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  ‘I can’t tell them anything.’

  ‘Of course you can’t,’ he said warmly. ‘You’ve only just got here. You mustn’t worry about it. It’s nothing to do with you.’

  A frown crossed his mother’s forehead. ‘But I don’t understand why…’

  ‘Why what?’ He was worried now, she looked suddenly so old and defenceless. Besides, there was ever present the lurking fear that his mother might discharge herself from the Manor – and he knew exactly what his wife, Stella, would say about that, because she had already told him in no uncertain terms.

  Several times.

  Maisie said, ‘But why Morag McBeath?’

  ‘I don’t understand, Mummy.’ He wondered now if it was his mother who was confused. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I can’t understand why it should have been Morag McBeath who’s gone missing,’ she repeated.

  ‘We don’t know why, either,’ he said soothingly. ‘But I’m sure they’ll tell us all in good time. When she’s turned up again.’

  She wasn’t listening. ‘Because, you see, Charlie McBeath was on the Staff the whole time.’

  ‘No,’ he retorted, ‘I don’t see. What has Charlie McBeath got to do with it?’

  ‘Nothing. That’s the point.’

  ‘He was her husband, I take it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘Charlie McBeath never left Alexandria.’

  ‘What on earth are you talking about, Mummy?’

  ‘Never you mind.’ Maisie Carruthers clamped her edentulous jaws tightly together.

  Try as he might, her son couldn’t get her to say another word.

  * * *

  As the police car turned into the drive of the Manor at Almstone once again Detective Inspector Sloan saw fit to remark to Detective Constable Crosby, who was at the wheel at the time, that the gravel chippings there had not been laid down for the express purpose of his skidding to a dramatic halt thereon.

  ‘Of course not, sir.’ Crosby sounded injured. He pulled the police car round to the front door as if it had been the carriage and pair that the drive had been designed for and executed a gentle stop worthy of any professional chauffeur.

  Mrs Muriel Peden was standing at the front door at the top of the short flight of steps and between two polished granite curling stones. She gave a negative shake of her head as they got out of the car. ‘Not a sign of Mrs McBeath anywhere, I’m afraid, Inspector.’

  Sloan cast his eyes round the grounds. The gardens stretched as far as he could see, giving way in a structured artistic recession of shades of green to great parkland trees. He said, ‘We’re going to need more than a good eye for country to know where to begin here, Matron.’

  ‘The Brigadier’s insisted on organizing a search party already,’ Muriel Peden sighed, opening her hands wide in a gesture of helplessness. ‘I couldn’t stop him, Inspector. He’s sent poor Captain Markyate to work his way towards the front gates and he’s taken the back of the house and the car park himself.’

  Sloan nodded. Presumably the Brigadier had a soldier’s eye for country. It would, Sloan decided, be different from the police one.

  ‘And Miss Bentley’s checking the kitchen gardens, although what Mrs McBeath would be doing there and how Miss Bentley’ll manage with her stick I don’t know.’

  ‘Crosby can go and see,’ suggested Sloan, ‘can’t you, Crosby?’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ he said, obediently peeling off in the direction of the kitchen.

  ‘It’s all very well for you, Constable,’ said Lisa Haines, encountering Crosby on his way to the kitchen door, ‘but, missing persons or not, people have got to eat.’

  The King might be in this counting house counting out his money and the Queen in the parlour eating bread and honey but – mutatis mutandis – any upset still found the cook in the kitchen making apple crumble in quantity.

  ‘It’s a missing person all right,’ said Crosby, adding importantly, ‘We’re very worried about her.’

  ‘It’s chicken pie…’

  ‘Leftovers from yesterday,’ divined the constable.

  ‘I’ll have you know, young man,’ said Lisa Haines grandly, ‘that it’s called “knock-on cookery”.’

  ‘Whatever it’s called,’ retorted Crosby, ‘everyone who’s indoors has got to go to their rooms and stay there until we say so.’

  ‘That’s as may be,’ said the cook with spirit, ‘but I’ve got my ovens to see to. I’m not leaving them to go and twiddle my thumbs in some sitting room, not with those pies in them.’

  ‘I’ve come to guard the kitchen door, too,’ said the constable. ‘No one’s to go out of here. Not now we’re in charge.’

  Lisa Haines jerked her shoulder towards the window and said slyly, ‘What about coming in? All right to do that, is it?’

  Detective Constable Crosby peered out at a majestic figure making her stately way through the kitchen garden. ‘Who’s that?’

  A small smile hovered round the corners of the cook’s lips. ‘That’s our Miss Bentley making sure nothing nasty’s been going on under the gooseberry bushes. You’ll enjoy her.’

  Miss Bentley, leaning heavily on a stout walking stick, continued her progress, brown Oxford shoes and all, towards the kitchen door.

  ‘Really,’ she exclaimed, stumping into the kitchen and plonking herself down on the nearest chair, ‘this place is getting worse than Nightmare Abbey. Whatever next?’

  A grammatical purist might have wondered why Miss Bentley hadn’t said ‘whoever’ rather than ‘whatever’ but the former headteacher belonged to the Superintendent Leeyes school of taking bad news as a personal affront rather than as an occasion for sympathy for the victim.

  ‘We’ll be taking statements from everyone about when they last saw Mrs McBeath,’ said Detective Constable Crosby, taking her question about ‘whatever next’ literally.

  ‘It’s when we next see her that matters,’ snorted Miss Bentley, ‘if we do. Silly woman.’ Like the Superntendent, she too went in for victim-blaming. ‘And how she is when we do find her … she could be anywhere in this rabbit warren of a place.’

  ‘Standard procedure,’ riposted the constable, speaking the language of officialdom well on this – but not every – occasion.

  Miss Bentley, who might have been expected to have been on the side of the angels in the matters of both procedure and officialdom, made an indeterminate sound of dissent. ‘That won’t be the way to get at where she is, Constable.’

  ‘In the Force, madam,’ declared Crosby sonorously, ‘we find truth will out. Even,’ he added naively, ‘if it does take its time about it sometimes.’

  ‘Ah, yes.’ Miss Bentley suddenly beamed her agreement with this sentiment. One of her standard end-of-term addresses to the girls who were leaving had taken as its text the aphorism ‘The truth may be blamed but it can never be shamed.’ ‘But not that way.’

  ‘Tell me, what will be the way, then?’ asked Crosby.

  Miss Bentley didn’t answer the question but gave it as her considered opinion that while she could think of no reason at all for Mrs McBeath to have come to any harm, she could think of one very good one for Miss Margot Ritchie meeting trouble instead.

  Detective Constable Crosby sat down opposite her. ‘You can?’ he said encouragingly.

  ‘I can.’ Miss Bentley needed no encouraging. She had spent a lifetime pronouncing her strong views and having them treated with attention and respect. One of the many, many disappointments of retirement and old age had been that there were precious few people around now to listen to them.

  Detective Constable Crosby leaned forward and made it very clear that he belonged to this small minority. ‘Tell me,’ he said with patent interest.

  Miss Bentley was only too willing to expound her theories. These revolved round the subject of Walter Bryant and his expected remarriage. She asked, ‘Well, wouldn’t you prefer to live in a detached bungalow with a devoted wife and access to a motor vehic
le instead of being permanently incarcerated in this benighted place?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Crosby simply.

  ‘To say nothing of home comforts.’ In the interests of her own future comfort Miss Bentley, no fool, decided against mentioning the delights of home cooking in the presence of Lisa Haines.

  ‘Very important,’ agreed Crosby, who was too young even to envisage old age let alone its attendant shortcomings.

  ‘Take it from me,’ she said darkly, ‘those daughters of his will do anything they can to prevent the marriage.’ With a visible effort Miss Bentley struggled to her feet and sailed out of the kitchen in the direction of the downstairs cloakroom.

  He had barely had time to put his notebook away before she was back again, stickless and more than a little breathless.

  ‘It’s the Judge’s coat,’ she said dramatically. ‘It’s been slashed to absolute ribbons!’

  Chapter Sixteen

  Upon Death’s purple altar now

  ‘My old coat, you say? Really?’ Two guileless blue eyes belonging to Judge Gillespie momentarily met those of Detective Inspector Sloan and then looked away. ‘How very strange.’

  What was stranger still in Sloan’s view was that the Judge appeared to have lost a great deal of his tremulousness. Aged totterton he might still be, but his hands were much steadier than they had been the day before and his voice noticeably firmer.

  ‘It was a very old coat,’ the Judge added mildly. ‘And like me, Inspector, it’s been around for a long, long time.’

  ‘It is now a very damaged one,’ said Sloan.

  While Sloan bearded the Judge in his own room, Detective Constable Crosby had been sent to summon police reinforcements from Berebury.

  ‘It was practically worn out anyway,’ said the Judge deprecatingly. ‘It’s no great loss.’

  ‘Which makes the attack on it even more curious,’ said Sloan firmly. He had been particularly anxious to be the very first person to talk to the nonagenarian about an ancient coat – and a missing elderly lady.

  ‘It does indeed, Inspector.’ The Judge’s expression was quite fathomless.

  ‘And we should like to know why.’

  ‘Yes, of course, Inspector. I quite understand that.’

  ‘What I don’t understand, sir,’ countered Sloan in a voice pregnant with meaning, ‘is quite why someone should take it into their heads to cut an old coat to pieces.’

  ‘Nor I,’ said the Judge blandly.

  ‘Your old coat…’

  ‘My very old coat…’

  ‘Practically shredded, you might say…’

  ‘Shredded, eh?’ Gillespie sounded positively spry now. ‘How very curious.’

  ‘I do understand, though,’ Sloan forged on, ‘that this particular coat had recently been mended for your ninetieth birthday.’

  ‘Yes, indeed, Inspector. It was quite restored for me. Wasn’t that thoughtful?’

  ‘Who by?’ The sentimental side could wait.

  ‘I think you might say it amounted to a conspiracy.’

  ‘A conspiracy?’

  ‘Shall we say then,’ the Judge’s lips twitched into something approaching a smile as he searched through his memory for the right phrase, ‘by a number of the residents here acting in concert.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Well, the Brigadier devised various ploys to keep me out of the grounds and therefore not needing my coat.’ He chuckled. ‘I only worked out afterwards how he had been diverting me whenever I showed signs of wanting to take a constitutional in cold weather.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘I am told that after Mrs McBeath had worked on it – she’s the needlewoman here, you know – Captain Markyate wore it into Berebury and left it at the cleaners.’

  ‘I see.’ Detective Inspector Sloan noted that the Judge was able to mention Mrs McBeath’s name without a quaver. ‘And then?’

  ‘Miss Ritchie – that’s Walter Bryant’s lady friend – collected it and delivered it back here under cover of darkness.’ He looked rather wistfully at Sloan and said, ‘She still drives, the lucky woman. And lucky Walter.’

  ‘Quite,’ said Sloan drily.

  ‘Dowries come in all shapes and sizes these days,’ said the Judge, ‘only it’s the car that’s coming with the bride and not the other way round.’

  ‘The coat…’ said Sloan.

  ‘Ah, yes,’ he said urbanely. ‘The coat. They presented it to me with a nosegay which Miss Bentley had made up. Judges, you know, used to be presented with a nosegay in olden times when they came to court to ward off infection. Gaol fever and so forth.’

  ‘It’s always been a risky job,’ said Sloan. There had been something, in judicial history about the gift of a pair of white gloves, too, but he couldn’t call the exact details to mind. Not at this moment.

  ‘I thought it was very thoughtful of them,’ said Gillespie. ‘There’s not a lot that you can give a man my age that he hasn’t got already or doesn’t want.’

  What Sloan wanted were facts.

  ‘Was there something hidden in the coat?’ asked Detective Inspector Sloan, wondering if he was going to get a lecture on the asking of leading questions.

  Calum Gillespie’s lips twitched. ‘A diarium secretum? No, Inspector. All I may have had there was a list of residents and former residents – oh, and my library list. Books,’ he added blandly, ‘are a great comfort when you get to this stage of life.’

  ‘It would be very helpful at this stage, sir,’ said Detective Inspector Sloan formally, ‘to know if you have any enemies.’ He hadn’t got his notebook out yet but it was there, ready.

  ‘All judges have enemies, Inspector,’ he wheezed. A faint note of surprise came into his cracked voice. ‘You should know that.’

  ‘Any enemies at the Manor,’ said Sloan steadily. One of the many wise things he had learned at his old Station Sergeant’s knee had been the importance of not being frightened of judges.

  ‘You mean they might be doing injury by proxy,’ the old man mused, ‘attacking my coat instead of sticking pins into a wax figure?’ He stroked his chin. ‘Now that is an interesting concept.’

  ‘It doesn’t answer my question, though, sir, does it?’ Something else that that same wily old sergeant had drummed into him had been to be wary of anyone who responded to a question with a question of their own. Doctors did that a lot.

  ‘Perhaps not,’ the Judge sighed. ‘Since the coat has absolutely no intrinsic value, Inspector, I must regretfully conclude that the choice lies between an outbreak of gesture politics or the damage being the work of a mind deranged.’

  Sloan tried another tack. ‘And which would you think the more likely?’

  ‘Malice or madness? I’ve no idea at all, Inspector.’

  ‘Perhaps, then, sir,’ said Sloan, who himself was thinking along the lines of a more businesslike ‘means, motive and opportunity’, ‘you might care to offer an opinion on why Mrs Morag McBeath has gone missing this morning.’

  ‘God bless my soul!’ he exclaimed, sitting bolt upright in his chair. ‘Morag McBeath! But she isn’t even ill.’

  * * *

  ‘The last person I should have expected to get lost,’ said Captain Markyate, visibly stricken. ‘Poor old Morag.’

  Detective Constable Crosby had encountered the Captain on the drive in front of the Manor after Markyate returned from his abortive search of the further part of the grounds. Markyate declared he had seen nothing and nobody out of doors save Hazel Finch, who had told him she was just slipping down to the village shop. She would ask there if anyone had seen Mrs McBeath.

  ‘How come Mrs McBeath was the last person you’d have thought would go missing?’ asked Crosby, who had yet to master some of the finer points of questioning a witness.

  ‘She was one of the youngest residents here, Constable, that’s why.’ Somehow Markyate seemed more positive in the open air. ‘And very fit for her age.’

  Crosby frowned but kept silent. Political correctne
ss had been added to the burdens of today’s police officer and he wasn’t at all sure where ageism came into all this.

  ‘She didn’t marry Charlie McBeath, you see, until well after the war,’ explained Markyate.

  Where the detective constable came from, so to speak, the younger the woman the more likely she was to have met a violent end, but he did not say so. Instead he said that he didn’t see what her age had got to do with Mrs McBeath getting lost and did the Captain?

  ‘No, no,’ said Markyate hastily.

  ‘What would you say, then, had got to do with it?’ asked Crosby a trifle naively. He had been sent on his way to set up an incident room for a large-scale search. But all information was grist to a detective’s mill: Detective Inspector Sloan, for one, was always saying so.

  Captain Markyate stood uneasily on the gravel, shifting his weight first from one foot then to the other. ‘Blessed if I know,’ he said eventually, for once sounding almost animated. ‘Someone’s playing very dangerous games around here…’

  ‘Dangerous games usually mean high stakes,’ said Detective Constable Crosby feelingly, ‘but not always.’ It wasn’t so very long ago that he had flatly refused to abseil down the cliffs at Kinnisport in aid of a police charity. That game was not worth a candle.

  ‘And risk and reward are usually linked,’ murmured Captain Markyate, adding almost to himself, ‘except perhaps by the military authorities in times of war.’

  ‘You saw action, sir?’ asked Crosby, a little shyly. That, he knew, was what separated the men from the boys, and always had.

  A grim little half-smile played round the Captain’s lips. ‘I don’t think there’s a man at the Manor who didn’t, Constable. That’s the whole trouble here.’

  ‘And were you, sir,’ asked Crosby, still unusually diffident, ‘at that Tinchel or whatever they call it at Wadi el Gebra?’

  Markyate nodded. ‘Indeed, I was. It was very nasty. We were completely surrounded and under continuous fire. In fact, I still wake in the night and wonder … I dare say we all do.’