Amendment of Life Page 13

  ‘I didn’t mean that sort of how, sir.’ Crosby screwed up his face in an effort to express himself better. ‘I meant how did whoever kill her get her to where she was found in the dark. She wasn’t going to walk in there herself if she wasn’t planning on committing … what is it they call suicide now?’

  ‘Voluntary death, but what’s in a name, Crosby?’

  ‘You tell me, sir.’

  ‘I reckon she went in inside one of those big bins, all right.’ He pushed his notebook away. ‘Forensic think they’ll be able to confirm that by morning.’

  ‘I didn’t mean that either,’ Crosby said awkwardly. ‘I meant how did whoever did it get about in the maze in the dark, let alone to the very centre. Light from a torch would have shown up and, for all the murderer knew, the old lady at the window would have spotted that.’

  ‘True, very true.’ Sloan gave another, even bigger yawn. ‘Perhaps’, he said lightly, ‘he used a ball of wool like that lady statue. Ariadne, did Miss Pedlinge say she was called…’ He sat up, his tiredness dropping away. ‘A good length of string would have done, Crosby, wouldn’t it?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘The only person in the maze with a reason for using string or anything else like it to measure the maze was David Collins.’

  ‘Who was measuring up for Double Felix’s estimate,’ said Crosby, light dawning.

  ‘Before their very eyes, so to speak, although’, said Sloan fairly, ‘anyone else could have seen that it was there, too, and used it. Or brought their own.’

  ‘Collins was the only one who could count on it being there, though,’ pointed out Crosby.

  ‘And David Collins is the only one with a solid alibi,’ said Sloan ruefully. ‘I ask you, Crosby, a Bishop and a Dean…’

  ‘And a goat, called Aries,’ put in Crosby, ‘which he told everyone he’d heard and which he couldn’t have done if he hadn’t been there.’

  Detective Inspector Sloan pulled his notebook back towards him. ‘Not so fast, m’lad. He could still have told everyone he’d heard it even if it hadn’t been there, couldn’t he? Just you take another look at what the goat lady said, will you?’

  The Detective Constable leafed through his own notebook. ‘She thought she would have noticed if Aries had been missing at the seven-thirty feed, but she couldn’t swear to him having been there.’

  ‘The goat could have been stolen later on in the night – nobody else said they heard him until this morning.’ Sloan flung his pen down on his desk. ‘It doesn’t get us anywhere, though. At the time Collins was miles away from where the action was to boot and he couldn’t have got there by walking. He had to have pushed the body up to the Minotaur before Milly Smithers locked the postern gate.’ He must be more tired than he had realized if he had taken to mixing metaphors like this. ‘Inspector Harpe is finding out if anyone on duty in Traffic saw a Double Felix van anywhere on Sunday evening except at the Close, where the Security people say it was all evening, but I’m not very hopeful. Murderers don’t drive around with vans with their names on.’

  ‘You’d have thought that fellow Bevis Pedlinge could have done better than saying he’d driven over to the hospital, but that the sister he’s sweet on was off-duty, wouldn’t you, sir?’

  ‘I’m not sure which is best, Crosby, no alibi like Jeremy Prosser, half an alibi like Bevis Pedlinge or a rock-solid one like the man Collins.’ Perhaps the Superintendent hadn’t been so far off the mark as Sloan had thought when he’d quoted that old choosing chant ‘Eenie, meanie, miney, mo’. ‘By the way, Crosby, Inspector Harpe tells me that he’s had a complaint from the rider of a Harley-Davidson about being cut up by a speeding police car.’

  ‘Some people can’t take a joke,’ responded Crosby heatedly. ‘You can’t tell what a man’s like under one of those great crash helmets, let alone who he is…’

  Sloan went suddenly still. ‘Suppose – just suppose, Crosby – that Collins had gone from the Minster at Calleford to Aumerle Court by motorcycle after the vehicle gates had closed and got in through that little postern gate and then pushed his wife round to the maze, tipped her out, replaced the bin in the bothy, and gone back to the Minster. Who would have noticed?’

  ‘The Bishop and the Dean,’ said Crosby promptly. ‘He wouldn’t have been there to have been seen when he was.’

  ‘Motorcycle leathers are as good a disguise as any, though,’ Sloan was saying as the telephone rang.

  ‘For you, sir,’ said Crosby. ‘It’s Mrs Sloan. She’s wondering if you’ve forgotten where you live.’

  ‘“Show me the way to go home…”’ hummed Sloan. ‘Tell her I’m on my way.’

  He noticed Crosby’s face suddenly turn pink with pleasure as he replaced the telephone receiver. ‘She’s asked me, too, sir. It’s Lancashire hotpot for supper.’

  * * *

  The telephone rang late, too, in a modest house in Nether Hoystings.

  ‘That you, David?’ said Eric Paterson. ‘I just thought I’d better see how things were over there.’

  ‘Pretty bloody,’ said David Collins. ‘Margaret’s mother thought it was as well to take James straight back with her from the hospital.’

  ‘Less upsetting for the little chap than coming home and then leaving again,’ agreed Paterson.

  ‘I’ve just had a policewoman here calling herself the family liaison officer, but she’s gone again. Not that she could tell me anything much…’

  ‘No…’

  ‘And now the house feels emptier than ever. If you must know, Eric, I’ve just had the biggest whisky I could swallow.’

  ‘Don’t blame you.’

  ‘Everyone’s been very kind,’ he said savagely, ‘which they think helps and, let me tell you, it doesn’t. Not one little bit. In fact,’ he hiccuped, ‘it makes everything even worse.’

  ‘You’ll get some sleep on the whisky, anyway,’ said Paterson.

  ‘Sleep!’ he echoed. ‘Believe you me, Eric, I’ve never felt less like sleep in my entire life.’

  ‘I quite understand,’ said his partner peaceably. ‘But even so, you won’t feel like work tomorrow and I need to know the state of play with one or two projects, so as to keep things going.’

  ‘Let me think a minute – so much has happened since this morning. Well, I finished at the Minster, except for the new work they talked about this morning, which’ll need sorting.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘All the equipment’s in the van.’ He gulped. ‘I’d just finished tidying up and loading when the police came for me there to say about Margaret’s having been…’ He swallowed audibly. ‘To tell me about Margaret.’

  ‘The police came to us for your file on Aumerle Court this afternoon,’ said Eric Paterson quietly.

  ‘What’s that got to do with them…?’ His voice fell away. ‘Oh, the maze … yes, I’d started to measure that up. God, I never thought of that.’

  ‘They did.’

  ‘They would.’ He groaned. ‘Listen, Eric, I swear that I didn’t know my way around the place and how Margaret did beats me…’ His voice trailed away. ‘What a ghastly business it all is.’

  ‘Yes,’ agreed Paterson.

  He gave another little hiccup. ‘And it’s no use your saying I’ll feel better in the morning, Eric, because I know I shan’t.’

  ‘I know you won’t, too, David. From where I sit there’s a lot more to come on this and none of it’ll be good.’

  He didn’t add that it wouldn’t be good for Double Felix Ltd, either, but he thought it.

  * * *

  Mary Wallingford’s bedtime routine was every bit as ritualized as her husband’s saying of his daily Office. Whereas the Bishop was a man who got speedily into bed, his wife pottered round the bedroom, gradually shedding her involvement with the day as she worked her way slowly through the nightly business of undressing, washing, brushing her hair and applying various unguents to her face.

  ‘Bertie…’, she said, still sitting at her dressing
table.

  ‘Yes, m’dear?’ He didn’t look up from his favourite bedtime reading.

  ‘Bertie, I suppose you’re quite sure you saw David Collins working in the slype last night—’

  ‘Well, if it wasn’t him, then it was somebody very like him and there was nobody else with any reason to be there.’

  ‘There wasn’t really a lot of reason for him to be there either,’ she said.

  ‘The clergy aren’t the only people who are busy on Sundays, you know,’ he said, turning over another page of his well-worn Zane Grey. ‘Quite a lot of people work then. More than ever before, actually, these days.’

  ‘Malby saw him, too, didn’t he?’ she said uncertainly.

  ‘He did.’

  She laid down her hairbrush. ‘Bertie, I don’t like what’s going on in the Close.’

  ‘I can’t say I do either, m’dear.’

  ‘Don’t forget “Sticks and stones may break our bones”,’ she said. ‘And there were sticks and stones on our step as well as those other things.’

  ‘You musn’t lose your sense of proportion, Mary. It’s nothing compared with what some people have to put up with and it’s nothing that can’t be taken care of, either.’

  ‘You don’t think there’s someone out there who might have driven poor Margaret Collins to take her own life with all this black magic – somebody with a grudge, perhaps…’

  ‘Perhaps, but we must be rational about it.’

  She paused in the brushing of her hair, her hand suspended above her head. ‘I’m worried that it might turn even nastier.’

  ‘Have faith – and for Heaven’s sake woman, come and get into bed.’

  Chapter Seventeen

  Tuesdays, or rather this Tuesday, showed every sign of not being a good-hair day at the Berebury Police Station any more than the Monday had been. For one thing, Superintendent Leeyes wanted an immediate update on the death of Margaret Collins. As soon as Detective Inspector Sloan came in, anyway. If not sooner. There was a terse message to this effect waiting on his desk when the head of Berebury’s tiny Criminal Investigation Department reached it the next morning.

  There was also the first of a stream of reports. Forensic had found hairs and what they euphemistically described as ‘body fluids’ inside one of the waste bins in the bothy. The hair matched that of the deceased. There had been no fingerprints on the bin handle other than those of Kenny Prickett, but there were signs of the handle previously having been wiped suspiciously clean. Dyson and Williams had sent over a set of official photographs which, though not pretty, showed the body of the deceased from every possible angle. They’d sent some unofficial pictures, too, of the statue of the Minotaur taken from several unexpected aspects.

  ‘Who do they think they are?’ grumbled Sloan, unamused. ‘Man Ray?’

  ‘Comes of watching too many wildlife programmes,’ said Crosby.

  The Sister on the twilight shift at the Accident and Emergency Department at the hospital had been interviewed and agreed that, since they asked, she often spent time with Bevis Pedlinge on Sunday evenings – and a great many other weekend evenings when on duty, which she hadn’t been this Sunday – dating from the time he had first attended some months ago with a minor injury and a deeply troubled mind.

  She had variously prescribed marital counselling, anti-depressants, emigration, referral to a psychotherapist, trial separation and – as a last resort – she had suggested the socks treatment …

  ‘What’s that, sir?’ asked Crosby when he came upon it in the written record.

  ‘It’s like shock treatment, Crosby, except that you do it yourself.’

  He frowned. ‘Socks treatment?’

  ‘Pulling them up,’ said Sloan. ‘Although I don’t know that I’d care to be caught between the two ladies in his life myself.’ The Greeks had had a word – or, rather, two words – for Bevis Pedlinge’s situation. They were Scylla and Charybdis. ‘Two lots of great – and very different – expectations are a bit much for a young man like him. No wonder he’s taken to writing pageants. Amateur dramatics can get a lot out of the system.’

  ‘There’s this follow-up on Captain Prosser, too,’ said Crosby, picking up another report. ‘He’s got a right old nosey parker for a next-door neighbour – the sort that counts the handkerchiefs on the washing line and asks if you’ve got a cold.’

  ‘A very present help in time of trouble to an investigating officer,’ said Sloan. ‘Tell me more.’

  ‘She says she’d always thought he’d had a little piece on the side, but she’d never been able to find out who the lady in question was.’

  ‘A very discreet man, our Captain Prosser.’

  ‘And Mrs Collins must have been a discreet woman,’ said Crosby. ‘Especially if the husband didn’t know either. Or anyone else, come to that.’

  ‘It can be done,’ growled Sloan. ‘They say it adds to the excitement.’

  ‘Myself, I wouldn’t know, sir.’

  ‘I should hope not,’ said Sloan.

  ‘Anyway, she says it shook Prosser rigid to get the chop as estate manager at the Earl of Ornum’s place. According to this old biddy next door, he’s been on the straight and narrow ever since.’

  ‘By “straight and narrow”, does she mean no love life at all?’ enquired Sloan with interest. They had criminals on their books at the police station who didn’t equate being on the straight and narrow with marital fidelity at all. Not for a moment. On the contrary, sometimes.

  ‘She does. At least,’ said Crosby, scanning the report, ‘none that she has seen. No one answering to the description of Margaret Collins ever came to his house alone that she saw – she knew her well by sight anyway, being a neighbour. She was quite sure about that.’

  ‘A careful man, our Captain Prosser.’ He tapped the desk with his pencil. ‘We’re looking for a careful man, Crosby, don’t forget. A very careful man.’

  ‘A very clever man, too,’ said the Constable morosely. ‘The people on the Ornum estate knew he had been seeing a married woman, but didn’t know who she was either. They said the Earl didn’t like it.’

  Sloan couldn’t remember the family motto of the Earls of Ornum – or how many Countesses the current one had had – but the motto had something to do with fealty, forbearance and fortitude. He must look it up sometime – especially fealty.

  ‘The child’s diagnosis could have been the catalyst for the end of the affair,’ he said to Crosby. ‘Not the loss of the job, although no one would guess.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’ Crosby laid the report down. ‘But Prosser’s not going to kill the woman now for ending it for whatever. Not after all this time, surely?’

  ‘There is a quotation that all police officers ignore at their peril, Crosby.’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘It goes something like “Revenge is a dish that can be eaten cold.”’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘But’, sighed Sloan, ‘I do have to say that I myself saw Prosser recognize the deceased in the maze through Miss Pedlinge’s binoculars and I could swear he was genuinely surprised and shocked at the sight, for all his Army discipline and training in self-control.’

  ‘If it’s David Collins after all,’ sniffed Crosby, ‘then he managed to push that bin into the maze at exactly the same moment as he was being seen by the Bishop and the Dean miles away.’

  ‘As alibis go,’ conceded Detective Inspector Sloan with a sigh, ‘being seen by a Dean and a Bishop takes a lot of beating.’

  ‘He could have met his wife as she left the hospital without anyone spotting her, though,’ Crosby flipped over his notebook, ‘because they’ve got that little “live waiting” area for cars at the side. We’ve got someone asking if either of them were seen in the car park, naturally, but no joy on that yet.’

  ‘Remember, for all anyone else knows, she might never have intended to stay overnight there at all, Crosby.’ Sloan thought for a moment. ‘The husband could have given her the sedative in a cup of tea
from the Thermos that he said he had in the van and, when she’d dozed off, driven over to Aumerle Court with her unconscious—’

  ‘But that doesn’t help, sir,’ objected Crosby.

  ‘Oh, yes, it does,’ responded Sloan. ‘All he has to do, then, is to back his van up against the bothy, open the doors and decant her into one of the bins…’

  ‘And go off and measure up the maze with Bevis Pedlinge and Captain Prosser, do you mean?’ asked Crosby.

  ‘Exactly. The body would be safe enough in the bin until it was dark,’ said Sloan. ‘Do you remember Kenny Prickett telling us they didn’t work Sundays any more? Don’t forget, the Captain put a stop to overtime when he came.’

  ‘All right, then, so Collins goes over to the Minster at Calleford, leaving the body in a bin, lays a trail under the noses of the other two men to get back through the maze, pretending it’s for an estimate from his firm – then what, sir?’

  ‘Aye, Crosby,’ said Sloan, pushing his own notebook away and sitting back. ‘Then what? That’s where we come to a full stop. Collins is over at the Minster at the material time and the body of his wife is at Aumerle Court.’

  Sloan sat silently for a moment, his mind somewhere else. What was it that Miss Pedlinge had said was the way out of the maze? He tried to remember. Advance right up to every dead end before backtracking and only backtrack as far as the next opening – the first on either side. That was it. Then take that route and do the same again until you get out of the maze. He nodded to himself, staring down at his notes. This case would make a good parallel with her theory – at least they had advanced up to plenty of dead ends in it, met them and retreated.

  The goat wasn’t a dead end.

  The goat was an unsolved mystery.

  ‘Have a word with Calleford, Crosby, and check whether they’ve been having any black mass trouble in a wider area over there, will you? Ought to have done it before, I suppose.’