Losing Ground Read online

  ‘Yes?’ Sloan himself was studying a message from forensics about lobster shells and glass in shoes.

  ‘It just said “1 s” all the time except when it said “2 s”.’

  ‘An heir and to spare,’ said Sloan. There had been no doubt about the lobster shells or the glass.

  ‘Beg pardon, sir?’

  ‘Nothing. Go on.’ The lobster shells had been sitting on bones from adult beef cattle.

  ‘That “s” stands for son, sir, and he’s always called Francis Edward or Edward Francis which makes it difficult.’

  ‘Ringing the changes,’ said Sloan absently, turning over the report from forensics who wanted to know if he needed the cattle further identified.

  ‘At least the eldest sons are,’ said Crosby.

  Sloan sighed. ‘Did you copy it out?’

  Detective Constable Crosby struggled with a piece of paper stuck in his pocket. ‘That man who went to Switzerland, he died there in the war, leaving a baby son. He grew up and married…’

  ‘Those two stages in life, let me remind you, Crosby, don’t always go together these days.’

  ‘No, sir.’ Crosby was still a bachelor. ‘And that Filligree had two sons and a daughter and they had sons and daughters.’

  Sloan said, ‘So there are still some of them around?’ For a fleeting moment he wondered whether they all had what Thomas Hardy had called ‘the family face’. It was his wife who liked Hardy – he hadn’t been struck on his writing – not a man’s writer, he decided. That was until she had made him listen to the poem:

  I am the family face;

  Flesh perishes, I live on

  Projecting trait and trace

  Through time to times anon.

  He’d liked that and remembered it as he realised how absurdly pleased he had been at the christening of his own baby son when someone had remarked on the boy’s likeness to his grandfather.

  ‘Yes, sir.’ Crosby consulted the crumpled piece of paper. ‘And it’s the turn of the eldest to be Edward Francis.’

  Detective Inspector Sloan laid the report from forensics down on his desk. He would decide later whether to ask the clever scientists there if the bones had come from a cow called Daisy or a bull called Taurus. ‘Since routine is what makes detection what it is,’ he said, ‘I suppose we’d better track the latest Filligree down. You can be getting on with that, Crosby. That’s after we’ve taken some statements from the staff at Berebury Homes about their route to work this morning.’

  These proved singularly unhelpful. Randolph Mansfield lived at the other side of the county and never came past Tolmie Park. Robert Selby always came to work that way.

  ‘No, Inspector,’ he said when interviewed. ‘There was certainly no smoke visible when I came by. I do, of course, get in quite early these days. My department is very busy just now and I have to put in a long day just to keep up with the workload.’ He shook his head. ‘No, I didn’t see Lionel at all but then I wouldn’t expect to have done. He doesn’t usually get in until much later.’

  Derek Hitchin said breezily, ‘Yes, I came that way. Don’t always but I did this morning. No, I didn’t see Lionel’s car at all but then he would have been later than those of us who have to earn our crust.’

  ‘Quite so,’ said Sloan. ‘And any sign of fire? Did you see smoke?’

  ‘Nope. I wouldn’t have gone any further if I had, would I?’

  ‘I’ suppose not,’ said Sloan, who supposed no such thing. ‘By the way, the gate to the drive over there was locked when the fire brigade arrived. Do you know who has keys?’

  ‘Anyone who needs to go over there collects them from the office,’ said Hitchin. ‘They’re on a hook there.’

  ‘Labelled?’

  ‘Course they’re labelled, Inspector. Tolmie Park isn’t the only development we’re working on, you know. Fine mess we’d all be in if we didn’t know which key was which.’

  Auriole Allen lived between Berebury and Calleford and thus did not pass Tolmie Park. ‘And I was a little bit later than usual this morning, Inspector,’ she admitted. ‘I stopped off on the way to collect the local paper. It’s the one I have to keep my eye on most.’

  Ned Phillips was willing but uninformative – up to a point, that is. ‘Yes, I came in that way from Almstone first thing but I didn’t see anything out of the ordinary. Mind you, Inspector, you need to keep your eyes on the road that way. Before you know where you are there’ll be a tractor in front of you and no room to pass. Anyway the house is too far from the road to see it properly.’

  Sloan asked whether he had seen Lionel Perry’s car on the road.

  ‘The Jag? No, but I took it round to the garage for them to mend the spare after he’d had a flat. The garage couldn’t find a puncture. They said it was a loose valve.’

  Detective Inspector Sloan made yet another note in his records.

  ‘I can only report the establishment of some facts, sir,’ said Detective Inspector Sloan. ‘Nothing more.’ Duty bound, he was keeping in touch with Superintendent Leeyes.

  ‘About some definite offences, though, I take it?’ said Leeyes pertinently. ‘Police time is valuable.’

  ‘A portrait has been taken from the museum and there has been arson at Tolmie Park. More than that, sir, I can’t say. Not at this stage.’

  Leeyes grunted.

  ‘But there are certainly some other matters, sir, that require further investigation and may have some bearing on the situation – such as the burnt bones.’

  ‘There’s no need to speak like a rookie giving evidence, Sloan. You’re not in court now.’

  ‘No, sir.’ He took a deep breath. ‘For starters, someone broke a window at the museum and entered without activating the alarm system…’

  ‘And got out again, presumably,’ said Leeyes.

  ‘Unless it was an inside job, the alarm might well have been silenced by an expert and Jonathon Ayling…’

  ‘He of the Nimby Brigade?’

  ‘Beg pardon, sir?’

  ‘Not In My Backyard. Nimby. The “build what you like but not near me” crowd. Got it?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’ Sloan didn’t like acronyms. ‘Him, although Tolmie Park isn’t very near anyone. The firm that Jonathon Ayling works for installs burglar-alarms. Crosby’s gone back to the museum to see if Berebury Precision Engineering put theirs in for them and then he’s going out to tell Ayling that we want to interview him.’

  Leeyes grunted again.

  Sloan forged on. ‘I think the theft of the portrait of Sir Francis Filligree is where the puzzle begins.’ He coughed. ‘We have been trying to establish the present whereabouts of the current baronet but without success so far.’

  ‘Ah,’ said the superintendent alertly. ‘So there’s one about.’

  ‘Somewhere, I think,’ said Sloan. ‘But where I couldn’t say. Another complication is the fact that a young man called Jason Burke had apparently expressed an interest in buying the Tolmie Park estate.’

  ‘Just like that?’ asked the superintendent.

  ‘Outright. Without strings. Lionel Perry of Berebury Homes turned him down flat without giving him the option of making him an offer.’

  ‘Thought he was having him on, I expect,’ said the superintendent.

  ‘But we don’t know how Burke took that.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Leeyes alertly, ‘So this Burke sets it on fire, taking the view that if he couldn’t have it, then he would see that nobody else could either?’

  Sloan searched for the right words, taking care not to imply that his superior officer could be jumping to conclusions. ‘I don’t think that we can go as far as that just yet, sir.’

  ‘This Jason Burke,’ said Leeyes thoughtfully. ‘How was he going to pay for Tolmie Park? Do we know that? He wouldn’t get it for peanuts, not unless the developers didn’t get their planning permission.’ He looked up and said sharply, ‘Sloan, we haven’t stumbled on some money-laundering, have we?’

  ‘I don’t think so,�
� said Sloan. The superintendent was inclined to use the royal ‘we’ when there was any prospect of a really successful case being solved. ‘You see, Jason Burke is the real name of Kevin Cowlick.’

  Leeyes sat up. ‘What, that nerd with the long hair who gives those ghastly musical performances?’ Pop concerts ranked high on the list of unhappy interactions between police and public.

  ‘Him,’ said Sloan succinctly.

  ‘Then, if he’s not money-laundering, he must have got his money from drugs,’ concluded Leeyes, a thoroughly modern Peeler.

  Detective Inspector Sloan shook his head. ‘No. I’ve been on to our drugs section and they say that although they always pick up a few users at his concerts, he’s stayed clean.’

  Leeyes grunted. ‘Makes a change.’

  Sloan studied the papers on the desk. ‘I understand we have to thank his doctor for that.’

  ‘How come?’

  ‘Frightened him with a needle when he was young. Apparently this young Jason still runs a mile at the sight of a hypodermic syringe.’

  Leeyes grunted again.

  ‘And our man at headquarters who knows about these things tells that Burke could have made the money to buy Tolmie Park or anywhere else you care to name with the proceeds of his albums. Easily.’

  Superintendent Leeyes said something indistinguishable about policemen who earned their pittance with hard work.

  ‘There’s something else, sir.’ Sloan thought it better to hurry on. ‘It would also be helpful to know why Lionel Perry was so upset to learn about the bones and the lobster shells. Those really shook him.’

  ‘Someone,’ observed Leeyes profoundly, ‘is playing funny games.’

  ‘But who with, sir? That’s what I would like to know. With us? Or with someone else?’

  ‘Well, find out, Sloan, and soon. There’s that money thing you’re supposed to be working on.’

  ‘Transactional fraud.’

  ‘That’s it. Well, it’s important to be getting on with that, too.’

  It was something he didn’t need telling.

  * * *

  Wendy Pullman of the Berebury Preservation Society was telephoning someone else. It was Jonathon Ayling at Berebury Precision Engineers this time.

  ‘Wendy,’ he protested, ‘you know I don’t like being rung up when I’m at work.’

  She brushed this aside. ‘I’ve heard, Jonathon, that you’ve had a visit from the police and I want to know if it’s true.’

  ‘My middle names are George Washington and I cannot tell a lie.’

  ‘Let’s have the truth, then,’ she said.

  ‘If you really want to know the sordid details an Inspector called – oh, and he had a constable with him who looked as if running late was the only exercise he had.’

  ‘Of course I want to know the details,’ she exploded in exasperation. ‘What have you done now?’

  ‘Moi?’ said Jonathon Ayling in his best French.

  ‘Vows,’ she retorted firmly.

  ‘I am innocent,’ he said in mock histrionic tones.

  ‘And what exactly does that mean?’

  ‘That I wouldn’t do anything to bring disgrace on the Berebury Preservation Society.’

  ‘I should hope not.’

  ‘Nothing, that is,’ he added, fingers crossed, ‘where the end doesn’t justify the means.’

  ‘That,’ she countered, ‘is not an argument.’

  ‘I didn’t say it was. It’s a statement.’

  ‘So what did you do to make the police visit you?’

  ‘They didn’t say.’

  ‘Jonathon, I am not prepared to listen to this nonsense any longer.’

  ‘If you must know they wanted to look at my shoes.’

  ‘Your shoes?’

  ‘My footwear, then.’

  ‘So where had you been that they wanted to check?’

  ‘They didn’t say that either. Now, Wendy, I must get back to work…’

  Her voice took on a more serious note. ‘There is a rumour going around that some bones were found after the fire and we’re all a bit worried about it.’

  He responded with an unusual earnestness. ‘If it will reassure everyone, I can truthfully say that I didn’t have anything to do with the fire at Tolmie.’

  ‘So what have you been up to, then?’ she asked, only half-convinced by what he had said.

  ‘Helping save Tolmie Park – well, some of it, anyway – for posterity. That’s what you want, isn’t it?’

  After he had put the telephone down he added to himself, ‘And let us hope that the end justifies the means.’

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Everyone who works obviously has to do it somewhere, be it at an office desk, a computer workstation, a supermarket check-out, a factory bench, or even down on the farm still. Policemen had places of work, too, but those places weren’t often similar to those of other wage-earners. A session with an informant in a seedy downtown café was far removed from a plush office with a receptionist so superior that she has to be convinced that the front door – rather than the tradesman’s entrance – was the right one for an officer of the Crown, but Detective Inspector Sloan had worked in both settings.

  The bedroom of a startled drug-dealer apprehended in the middle of the night had very little to be said for it as a place of work either but if that was where the work was, then that was where the policeman went. The same went for the bridge over the river at Berebury on whose parapet Detective Inspector Sloan had once spent half a day talking a man out of jumping into the waters below, whilst some of the places in which he had arrested young tearaways were definitely best forgotten.

  So when he and Crosby reached the place of work of Jason Burke and were admitted by Stuart Bellamy, he was able to look round with the detached interest of an impartial observer. Crosby, on the other hand, seemed to be under the impression that he was entering the holy of holies. ‘So this is where Kevin Cowlick hangs out,’ he breathed as they entered the studio.

  ‘This is where Jason Burke hangs out,’ said Sloan more mundanely, unwilling to describe what the pop star did as work. He looked round at a vast collection of tapes, compact discs and even the odd, old 78 rpm shellac record, but it was the enormous synthesiser against the further wall that had immediately caught Crosby’s eye.

  ‘Man, will you take a look at that…’ he was saying as the door opened and the pop star came in, or rather, made an entrance.

  ‘Hi,’ said Jason Burke, advancing on them with Stuart Bellamy trailing along behind him. The pop star was small and wiry, with an air of purpose that helped explain his rise to the top of the performing pyramid. ‘You guys wanting somethin’, then?’ he asked.

  ‘Just a bit of information,’ said Sloan in neutral tones.

  The pop star turned to his manager and grinned. ‘That’s what they always say, isn’t it, Stu?’

  ‘I wouldn’t know about that,’ said Bellamy calmly, adding, ‘and I wouldn’t have thought you would either, Jason.’

  Jason smiled disarmingly and said, ‘Stuart here keeps everything in order, including me.’

  ‘I’m glad to hear it, sir,’ said Sloan heartily. ‘It’s a wicked enough world as it is.’

  Jason Burke stared at him for a full minute and then went over to a microphone and repeated the words into it, savouring them as he did so. ‘Sorry about that, but they might make a good start to a lyric.’ He began to hum the words, ‘It’s a wicked enough world as it is,’ under his breath. When they were duly recorded he flipped the fringe of hair known as a cowlick away from his forehead and said, ‘Now what was it exactly that you wanted to know?’

  Without waiting for an answer, he went on to leave them in no doubt about what it was that he himself wanted. ‘Tolmie Park, Inspector. I’ve always wanted it and I have every intention of having it.’ He fixed Sloan with a beady eye and said, ‘And I don’t care what I have to pay to get it. Do you get me there?’

  ‘Receiving you loud and clear,’ s
aid Crosby unexpectedly.

  Detective Inspector Sloan was more concerned about whether or not what Jason Burke was prepared to do to get hold of Tolmie Park was legal but this didn’t seem the right moment to say so. ‘Why didn’t you buy it before Berebury Homes did, then?’ he asked him, ignoring Crosby’s intervention.

  ‘Because, Inspector, I didn’t know it was up for sale then, that’s why. Sneaky is what I call the way that it came on the market. Must have been a word in someone’s ear.’ Jason Burke suddenly looked quite fierce. ‘I tell you, if I don’t get Tolmie Park in the end I’m going to have it out with the bank man. And if he’s been two-timing me, then I’ll take my account somewhere else.’

  ‘I see,’ said Sloan, considerably entertained by the vision of the young guitarist reprimanding the portly Douglas Anderson, the middle-aged manager of the Calleshire and Counties Bank. It told him more than anything else about the state of the pop star’s wealth – and when he came to think about it, it told him a great deal about the changing values in a changing world. If Jason Burke had ever once walked into the manager’s office as a supplicant, he certainly didn’t do so any longer.

  ‘And I’ll tell him what he can do with his marble and mahogany,’ added Jason Burke.

  ‘Tolmie Park…’ began Sloan.

  ‘And when you lot find out who set it on fire – if you ever do – then I’m going to have something to say to him as well.’

  ‘Or her,’ put in Crosby, fresh from a recent lecture on equal opportunities.

  Jason Burke turned his attention to the detective constable. ‘You’re right there, mate. Mustn’t forget the ladies.’

  Stuart Bellamy coughed. ‘We have registered with the bank that Jason here is interested in buying the property should anything fall through with the financing of the development by Berebury Homes.’

  ‘Interested!’ snorted Jason Burke. ‘I’m more than interested. I’m going to have that place if it’s the last thing I do.’

  ‘I meant should Berebury Homes not get all the planning permissions and so forth that they want,’ went on his manager smoothly, ‘it is not impossible that it might come back on the market.’