suddenly came to life. Write it down, they’d taught him… let someone else decide if what you’d written was valuable or not.
He swung his glance back in the direction of the sea. This time there was something to see. Round the coast from Marby harbour was coming a small trawler. Ridgeford got to his feet and walked farther up the headland to get a better view of it. As he did so he nearly tripped over a figure lying half hidden in the grass. It was a man. He was using a pair of binoculars and was looking out to sea so intently that he hadn’t seen the approach of the policeman.
“Hullo, hullo,” said Ridgeford.
The man lowered his binoculars. “Morning, officer.”
“Looking for something, sir?”
“In a manner of speaking,” he said, scrambling to his feet.
The trawler was forging ahead. Ridgeford noticed that it was keeping close inshore and that the other man could not keep his eyes off it. Ridgeford asked him his name.
“My name?” said the man. “It’s Jensen. Basil Jensen. Why do you want to know?”
The general practitioner, Dr. Gregory Tebot, came out of Collerton House and joined Detective Inspector Sloan outside the shed while the various technicians of murder were bringing their expertise to bear upon the body inside it.
“She’ll be able to talk to you now, Inspector,” Dr. Tebot said. He was an old man and he looked both tired and sad.
“Thank you, Doctor,” said Sloan.
“Shocking business,” he said, pointing in the direction of the shed. “Are you going to tell the widow or am I?”
Death, remembered Sloan, was part of the doctor’s daily business too. What he had forgotten was that Dr. Tebot would know the Boilers. “Tell me about him,” he said.
“Horace? Not a lot to tell,” said the doctor. “Didn’t trouble me much.”
“A healthy type then,” said Sloan. Blackmail—if that was what he had been up to—was unhealthy in a different way.
“Spent his life messing about in boats,” Dr. Tebot said. “Out of doors most of the time.”
“Make much of a living?”
“I shouldn’t think so. Picked up a little here and a little there, I should say. Mostly at weekends but you’d never know, not with Horace.”
“Didn’t give anything away then,” said Sloan.
“He was the sort of man, Inspector,” said the old doctor drily, “who wouldn’t even tell his own mother how old he was.” He nodded towards Collerton House. “Go easy with the girl if you can. She’s had a packet lately, what with the aunt dying and everything.”
“The aunt,” said Sloan. A packet was an old army punishment. The “everything” was presumably a young man who had gone away.
“Hopeless case by the time I saw her,” said Dr. Tebot. “The other doctor said so and he was right.”
“What other doctor?”
“The one over in Calleford. I forget his name now. Mrs. Mundill was staying over there when she was first taken ill.”
“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
