Chapter and Hearse Page 13

  ‘Exactly,’ agreed Venables, slightly more cheerfully. ‘And that’s the trouble. By the way, the wine here isn’t at all bad…’

  As he partook of an excellent white Macon Villages, Henry mentally struck High Rocks off his programme for the afternoon.

  ‘Another thing about experts, Tyler…’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘They just won’t admit defeat.’

  ‘Now that’s your true specialist – totally unrealistic,’ said Henry judicially. ‘I’ve always found them more inclined to worry at problems long after the moment has passed.’ Life at the Foreign Office could sometimes move on with surprising speed.

  ‘They go on like a dog at a bone.’ Malcolm Venables nodded and slid a piece of paper out of his pocket and slipped it inside the menu with a skill born of much practice at the ancient art of legerdemain. He handed the menu concealing the paper to Henry and said, ‘What do you make of that, Tyler?’

  It was a single sheet on which was written a series of apparently meaningless sentences.

  ‘Well,’ said Henry, after studying the paper for a long moment, ‘I can see that there are – er – very definite overtones of Alice in Wonderland there.’

  ‘That,’ groaned Venables, ‘is part of the problem. My boss thinks that my contact – I think we’d better call him my informant, my overseas informant, if you take my meaning – is having me on.’

  ‘It has been known…’

  ‘And our cryptographic department says it’s one of the most interesting ciphers they’ve seen in many a long year and would I give them more time.’

  ‘Which means they can’t solve it,’ Henry translated without difficulty.

  ‘Exactly and, for reasons which I can’t go into, I just can’t give them more time…’ He twisted in his seat and snatched the menu back as the waiter hove into view.

  ‘Are you ready to order, gentlemen?’ The man hovered, order pad in hand.

  ‘We’ll have the fish,’ said Venables swiftly.

  ‘Two fish…’ The waiter melted away again.

  ‘So urgent,’ said Venables, handing the menu back to Henry, ‘that if we fail, the problem’ll probably end up on somebody’s plate in your department, my friend, and nobody’s going to like that.’

  Henry, who could take a hint even better than the next man – since hints, rather than plain English, were part of the currency of the Foreign Office – turned his attention back to the paper lurking inside the menu.

  Venables leaned across the table and pointed to the words on the sheet. ‘You’ll see, Tyler, that each sentence contains a number incorporated in the text…’

  ‘A written number,’ murmured Henry, his eye running along a line which read, ‘Beautiful Soup, so rich and green, Waiting in twelve hot tureens.’ ‘By the way, Venables,’ he added plaintively, ‘I mightn’t have wanted the fish.’

  The man from Mercantile and Persuasion ignored this last. ‘What strikes you about those lines?’

  Henry, who had been properly educated even at nursery level, searched for a childhood memory. ‘Unless I am mistaken, the original text doesn’t mention the exact number of tureens.’

  ‘Precisely!’ In his eagerness, Venables leaned across the table again and tapped the paper inside the menu. ‘Here it says, “Who would not give all else for ten pennyworth only of beautiful soup?”’

  ‘Soup?’ The waiter materialized at their table. ‘Do you want the soup as well?’

  ‘No,’ said Venables sharply.

  The waiter put out a practised hand and started to tweak the menu from between Henry’s fingers.

  ‘I’m thinking about the soup,’ said Henry with perfect truth, firmly hanging on to the menu.

  ‘Very well, sir.’ The man withdrew.

  ‘What I’m thinking about the soup,’ said Henry, as soon as he had gone, ‘is that in Lewis Carroll’s poem “Turtle Soup” it says two pennyworth not ten.’

  ‘That’s why I’m here in Tunbridge Wells,’ said Malcolm Venables. ‘I’ve been getting a world authority on the works of Lewis Carroll to take a look at it.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And he says that while all the contexts on this paper here are textually correct, all the numbers that have been added or changed are meaningless to him.’ Venables paused and added thoughtfully, ‘Fancy devoting your working life to studying Alice in Wonderland…’

  ‘No funnier than what you’re doing,’ said Henry.

  ‘What do you mean?’ responded Venables indignantly. ‘I’m trying to save the nation from its actual and its commercial enemies…’

  ‘One and the same from our perspective,’ said Henry cynically.

  ‘Could be,’ admitted Venables. ‘Well, this coded message is from one of our best men…’

  ‘So…’

  ‘And is meant to tell us the exact design of a new uranium-assisted gun hatched up behind the Net Curtain…’

  Henry Tyler suddenly sat up very straight.

  ‘… and moreover, one,’ added Malcolm Venables meaningfully, ‘which is remarkably like a new one of ours.’

  ‘One of ours that no one was supposed to know about?’ hazarded Henry intelligently. There, presumably, was the rub.

  ‘Got it in one,’ said Venables, his appetite reviving sufficiently for him to reach for a bread roll.

  ‘And you need to know not only whether they – whoever they are – have actually got it but who it was that gave it to them, if they did?’

  ‘Precisely,’ said the man from Mercantile and Persuasion, warming under this ready understanding. ‘And preferably without anyone knowing that we know anything about anything at all.’

  Henry Tyler was at one with him there. While, when there was cloak and dagger work about, he was quite content to leave the dagger side to the Ministry of Defence, he spent a lot of his own working life concentrating on keeping a number of cloaks tightly wrapped.

  ‘But what forty-two walruses and seventy-two carpenters have to do with it, I can’t begin to say,’ the Foreign Office man admitted. Struck by a sudden thought, he said, ‘Wasn’t Lewis Carroll a mathematician in his private life?’

  ‘He was and I’ve had one of them working on it as well,’ said the man from Markets and Perks with a certain melancholy satisfaction, ‘and all he said too was that it was interesting, very interesting.’

  ‘Hang it all, Venables, it must mean something…’

  ‘That’s what my Minister thinks.’

  ‘There’s quite a lot hanging on it, isn’t there?’ deduced Henry realistically.

  ‘You can say that again, Tyler. My ‘K’ for a start…’

  ‘Quite, quite,’ said Henry soothingly. Malcolm Venables was well known in the corridors of power to be suffering from ‘Knight starvation’.

  ‘Another odd thing about this message is that it’s composed in words at all … Hang on, the waiter’s coming back again.’

  Henry exercised his own prestidigitatory skills by extricating the paper from the menu under cover of his napkin and slipping it beneath his table mat.

  ‘Two fish,’ announced the waiter, setting down a pair of substantial platters. ‘Chef says to mind the plates. They’re very hot.’

  ‘They’re not the only things at the table too hot to handle,’ said Henry when the waiter had withdrawn to a safe distance and he’d retrieved the paper. ‘I should think this billet-doux of yours is too.’

  ‘What we were hoping for,’ persisted Venables, ‘was a drawing of the weaponry in question. We badly need to know if it’s ours or theirs. A description wouldn’t be half as good as a picture even if we could understand it, but we can’t.’

  ‘So the numbers aren’t measurements?’ said Henry, picking up his fish knife and fork.

  ‘We’ve tried them every way we can – with and without computers – and no matter which way we hold them up to the light, they don’t produce a measured drawing of any sort.’

  ‘There is one thing about the numbers, though, isn’t the
re,’ observed Henry diffidently. ‘Oh, yes, thank you, a little more of the Macon would go down very well.’

  ‘What’s that?’ Venables paused, the bottle suspended over Henry’s glass.

  ‘There are no two the same.’

  ‘Oh, that,’ said Venables dismissively. ‘Yes, the boffins pointed that out first before they really got to work. All the numbers between one and eighty-seven, none recurring. It didn’t help, actually…’

  Henry took another look at the text. ‘I wouldn’t say that, old man. Lend me a pencil, will you?’

  ‘Here you are.’ Malcolm Venables produced one with a chewed end from about his person.

  ‘Thanks. Now, give me a minute, will you? And don’t you let your fish get cold. This’ll take a minute or two…’

  ‘I say, what are you doing, Tyler?’

  Henry pushed his own fish to one side and laid the paper flat on the table. He began to apply the pencil to the message. ‘Give me half a minute and I’ll tell you.’

  ‘I hope you know what you’re doing,’ said Venables anxiously. ‘You do realize that I’ll be done for if anything goes wrong with that message?’

  ‘Would the barrel of this gun of yours happen to look like this?’ enquired Henry, a design beginning to take shape under the pencil.

  ‘Good God!’ Venables sat up, his fish forgotten. ‘How did you work that out?’

  ‘And the sights like this?’ What was even more clearly a very formidable piece of armoury emerged as Henry drew lightly over the written words.

  ‘I don’t believe it…’ breathed Venables. ‘I just don’t believe it.’

  ‘I think you’ll just have to,’ said Henry bracingly as the final details of a horrendous weapon grew before their eyes. Realism was prized very highly at the Foreign Office.

  ‘That’s it, all right,’ said Venables with barely suppressed excitement. ‘How did you do it, Tyler?’

  ‘I joined up the full stops at the end of every sentence in order,’ explained Henry modestly.

  ‘You did what?’ spluttered the man from Mercantile and Persuasion.

  ‘Starting,’ said Henry Tyler, ‘with the one that mentioned the figure one and going on to the one which talked about eighty-seven lobsters.’

  ‘I don’t believe it,’ said Venables.

  ‘It’s called “Dot-to-Dot” and my niece does it rather well. She’s seven, you know.’

  Malcolm Venables wasn’t listening. He was gazing out of the window. ‘Do you realize, Tyler, that we can come back here each year for the rest of time and sit at this table and spout Tennyson to each other?’

  ‘Tennyson?’

  Venables nodded ‘You remember…’

  ‘No,’ said Henry, who was getting really hungry now.

  ‘“And,”’ quoted Venables dreamily, ‘“gazing from this height alone, We spoke of what had been.”’

  Like to Die

  ‘The law,’ pronounced Superintendent Leeyes heavily, ‘is an ass.’

  ‘Sir?’ Detective Inspector C. D. Sloan raised an enquiring eyebrow but didn’t commit himself to the general proposition. However much he agreed privately with any sentiment of his superior officer’s, he had always found it prudent to wait to hear first exactly what it was that had provoked the Superintendent into generalization. He wondered what it was going to be this time.

  ‘A total ass,’ repeated the Superintendent, pushing about some papers on his desk in a fretful manner. ‘Doesn’t the man know we’ve got better things to do?’

  ‘Which man?’ asked Sloan very tentatively. In Leeyes’s present mood, it might even have been better not to have put the question at all.

  ‘The Coroner, of course,’ snarled Leeyes.

  ‘Ah…’ Now Sloan understood. Mr Locombe-Stableford, Her Majesty’s Coroner for the town of Berebury in the county of Calleshire, was an old sparring partner – not to say arch-enemy – of the Superintendent. This was because he was one of the few people in the world whose authority exceeded his own.

  ‘It isn’t even as if he doesn’t know that we’ve got more than enough other things on our plate,’ carried on the Superintendent in aggrieved tones. ‘Much more important ones than this potty little case…’

  ‘What case might that be, sir?’

  Leeyes ignored this. ‘There’s that road traffic fatality over at Cullingoak, for instance.’

  ‘Hit-and-run killers are very hard to find,’ put in Sloan by way of apology. ‘Everyone’s working on that one flat out.’

  ‘Just what I mean, Sloan,’ said Leeyes sturdily. ‘And I told him so.’

  ‘The Coroner, sir.’ Sloan came back to the matter in hand. ‘What exactly is it that he – er – wants us to do?’ The Detective Inspector knew one thing about Mr Locombe-Stableford and that was – like it or not – his writ ran throughout the patch covered by ‘F’ Division of the county constabulary.

  ‘The Coroner,’ said Leeyes flatly, ‘has decided for reasons best known to himself to hold an inquest on a Mr Thomas Lean, a wealthy retired businessman…’

  Since this action was totally within that august official’s prerogative, Sloan waited.

  ‘… who died yesterday in a nursing home.’ Leeyes tapped his desk and added meaningfully, ‘The Berebury Nursing Home.’

  ‘Ah…’ said Sloan.

  The Berebury Nursing Home was considered one of the best in the whole county. Only the well connected and the well off went there; Sloan promptly amended the thought – well, the well off anyway. It was no use being well connected unless you were also well off if you wanted to be treated at the Berebury Nursing Home. He’d heard that the fees were monstrously steep.

  ‘And they don’t like it,’ said Leeyes.

  ‘The nursing home, you mean, sir?’

  ‘Naturally.’

  ‘Not good for business,’ agreed Sloan.

  ‘The Matron’s in a proper taking about there being a post-mortem. Dr Dabbe’s doing it now.’

  ‘I can see that she might be,’ said Sloan, frowning at an elusive memory. ‘Isn’t that where the Earl of Ornum’s dotty old aunt is? Lady Alice…’

  ‘Shouldn’t be surprised,’ said Leeyes. ‘Now, this Thomas Lean hadn’t been in there very long. He’d been pretty dicky for months and just got too ill to be nursed at home.’

  ‘So why the inquest?’ Sloan was beginning to see why the Superintendent thought the Coroner was being perverse and making more work for the Consultant Pathologist at the Berebury District Hospital Trust, into the bargain.

  ‘Because his illness didn’t kill him,’ came back Leeyes smartly, ‘that’s why.’

  ‘I see, sir.’ Sloan reached for his notebook. That did sound more like work for the head of Berebury’s tiny Criminal Investigation Department.

  ‘It was food poisoning. Or so the patient’s doctor says.’ The Superintendent sniffed. He didn’t like giving medical opinion any more credence than was absolutely necessary.

  ‘And what have the family got to say?’ Their views, thought Sloan, might be just as relevant as those of the Matron.

  ‘We don’t know yet,’ said Leeyes. ‘They were away on holiday when Thomas Lean died. They’re on their way home from France now.’

  Detective Inspector Sloan opened his notebook at a new page. ‘This old gentleman, sir…’

  ‘He wasn’t all that old,’ said Leeyes briskly. The Superintendent was getting towards retirement age himself and had turned against ageism. ‘He was just coming up to seventy-five and that’s not old these days.’

  ‘No, sir,’ agreed Sloan hastily. ‘No age at all.’

  Leeyes pulled one of the pieces of paper on his desk towards him. ‘That’s right. Seventy-four and eleven months. His birthday … oh, his birthday would have been tomorrow.’

  * * *

  The Matron of the Berebury Nursing Home seemed as upset about that as she was about everything else. ‘You see, gentlemen, we always try to celebrate the birthdays of all of our patients … poor dears. Nothing el
aborate, naturally.’

  ‘Naturally,’ agreed Detective Inspector Sloan.

  ‘Not in their state of health,’ chimed in Detective Constable Crosby. Because they were so busy down at the police station, Sloan had taken the detective constable with him to the nursing home as being better than nobody. Now he wasn’t so sure that Crosby was better than nobody.

  The Matron, who looked more than a little wan herself, waved a hand. ‘You know the sort of thing, a glass of sherry and a special cake and so forth – not that poor Mr Lean would have been fit to join in anything approaching a celebration today.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘And, as it happened, none of us would have felt like eating. Not after yesterday.’ She shook her head sadly. ‘And this would have been his last birthday, you know. He wasn’t going to get better.’

  Detective Constable Crosby looked interested.

  ‘He’d come in here to die,’ explained the Matron. ‘He’d been going slowly downhill with cancer for a long time, but the chemotherapy was keeping him going – and the painkillers, of course. Then it got that the family couldn’t manage any more.’

  ‘I see,’ said Sloan carefully. There were some homes, the police knew only too well, where the painkillers killed more than the pain, but this hadn’t been what had alerted the Coroner about this death.

  ‘And,’ she said, ‘they were certainly helping him to hold his own.’ She made a gesture of despair with her hands. ‘If it hadn’t been for this terrible food poisoning, we might have had him with us yet for weeks – perhaps months…’

  It began to sound as if the Coroner was being pedantic to a fault and that the Superintendent was right after all. Mr Locombe-Stableford had dug his heels in over a legal nicety: a verdict of misadventure, perhaps, rather than natural causes.

  ‘Tell me about yesterday,’ invited Sloan.

  ‘Everyone was very, very ill.’ She shuddered at the memory. ‘But everyone … staff and patients.’

  ‘And especially Mr Lean…’

  ‘Well, no … not at first anyway,’ she said, drawing her brows together. ‘That was the funny thing.’

  ‘Funny peculiar or funny ha-ha?’ asked Crosby.