compose the note? Conges deserved to have more time spent on them than that. Besides she might have come down the stairs at any time and found him sitting there and that would never have done. She rejected the notion almost as soon as she had thought of it. No, that note and the ring had been slipped on the table at a very opportune moment.

And the slide rule?

She couldn't imagine exactly when the slide rule had slipped out of its proud owner's pocket and fallen deep down between the cushions. But it had been after the last time she had seen him-and it meant that when he had last come to the house he had sat on the window-seat long enough for it to work its way out of his pocket. She sat there quite motionless for a long time while she thought about it.

14.

Soften the evidence.

The lecturer at l.u.s.ton College of Technology rolled his eyes at his first visitor the next morning and said, "Hinton? He was another drop out, that's all, officer. We get them all the time."

"Do you know why?" asked Detective Constable Crosby.

"This isn't a kindergarten."

"No, sir, I'm sure."

"Hinton wasn't any different from all the others," he said irritably.

Crosby said he was sure he hoped not. "Did you make enquiries at the time, sir?"

"I didn't but the registrar will have done. He'll have had a grant, you know, and that will have had to be signed for."

"Quite so, sir." In an uncertain world the accounting profession was more certain than most. "Examinations, do you think it was, sir?"

"Examinations?" snorted the lecturer. "It's not examinations that they're afraid of. It's hard work."

"Can you tell me when he was last here?"

"That's not difficult. It'll be here in the register." He ran his thumb down a list. "Hinton, E R., was here for the first two weeks of the summer term and not after that."

"Thank you, sir, you've been most helpful."

The courtesy appeared to mollify the lecturer. He opened up slightly. "He was supposed to be doing a dissertation, too, but he never handed it in. His home address? You'll have to ask the registrar for that too. I have an idea his family were abroad..."

Detective Inspector Sloan intended to concentrate first of all on the Mundill menage. He began sooner than he expected when he b.u.mped into Inspector Harpe of Traffic Division crossing the police station yard.

"Mundill?" Harry Harpe frowned. "I know the name."

"Demon driver?"

"No, it wasn't that." He frowned. "Mundill-let me think a minute." He slapped his thigh. "Got it!"

"Inner guidance?" suggested Sloan, not that Mundill had looked a drinker.

"Not that either." Harpe knew all the heavy drinkers for miles around. "He's an architect, isn't he?" Harpe nodded to himself with satisfaction. "Then he designed the multi-storey car park last year. He got some sort of architectural award for it. I met him at the official opening. You remember, Sloan, the mayor's car was the first one in."

Sloan had a vague memory of bouquets and mayoral chains and speeches and photographs in the local paper.

Harpe emitted a sound that for him was a chuckle. "But he couldn't understand the principle it was built on. I heard Mundill trying to explain it to him. The mayor couldn't see why the cars going up never met the cars going down."

"Two spirals," said Sloan immediately, "one within the other."

"Mundill gave it some fancy name and that didn't help the mayor one little bit."

"Double helix," supplied Sloan.

"That was it," agreed Harpe. "Mundill told him there was a well in Italy-at Orvieto, I think he said it was-that was built on the same principle. The donkey going down never met the donkey coming up. Clever chap. Not the mayor," he added quickly. "Mundill."

"It's a good car park," said Sloan.

And it was.

"Keeps the cars off the streets," agreed Harpe.

Sloan left Harpe while he was still thinking about the apotheosis of Traffic Division's dreams-totally empty roads.

When he got to his room Sloan picked up the telephone and made an appointment with Frank Mundill to go over to Marby during the morning to identify the boat on the beach.

He sat in front of the telephone for a long moment after that and then he dialled the County Police Headquarters at Calleford.

"I want a police launch," he said to the officer at the other end.

"Speak on."