those whose paintings were bought with an eye to the future—deserved to be distinguished from Richard Camming and his amateur efforts. They had been known—in the family and out of earshot of Richard Camming—as real artists.
“Poor Grandfather!” she thought. Time and money weren’t what made a painter. “Nor,” she added fairly in her mind, “was application.” Grandfather Camming had certainly applied himself. She gave a little, silent giggle to herself.
Richard Camming had cheerfully applied paint to every canvas in sight.
As Elizabeth placed the roses in the vase she was conscious of how the lively shell-pink of the centre of the flower made a fine splash of colour against the newly turned earth. She would have liked to have had that bare earth covered in stone or even grass but the sexton said it had to stay the way it was until it had settled. Frank Mundill didn’t seem worried about the bare earth either. When she had mentioned it to him later he had said he was still thinking about the right monumental design and so she had left the subject well alone.
She sat back on her heels for a moment to consider her handiwork in flower arrangement. She hoped it wouldn’t flood in this corner of the churchyard but you never could tell with the River Calle. The river seemed to have a will of its own. Way, way inland—above Calleford, and almost as far inland as the town of Luston—it was a docile stream, little more than a rivulet, in fact. By the time it got to Calleford itself it was bigger, of course, but it was tamed there by city streets and bridges, to say nothing of the odd sluice gate.
Once west of the county town, though, and out onto the flat land in the middle of the county—those very same low-lying fields in which Grandfather Camming had painted during his Constable period—the River Calle broadened and steadily grew into a force of water to be reckoned with. The bends in its course through Collerton towards Edsway and the sea it seemed to regard as a challenge to its strength. In spring and autumn, that is.
Her flowers arranged and her tears dried and forgotten for the time being, Elizabeth Busby rose to her feet and dusted off her knees. She decided that she would walk back to the house along the river bank. It was a slightly longer way back to Collerton House than by the paved road but what was time to her now?
She slipped out of the little kissing gate that led from the churchyard onto the river walk feeling rather as if she had stepped out of a William Morris painting—or was it another of the Pre-Raphaelites who had been so fond of having girls stationed prettily beside a river as they put brush to canvas? Perhaps it was Millais? Not Baron Leighton, surely? She always felt a little self-conscious when she was walking along the river bank with a wooden gardening trug over one arm. At least she didn’t have a Victorian parasol in the other.
It was while she was walking back along the path on the river bank and rounding the bend that matched the curve of the river that the boathouse at the bottom of the garden of Collerton House came into view.
Someone, she noticed in a detached way, had left the doors of the boathouse open.
9
See my courage Is out.
« ^ »
Detective Inspector Sloan and Detective Constable Crosby made their way back to the pathologist’s mortuary. They found the pathologist in his secretary’s room, there talking to a squarish woman with shaggy eyebrows and cropped hair, Rita, the pathologist’s secretary, was there too. She was a slim girl whose eyebrows showed every sign of having had a lot of loving care and attention lavished upon them. Dr. Dabbe introduced the older woman to the policemen as Miss Hilda Collins.
“We’ve met before,” she announced, acknowledging them with a quick jerk of her head.
Sloan bowed slightly.
“I never forget a face,” declared Miss Collins.
“It’s a gift,” said Sloan, and he meant it. For his part Sloan remembered her too. Miss Collins was the biology mistress at the Berebury High School for Girls. “I wish we had more policemen who didn’t forget faces,” he said— and he meant that too. What with Identikits, memory banks and computer-assisted this and that, the man on the beat didn’t really have to remember any more what villains looked like. It was a pity.
At the other side of the room Constable Crosby was exhibiting every sign of trying to commit Rita’s face to memory. Sloan averted his eyes.
“Miss Collins,” said the pathologist easily, “is an expert.”
“I see.” Sloan remained cautious. If his years in the Force had taught him anything, it was that experts were a breed on their own. Put them in the witness box and you never knew what they were going to say next. They could make or mar a case, too. Irretrievably. There was only one thing worse than one expert and that was two. Then they usually differed. “May I ask on what?” he said politely.
“Good question,” said Dr. Dabbe. “I must say I’d rather like to know myself. It’s in the lab… this way.” He led them through from his secretary’s room into the small laboratory that Sloan knew existed alongside the post- mortem room. “I called him Charley because he travelled,” said the pathologist obscurely.
“With the body, I think you said,” murmured Miss Collins gruffly.
“It was my man Burns who said that,” said Dr. Dabbe. “He found it wriggling inside the man’s shirt. That was still very wet.”
“He found what…” began Sloan peremptorily, and then stopped.
The pathologist was pointing to a wide-necked retort that was almost full of water. Swimming happily about in it was a small creature. “Burns said they call it a ‘screw’ in Scotland,” he said.
As if to prove the point the creature wriggled suddenly sideways. It was a dull greenish-yellow colour and quite small.
“It’s still alive,” said Detective Constable Crosby unnecessarily.
“That proves something,” said Miss Collins immediately. “What’s it in?”
“
Sloan made a mental note that sturdily included the words “distilled water.” Latin used where English would do always made him think of Merlin and spells.
Miss Collins advanced on the specimen in the glass. “It’s one of the Crustacea,” she said.
“That’s what I thought,” said Dr. Dabbe.
“Amphipod, of course,” announced Miss Collins. “The order is known as ‘Sand-hoppers’ although few live in the sand and even fewer still hop.”
There were inconsistencies in law, too. Sloan had stopped worrying about them now but when he had been a younger man they’d sometimes come between him and a good night’s sleep.
“You’ll find it demonstrates negative heliotropism very nicely,” Miss Collins said.
If she had been speaking in a foreign tongue, Detective Inspector Sloan would have been allowed to bring in an interpreter at public expense. And as far as Sloan was concerned she might as well have been.
The pathologist must have understood her, though, because he pushed the jar half into and half out of the rays of sunlight falling on the laboratory bench. Whatever it was in the water—fish or insect—jerked quickly away from that part of the jar and scuttled off into such dimmer light as it could find.
“We do that with the third form,” said Miss Collins in a kindly way, “to teach them phototropism.”
Dr. Dabbe was unabashed while Miss Collins bent down for an even closer look. “The family Cammaridae,” she pronounced.
Detective Constable Crosby abandoned any attempt to record this. He too bent down and looked at the creature. “Doesn’t it look big through the glass?” he said.
“You get illusory magnification from curved glass with water in it,” the pathologist informed him absently.
Both Miss Collins and Crosby were still peering, fascinated, at the glass retort and its contents. Some dentists, Sloan was reminded, had tanks with goldfish swimming in them in their waiting rooms. The theory was that patients were soothed by watching fish move about.
