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?
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 Luston 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 bumped 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.
