Harm’s Way Read online

  “So it would,” said George Mellot in tones utterly devoid of emphasis.

  “Quite surprising really,” observed Mason, “that neither of you happened to mention it.”

  Hodge started involuntarily. “So that’s why—” He stopped as suddenly as he had begun.

  Both men turned to him.

  “So that’s why what, Len?” asked Mason silkily.

  “Nothing,” said Hodge, clamping his jaws together and falling silent.

  “You were going to say something,” said Mason.

  “No I wasn’t,” declared Hodge belligerently. “I wasn’t going to say nothing and you can’t say I was, Ted Mason.”

  TEN

  The deeds of darkness

  Psychologists insist that every normal human being needs someone who is known as a speech friend. It is with this speech friend that the details of the small happenings of daily life are regularly exchanged. In the manner of their kind these same psychologists do not indicate whether this role is always filled by a spouse, but there was no doubt about that in the case of Sam Bailey.

  The news of the finding of the skeleton had come to Lowercombe Farm earlier, but Sam Bailey hadn’t been able to share it with his wife, Maggie, because he couldn’t find her. There being nothing more irritating than being the possessor of interesting news and yet not being able to impart that news to anyone, the old farmer was in a fine state of indignation by the time he did meet her. She was standing in the farmhouse hall with a bunch of flowers in her arms.

  “Where have you been?” he said crossly. “I’ve been looking for you everywhere.”

  A lesser woman might have referred to the garden. A more distant relation might have even waved the flowers at him. Elsie Bailey, however, had been married to him for the best part of forty years.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked practically instead.

  “The police.”

  Her head came up sharply. “What about them?”

  “They’ve found what they were looking for.”

  “Oh.” Her anxiety palpably subsided.

  “George Mellot rang to tell us.” He added another grievance. “I thought you’d come in when the telephone rang. You know I don’t like answering it.”

  “Poor soul.” She laid the flowers down on the hall table. “It can’t be anyone we know, Sam, can it?”

  He shook his grizzled head. “That’s one thing to be thankful for. What do you want with those flowers anyway, Elsie? There are flowers everywhere already.”

  “Poor George and Meg,” she said. “It can’t be very nice for them. And they’ve had a lot of extra worry lately anyway what with one thing and another.”

  “At least it wasn’t foot-and-mouth in the end.”

  “A herd isn’t everything, Sam.”

  “Troubles never come on their own,” said Bailey. That made him remember something else that had caused him to feel deprived. “That beef we had today—”

  “Sam, there was nothing wrong with that beef. It was the best that Hubert Wilkinson—”

  “I know there wasn’t. That’s what I mean,” he said indignantly. “I thought it would be nice to have it cold with pickle tonight and I couldn’t find it in the larder.”

  “I’ve made you a pie for supper. You like pie.”

  He wasn’t listening. “And another thing, Elsie.”

  “What?” she enquired patiently.

  “My raincoat. I can’t find it.”

  “I expect you’ve put it somewhere and forgotten where,” she said tranquilly. “It’s not raining, anyway.”

  “It wasn’t there when I got back from church.”

  “By the way,” she said obliquely, “I thought you read the lesson very well this morning. The rector said so too.”

  “Huh!” snorted Bailey. “He wants the churchyard mowing.”

  “You are a churchwarden,” pointed out his wife.

  “What’s that got to do with it?”

  “And you have got a gang mower.”

  “It’s been the same for forty years,” he grumbled. “Every June.”

  “Grass grows every year,” said his wife.

  “Let him ask me, then,” growled Bailey.

  “You’ve done it every year.”

  “He’s only got to ask,” insisted the old man, “and I’ll send someone down to do it.”

  “And your father before you,” she said. “Baileys from Lowercombe have always kept the churchyard mown.”

  “Now don’t you start on that, Elsie. The rector can have his churchyard cut the minute he asks me.”

  “On bended knee?” she enquired ironically.

  “I’ve got my pride and he’s got his.”

  “Oh, Sam,” she said softly, “you are a stiff-necked old fool and well you know it.”

  George Mellot left the farmyard and went indoors with the slow heavy tread of a worried man. His wife had been standing by the window watching him approach but she did not turn round when he came into the kitchen. Instead she kept her back towards him as if afraid to meet his eye.

  “Len knows something,” he said without preamble.

  “I wondered,” she said.

  “About the fork lift tractor,” said Mellot flatly.

  “I noticed that he’d suddenly gone all quiet,” she said.

  “Ted Mason spotted it, too,” said Mellot. “About the fork-lift tractor, I mean.”

  She did turn to face him then. “It’s not like Len to be so quiet.”

  “Not that Mason could have missed it.” Mellot was pursuing his own gloomy line of thought. “Len got all uptight as soon as Mason even mentioned the fork-lift tractor, let alone took a proper look at it.”

  “It must be obvious, mustn’t it”—she swallowed visibly—“that that’s what got … it … up there.”

  “There’s nothing else around,” agreed the farmer grimly, “that would have done the job half so well.”

  “Don’t!”

  “Any policeman could see that with half an eye. There’s no use pretending—”

  “Len did work for your father, too, when he was a boy,” said Meg with seeming irrelevance. “Didn’t he? And so did his father.”

  “Oh, he won’t say anything,” said Mellot confidently. “Not Len. I’m pretty sure about that.”

  “That’s all very well but it’s not going to make a lot of difference to the police, is it?” responded Mellot. “They’ll just go on until they find out.”

  Her husband sat down at the kitchen table and sunk his head down into his hands like an old, old man. “I know.”

  “And there’s another thing I’ve thought of,” said Meg with lowered eyes.

  “What’s that?”

  “Not everyone can work one of those machines, can they?”

  “No.”

  “It’s not like driving a car. You need to know how. There are levers and things,” she said. “I’ve seen them.”

  “The police will work that out, too,” he said wearily. “They aren’t fools.”

  “That will narrow down who can have used it.”

  “That’s what’s worrying me.”

  “And Len—”

  “I must say,” remarked Mellot, “that Len has been a bit difficult this past week or two.”

  “Longer.”

  He shrugged his shoulders. “You notice these things and I don’t.”

  “He’s had something on his mind, anyway,” she said. “I could tell that much from talking to him.”

  “I’ve never known him to keep out of my way so much,” agreed Mellot. “I haven’t been able to find him half the time.”

  “I would say,” said Meg slowly, “that it was since that day he came to work with a black eye. Do you remember? And he wouldn’t say what had happened. He was bruised, too.”

  Mellot lifted his head in slow wonderment. “I’d forgotten all about that.”

  “Oh, George, do you think—” She stopped.

  “That was about a month ago, wasn�
�t it?”

  She nodded. “It was a Monday morning when he came to work looking like a prize-fighter. I do remember that.”

  With leaden, unwilling movements her husband slowly swivelled round to peer at the calendar hanging on the kitchen wall. “A Monday, did you say?” he echoed hollowly. “About four weeks ago—”

  “The beginning of the month.” She followed his gaze as if mesmerized.

  He turned quickly away from the calendar and sat back at the table again, his hands covering his eyes. “June the fifth, that would have been. Oh, dear, oh, dear …”

  “What will the police do next?” asked Meg Mellot tremulously.

  “They want to talk to me.” With the hesitation of one conveying unwelcome news George Mellot added, “And they’ve asked for Tom’s address.”

  Detective Inspector Sloan went indoors to the telephone at Pencombe Farm unwillingly. The message had been that Superintendent Leeyes was on the line from Berebury asking for a progress report.

  “The situation, sir,” said Sloan, stressing the word slightly and not mentioning progress at all, “is that the doctor is up there now with the remains and that the farmyard is being searched very carefully as quickly as possible.”

  “Quickly?” Leeyes pounced. “I don’t like rushed jobs, Sloan.”

  “There’s a herd of cows waiting to be got into their milking parlour, sir.” If Sloan could have hung the telephone receiver out of the window the Superintendent would have been able to hear the mournful sound of lowing wafting across the farmyard in eerie confirmation of this fact.

  “Tricky,” agreed Leeyes immediately.

  “It’s long past their milking time as it is,” said Sloan. They both knew that if he kept the cows out of the milking shed and the court ever got to hear about it, the prosecution case would be as good as lost.

  Leeyes grunted. “It’s always difficult with animals.” It was a lesson learned hard and early in the police force. Every chief constable had had to deal with lost dogs in his day. And then it wasn’t so much a case of every dog having its day as every day having its dog.…

  “Always,” agreed Sloan fervently. There had only been one thing worse than lost dogs and that was escaped budgerigars. Little old ladies seemed to think that these were easier to capture than professional criminals and they weren’t. There was no doubt, though, that animals ranked over men in sentiment as far as the Great British Public was concerned. Always over dead men. And especially over very dead men.

  “So, Sloan …”

  “So, sir, we’re going over the farmyard first.” It wasn’t that Sloan was an animal lover: rather that he was a realist. There wasn’t a jury in the United Kingdom that would have agreed to the theoretical requirements of justice being subverted to the actual needs of the animal kingdom.

  “And then?”

  “We’ll tackle the roof. We think, sir,” he added cautiously, “that we know how the body was got up there.”

  “Ha!”

  “There’s a fork-lift tractor in the yard.”

  He was answered with an unexpected witticism. “A means to an end, eh, Sloan?”

  “Quite so,” he said, dutifully acknowledging this. He cleared his throat. “There is a farmworker here who gives the impression of knowing more than he’s telling us. Mason is sure about that.”

  Leeyes grunted.

  “Moreover,” continued Sloan, “he’s the man who about a month ago had a fight with a mysterious stranger in the pub here in Great Rooden.”

  “Nonsense,” countered his superior officer robustly. “You don’t get mysterious strangers in villages. You should know that, Sloan. Everybody knows everybody.”

  “Yes, sir.” Sloan accepted the rebuke meekly. I’ll remember that.”

  “And another thing …”

  “Sir?”

  “People don’t fight people they don’t know,” said Leeyes profoundly.

  “No, sir.”

  “There’s no point in it.”

  Sloan rephrased what he had said. “He had a fight with a man nobody’s telling us about.”

  “That’s better.”

  “Tomorrow, sir,” Sloan forged on. Even though today had been endless, tomorrow would come. “Tomorrow I’d like the search-party back.”

  “One body not enough, then?”

  “To search Dresham Wood,” said Sloan steadily.

  “Ah!” The superintendent’s response came alertly down the telephone line.

  “There’s something in there, sir, I’m sure, but I don’t know what.” At Cold Comfort Farm there had been something in the woodshed but here at Great Rooden whatever it was was in the wood. Sloan was sure about that. At Cold Comfort Farm it had been something nasty. It might well be something nasty in the wood here. Only a proper search would tell.

  “Tomorrow,” observed Leeyes gloomily, “may be too late.”

  Sloan’s mother was a great reader of the Bible and from time to time Sloan was glad about this. A working knowledge of how helpful Job’s comforters had been to Job had stood Sloan in good stead when functioning with the superintendent. He didn’t argue. Instead he said, “I’ve put out a general call for Martin Ritchie of Stanestede. It would be nice to cross him off our list.”

  “One less missing man to be bothering about,” agreed Leeyes.

  “The timing’s right for it to be him,” Sloan reminded the superintendent.

  “It is for Ivor Harbeton, too,” pointed out Leeyes. “Those papers about him should have got to you by now.”

  “And,” persisted Sloan, “the timing’s right for whoever it was that Hodge had a fight with. That was at the beginning of June, too.”

  “We mustn’t forget him,” said Leeyes. “The … ah … the third man, you might say.”

  “Yes, sir,” agreed Sloan. The superintendent’s responses were a little dated these days. “Martin Ritchie, Ivor Harbeton and the third man.”

  “Unless,” said Leeyes, “Hodge had a fight with one of the other two—with Harbeton or Ritchie, I mean. Then there would be only two men in the picture, wouldn’t there?”

  They said, didn’t they, that the counting nursery rhymes were the oldest of all. The one that Sloan couldn’t get out of his mind was about pigs.

  And this little piggy went to market and this little piggy stayed at home.…

  He couldn’t remember what had happened to the third pig.

  The parlour at Pencombe Farm wasn’t an ideal murder headquarters but Sloan decided that it would do. It was a pleasant, relaxed room with a few pieces of good furniture in evidence: and there was that about the carpet which made Detective Constable Crosby look twice at the state of the soles of his shoes as he came in from the farmyard.

  On a rather nice burr walnut table was a bowl of freshly gathered ligtu hybrid alstroemeria and on the windowsill a skilful arrangement of old rose. Detective Inspector Sloan grew roses as a hobby and he cast an appraising eye over them, noting the varieties. He had already seen a good pure white Seagull rambler growing round the front door, and the crimson purple Gallica Tuscany Superb by the gate. This farmer’s wife didn’t have to devote herself exclusively to the farm: there was time and money at Pencombe to spare and it showed.

  Detective Constable Crosby chose the stoutest chair in the room and lowered himself into it with care. “What’s the betting, sir,” he said, “that we’re going to get the three monkeys treatment about that skeleton?”

  “What’s that?” asked Sloan absently. He had opted to sit on a Knole sofa done up in an old-fashioned chintz with contrasting plain sea-green cushions. He began to open the message wallet that the superintendent had had sent over from Berebury Police Station.

  “They saw nothing,” chanted Crosby, “they heard nothing and—”

  “I know, I know,” said Sloan morosely. “You don’t need to tell me—”

  “And they’re going to say nothing,” finished Crosby triumphantly.

  “Maybe.” Sloan ran his eye over the sheaf of
press cuttings which had been sent by the superintendent. They were all about the disappearance of Ivor Harbeton. “We’ll know in a minute. The Mellots are on their way.”

  Crosby got his notebook out.

  “It says here,” said Sloan, who had been studying one of the press cuttings in detail, “that Harbeton was a man of medium height. See that Dr. Dabbe is told, will you? And while you’re about it, you might check how tall the amorous Martin Ritchie was.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You can’t be too careful in this game.” That was one thing that was certain in an uncertain world.

  “Shall I see if there’s anyone called Beverley missing, too, sir?”

  “Who’s Beverley?” asked Sloan blankly.

  “The girl who Martin Ritchie has gone off with,” said Crosby.

  “By all means,” said Sloan warmly, “although, of course, she may not be missing at all.”

  “But—”

  “She,” observed Sloan pithily, “may merely have used the time-honoured phrase ‘Come live with me and be my love’ and he did.”

  “Pardon, sir?”

  “Nothing,” said Sloan. “You go ahead and check.” He stopped, struck by a sudden thought. “She may not exist, of course. We have no evidence that she does.”

  “The letter—”

  “The letter was thrown away by the outraged Mrs. Ritchie.

  “‘Cupid,’” quoted Sloan neatly, “‘is a knavish lad.’” The poet might have said it first but it was a lesson learned early on the beat.

  Crosby made a note in his book.

  “Ivor Harbeton,” said Sloan, waving a piece of newspaper in his hand, “was last seen on Friday, June second.”

  “Three—no, more than that—four weeks ago,” said Crosby, counting them out on his fingers.

  “The day that the auditors were due at one of his company’s offices,” continued Sloan, reading aloud.

  “Auditors shouldn’t say when they’re coming,” said Crosby. “They don’t with banks, you know, sir. Catches out the teemers and laders a treat.”

  “It doesn’t sound from reading this,” responded Sloan mildly, “as if Ivor Harbeton is the sort of man to be bothered about a little thing like fiddling the receipt book.”