A Going Concern Page 12

  ‘We don’t know. We think the “O” stands for “Operation” but the “Z” could be for anything.’

  ‘Zeppelin?’

  ‘Could be. All this “OZ” stuff was going on in the last war. Then there’s always Zion,’ added Sloan, dutiful son of a church-going mother.

  ‘Isn’t there a musical instrument …’

  ‘Zither,’ said Sloan.

  ‘And zinnia,’ said Margaret Sloan. ‘You should have got that, Chris. You’re the gardener.’

  ‘And you’re the cook,’ he said. Canteens were no challenge to home cooking.

  ‘Sorry. There’s no more left. Bring young Crosby round one evening and I might make a steak and kidney pudding. It’s not worth doing for only two.’

  ‘When he’s done a bit of work on this case.’

  ‘What’s all this about the letter “Z” then?’

  He told her.

  He was still talking about the case when his telephone rang.

  Gregory Rosart had stayed on at the offices of Chernwoods’ long enough to get Joe Keen’s phone call.

  ‘I’m not sure you were right, Greg, about squashing Claude’s idea about a press release,’ said the chief chemist.

  Rosart bit back the obvious retort that it had been Keen who had been against it to start with. ‘And what do you suggest?’ he said with the self-control of the skilled public relations man.

  ‘Had you thought that a little bit of publicity might produce that woman you’re looking for from way back?’

  ‘Miss Catherine Camus?’ guardedly. ‘No, Joe, that hadn’t occurred to me.’

  ‘You never know what’ll come out of the woodwork once the newspapers get going,’ said Keen.

  ‘Joe, do you think Harris and Marsh have stopped buying because they’ve got what they were looking for?’

  ‘Perhaps, or …’

  ‘Or?’

  ‘Or they’ve dreamed up another way of getting it. Hadn’t thought of that, had you?’

  ‘No,’ said Gregory Rosart thoughtfully. ‘No, I hadn’t.’

  Amelia had made her way home through the dark streets more than satisfied with her evening’s researches. With only a modicum of luck she soon should be able to find out exactly what the Fearnshires had been up to in those crucial months of March, May, and December 1940. And even perhaps glean from its history what its connection with a young Octavia Harquil-Grasset had been – although now she was beginning to think that she could work that out for herself.

  Just as her great-aunt would have expected of her …

  She would now start to look for someone called Kate and the location of the cross on the photograph Great-Aunt Octavia had so carefully left for her. After, that is, she had studied the regimental history of the Fearnshires. Tomorrow, too, she would go over her great-aunt’s Will again. Since the old lady had taken such care with it there might be clues that had escaped her this morning – had it only been this morning? She hadn’t really studied the Will properly either … what was that saying which had popped up in her history lectures? ‘Documents don’t speak to strangers’… she would look at the Will with new eyes in the morning …

  Amelia turned into her own road, wondering if, after all, Phoebe had got back from her clinical meeting before her … she herself had certainly been out for quite a time. She crossed the road behind a parked car. She pushed open the gate, noting only subconsciously that it was unlatched and that she remembered closing it carefully after her when she had gone out earlier in the evening.

  Amelia turned her gaze towards the garage but its doors were shut and she couldn’t tell at a glance whether her stepmother was back indoors or not. She started up the path … and nearly fell over something lying on the ground.

  As she regained her balance she looked down more carefully.

  She had almost fallen over the figure of a girl – a girl from the back of whose head was oozing something dark and sticky.

  SIXTEEN

  Plant his poor grave with whatever grows fast.

  ‘Good grief, Sloan,’ exploded Superintendent Leeyes, ‘can’t you even keep young girls safe at night in the streets of Berebury now?’

  ‘This girl wasn’t in the street, sir,’ returned Sloan levelly. ‘At least, not when she was found. She was in the garden of Amelia Kennerley’s house. We don’t know yet exactly where she was attacked.’

  ‘By an unknown assailant, I suppose?’ said the superintendent sourly.

  ‘Unknown to us, sir,’ conceded Sloan tacitly. ‘We don’t know whether he – or they – were unknown to her because she’s still deeply unconscious and can’t tell us.’ Actually to Sloan the girl in the hospital had looked more like a lay figure than a living person.

  Leeyes grunted as Sloan went on.

  ‘Amelia Kennerley remembered noticing a small blue car parked in the road when she crossed it and that’s all.’

  ‘That’s not much help.’

  ‘Then her stepmother, Dr Plantin, arrived back from a medical meeting at Calleford. She dressed the girl’s head wound while waiting for the ambulance and got her off to hospital.’

  Leeyes grunted again.

  ‘And neither she nor Dr Plantin knew the girl by sight,’ said Sloan before he could ask.

  ‘Does Tod Morton?’ asked Leeyes, whose own Monday night had been spent in bed undisturbed. ‘He saw a girl.’

  ‘We’re getting him to go to the hospital to take a look-see,’ said Sloan. ‘She wasn’t carrying anything to say who she was. We’re going to get the rector of Great Primer to go up there, too, but I want to talk to him myself first.’

  ‘You’ve set up a bed-watch on the girl, I trust.’

  ‘I have, sir,’ said Sloan, returning to his narrative. ‘The girl was attacked from behind with something smooth and heavy about an hour before she was found and that’s about all we can tell at the moment …’

  ‘And, Sloan,’ said the Superintendent acidly, ‘do we know whether this girl was assaulted in her own right so to speak or in mistake for Amelia Kennerley?’

  ‘No,’ said Sloan frankly, ‘we don’t, but it’s not as simple as that, sir.’

  Leeyes groaned. ‘I didn’t think it would be. Go on …’

  ‘We aren’t sure why the girl was at the house anyway but –’

  ‘Getting nowhere fast, then, aren’t we?’

  Detective Inspector Sloan said: ‘Only in a manner of speaking, sir. But there is also the house …’

  ‘This is no time for riddles, Sloan. You should know that. What do you mean?’

  ‘Someone was doing there, sir, what I think they’d already done at the Grange last Friday.’

  ‘Looking for something …’

  ‘Just so, sir,’ said Sloan wearily. His own night had not been spent undisturbed in bed. ‘I think that they – whoever they may have been – can’t have found what they were searching for at the Grange …’

  ‘Whatever that might have been,’ said Leeyes, whose highly idiosyncratic approach to algebra had never – without argument – got past the point of letting a equal one thing and b another. He was a little better about allowing the letter x stand for the unknown quantity: but not much.

  ‘Whatever that might have been,’ agreed Sloan, ‘when they did over the Grange at Great Primer.’ He went on more slowly: ‘As they presumably didn’t find what they wanted there, they may have therefore concluded that Mrs Garamond’s solicitors might have had it …’

  ‘Whatever it was …’

  ‘Whatever it is,’ said Sloan more hopefully, ‘and decided that it wasn’t likely to be easily accessible when locked in the solicitors’ office safe but might be so if it had later been handed to Amelia Kennerley. As sole executrix, presumably she would have been entitled to have it, whatever it might be.’

  ‘So,’ suggested Leeyes, ‘you think they turned her house over instead?’

  ‘It would seem so.’ Detective Inspector Sloan drew breath.

  ‘But you still don’t know what
for, do you?’ said Leeyes, putting an unerring finger on the weakness.

  ‘No, we don’t. As it happens, sir, the only item which James Puckle, the solicitor, had actually handed over to Amelia Kennerley was a rather blurred photograph of a wayside memorial.’

  ‘Ah!’

  Sloan couldn’t remember the name of the man who had said ‘But me no buts’ but he felt a considerable fellow-feeling towards him, and would have liked himself to have said ‘Ah me no ahs’ to the superintendent but didn’t think he should. There was, after all, his pension to think of …

  Instead he said that as it happened Dr Phoebe had had the photograph safely in her handbag all afternoon and evening and if that was what the unknown intruder had been seeking then he hadn’t got it because Dyson was working on the photograph in his darkroom at this very moment and had promised his report soonest.

  He might have known that that wouldn’t have been quick enough for the superintendent who said: ‘How, Sloan, can a photograph be as important as that?’

  ‘I couldn’t say, sir, I’m sure,’ replied Sloan, who certainly wasn’t going to attempt to explain anything about the possible significance of a regimental motto to a man who had once been heard to dismiss William Shakespeare’s Othello as a lot of fuss over a handkerchief.

  ‘I’ll expect a situation report by noon then,’ said the superintendent briskly. ‘Well, man, what are you waiting for? Don’t just stand there …’

  Sloan coughed. ‘I’m afraid, sir, that it appears that there is a slight complication in our listing of those who might have known about Miss Kennerley’s having been appointed sole executrix.’

  Beetle-browed, the superintendent said: ‘Oh, there is, is there?’

  ‘Apparently Mortons, the undertakers, have been giving it to anyone who asked.’

  ‘No reason for them not to, I suppose,’ said Leeyes grudgingly. ‘It can’t be kept secret for ever … so what, then, do you propose doing next, Sloan?’

  A stranger listening to Superintendent Leeyes might have been misguided enough to think that he had performed a complete volte-face and was suddenly favouring the non-directive approach. Detective Inspector Sloan, who knew better, said: ‘I’m going back to the hospital …’

  Leeyes grunted.

  ‘After which, sir, I’m going out to Great Primer to see Mr Fournier, which I think I should have done earlier. And then I shall try to see two old fellows called Nicholas Cochin and Martin Didot and look for an ancient lady by the name of Miss Catherine Camus.’

  ‘Phoebe, when are you going to ring the hospital again?’

  ‘I’m not,’ responded Phoebe Plantin equably. ‘They won’t tell anyone anything worthwhile over the telephone anyway. Besides, I must be off now.’

  That poor girl.’ Amelia still looked stricken. ‘It might have been me.’

  Phoebe said soberly: ‘It might have been meant to be you.’

  They were standing together in the hallway of a house which had been searched at speed and left in disorder. ‘The police say we can tidy up,’ said Amelia. ‘I’ll get started on all this.’

  ‘Better to have something to do,’ agreed Phoebe, ‘but I’d think twice about answering the door, all the same.’

  Amelia started to restore order in the kitchen first – someone had even seen fit to examine the tea caddy – but she couldn’t keep her mind on it. Impulsively she rang James Puckle and told him what had happened.

  ‘Mr Puckle, I need to start looking for someone from the Fearnshires who was killed after Great-Aunt knew she was pregnant but before she could get married …’

  ‘That will only give you the name of the child’s father,’ said Puckle, ‘and then it would only be supposition …’

  ‘It would be something.’

  ‘It would help more if we knew the adoptive name given to their daughter,’ countered Puckle, ‘and, moreover, it is unlikely to explain the great interest that your great-aunt’s former firm appear now to be taking in her effects, to say nothing of those who have broken and entered.’

  ‘And injured,’ she said, telling him of the unknown girl lying nigh unto death.

  ‘Miss Kennerley,’ he counselled earnestly, ‘you must take care, great care. And I think you must also tell the police the terms of the precatory trust. You may be in great danger and that would have been the last thing Mrs Garamond wanted.’

  ‘No,’ she said harshly. ‘The last thing she wanted was the police at her funeral. Remember?’

  Her next telephone call was to a secondhand bookseller called Henryson.

  The rector of Great Primer was in his garden trying to start his grass mower. He gave a final despairing pull at a recalcitrant two-stroke engine. It did not respond. Regarding the machine with savagery, the rector slowly straightened his back and asked the two policemen their business.

  ‘Old Mrs Garamond?’ he said, frowning. ‘I took my letter round to the Grange about half-past four on Friday afternoon. After all, if they want a funeral service taken next Friday afternoon, and I am given to understand by the undertakers that they do, then I need to know the details, don’t I?’

  ‘Yes, rector. Naturally.’

  ‘To say nothing of alerting the choristers and the bell-ringers … if they’re going to be wanted, that is …’

  ‘I couldn’t say about that, sir,’ began Sloan, saying nothing at all either about the very real possibility of his having to stop the funeral altogether for further enquiries to be made, ‘but …’

  ‘I dare say they will be,’ said Mr Fournier grudgingly. He produced a large handkerchief and wiped his hands on it. He seemed slightly surprised when streaks of black oil appeared on the white linen and quickly stuffed it back into his pocket. ‘That sort of person always likes to go out in style.’

  ‘I can’t say about that either,’ said Sloan, ‘but we would like to know a little more about who you saw when you delivered your letter to the Grange.’

  ‘A girl walking back down the drive,’ said Mr Fournier immediately. ‘Away from the house. She was carrying a bunch of flowers.’

  ‘Age?’ The hospital had estimated their grey-faced, bandaged patient as twenty-four.

  ‘Youngish.’

  ‘Did you happen to notice what she was wearing?’ Detective Inspector Sloan did not entirely subscribe to the view that clothes made the man, but they certainly helped in putting together a police description.

  ‘A perfectly ordinary summer dress …’

  An ordinary dress had been removed from the girl in hospital, only it wasn’t perfect any longer.

  ‘What did she say?’ After all, thought Sloan, they weren’t talking about a ghostly visitation but a live girl. The be-tubed girl in the hospital was alive so far … but the hospital had been very guarded.

  ‘She told me that she had been very much hoping to see Mrs Garamond but there had been no reply at the Grange.’

  ‘She wasn’t carrying anything else …?’ The hospital patient had had no means of identification about her person.

  ‘Not that I noticed, Inspector.’ The rector explained that he had told her about Mrs Garamond’s death.

  ‘And how did she take the news?’

  ‘She appeared to be most upset. She asked about relatives and I referred her to Mortons, the undertakers, since someone must have instructed them.’

  ‘The last time, rector, that you saw Mrs Garamond, she didn’t happen to mention that she was expecting visitors?’

  ‘The last time I saw Mrs Garamond,’ said the clergyman, who appeared to be nursing some kind of a grievance, ‘all she would talk to me about were hatchments.’

  Detective Inspector Sloan opened his mouth to speak but was thwarted.

  ‘Hatchments, I ask you!’ uttered the rector with unexpected violence. ‘In this day and age with half the children in the world starving, the wealthiest woman in my parish insists on talking to me about a medieval anachronism like hatchments.’

  ‘Quite so,’ murmured Sloan, although fr
om what he remembered from his history lessons, surely it had been medieval people who had taken Christianity most seriously of all? ‘Perhaps you would remind me about hatchments, rector?’

  Mr Fournier sniffed. ‘A custom, affected by those who think themselves a cut above their neighbours, of having a lozenge-shaped painted wooden tablet exhibiting the armorial bearings of the deceased affixed to the front of their last dwelling-place …’

  ‘I see,’ said Sloan. ‘A sort of “Keeping up with the Joneses”.’

  ‘For a year after death,’ continued the rector, ‘after which it was customary for it to be received into the church, where it hangs for ever afterwards.’

  ‘Or until Kingdom Come,’ amplified Crosby, who had suddenly started to take an interest in the proceedings.

  The rector was undeflected by this helpful theological comment and surged on indignantly: ‘Not only couldn’t I get her interested in aiding the starving children of the underdeveloped world, Inspector, but to my mind she didn’t seem to care that the other half of the world – funnily enough – seems to be determined to destroy themselves and everyone else on this planet while they’re about it.’

  ‘Quarrelled with her about it, did you, sir?’ asked the detective inspector. Doctrine wasn’t his province: disagreement might be. Wealth was his concern more often than he liked.

  ‘I suppose you could say that I took issue with her,’ admitted the clergyman. He paused and then added significantly: ‘Or she with me.’

  ‘On the starving children of the underdeveloped world,’ enquired Sloan gravely, ‘or the hatchment?’

  ‘Neither, Inspector.’ The rector began to look even more heated. ‘It was a matter of principle with me, Inspector, and thus no light matter.’

  ‘What was?’ asked Sloan at his most avuncular.

  ‘Didn’t you know, Inspector?’ Mr Fournier stood erect beside the lawn mower and declared: ‘The first point on which Mrs Garamond and I fundamentally disagreed was the keeping of Remembrance Sunday each November at the time nearest to the anniversary of Armistice Day.’

  ‘Ah …’

  ‘You see, Inspector, when I first came to this living two years ago I insisted on stopping the annual church parade and the two minutes’ silence at eleven o’clock.’