A Late Phoenix Read online

  Dabbe said, “I’ve arranged to have a word later this morning with a better ballistics man than I am but I’m moderately sure about the distance. Otherwise you wouldn’t have found your bullet at all. Even so it might only be because she had some particularly thick clothing on at the time she was shot.”

  “It might have been winter,” agreed Sloan. “We don’t know yet.”

  “Or evening.”

  “A leather coat,” suggested Sloan. “She might have been wearing a leather coat. They’re pretty stout things, you know.”

  “Except, Inspector,” the other reminded him neatly, “that women didn’t wear them at the time. Not leather coats. They weren’t in fashion then. People just had utility clothes.”

  As he replaced the telephone receiver Sloan decided that the public library would have to have first priority.

  Before he made a really serious mistake over the differences between then and now.

  In the police car he told Crosby the gist of what the pathologist had said.

  “Two hundred yards!” echoed that worthy, just as Sloan himself had done. “That’s not exactly ‘waiting until you can see the whites of their eyes’ sort of stuff, sir, is it?”

  “No.” Sloan fidgeted unhappily in the front passenger seat. “Not like you and pedestrians, Constable. Look out—you nearly had that woman there …”

  Crosby swerved obediently.

  “And I suppose, sir,” he said as soon as they were back on course, “just to make it more fun for us everyone had a rifle at the time?”

  “Almost,” agreed Sloan glumly. He couldn’t see this case ever getting started—let alone finishing. “After Dunkirk all servicemen took their weapons home on leave with them. And the Home Guard had theirs all the time.”

  Crosby slid through some traffic lights on the amber.

  “That bit about fighting on the beaches and in the streets, then, they meant it, did they, sir?”

  “They did.”

  “Of course, next time,” said that child of the present, “there won’t be any fighting, will there, sir?”

  “Oh, and why not?”

  “We’ll all be incinerated,” said Detective Constable Crosby cheerfully, “in the first five minutes.”

  Luston might not be the most picturesque of English towns but their police force was nothing if not on the ball.

  Sloan had barely got to his own desk at Berebury Police Station before there was a bright sergeant on the line called Pritchard. He didn’t sound very old.

  “You rang, sir, about a Harold Waite …”

  “I haven’t forgotten, Sergeant,” said Sloan evenly. In fact, Harold Waite hadn’t been out of his thoughts all morning.

  Harold Waite, who had left Berebury after the war because he couldn’t settle down again in his own home town.

  Harold Waite, who had stood still in his working career while his erstwhile friends and colleagues had gone on to better things.

  Harold Waite, in whose mind the mention of the missing girl had definitely rung a bell.

  “Well?” barked Sloan.

  “His wife says he’s missing.”

  Sloan groaned aloud.

  “I beg your pardon, sir?” Sergeant Pritchard’s anxious voice came down the line. “I didn’t quite catch what you …”

  Most important of all, Harold Waite who had now disappeared.

  “Nothing. Go on.”

  “Seems as if he didn’t come home last night after the twilight shift at his factory …”

  “How do you know?” He didn’t doubt the man. It was just that after a while it became automatic, this checking on facts. Then—and not before then—you could be said to have the true police mind.

  “Bed not slept in, sir. And supper not eaten.” Sergeant Pritchard coughed. “I gather Mrs. W. wasn’t one of those who waited up. Just left him something in the oven. This morning when she came down …”

  “Supper still in oven,” said Sloan flatly. “What else did she say?”

  “Praise not the day before evening,” said Pritchard uneasily. “That’s all she said.”

  He put down the telephone and went in to make his report to Superintendent Leeyes. The superintendent was standing at his window staring down at the Market Square.

  “They’re getting worse, Sloan,” he said excitedly. “Look at that one. There. Now, you tell me. Is that a boy or a girl?”

  Sloan followed his gaze to the youthful figure lounging on the pavement outside Dick’s Dive, took in the long hair, the trousers and the sexless, epicene features and then averted his eyes. “I couldn’t begin to say, sir, I’m sure.”

  “They used to say ‘boys will be boys,’” muttered the superintendent, “but …”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I don’t know what we’re coming to …”

  “No, sir. About …”

  “Ah, yes, how is the case of Yorick’s lady friend?”

  “I beg your pardon, sir … oh, I see. Yorick’s lady friend, of course. We’ve made a start but I’m not happy about Harold Waite.”

  “That’s the one married to the Bible puncher?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Not likely to overlook a little peccadillo like getting a girlfriend into trouble …”

  “No, sir, but …”

  “Well then,” said Leeyes largely, “you’re halfway there, aren’t you?” He swung back towards the window.

  “Look, Sloan, there’s another of them. They ought to be run in for personation, that’s what should happen to them.”

  “Yes, sir.” Sloan took a step back. Perhaps he could get away now. “We’re just going round to the Public Library …”

  “The public library, Sloan? Good God, what on earth do you want to go to the public library for?”

  “The war, sir,” explained Sloan patiently. “I feel I must get hold of some background stuff seeing how that’s when the skeleton dates from. Put everything into perspective a bit, I hoped.”

  “Perspective? What you should be doing is finding out who killed her and,” as a distinct afterthought, “who she was anyway.”

  “Yes, sir, I know but it was all so long ago and I’m afraid I don’t remember myself what …”

  “Some things were different,” agreed the superintendent loftily. “There were guns all over the course. And I must say the greens weren’t as well kept as they should have been.”

  “The greens, sir?”

  “The greens. On the golf course. The rough went very early on. Splendid fodder it made, too, I’m told. That was a good thing.”

  “Was it, sir?” Sloan didn’t play golf.

  “Well, it wasn’t when it came back after the war because, of course, you’d got used to it not being there.”

  “Quite,” said Sloan noncommittally.

  “And we had sheep on the fairways. After all, as the Committee said, there was a war on.”

  “Quite,” said Sloan again.

  “You had to pick up all the bomb and shell splinters you could on the way round to save the mowing machine.”

  “As well as replacing the divots?” That much he did know.

  “And the rules had to be changed.” The superintendent was getting well into his stride now. “You could take cover in a competition without penalty for ceasing play during gunfire and while bombs were falling, you know.”

  Sloan cleared his throat. “That seems—er—quite reasonable, sir.”

  Or was it a case of “England expects that every golfer …”?

  “It wasn’t all in your favor like that,” grunted Leeyes. “If a bomb exploding put you off your shot there was a penalty. You lost a stroke.”

  “Not your head?” muttered Sloan wildly.

  “Damned illogical, if you ask me. Losing a stroke because of a blasted bomb.”

  “Did it happen often, sir?”

  “Often enough,” growled the superintendent. “Ruddy great high explosive came down on the twelfth one day …”

  “That c
rater would have taken a bit of filling in …”

  “Filling in!” he snorted. “The Committee didn’t fill it in. They tidied up the edges, put some sand in the bottom and called it a bunker. But it wasn’t the ones that went off that were the trouble. It was the others. The unexploded ones.”

  Sloan tried his best to sound sympathetic. “I can imagine that.”

  “There was a delayed action bomb on the approach to the ninth. They marked it with a red flag. Took four days to go off.”

  “Another bunker, sir?”

  “A water hazard, Sloan. Devilish position for it. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve been in there since. Couldn’t be in a worse place if the Committee had put it there themselves. Efficient fellows, those Germans, I will say that for them.”

  The lady in Lamb Lane was a sort of delayed action affair too—just exploded—when you came to think of it.

  Without the red flag.

  Sloan said as much to the superintendent.

  “They,” pronounced Leeyes ominously, “were always the most trouble in the long run.” He grunted. “And it’s not all quiet on the Western front either. Your friend, Dr. Latimer, was clobbered in the night. Down by that precious site.”

  Sloan cocked his head. “Oh?”

  “Watch and wallet job. Won’t be able to count any pulses until he gets another.”

  The surgical dressing which had been put on Dr. Latimer’s lacerated scalp had one unexpected result.

  At his morning surgery.

  It brought about a subtle change in that delicate human situation known throughout the world as the doctor-patient relationship.

  The balance of power was marginally altered: the ordering of positions was not what it was.

  There was a minuscule retreat on William Latimer’s part from the normal Buddha-like attitude adopted by all doctors as the fountainhead of medical wisdom. Fountainheads of wisdom did not normally have bandaged heads.

  There was a fractional advance by the patients. Sympathy was tendered.

  And accepted.

  He took his morning surgery as he did all his work, slowly. This was not only because his head was still sore but because he was still feeling his way with people whose case and family histories were new to him. Dr. Tarde, of course, would have been able to have gone more quickly because he knew them all. As nobody seemed to tire of telling him, Dr. Tarde had known everything and everybody in St. Luke’s.

  And he had committed suicide.

  “Miss Tyrell …”

  “Yes, Doctor?”

  “If you ever catch me prescribing aspirin for a really bad headache will you remind me about today?”

  “Yes, Doctor.”

  “It’s no good. No good at all.”

  “No, Doctor.”

  “Just a placebo.” Latimer put an exploratory hand up in the direction of a lump on his scalp that seemed—from the inside anyway—to be about the size of Everest. “I’d no idea you couldn’t walk through the streets here at night without getting hit on the head.”

  Miss Tyrell said that there were some very funny people about these days and asked if he had been hurt anywhere else.

  “No.” William started to shake his head in a traditionally negative manner and then thought better of it. It hurt less if he kept it still. “But it’s enough.”

  “You look a little better now than you did first thing,” said Miss Tyrell judiciously.

  “I feel a little better. Not that I got a lot of sleep. By the time the police had been all over the place there wasn’t a lot of night left.” He pressed a buzzer. “Who’s next?”

  It was a fat, garrulous woman called Mrs. Lepton.

  “Me, again, Doctor,” she said, flopping down into the chair and panting slightly. “Me legs. Giving me gyp, the left one is. Lepton had to make me a cup of tea at three o’clock this morning. Couldn’t sleep with it. Not a wink.”

  William stripped off the discolored bandage and murmured something about her overweight not helping.

  “I don’t eat enough to keep a bird alive,” she retorted smartly. “I don’t know where it all comes from I’m sure.”

  “Keeping the legs elevated would help, too,” he said, “Give it a better chance of healing.”

  “Oh, I couldn’t keep it up,” she said promptly. “I’ve got Lepton to see to. And the house and everything.”

  “It isn’t going to get better if you don’t.” William laid fresh strips of tulle dressing across Mrs. Lepton’s leg and diverted her by asking what Dr. Tarde had done for it in the past.

  “Same as you, Doctor. But it never got any better. Me mother had bad legs, too. Ow …”

  “Sorry,” said William. He could see that Mrs. Lepton’s left leg was going to be on the winning side in an unequal struggle between nature and heredity on the one hand and medicine on the other. “You must have seen quite a lot of Dr. Tarde with a leg like this.”

  “Twice a week,” she said with satisfaction, “until the end. He looked at it on his very last day. You’d never have known, Doctor, what he was going to do. Never. I was his last patient that morning—I usually wait until the end so as I don’t keep anyone waiting—’cept Gilbert Hodge. I told Gilbert to go in afore me but he wouldn’t.” She sniffed. “Liked using the free chairs, I expect … No, that night Dr. Tarde …”

  If Miss Tyrell’s brief knock could conceivably have come after—not before—her entry into the consulting room, William would have sworn that was the way it was.

  When Mrs. Lepton had gone William said quietly, “I know about Dr. Tarde, Miss Tyrell. Somebody told me last night.”

  “I thought they would,” she said bitterly.

  “I was bound to hear …”

  Her gaunt features were as still as carved stone. “Putting you in the picture, they’d call it.”

  “Why did he do it?”

  “I don’t know. That’s the terrible part. I just don’t know.” She turned her face away from him but he had already seen the blank mask of misery there. “He didn’t tell me, Doctor. And I used to think he told me everything.”

  As gently as he could he asked how Dr. Tarde had done it.

  Her face was bleak. “He hanged himself.”

  Simmer very gently

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  War, it seemed, was a subsection of history.

  Bombing came under air history.

  The bombing of England came before the bombing of Germany, but that was alphabetical.

  “See also,” ran the catalogue, “Art, destruction of.”

  When the two policemen found the bookshelves they discovered that there was not so much as a book about the bombing of England as a whole literature.

  They had gone to the public library after Sloan had put out a general call for Harold Waite and Crosby had sent a list of names to the General Register Office at Somerset House.

  Now Detective Constable Crosby was surveying the serried rows of books. “You mean, sir, they wrote all that about it?”

  Sloan followed his gaze. “’Twas a famous victory.”

  “Beg pardon, sir?”

  “Nothing, Crosby.” Sloan pulled out a book at random. This was going to be much more difficult than he had thought. There were so many books.

  Crosby cleared his throat and read aloud. “An Anderson shelter is made of heavy galvanized cast iron …”

  “Here we are.” Sloan put out his hand for a book. “This is the one we want. Calleshire at War: A History. I expect this will tell us what we want to know …”

  It didn’t really.

  It recorded that there had been 2522 alerts, 239 incidents, 1364 High Explosive Bombs, 6 oil bombs, 18,300 incendiaries (approx.) 13 flying bombs, 27 shells (enemy), 20 crashed enemy aircraft, 9 machine gun and cannon fire incidents and 12 mines (parachute) in the town itself.

  Then it went on to describe the legal structure of the county under fire. Sloan got confused about the Clerk of the Peace and the Clerk of the War Zone Court being one
and the same person and put the book back.

  “They had a bomb called a Bouncing Billy,” remarked Crosby whose Christian name was William.

  But by then Sloan had got on to the books the American correspondents had written about England in wartime.

  Nobody could have called them isolationists.

  “I see,” wrote one of the very best, “that in the middle of a war you still grow marigolds.”

  The same writer had noted that before the fall of France the grass in the Tuileries had not been cut …

  “I asked a policeman this morning,” wrote somebody else, “did he expect invasion? He smiled broadly and said ‘Not really,’ as though I had enquired if he believed in fairies.”

  Sloan looked to see what Churchill had to say.

  “They had no firsthand knowledge of defeat and, being a remarkably unimaginative people, have never been able to conceive of it as more than a theoretical possibility.”

  He put the book back.

  Four minutes’ warning. Wasn’t that what you were supposed to have nowadays? Before somebody—on one side or the other—or both—used weapons that weren’t very nice. The weapons with the ominous name of Ultimate. Where the outcome was likely to be non-survivable.

  Constable Crosby had stumbled on another school of authorship.

  “These people, sir, seemed to think it was all political.”

  “Everything’s political,” said Sloan.

  “No, I mean that they’re saying that it was the government’s fault and the council’s fault—not the enemy’s.”

  “Some people,” began Sloan, “will always …”

  “They say that they should have had shelters earlier,” read Crosby, “and better facilities …”

  “And more money,” supplied Sloan.

  “That’s right, sir. How did you know?”

  “Because they’re the ‘If you take away from me what you haven’t got, and then we’ll be equal brigade,’ that’s why,” said Sloan. “Spot ’em anywhere, any time.”

  But Crosby had already gone on to something else.

  “Sir, do you know how they worked out their casualties?”

  “Counted them?” suggested Sloan.

  “Standardized killed rate per ton,” said Constable Crosby, upon whom sarcasm in any shape or form was quite wasted.