A Late Phoenix Read online

  “Last night,” said Sloan. “Can you tell us anything about last night or about last Friday night …

  “Wednesday it was,” said Jackson. “Not Friday. The Wednesday. Thought I’d had it that night.” He coughed. “They used to say, you know, if you heard it coming it wasn’t yours …”

  “Did they?” This was worse than French Literature or Psychology Today. This was historical reminiscence in the first person singular.

  “All my eye,” said Jackson vigorously. “Besides—how could they prove it? Tell me that.”

  “Difficult,” agreed Sloan. “Now, about last night …”

  “Difficult? Impossible! Like with this one on the Wednesday. I ’eard it all right. Started as a whine and sort of rose to a whistle. That’s when I took the hint and went down by the doctor’s garden wall, over there—see?”

  Sloan obediently swiveled round and took a look at the dwarf retaining wall in front of Field House.

  “Mind you, mate, I didn’t hear the actual bang.”

  “No?”

  “Just felt as if I’d been clobbered all over with a sand bag. No pain. The pavement”—he wheezed—“the pavement seemed to come alive just like one of them things kiddies bounce on at school. What do you call ’em?”

  “Trampolines?”

  “That’s right. One of them. Ground rushed up to meet me.” He coughed again. “I rushed down to meet the ground.”

  “Nasty,” said Sloan. Perhaps they could get to the point soon …

  Bert Jackson sucked in his breath. “So was the next thing, mate. Funniest feeling I’ve ever felt. Like as if I’d got one them magnets inside me that was pulling me inwards until I was the size of a pinhead.”

  “You don’t say.”

  Jackson spat over the wall again. “Dr. Tarde, he said afterwards that was the effect of the vacuum from the blast on me lungs.”

  “Really?’

  “That wasn’t all.”

  “No?” Sloan hadn’t thought for a single moment that it would be. It wouldn’t be often now that the old chap got a chance to tell his bomb story to a new audience.

  “No. After that there was this almighty roar.”

  “Another bomb?”

  “No. Same bomb. All the earth what had gone up in the air decided to turn round and come down again.”

  “And buried you?” suggested Sloan.

  “Nearly. Took me a tidy time to shake it off I can tell you. Then I thought I’d gone blind. Everything was black.” He spat again with remarkable precision. “Dust and dirt. Couldn’t see the moon any more. And as for the smell of exploded powder …”

  “Quite.”

  “First thing I did was to look where the bomb fell …”

  “Naturally.” Yesterday Sloan would have been keenly interested. Anything about the bombing which might have led them towards the unknown woman would have been a help. But now they had something more positive still. The late Harold Waite.

  Jackson waved a hand at the bomb site. “Nothing much left of these four, I can tell you. And my own house looked as shaky as I felt.” He coughed. “I got down to our shelter over there …”

  Sloan looked. It was still there. At the bottom of the garden. Covered with ivy and full of potatoes.

  “And my own wife didn’t recognize me. Thought the bomb had unhinged her, I did.”

  “Shock?” sympathetically.

  He shook his head. “It was me, guv’nor. I was so dirty she didn’t know me …” He broke off in a fresh paroxysm of coughing.

  “The blast didn’t do your chest a lot of good,” observed Sloan.

  “My chest,” cackled the old boy. “That’s a laugh, that is. It wasn’t Hitler’s war that did for my chest, mate.”

  “Wasn’t it? I’m sorry …”

  “Gas,” said Bert Jackson temperately. “In the Salient. Wipers to you. Early in April ’15.”

  Sloan nodded his comprehension. There was a bit of verse—English verse—buzzing around in his mind, pushing its way to the surface. That line about the evil that men do living on after them. The Greeks weren’t the only ones who could write about war.

  Bert Jackson said, “I pat that wall of the doctor’s over there every time I go by.”

  “‘Thou bleeding piece of earth,’” murmured Sloan under his breath. That described it best of all.

  “Beg pardon, sir,” said Detective Constable Crosby upon the instant.

  Sloan gave him a sour look. Most of the time Crosby looked as if he wasn’t paying any attention at all but you only had to …

  “Shakespeare,” he said shortly. “We had to learn it at school.”

  Crosby subsided. He hadn’t.

  “Julius Caesar,” added Sloan for good measure. “Boys always do Julius Caesar.”

  At that moment a car drew up in Lamb Lane. A smooth, sleek car, without protuberances. Sloan recognized it from the day before. Two men got out. Garton, the builder, and Reddley, the developer.

  “We’ve just heard about Harold Waite, Inspector …” that was Mark Reddley.

  “A bad business,” contributed Garton.

  “As you say, gentlemen,” agreed Sloan ponderously.

  “Knew him well in the old days,” said Garton. “One of our crowd then.”

  “So I believe,” said Sloan.

  Reddley looked up sharply at that.

  “I shall be wanting to know a bit more about the old days.” Sloan took out his notebook. “Perhaps, Mr. Garton, you’d tell me what you did in the war?”

  “What I did in the war?” Garton had the pale, almost translucent skin that went with ginger hair. Only it wasn’t pale any more. It had flared up into an aggressive red. “What is this? A sort of quiz?”

  Old Bert Jackson coughed his way into their conversation. “He means did you fight for King and Country, mate.”

  “You know damn well I didn’t.” Garton spun round and glared truculently at Jackson. “But I did my bit. We all did.”

  “What I was getting at, sir,” said Sloan patiently, “was whether you were away from Berebury during the war.”

  “What? Oh, I see. Why didn’t you say so? I was here, Inspector. They wouldn’t have me in the services. Diabetic. I tried often enough.”

  “In that case,” said Sloan, “perhaps you can tell me what happened here after the bombing.”

  Garton frowned. “Alf White and his mob would have given it the once over immediately after. They were the rescue people.”

  “I bet your old man cleared the rubble,” said Mark Reddley.

  “I expect he did,” agreed Garton. “He never missed a trick.”

  “Rubble was always wanted,” Reddley murmured. “Then and now. Funny that, when you come to think of it.”

  “I know he used to pay half a crown a yard for the bomb stuff.” Garton looked quite wistful. “Half a crown a yard! Do you know what I’m paying now, Inspector?”

  “What I would like to know, sir,” rejoined Sloan deftly, “is what your father did with the rubble.”

  Garton scratched the back of his head. “I can guess. The same as he did with every other bit of rubble, aggregate, and everything else he could lay his hands on at the time.”

  “What was that, sir?”

  “Took it down to the airport. Aerodromes they used to call them in those days.”

  Bert Jackson wheezed over the fence. “Changing everything, they are. Won’t leave anything alone these days. Not even names.”

  “The airport, sir?”

  Garton nodded. “We were building runways as fast as we could. Making a bomber station there. Couldn’t get enough of anything quickly enough. Dad had the contract. We weren’t allowed to do any other sort of building then. Just the odd repair and bomb damage. And you had to have a certificate of essentiality before you could do them.”

  “The runway …” said Sloan.

  But Garton wasn’t so easily kept to the point.

  “Funny how quickly we forget, don’t we?” he said. “Especi
ally bad times. You sort of put them out of your mind.”

  Sloan nodded.

  Unless they were really bad like Bert Jackson and his bomb. Then you had a mental picture for keeps as clearly etched on the mind as if it had been truly done by acid eating into copper. Something that took priority in the memory-retaining cells of the brain. Total recall wasn’t in it. What you had then was a sort of permanent lithograph ready to run off an impression at the drop of a hat. Or the trigger of someone else’s reminiscence.

  “The runway,” he said again. “When were you building that?”

  “Beginning of ’42,” said Garton. “Scoured the countryside for pebble, aggregate, rubble. Anything we could lay our hands on.”

  “When did you finish it?”

  “April. It went operational in May.”

  Sloan looked down. “So this ground would have been cleared by then?”

  “A bit before that I’d say, if we used the rubble for the foundations.”

  “And all the loose surface stuff would have gone?”

  Dr. Dabbe had gone now, he could see that, and the late Harold Waite had been taken away.

  “And the kitchen stove,” said Garton. “If it was moveable we took it.”

  That might give him another date to work from for the first murder, thought Sloan. On the other hand they had an exact date for Harold Waite’s murder and that didn’t seem to be helping much. He was aware that Mark Reddley was getting restless.

  “Inspector”—Reddley rested a well-shod foot on a couple of bricks—“will your people be long on the site? I know you’ve got your troubles here but I don’t know if you realize quite what a pricey business it is keeping men hanging about like this?”

  “Yes,” said Sloan rather shortly.

  He knew.

  And if he hadn’t known he would have guessed from that car parked in Lamb Lane. Developing was a profitable game and keeping Mark Reddley waiting would be expensive. He took the initiative.

  “I understand, sir, that you undertook to inform the council that work was about to begin on the site in sufficient time for any archaeological excavation to be …”

  Mark Reddley groaned aloud. “Fowkes and his precious bits and pieces. Yes, Inspector, I told one of my girls to send the council a postcard.”

  “Which girl, sir?”

  Reddley looked up quickly. “I believe I wrote a memo, now I come to think of it. Couldn’t say offhand which one of them dealt with it.”

  “I’d be obliged, sir, if you’d ask because it doesn’t seem to have reached Mr. Fowkes yet.”

  “I’m sorry, Inspector, but I don’t think that’s my fault. I expect it’s stuck on the pipeline somewhere.”

  He grimaced. “My experience is that the only thing that doesn’t get stuck at the Town Hall is the rate demand.”

  “Very possibly, sir, but nevertheless I should like to be told in due course the name of the girl who sent the card.”

  Reddley raised his eyebrows and said politely, “By all means. Was the historical stuff important then?”

  “I don’t know, sir …”

  “But I thought they didn’t find anything,” interposed Garton. “I told Mr. Fowkes they could have all the weekend …”

  “The fact,” said Sloan, “that they didn’t find anything might have been because they didn’t look in the right place.”

  “But …”

  “They didn’t look where Mr. Fowkes wanted them to look. If they had”—Sloan paused—“if they had they might have …”

  “Spotted the lady,” said Detective Constable Crosby unconscionably.

  A Wedding Should Be Such a Happy Time …

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  “Leslie Waite’s gone to sea,” announced Superintendent Leeyes.

  “What?”

  “Leslie Waite’s gone to sea …”

  Surely it was Bobby Shafto who had gone to sea, thought Sloan bemusedly to himself, his mind still on the bomb site even though he had now come back to report to the superintendent in his office at the police station. His wife, Margaret, who had a good voice, often sang about Bobby Shafto going to sea. Bonny Bobby Shafto.

  “Message just in from Kinnisport Police,” said Leeyes laconically. “They say he put out of the harbor about an hour ago.”

  Sloan nodded, absorbing the information at last.

  “At ebb tide, I suppose.’”

  “That’s right, Sloan. What is this? Another Cain and Abel affair?’”

  “I’m not sure, sir, yet.” He didn’t know that he was sure about anything any longer. Only that a girl had died a long time ago and a man last night and that they had both probably died in the same cause—someone else’s security.

  The superintendent was apparently looking on the bright side. “At least,” he growled, “this chap being killed narrows the field.”

  Was that, thought Sloan, an epitaph for a suspect or did Leeyes think they were playing the game of Ten Little Indians?

  “It gives us a list of starters,” he agreed drily, sticking to the metaphor. To his way of thinking its metaphors were the only useful part of horse racing; the only thing worth putting on a horse in his philosophy being Lady Godiva. “There’s Gilbert Hodge,” he said. “I don’t know if it’s living by Vesuvius that’s given him his ulcer or not. And Anthony Garton. He would have known all about both the development and about the archaeological digging. And Mark Reddley. All three of them were of an age to be fathers then.”

  “What about the old chap you’ve just been talking to?”

  “Bert Jackson?” Sloan paused. “He would have known all right but I think we can scrub him. He hasn’t got enough wind these days. Not for violence.”

  “Plenty of that in this case,” said Leeyes gruffly. “We’re not dealing with kid glove stuff. What about Leslie Waite?”

  “Gilbert Hodge said he saw him over here in Berebury on Friday evening,” said Sloan uneasily. “But he told me himself he never came this way nowadays.”

  “Ha …”

  “Hodge said he saw him,” said Sloan. “We’ve no evidence yet that he was over here.”

  “You’ve gone a bit particular all of a sudden, Sloan, haven’t you?”

  “Garton,” persisted Sloan, “mentioned a man called Alf White who was at the bombing—we’re looking up his address now.”

  “That’s all in the past, man. What about last night?”

  “Last night, sir,” forecast Sloan, “will turn out to be a dead loss. I’ve got Crosby checking but I’m not hopeful. I’m afraid we will find that each of our—er—starters will have gone to bed at his usual time and will have been found in bed in the usual manner in the morning.” He flipped over the pages of his notebook. “Luston Police have traced Harold Waite as far as the train which arrived here at half-past seven last evening. We can’t find anyone who saw him after he got here.”

  Leeyes grunted again. “I expect he took good care not to be seen.”

  When Sloan got back to his own room he found Crosby there.

  “The lady in Lamb Lane wasn’t the dentist’s chairside assistant, sir. She’s alive and well and living in London. We just got a message through. She wrote to her mum afterwards and made it up with her, too, though not with the dentist’s wife, if you know what I mean.”

  “I didn’t think it would be here,” said Sloan. He picked up Dyson’s photographs of Harold Waite and started leafing through them. “I think we’re dealing with someone who knew better than to write a letter on someone else’s behalf.”

  “Oh?” Crosby didn’t sound particularly interested. “And I’ve got this chap Alf White’s address for you.”

  “Tricky things, letters,” said Sloan ruminatively. “A letter gives you something to hold on to … something to keep and to go on looking at.” The photographs weren’t very nice. “You can start to trace a letter and if it’s a forgery …”

  “You smell a rat, sir?” suggested Crosby helpfully.

  “Exactly.” He look
ed up. “Do you realize, Crosby, that it would seem no rat was smelt?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “That’s the funniest part of this case.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Or if,” said Sloan profoundly, “a rat was smelt it was more convenient not to say.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And that doesn’t really help.”

  “No, sir.”

  Sloan sighed. Crosby wasn’t really what you could call a great help either. “And what else have you been doing?”

  “Talking to P.C. Brown, sir. Telling me one of his stories he was.”

  “Was he?” said Sloan savagely. “Well, let me tell you that while you’ve been …”

  “It was one of his first blackout jobs in the war, sir. Seems as if he and his mate were out on the beat and they called up to this woman that she’d got a small chink showing in her bedroom. ‘You’re mistaken, officer,’ she calls back, ‘It’s a Japanese friend.’”

  Sloan sent him to get the car out.

  Mr. A. White (“Call me Alf, officer, everyone does”) of “Mon Repos,” Shepherd Street, Berebury, was only too happy to talk to Detective Inspector Sloan about the bombing. Sloan could see the glint of reminiscence in his eye a mile away.

  “Yus,” he said. “I was in the A.R.P. all right. Air Raid Precautions they called it. If you ask me there was a lot of P. and no A.R. to begin with. But then it really got started and we had the air raids all right.”

  He was a shrimp of a man, bright as button, with an wholly agreeable merriness about him. He knew all about the bodies on the Lamb Lane site. “Having a bit of trouble round there I hear …”

  “You were there in the beginning,” began Sloan generally.

  Alf White did not need a second invitation.

  “I’ll say,” he said. “That was a night, the Wednesday.”

  Sloan nodded mechanically. Listening to Alf White had a place in detection. It came under the “stones and avenues” heading. If you worked for Superintendent Leeyes you left a stone unturned or an avenue unexplored at your peril.

  “We didn’t know where to go first,” said White. “I was attached to Post D round the corner. You know it, I expect, guv’nor. It’s the hall where the Brownies meet now …”

  There was an old saw pit in the village where Sloan had been born which, as hand sawing went out and motorcars came in, had, by much the same token, slipped into use as a garage inspection pit.