Slight Mourning (17 page)

“It must have tasted pretty grim to begin with, sir, on its own even without any stu … soluble barbiturate.” He screwed up his face. “Curds of sour cream! Ugh!”

“Let us say,” murmured Sloan, “that the flavour was what is called pronounced.”

“One spoonful would have been enough for me, sir, I can tell you.”

“You are forgetting, Crosby, that these people there that night would probably have enjoyed it and if they didn't enjoy it they would still have eaten it.”

“Cor …”

“And there was one person there who would have eaten it if it killed him,” said Sloan, “whatever it tasted like.”

“Who was that, sir?”

“The husband of the woman who made it,” said Sloan, worldly-wise and married.

“Really, sir?”

“You're still a bachelor, Crosby, aren't you?”

“Yes, sir. Though if Mrs. Pennyfeather …”

“The poisoning,” said Sloan briskly. “Now, then, how was it done?”

Crosby practically came to attention at the wheel. “Something put in the crémet?”

“Probably. Which one?”

“The collapsed one,” said the constable at once.

“Why that one?”

“Because they couldn't get the poison in without breaking it?”

“No,” said Sloan. “The poison, I should say, went over it. It was soluble, remember. No, I should think it was broken for a different reason.”

Crosby slowed down and turned into a major road and immediately picked up speed.

“Go on, Crosby. Work it out for yourself.”

“Was it,” he began uncertainly, “collapsed to make sure that the right person had the doctored one?”

“I think so. Though,” said Sloan conscientiously, “that leaves us with one big difficulty.”

“Which was the right person?” offered Crosby.

“Exactly. From the way things were I think whoever damaged one of those puddings could only be sure that either the host or hostess had it. Granted one of them would be bound to … which is a bit tricky, to say the least.”

“Not if it didn't matter which of them had it,” said Crosby, taking the literal view.

“True,” said Sloan mildly. “I think we'll have to get a little nearer than that for the Prosecution. Now, there's something else we'll have to establish …”

“Whether the twelfth crémet collapsed before or after it was put on the sideboard …” finished Crosby for him.

“Well done,” said Sloan, meting out praise where praise was due. He stared out of the car window. “And as I see it there's only one way to go about that.”

Crosby groaned. “Not Milly again, sir? Anything but that.”

“Duty calls, Crosby.” He grinned. “Besides, you're the younger man. You've got longer to live.”

“I'm not sure that I have,” protested the constable. “Not with those brothers of hers on the war-path. And then there's her mum.”

“Courage,” said Sloan bracingly. “Remember there's always the Police Widows and Orphans' Fund behind you.”

“But I'm not married,” wailed Crosby, “like I said.”

All the bells were down when Sloan and Crosby got back to Berebury Police Station. Superintendent Leeyes was sitting in his office drumming his fingers on his desk.

“Something's happened,” he snapped.

Sloan waited.

“One of your dinner party people,” he said.

“Yes?” said Sloan.

“Gone missing.”

FOURTEEN

“Who, sir?”

Superintendent Leeyes squinted down at a message pad. “A party by the name of Marchmont. Mrs. Marjorie Marchmont.”

“The fat one,” said Sloan. “She's on our list but we didn't get as far as her house this morning.”

“Pity,” said Leeyes. “She hasn't been seen since yesterday evening.”

“Her husband?”

“Her husband didn't come home last night.”

Sloan pricked up his ears.

“Or so he says,” added Leeyes portentously. “He says he got back home this morning to an empty house with no wife and every sign of no wife having been there last night either.”

“Every sign?”

“Empty milk bottles not put out,” recited Leeyes, “bed cold, cat not fed …”

Sloan's mind drifted away from the superintendent's bare office. How was it that William Shakespeare had put the duties of a wife—“To keep with you at meals, comfort your bed, and talk with you sometimes.” Somebody—his father-in-law, perhaps, it would have been like him—had quoted it at Sloan's own wedding and the ladies, he remembered, had been rather shocked.

“And the newspapers and morning post not taken in,” continued Leeyes prosacially. “It all adds up to no wife, Sloan … Sloan, are you listening to me?”

“Yes, sir. Of course, sir. I was just thinking about the husband. A thin, weedy chap.”

“So was Crippen,” said Leeyes darkly.

“Where was he last night?”

“Ah,” said Leeyes, “he was at a Regimental reunion dinner in Calleford. The East Calleshires. He always goes.”

“And he stayed the night?”

“So he says, so he says. It sounds to me,” added the superintendent complacently, “as if he had a touch of the Happy Harry's.”

“Breath test fever.” It was a disease that didn't do any harm. On the contrary …

“Didn't want to risk a d.i.c. check, anyway,” said Leeyes. “Regimental Reunion dinners aren't exactly Band of Hope affairs, you know, Sloan.”

Sloan did know. The whole of Berebury Police Station had to mind its step for a couple of days each year after the superintendent had splashed his way ashore at Walcheren all over again—with gestures.

He opened his notebook. “Where did her husband say he stayed, sir?”

“The Tabard in Bear Street.”

“P.c. Bargrave hasn't been to the house himself yet,” explained Sloan to Crosby as they returned to Constance Parva with all possible speed. “He remembered that Mrs. Marchmont was one of the twelve at the dinner party and sent for us instead.”

“One went to Heaven and then there were eleven,” chanted Crosby mordantly.

Sloan grunted. He knew it. Nursery rhymes and nursery games were just about Crosby's level.

“And now there are only ten, sir.” The constable slammed the car into top gear and put his foot down.

“It could be a false alarm,” Sloan reminded him. But he didn't think so.

He was even less inclined to think so after he had spoken to Daniel Marchmont.

“It's just not like my wife, Inspector,” he kept on saying over and over again. “If anything had happened she would have left a note for certain. She was always leaving notes for me. Funny ones, mostly. With drawings.” He looked embarrassed. “Actually, I've kept most of them though she doesn't know that.”

“So, sir,” said Sloan in a business-like fashion, “you think that we can assume that wherever she went she expected to be home before you?”

“Oh, yes,” said Marchmont. “Definitely.”

“She didn't mind being in the house alone?”

“Good Lord, no.” He practically threw his chest out on his wife's behalf. “Marjorie wasn't like that, Inspector. She wasn't frightened of anything. Anything or anybody.”

Sloan was sorry to hear it. Decent fear kept a lot of people out of trouble. “When did you last see her, sir?”

“Lunch-time yesterday.” He smiled jerkily. “We went to the funeral, of course, and then went back to the Washbys' to eat. They asked Professor Berry back too. He's a bit frail, you know.”

“And after that?”

“I went back to my office in Berebury—I'm an accountant, you know. I didn't come home until this morning”—he looked round helplessly—“and she wasn't here.”

“I see, sir. And the house was—er—as usual?” A cheerful untidiness had prevailed in all the rooms Sloan had seen so far.

“Oh, yes,” the accountant nodded. “This isn't the sort of house where you couldn't put a newspaper down …”

“Quite so, sir.” From where Sloan stood the disorder was such that it looked as if the problem would be—when you had put it down—finding it again in the general confusion. “And after you left your office, sir?”

“I went straight to Calleford for my Regimental Dinner. There didn't seem a lot of point in hacking my way out to Constance Parva again and then going on to Calleford the country way when I could do it all in half the time and twice the comfort by motorway.”

“Quite so, sir.” The Calleshire stretch of the London motorway was Inspector's Harpe's pride and joy. “By the way, sir, in the—er—the ordinary course of events would the late Mr. Fent have been going to this dinner too?”

“Bill? Oh, no, Inspector. Bill was too young for the war and then when National Service came in he was too busy trying to make a go of Strontfield as a farm. I should say he would have been exempt.”

“I see, sir. Thank you.” Sloan closed his notebook. “And you have no idea where Mrs. Marchmont might be?”

“None,” said the little man miserably. “And she's down to do the church flowers at three.”

For once Crosby didn't ask for orders as he climbed into the driving seat of the police car. Without comment he drove out of the lane where the Marchmonts lived, and down the length of Constance Parva High Street, past the doctor's house, past King's Tree House where the Renvilles lived, past Miss Paterson's cottage, round by St. Leonard's church, and finally turned the car sedately through the gates of Strontfield Park.

Sloan made no attempt to stop him.

So it was that when at long last Detective Inspector Sloan and Detective Constable Crosby did set foot inside Strontfield Park it was to inquire after a missing woman. And that was not before they had noticed and—police-fashion—duly noted that the little green car in which Quentin Fent had visited the Renvilles was back again and parked in front of the house.

Quentin himself received them and waved them authoritatively into arm-chairs in the drawing-room. A not-so-subtle change had overtaken Quentin Fent between yesterday and today. Gone was the subordinate mourner; even the “enfant terrible” was no more. Nor was the sophisticated West End art expert much in evidence. And as for the impecunious young man holidaying with relations, there was not a single sign.

“Tell me, gentlemen, what I can do for you,” he said.

For a long moment Sloan was afflicted with a deep sense of
déjà vu
. He didn't answer Quentin but sat quite still, feeling about in his memory, trying to locate something. Somewhere and at some time he had seen this change come over a young man overnight before. And then it came to him.

Constable Middleton made sergeant. Over Easterbrook way.

A fairy godmother's wand couldn't have wrought a greater change in stature between one day and the next. An inch in height at least for each stripe—to say nothing of chest measurements bigger by far. And every remark weightier forever afterwards.

“Do for us, sir? Oh, yes,” Sloan collected himself and explained about Marjorie Marchmont. “We understand from Mrs. Renville that Mrs. Marchmont proposed to come here yesterday evening to visit Mrs. Fent.”

“Well, she didn't get here,” said Quentin immediately. “Or if she did I didn't see her.” He grinned. “Not likely to miss her, are you, if she is around. Not at that size.”

“No, sir.”

“And if she did come,” said Quentin confidently, “she wouldn't have got near Helen for sure.”

“No, sir?”

“She's been mewed up in that bedroom of hers ever since Bill's funeral.” He shrugged his shoulders. “Annabel can't do anything with her. She won't see anyone. She won't even talk to anyone on the telephone so you can bet your bottom dollar that she wouldn't have seen Marjorie Marchmont, of all people.”

“Of all people?” Sloan let the phrase hang.

“Well,” he stirred restively, “you couldn't exactly call her peaceful company for a start, could you? There's her laugh for a start. And a bull in a china shop could beat her for tact any day of the week.”

“Spoke her mind, did she, sir?”

“Rain or shine, you might say,” replied Quentin Fent. “You know what people like that are like.”

Sloan nodded. The trouble with people who said what they thought was that they didn't always think a lot. “Did she …”

But Quentin had gone back to grumbling about his cousin's widow. “And all that Annabel can get Helen to eat is tinned peaches—oh, and tea. Seems,” he went on plaintively, “as if we're taking fresh pots up there every ten minutes.”

Sloan, veteran observer of more domestic tragedies than he cared to remember, said, “Tea is a great stand-by, sir.” He coughed discreetly and added, “Better than the bottle.”

“What? Oh, yes, of course. No worries there. Actually, I don't think Helen's had anything to drink at all since I've been down here, now you come to mention it. No, it's that she won't see anyone.”

“No one?”

“No one at all. Not even me,” said Quentin somewhat naively, the small boy showing for a fleeting moment, “let alone Marjorie Marchmont.”

Sloan let the touch of egoism pass. “Just Miss Pollock?” he said.

“She's different. She's a nurse.” Quentin Fent dismissed Annabel Pollock as having the universal
laissez-passer
of her profession. “But do you know since the funeral—that's when she got too upset—Helen's only seen me once.”

“Indeed?”

“And then all she said was to see Mr. Puckle about everything.”

“Well, he is …”

“I don't want to be insensitive and all that,” went on Quentin, “but hang it all, it's all going to be mine in under three weeks.”

“Perhaps,” murmured Sloan, “that's what Mrs. Fent is finding so hard to bear.”