Learning Curve Page 12

  ‘You’ll be doing that, all right, Honley, and getting cracking very soon, I hope.’

  ‘A name, then.’

  ‘One of Derek’s favourite caving words was “Resurgence”.’

  ‘Resurgence,’ Chris Honley rolled the word round his tongue. ‘A coming back – yes, that would do nicely.’

  ‘He explained once that it meant going down one hole, through a range of caves and then coming out of another hole, usually wet through.’

  ‘Sounds great,’ said Honley sardonically.

  A very different aspect of business behaviour was emerging in the industrial town of Luston. It was being projected by Ralph Iddon, Chairman of Luston Chemicals, and this became very evident when David Heath, newly appointed replacement of the late lamented Michael Linane as his head of sales, reported to him. Iddon’s office could not have been in greater contrast to that of Jonathon Sharp. The word that described it best was plush. The carpet was thick and the walls hung with modern art. Although his desk was polished walnut, Iddon was not sitting at it. Instead he was settled in a padded chair at the other side of the room, under a watercolour painting of the River Calle, nursing a cup of coffee and notably relaxed.

  ‘Sales of Mendaner are going up,’ said the head of sales, shuffling a sheaf of papers in his hands. He offered a sheet of figures across the coffee table but Ralph Iddon waved it away. ‘But the profit on it is way down,’ said Heath.

  Ralph Iddon rubbed his hands together.

  ‘Big time,’ stressed his salesman. ‘Both of them are up – sales and losses.’

  ‘The more the merrier of both, David,’ said Iddon. ‘Think what they must be losing over at Berebury Pharmaceuticals.’

  The new head of sales said that nevertheless the situation was playing merry hell with his own figures and he didn’t like it.

  Ralph Iddon ignored him. ‘Berebury Pharmaceuticals can’t be selling any of their Ameliorite at all these days.’

  ‘Not at their price, anyway,’ agreed David Heath.

  ‘Not at our price, which is what matters,’ said the chairman happily. ‘I can see that your trouble, David, is that you don’t have any appetite for risk.’

  ‘Probably not,’ said his head of sales, mindful of his bonus. Risk wasn’t meant to go with sales – its requirements were enthusiasm, contacts, good publicity, a reliable supply chain, cast-iron back-up and, above all, a first-class product. He decided against saying any of this to his boss.

  ‘You have to look at the big picture, David,’ said Ralph Iddon, whose mind was following quite a different train of thought.

  ‘Sure,’ responded David, notably unenthusiastic.

  ‘And,’ went on Iddon, rubbing his hands together again, ‘the Berebury lot certainly can’t afford to match our prices, let alone undercut us. No way. As I said before, remember, you have to look at the big picture.’

  ‘So you say,’ said his head of sales even more tepidly.

  ‘Moreover,’ chortled Iddon, ‘they must have been left with all their stock of their unsold product on their hands into the bargain.’

  David Heath nodded and said neutrally, ‘I agree that Ameliorite must have gone to the wall by now.’

  Ralph Iddon shied away from that particular metaphor like a nervous horse and said quickly, ‘I think we’ve practically cornered the market by now.’

  ‘At quite a cost, though,’ the salesman reminded him. He would have also liked to remind the chairman that cornering a market was illegal, something vague about the history of Zanzibar and cloves coming to his own mind. As it was, he thought that Luston Chemicals might be sailing pretty close to the wind but he didn’t feel he had been at the firm long enough to voice an opinion. Especially that one. And, as his wife was always reminding him, there was his bonus to bear in mind. That was worth more than a consciously suppressed view.

  ‘Don’t you worry about the cost,’ Iddon was going on bracingly. ‘Oh, I know it’s your job to keep an eye on costs and sales, David, and I know you do it very well but remember that as soon as Jonathon Sharp stops producing his stuff altogether we move in, put our price well up and make a real killing. That’s the name of the game.’

  What he didn’t say aloud was that with any luck the loss of their star product, Ameliorite, would also bring about the total collapse of their great rival, Berebury Pharmaceuticals.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Detective Inspector Sloan thanked his friend, Harry Harpe, and made his way back to his own office, thinking hard the while. Detective Constable Crosby was still there doing, as far as Sloan could see, nothing at all.

  ‘Into action, Crosby,’ said Sloan crisply.

  The constable sprang to his feet, clearly equating action with travel. ‘Where to, sir?’

  ‘Legate Lodge, Friar’s Flensant,’ said Sloan, ‘to see a young man about an apparent attack on his person.’

  ‘Not that Paul Tridgell?’ asked Crosby hopefully.

  ‘None other,’ said Sloan, reminding himself of the importance of a police officer remaining detached and impartial throughout an investigation. He toyed with the idea of emphasising this to Crosby but that callow young officer was already halfway out of the door making for the police car and thus was well out of earshot.

  ‘He needed taking down a peg or two,’ said Crosby, strapping himself in to the car. ‘Too cocky by half, if you ask me.’

  ‘I must remind you, Crosby,’ said Sloan sternly, ‘that the law requires that a police officer should be “idoneous homo” as well as, I trust, “sapiens”.’

  ‘Come again, sir.’ Crosby steered the car out into the traffic swirling round the exit to the police station, pleased as ever to see that it gave way to the police car as it usually did. He enjoyed the deference.

  ‘Have the honesty to execute the office of constable without malice, affection or partiality,’ said Sloan, quoting his old station sergeant’s legal hero, Patrick Colquhoun.

  ‘I still think he’s too cocky by half,’ said Crosby rebelliously. Clear of the town, he put his foot down and shot off in the direction of Friar’s Flensant.

  ‘He may have his reasons,’ said Sloan absently. He had already added that young man’s behaviour to the growing list of imponderables in his mind.

  Marion Tridgell admitted them to the house, looking worried. ‘What on earth is going on, Inspector? Jane and Paul could both have been killed last night. They really will have to do something about that road now.’

  Detective Inspector Sloan nodded and agreed that the road could do with street lighting and a pavement. He decided against explaining at this point that this was a matter for the county highway authority, whose interest in rural roads was known to be minimal. And that the state of the roadway was probably not relevant in this instance.

  ‘But surely,’ she went on, ‘any driver should have seen two pedestrians in his headlights even though it was in the dark.’

  Sloan believed in truth over tact. ‘I understand from what your son told our traffic people last night that the car was being driven without lights.’ The impious thought that Paul Tridgell had thus made it abundantly clear to Inspector Harpe that therefore he couldn’t be expected to help identify the car or driver Sloan kept to himself for the time being.

  ‘You mean that the driver meant to hit Paul and Jane?’ she said, visibly stricken.

  ‘Paul, anyway, perhaps,’ temporised Sloan. ‘May I see him?’

  Paul Tridgell was lying on the sofa in the sitting room, whilst his sister was huddled into an armchair near the fireplace, somehow seeming smaller than Sloan had remembered her.

  ‘I’m stirred, Inspector,’ Paul announced grandly from the depths of the sofa, waving his left arm in Sloan’s direction, ‘but not shaken.’ His face and hands were covered in grazes and his right wrist heavily bandaged. He was obviously, too, taking great care not to move his right knee.

  In Sloan’s opinion, Paul Tridgell was not only stirred but considerably shaken as well. His hands displayed a
tiny tremor and his voice was high and indignant. He asked Paul if he knew of anyone who would deliberately want to knock him down.

  His answer came too soon and too emphatically.

  ‘Certainly not, Inspector. I may not be like Rudyard Kipling’s Kim – the little friend of all the world – but I don’t know of any enemies.’

  ‘That’s a pity,’ said Sloan pleasantly, ‘because it rather looks as if you might have one at least.’

  Marion Tridgell had come into the room behind him. ‘Jane was luckier, though,’ she said, indicating her daughter who was curled up in an easy chair on the other side of the room in what an expert would have called the foetal position. ‘Weren’t you, dear?’

  ‘If you call being pitched to the ground in the dark from behind out of the blue while Paul got hit beside me being lucky,’ she said pallidly. ‘I don’t.’

  ‘At least you landed on the grass verge,’ said her brother, waving his grazed hands in front of her. ‘I hit the road.’

  ‘I thought Paul was dead when I first saw him lying there in the road,’ said Jane tremulously. ‘It was awful.’

  ‘Don’t,’ pleaded Marion.

  ‘Well, I wasn’t dead, was I?’ said her brother irritably. He turned to Sloan and demanded to know when the police were going to trace the driver of the car.

  ‘All in good time, sir.’

  Paul Tridgell gave a derisory snort.

  ‘However,’ Sloan carried on firmly, ‘I am given to understand by my colleague in Traffic Division that in the first instance you were very much against the police being sent for at all last night.’

  The young man on the sofa began, ‘I didn’t feel too bad at first …’

  ‘I wanted the police and the ambulance to come,’ Jane interrupted him plaintively. ‘And as quickly as possible. Both of them.’

  Detective Inspector Sloan swept on regardless. ‘Moreover, Inspector Harpe tells me that in fact it was a passing motorist who sent for us and for an ambulance, too, in spite of your asking him not to, Mr Tridgell. Perhaps you could explain this.’

  ‘Didn’t want to make a fuss,’ muttered Paul.

  ‘But you might have been killed, both of you,’ protested his mother. ‘Don’t you understand?’

  ‘Well, I wasn’t killed,’ he said ungraciously. ‘Was I?’

  ‘Or broken your wrist,’ she said, still unhappy.

  ‘I haven’t done that either.’ He tried to wave his bandaged arm in the air to demonstrate this movement but was patently defeated by pain. ‘The hospital said this morning that it’s only a very bad sprain and that it’ll be all right in a day or so. So will my knee.’

  ‘And poor Jane could have been harmed,’ his mother persisted, looking across at the somehow diminished figure in the armchair. ‘This is very serious, Paul, and you shouldn’t trivialise it.’

  ‘All I want to know,’ said Paul grumpily, ‘is when the police are going to find the maniac who very nearly killed us last night.’

  Detective Inspector Sloan changed the subject. ‘Can all three of you now assure me once again that you know of no reason why your late husband and father should have said what he did about someone killing someone?’

  He knew what their answers to the question would be before he asked it. What he wanted to see was the exchange of glances between the three of them as he spoke. He was rewarded by seeing a quick look pass between mother and son and an insistent shake of the head by the girl in the armchair, who didn’t try to meet anyone’s eye.

  ‘No idea,’ said Paul quickly.

  ‘We would have told you before, Inspector,’ said Marion with quiet dignity, ‘had we known.’

  The personal mobile telephone in Sloan’s pocket began to ring. ‘Excuse me,’ he said to the Tridgells, slipping out of the room and into the hall, leaving Crosby to listen to anything the family said when he wasn’t there.

  It was Inspector Harpe on his phone. ‘Hi, Seedy, another bit of news for you.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘A male customer turned up at the Leopard’s Head garage at Almstone first thing this morning with a damaged nearside front wing.’

  ‘Did he, indeed?’ said Sloan, tugging his notebook out of his pocket.

  ‘Black car, too.’

  ‘Well, well.’

  ‘He told the man at the garage that he’d hit a brick gate pillar as he turned into his entrance at home.’

  ‘And you’ve got a name and address for me, haven’t you?’

  ‘You bet. He’s called Trevor Skewis and he lives at Oakwood Close, Larking.’

  ‘Which,’ said Sloan, ‘is not a Sabbath day’s march from Friar’s Flensant.’

  ‘Too right. He lives at Number 13, as it happens.’

  ‘Thanks a lot, Harry. The number 13 might just be lucky for us.’

  ‘And in case you’ve forgotten, Seedy, Skewis was the surname of one of those guys in that fatal last Christmas that we talked about.’

  ‘I hadn’t forgotten,’ said Detective Inspector Sloan before ringing off.

  ‘Trevor Skewis, sir?’ asked Crosby as the two policemen left the Tridgell household and set off back to Berebury. ‘Who’s he?’

  ‘One of those in the same fatal road traffic accident as Paul Tridgell last Christmastime, remember?’ said Detective Inspector Sloan.

  ‘Aha,’ said Crosby.

  ‘That,’ responded Sloan astringently, ‘puts it very well. On the other hand, Crosby, it is always a mistake to theorise ahead of data and you should always remember that.’

  ‘Beg pardon, sir?’

  ‘Never mind,’ sighed Sloan. ‘But, if you remember, Crosby, he is also a man whom we were told was at our Paul’s father’s funeral. So was someone called Tim Cullen, don’t forget. We’ll have to see him next.’

  ‘So this Skewis fellow might have been the one that got the evil eye,’ concluded the detective constable, whose reading included the wilder sides of literature.

  ‘Perhaps, but only perhaps, Crosby. Remember that, too.’ He put his mobile phone back in his pocket and said, ‘I’m told that Trevor Skewis is a trainee dispenser at that big chemist’s shop in the high street. Inspector Harpe tells me that he heard that he had had to take a bus from Almstone to work this morning while the damaged wing of his car was repaired.’

  ‘Tough,’ said Crosby, who rarely took a bus either.

  Privately Sloan thought this may not be the only thing that Trevor Skewis might find tough today.

  The manager of the chemist’s shop saw no difficulty in one of his staff having a quiet chat with the police about a possible motoring offence. ‘We have a little private room, Inspector, for customers who want to discuss their medication away from other customers,’ he fluted with practised ease, glad to have the police out of public sight too. ‘Not everyone wants to talk about their illnesses in a crowded shop.’

  Detective Inspector Sloan couldn’t have agreed with him more. He himself worried that he might have an incipient bunion on his left foot after his years on the beat but wild horses wouldn’t have made him take his sock off in front of strangers.

  Trevor Skewis, summoned by the manager, duly appeared in the discreet side room. He looked from one policeman to the other and said, ‘What now?’

  ‘We would like to know where you were yesterday evening, sir,’ began Sloan. The young man’s face was vaguely familiar to him although he couldn’t immediately place where and when he’d seen him before. Deciding that it must have been at the Tridgell funeral, he dismissed the thought.

  ‘Me? Whatever for?’ Skewis reared up like a nervous filly.

  ‘We ask the questions,’ said Crosby importantly.

  Skewis stared at him. ‘And I’m supposed to answer them, am I? Without knowing why.’

  ‘Yes,’ replied that young scion of proper policing.

  Detective Inspector Sloan intervened to explain. ‘We are making enquiries into a road traffic accident last night at Friar’s Flensant.’

  Trevor Skewis r
elaxed at this and sat back in the customer’s chair. He said, ‘Well, it wasn’t me.’ He looked from one policeman to the other. ‘I know what this is,’ he then continued coldly, ‘you’re trying to fit me up after that other accident. I always knew you’d try to catch me on some trumped-up charge one day.’

  ‘No,’ said Sloan patiently, ‘that is not the case.’

  ‘So why the questions then?’

  ‘Two pedestrians were knocked over not far from the Lamb and Flag Inn.’

  ‘Nice pub,’ remarked Skewis. ‘They did us very well there after Paul’s father’s funeral.’

  ‘Paul Tridgell was one of those knocked over,’ said Sloan, ignoring this. ‘His sister ended up on the ground too.’

  Trevor Skewis whistled. ‘So that’s what this is all about.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Crosby simply.

  ‘The encounter of man and metal presumably causing some damage to the car’s front nearside wing,’ supplemented Sloan. As he explained to Crosby afterwards Edmond Locard’s exchange principle usually came into its own sooner or later.

  Trevor Skewis’s brow cleared. ‘And I took my car into a garage to have my front wing repaired this morning, didn’t I?’

  ‘We know that,’ said Crosby complacently.

  ‘Silly me,’ said Trevor Skewis.

  ‘So?’ said Sloan, looking interrogatively at Skewis.

  ‘So I caught it on our gatepost going home last night,’ he said defensively.

  ‘Having had a drink?’

  Skewis winced visibly, a look of pain flitting across his face. ‘No, I don’t drink any more these days.’

  ‘So why the bashed wing?’ asked Crosby directly.

  ‘So why the police?’ countered Skewis. ‘It happened in my dad’s drive, not on a public road.’

  Sloan could see the words ‘Sez you’ forming on Crosby’s lips and so before they were out of his mouth he said swiftly to Skewis, ‘Where were you yesterday evening?’

  ‘At a friend’s house.’

  ‘When did you get home?’