Landladies didn’t always come up middle-aged and inquisitive. Sometimes they were young and indifferent.
“Pete?” said Ms. Cheryl Watson, shrugging her shoulders. “He was around.”
“When?” asked Detective Constable Crosby.
She opened her hands expressively. “Don’t ask me. He’ll be back.”
“When?” asked Crosby.
“When he feels like it. He’ll settle up for his room all right, don’t worry.”
Crosby did not say that that was not what was worrying the county constabulary.
“What about his gear?” he said instead.
“Still around,” she said largely. “And his mail. He’ll be back for them.”
“Why did he go?”
Her eyes opened wide. “He had exams, didn’t he?”
“You think he chickened out?”
“A man has to be himself,” said the self-appointed representative of a different way of life, “hasn’t he?”
“I wouldn’t know about that,” said Crosby.
“Examinations are the sign of a decadent culture,” pronounced the young woman. ‘Always making you prove yourself.”
“A sort of initiation rite, you mean?” suggested Crosby.
“That’s right,” she said eagerly.
The course at the Police Training College made a man prove himself. Or leave. It was a sort of initiation rite too. A police constable was let into the mysteries of the service at the same time as he was being sorely tried by his instructors.
Ms. Watson looked Detective Constable Crosby up and down with unattractive shrewdness. “Is Pete in trouble then?”
“Not that we know about,” said Crosby truthfully.
“There was something else besides examinations.”
“Was there?” he murmured.
“He had a bird.”
“Ah.”
“Don’t say that.” She looked at him. “No, Pete was hell-bent on marriage.”
“Was he?”
“No less,” she said. “He was real old-fashioned about it.”
Crosby gave the absent Mr. Hinton a passing 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 instituted. 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 Luston 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 Luston 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.
“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
