“I didn’t know that.”
“Nice woman,” he said. “Young to die these days. Pity. Still, it happens.”
“It happens,” agreed Sloan. Perhaps they were the saddest words in the language after all.
“Pelion upon Ossa for the girl though.”
Life was like that, thought Sloan. The agony always got piled on.
“She was very good with her aunt,” said the doctor, “but she’s nearly at the end of her tether now.”
“I’ll bear it in mind,” said Sloan, but he made no promises. He had his duty to do.
He found Elizabeth Busby fighting to keep calm. “It was horrible, horrible.”
“Yes, miss.”
“The poor man…”
“He won’t have felt anything,” said Sloan awkwardly. “Dr. Tebot says he can’t have done.”
She twisted a handkerchief between her fingers. “Who is he? Do you know?”
“We think,” said Sloan cautiously, “that it’s someone called Horace Boiler.”
She sat up quickly. “Horace? But I saw him only yesterday.”
“You did?”
“He rowed past while I was putting flowers on my aunt’s grave. It’s by the river, you see.”
“You knew him then?”
“Oh, yes, Inspector.” Her face relaxed a little. “Everyone who lives by the river knows Horace.”
“He was,” suggested Sloan tentatively, “what you might call a real character, I suppose?”
“He was an old rogue,” she said a trifle more cheerfully.
Perhaps, thought Sloan to himself, that was the same thing…
“What did he say, miss?” he asked.
“Oh, he didn’t say anything,” she said. “He just rowed up river.”
If Elizabeth Busby had noticed the broken boathouse doors so would Horace Boiler. It was beginning to look as if he had taken the matter up with someone and that it had been a dangerous thing to do.
“You didn’t see him again after that, miss?”
She shook her head.
“Nor near anything last night?” That was a forlorn hope. The garden shed was at the back of the house.
“No.”
“Yesterday evening you and Mr. Mundill were both here?”
“I was,” she said. “Frank wasn’t. He’d gone to see someone about doing some measurements for an alteration to a house.”
Sloan wrote down Mrs. Veronica Feckler’s name and address.
“He went at tea time and stayed on a bit,” she said.
“And you, miss?”
An abyss of pain yawned before her as she thought about the slide rule. “Me? I stayed in, Inspector. I didn’t do anything very much.” An infinite weariness came over her. “I just sat.”
“And Mr. Mundill? When did he get back?”
“It must have been about eight o’clock. We had supper together.” She looked up and said uncertainly, “When… when did…”
“We don’t know for certain ourselves yet, miss,” said Sloan truthfully. It was, he knew, the refuge of the medical people too. They professed that they did not know when they did not really want to say. There was no comeback then from the patient. And it was true sometimes that they did not know, but the great thing was that the point at which they did know was not the one at which they told the patient…
“Not, I suppose,” she said dully, “that it’s all that important, is it? What’s important is that someone killed him.”
“Probably,” said Sloan with painful honesty, “what is important is why someone killed him.”
He was rewarded with a swift glance of comprehension.
“For the record, miss,” he went on, “I take it that to your knowledge Horace Boiler did not come to the house?”
She shook her head.
“And that you heard and saw nothing?”
“Not a thing, Inspector.” She lifted her face. “Not a thing.”
“Thank you,” he said quietly. “Now, miss, there are one or two things I want to ask you about a man called Peter Hinton…”
16
Her tryal comes on in the afternoon.
« ^ »
At first it was impossible for Detective Inspector Sloan, to tell if Elizabeth Busby was understanding the import of his questions.
She answered them readily enough.
She showed him Peter Hinton’s note.
“It’s in his handwriting, miss, I take it?”
“I hadn’t thought it wasn’t,” she said uncertainly. “But I couldn’t swear to it.”
“Did he usually sign his name in full?”
“He hadn’t—that is we didn’t—write much. There was the telephone, you see.”
“I see, miss.”
“It was written with his pen,” she said quickly. “He always wrote with a proper nib.”
Later she showed him what was really troubling her. The slide rule.
Sloan regarded it in silence.
“He must have come back,” she said, “and sat here after that last time.”
“Could he be sure you wouldn’t appear?” said Sloan.
“Towards the end,” she said, a tremor creeping into her voice, “we never left Aunt Celia alone.”
“So,” said Sloan slowly, “if Mr. Mundill was down here in the hall you would be certain to be upstairs.”
“Yes, that’s right. We took it in turns.”
“I see,” said Sloan. Disquiet was the word for what he was feeling about Peter Hinton. “And you’re sure your only disagreement the last time he was here was over whether your aunt should be in hospital?”
“Disagreement is too strong a word, Inspector.” She’d recounted all the details of the last time she’d seen Peter Hinton. “Hospital was just something we talked about, that’s all. Peter kept on suggesting it and we didn’t want it. You can see that, can’t you?”
“Yes, miss.” He cleared his throat. “You don’t happen to know if he ever broke his ankle, do you?”
“When he was seven,” she said immediately. “He fell off a swing. Why do you ask?”
It is an undoubted fact that, once set in motion, routine gathers a momentum all of its own.
That was how it came about that Detective Inspector Sloan and Detective Constable Crosby, standing by a dead Horace Boiler, were visited by a police motor-cyclist. He drew up before them, coming to a standstill with the inescapable flourish of all motor-cyclists, and handed over an envelope. Crosby tore it open.
“It’s a copy of Celia Mundill’s will, sir.”
Routine took more stopping than did initiative. Surely there was a moral to be drawn there…
“Well?”
Crosby scanned it quickly.
Routine, thought Sloan, took on a certain strength too. Perhaps that was because it wasn’t challenged often enough.
“It’s short and sweet,” said Crosby.
It seemed a very long time ago that Sloan had asked for it.
“She left,” read out the constable, “a life interest in all her estate to her husband.”
It occurred to Sloan that Mrs. Celia Mundill may very well have been in that delicate situation for a woman of being rather richer than the man she married. Certainly they had been living in her old family home and her husband’s profession was conducted from her father’s old studio.
“With everything,” carried on Crosby, “to go to her only niece at his death.”
“Including her share in the Camming patents,” concluded Sloan aloud. Mrs. Mundill, then, had seen her role as a fiduciary one—a trustee for the past, handing down the flame to the future.
“And if the niece dies before the husband, then,” said Crosby, “her sister collects.”
“What else?”
“Nothing else,” said Crosby.
“Date?” said Sloan peremptorily. There was a time to every purpose, the Bible said. The time for writing a will might be important.
Crosby looked at the paper. “April this year, sir.”