Passing Strange Page 10

  “Do you mean to say,” Leeyes barked crisply down the telephone, “that you let it slip through your fingers, Sloan?”

  “I didn’t have my hands on it, sir.”

  Predictably – as a plea in mitigation – this failed with the Superintendent.

  “That reel must matter,” boomed Leeyes at once. “You realize that, don’t you, Sloan?”

  Sloan said he realized that.

  Even Crosby had realized that.

  “Otherwise it wouldn’t have gone,” pronounced Leeyes.

  Sloan said that he realized that, too. He added, “We think perhaps there might have been fingerprints on the cardboard end of the wire.”

  Leeyes grunted. “It was an unpremeditated business, then.”

  That, too, was a fair conclusion.

  “Fingerprints left on what might have been used to kill Nurse Cooper,” said Sloan cautiously, “would certainly point that way.” Since every modern child learned at its mother’s knee about fingerprints they seldom got left at the scene of a crime any more. “It wasn’t,” he added, “the weather for gloves.”

  “A woman could have worn them,” said Leeyes promptly. “Especially at a flower show.”

  The Superintendent was an old-fashioned man in some respects. Sloan forbore to say that at a village flower show – save for the Member of Parliament’s wife – the wearer of gloves would have been as conspicuous as the fat white woman whom nobody loved who walked through the fields in them …

  The one sartorial ensemble that gloves most definitely would not have gone with on a high summer’s day in England was blue denim jeans and a shaggy brown woollen jacket.

  That brought Sloan to the next item likely to upset the Superintendent.

  “The girl Richenda Mellows,” he began.

  “Helping the police with their enquiries, I hope,” growled Leeyes.

  “Not exactly helping,” said Sloan delicately.

  “It sounds to me,” commented Leeyes sourly, “as if they could do with a bit of help.”

  “She’s sitting tight,” said Sloan. “Won’t say a word.”

  “Gone all quiet, has she?”

  Determined mutism would have been a better way of putting it, Sloan told the Superintendent.

  “Not even asking for her solicitor?” enquired Leeyes. “That makes a change.”

  Sloan cleared his throat. “She doesn’t appear to have a very high opinion of the legal profession.”

  Richenda Mellows had made Stephen Terlingham, Bachelor of Law, Notary Public, and Senior Partner of Messrs Terlingham, Terlingham and Owlet, sound like an enemy of the people.

  “We mustn’t hold that against her, must we?” said the Superintendent jovially.

  “Obstructionists, she called them, sir,” said Sloan. That had been before she had decided on a policy of elected silence.

  “Or that,” said Leeyes even more expansively.

  “I’m detaining her for questioning,” said Sloan before the Superintendent got quite out of hand.

  “We must be thankful for small mercies,” said Leeyes with unexpected piety.

  “Sir?”

  “If she feels that way about the law,” said Leeyes dourly, “there isn’t going to be anyone shouting habeas corpus at us, is there? Count your blessings, Sloan …”

  10

  Gemshorn

  “Might have known something else funny was going to happen,” said Ken Walls, sinking the last of his beer.

  “Felt it in your old bones, then, did you?” enquired Fred Pearson solicitously.

  Walls was undeterred. “What with Nurse Cooper.…”

  “Yes.” Fred observed a small silence for Nurse Cooper.

  “And my tomatoes.”

  “You and your tomatoes,” mocked Fred. “What about the reel of wire, then?”

  “It’s gone and that’s what’s so funny.”

  “And the girl?” Pearson reached for his own glass.

  “She’s gone too,” said Ken Walls, taking this literally.

  “I know.”

  “And that’s funny, as well.”

  “Why?”

  “I saw her taken away by a lady policeman,” he set his beer glass down. “In a police car.”

  “She says,” said Pearson, “that she’s the Brigadier’s great-niece …”

  “Same again, Fred?” Ken Walls had caught the barman’s eye with practised ease.

  “… but Mr Hebbinge says she can’t prove it.” He drained his glass. “Thank you. I don’t mind if I do.”

  Ken Walls attended to the business of ordering. “Make it two, Percy, there’s a good lad.” Then he considered carefully what Pearson had said. “Come to think of it, Fred, it must be a bit difficult to prove with humans.”

  Fred Pearson nodded. “You’re all right with calves,” he said comfortably. “Marked at birth in the ear.”

  “Old Bill over there –” Ken Walls pointed to an ancient countryman settled in the far corner of the bar – “says he can tell with sheep too. No problem, he says.”

  “Shepherds always say that,” said Pearson, “but how do they know they’re right?”

  “And how do we know they’re right when they say they are?” demanded Walls, a natural Doubting Thomas if ever there was one.

  “That’s a point. They’re not branded, are they?”

  “You can’t really check up if the shepherd knows them or not either, can you?” Almstone’s own Didymus raised his glass. “Thanks, Percy. Here’s to the next Show, Fred. It can’t be worse than this one.”

  “The next Show,” echoed Pearson, drinking the first inch of his beer. “Perhaps it’s the dog that knows.” Fred Pearson had a great faith – born in the field – in sheep dogs.

  Ken Walls swivelled round and took a look at the Scottish collie dog lying – obedient and inseparable – at the old shepherd’s feet.

  “Of course,” said Pearson, “the looker’s always got the flock colour mark on their fleeces to go on.”

  “Perhaps the girl looks like family,” suggested Ken Walls, following a fairly straightforward line of thought.

  “The solicitor came over from Calleford to have a look at the portraits of all the Mellows ancestors at the Priory early on,” said Pearson. The woman who did the rough work in the kitchen at the Priory was his wife’s first cousin. “I hear they didn’t help much.”

  Walls considered this. In the circles in which he moved a decent pause for thought was considered only polite: instant responses smacked of indifference. He did, however, get to the heart of the matter. “If this girl isn’t the Brigadier’s great-niece what happens to the Priory then?”

  “An old lady in Calleford gets it. A Mrs Edith Somebody.” Where Norman Burton, headmaster of the village school, had hesitated to ask the Priory agent outright questions, Fred Pearson was troubled by no such fine feelings. He was an essentially simple man and Edward Hebbinge had recognized this – and given him the answers to what he had wanted to know. “She’s the widow of a Canon.”

  Ken Walls took a pull at his beer and came up with a new thought. “They say you can do a lot with fingerprints.”

  “Not if you haven’t got them on anything, you can’t,” said Pearson with a certain robust logic. “None of the Mellows family wrote to each other, remember. Not after the quarrel. And the girl would have been only a baby then.”

  “Friends,” pronounced Walls with certainty. “They always know who you are. Bound to.”

  “She hasn’t got any in England,” explained Pearson patiently. “That’s the trouble. Her parents took her out to Brazil when she was quite small.”

  “Relations, then,” said Walls unwillingly. He didn’t often mention the word. His wife’s relations belonged to the enemy – his wife’s – camp. His own relations hadn’t been able to stand his wife and had withdrawn to the safe distance of remembering Christmas and birthdays.

  “Nor them,” said Pearson, “otherwise she wouldn’t be next in line to inherit the Priory, w
ould she? This Mrs Edith –” he searched in his memory for the name. “Dammit, Mr Hebbinge did mention it.”

  “It doesn’t matter what she’s called,” said Ken. He, too, had an eye for essentials.

  “Got it!” exclaimed Pearson. “Wylly. Mrs Edith Wylly. She’s only a second cousin and she hadn’t ever even clapped eyes on the Mellows girl.”

  “Get away!” said Ken Walls.

  “Mr Hebbinge told me this Richenda’s been in South America nearly all her life. She’s been living with this primitive tribe that her father was studying.”

  “They know who she is, then,” said Walls triumphantly.

  “They know she’s the girl who’s been living with them,” expounded Pearson.

  “I should hope so,” retorted Walls smartly. “They’d be very primitive if they didn’t.”

  “But they don’t know if she’s the great-niece of Brigadier Richard Mellows of the Priory here, do they?”

  Ken Walls was not a man to give up easily. “They – this tribe that you’re talking about – they knew she was her father’s daughter, didn’t they?”

  “Ye … es,” said Pearson cautiously.

  “And,” persisted Walls, “everyone here knew he was the Brigadier’s nephew, didn’t they?”

  “Yes.”

  “And that he had a daughter,” Walls said, firmly finishing his argument. “Even I knew he had a daughter. She was born at the Priory, remember?”

  “It’s not as simple as that, Ken.” Fred set his glass down carefully on the bar counter the better to argue. “Mr Hebbinge says she was away from their village arranging supplies for their camp. She was in the city – what’s the capital of Brazil? Never mind,” he said hastily. “Anyway, she was there when her father was killed by this other tribe. She didn’t know it had happened until she got back to the jungle and that was three weeks later.”

  “She’d got her passport,” said Walls pertinaciously. “That says who you are.”

  “No, she hadn’t,” said Pearson triumphantly. “She’d gone out there as a child on her father’s passport and he’d had his with him in the camp.”

  “Gone?” said Walls.

  “Gone,” said Pearson. “And,” added Pearson for the sake of clarity, “him, too. She never saw either of them again.”

  Richenda Mellows might not wish to speak to a solicitor. Detective-Inspector Sloan could not say the same. He wanted to speak to Mr Stephen Terlingham quite badly. He wouldn’t have at all minded a little chat with Sam Watkinson of Priory Home Farm, too. But most of all he wanted to talk to Mr Maurice Esdaile of Esdaile Homes.

  It was ironic – such was the way of the world – that the only person immediately to hand for converse should be Detective-Constable Crosby. He was still talking about the missing reel of wire. He had no comfort to offer at all.

  “It sounds, sir,” he reported gloomily, “as if any single one of them could have come back and taken it.”

  “There would have to have been six men around at the time,” said Sloan. It was a wide field.

  “Just our luck,” agreed Crosby mordantly. “Of course the light was beginning to go by then too.”

  “Naturally,” said Sloan. Not even murder brought the world to a standstill.

  “I didn’t get out the arc lamps, sir,” said Crosby. “Whatever we’re looking for’s gone into the river by now.”

  Sloan nodded. There was no appeal against the light in the pursuit of crime. Rain didn’t stop play either.

  “After they got the marquee on to the lorry,” related Crosby, “they fanned out over the whole perishing place to see if anything had got left by mistake.”

  “Anything else, you mean,” said Sloan poignantly.

  “What?” The detective-constable frowned. “Oh, I see what you mean, sir. Anything else besides the wire.”

  “I dare say,” said Sloan briefly, “that reel wasn’t meant to be found at all.”

  “No, sir.”

  “Ten to one someone hoped that they would get a chance to put it back where they found it,” said Sloan, half his mind on something else.

  “Only they didn’t,” said Crosby.

  “Mrs Kershaw had put her basket in the boot of her husband’s car by then,” rejoined Sloan absently.

  “Or so she says, sir.”

  “That’s right, Crosby. Never take anything at face value and we’ll make a detective out of you yet.”

  “No, sir.” Crosby tugged at his pocket and handed over six separate statements about the reel of wire taken from the men who had been striking the marquee and one – by far the neatest – from Mrs Millicent Kershaw. “They all seem to agree about what happened. Mr Hebbinge went to pick it up and Mr Burton shouted at him not to.”

  “What about our two stout friends?” Privately Sloan had christened the pair “Nettle and Dock”.

  “Pearson and Walls?” Crosby rolled his eyes. “They’re still going on about Walls’s precious tomatoes.”

  “Ah,” said Sloan solemnly, “a grave misjudgement was made today, Crosby.”

  “Sir?”

  “In the matter of the awarding of the first prize in the tomato class. Perhaps you’d better look into that, too, Crosby.”

  “The judge made a mistake,” said the constable stolidly. “Pearson said so.”

  “Judges do,” said Sloan, “but not as many as most people.” In a notoriously imperfect world no man could do better than that: and in that notoriously imperfect world it was as well for a policeman not to set his expectation of Justice too high. Criminals were men whose potential achievements could never match their expectations. Disillusioned policemen were those who asked more of the law than it could give.

  “Yes, sir.” Crosby scratched his head. “He was only a flower show judge, sir.”

  “All the more reason for him to make the right judgement,” responded Sloan briskly.

  “Sir?”

  “At flower, fruit and vegetable shows,” said Sloan impressively, “the decisions of the judges are final.”

  “Oh, then they can make as many mistakes as they like, then …”

  Detective-Inspector Sloan regarded the constable with close attention. He had sounded serious enough. “Come, come, Crosby …” he began.

  “Well, sir, they don’t have to worry about the Appeal Court, do they?”

  Sloan paused. Was this the moment to launch into a curtain lecture à la Mrs Caudle? If Crosby believed that it was only the thought of the Appeal Court that kept Her Majesty’s Judges on the straight and narrow path of just judgements, who was he, Sloan, to tamper with natural ignorance?

  “And there’s no messing about with Reserved Judgements either,” said the detective-constable baldly.

  “A writ of certiorari …” began Sloan – and stopped. This was not the moment for jurisprudence. It was the moment for action. He turned. “First of all,” he said, “perhaps I’ll have another word with the man in the saddle here.”

  Edward Hebbinge was beginning to show signs of strain. “It’s been a long day, Inspector. It’s always a tiring one, but today …” His hands fell open in a gesture of weariness. “Poor Joyce Cooper.”

  “Poor Joyce Cooper,” said Sloan. He was always in favour of the victim having as much sympathy as possible while it was going. It didn’t last. The accused seemed to get more than their fair share once they stood in the dock and their Defence Counsel got into his stride. Sloan took another look at Hebbinge. The land agent was built on the spare lines which carried the years well, but even so he must be getting on for sixty.

  “Tomorrow’s Sunday,” said Hebbinge. “That’ll give everyone a bit of breathing space.” He looked up. “Except you, of course, Inspector.”

  “I dare say I’ll be working,” said Sloan unemotionally. “Tell me, sir, what’s all this about new houses being built at Home Farm?”

  The land agent did not speak until he had marshalled his facts. “As you may imagine, Inspector, the Priory estate is now somewhat undercapit
alized.”

  Sloan, in fact, could not imagine anything of the sort but he did not say so.

  “None of the farms is in hand,” went on Hebbinge.

  That meant even less to Sloan.

  “So,” said Hebbinge, “for many years now there has only been the rent from them to keep the estate going.”

  “Er – yes,” said Sloan. He should be following this closely. He realized that.

  “That means,” explained Hebbinge, “that there hasn’t been any real capital to speak of available for improvements and modernization.”

  Sloan nodded, glad that the other man had kept those two concepts separate. He had already reached an age when he did not automatically think of improvements and modernization as synonymous.

  “Sam Watkinson,” said the agent. “You’ve met him, Inspector, haven’t you?”

  Sloan nodded. “It was his field where the red Mini was parked.”

  “That’s him. He’ll be retiring in a year or so and then the Home Farm can be run by the estate. That will help a lot.”

  “How will it help?” Sloan didn’t hesitate to ask. It was no part of a detective-inspector’s duties to know how farm-land was managed.

  “If it’s rented, then the income from it is treated by the Inland Revenue as unearned,” explained Edward Hebbinge, “and taxed at a higher rate. If we farm it, then it’s dealt with as earned income.”

  “I see,” said Sloan. The policemen he knew earned their income. All of it. All of them. “Go on.”

  “Even so, the Home Farm is more than big enough – Sam Watkinson hasn’t any sons to help him you know – and the estate could do with the extra money now.”

  “Stair carpet?” said Sloan.

  “The roof, I think, first,” said the agent wryly. “There’s a stretch of land on the wrong side of the road that we want to hive off for development. It’s really quite separate from the farm and not good land. Too wet. It should bring in a good ground rent.”

  Sloan nodded. Developing was a word that detective-inspectors did not understand. The modern alchemy was to take land and bricks and mortar and turn them into gold. The equivalent Philosopher’s Stone was something typed on a piece of paper called Planning Permission.

  “Sam Watkinson says he’ll be quite glad for it to go.”