Harm’s Way Read online

  Sloan nodded in sympathy. Metrication was yet another hazard to clear thought by members of juries. “And are there any—er—pointers at all to the cause of death, Doctor?” He had an ingrained objection to using the word “clue.”

  “None that I could see from where I had to stand,” admitted the pathologist cheerfully. “I might be able to be more helpful, though, after we’ve got him down off the slopes of Mount Parnassus here and back in the mortuary.”

  “Quite so,” said Sloan. He agreed that these were not ideal for proper scientific examination.

  “Although,” said Dr. Dabbe, “how that’s going to be done, I really don’t know.”

  “Dead man’s lift?” suggested Crosby brightly.

  “You had better go down first, Crosby,” said Sloan repressively.

  Dr. Dabbe was still considering the skeleton. “There’s one thing I can’t tell you yet, Sloan.”

  “What’s that, Doctor?”

  “At exactly what stage the head came off.”

  Sloan cleared his throat. “It would be a help to know.”

  “It didn’t fall off, Sloan, that’s for sure.”

  “No, Doctor.” Sloan hadn’t supposed that for one moment that it had.

  “But,” said the pathologist, “I can tell you how it came off.”

  That, too, thought Sloan, would be useful information. The police didn’t have a lot in the way of hard facts yet. Crosby had started to swing off the platform and onto the top of the ladder as Dr. Dabbe spoke. He paused.

  “Someone used an instrument,” said Dr. Dabbe.

  “What sort of instrument?” asked Sloan cautiously.

  “A cleaver of some kind. An axe, perhaps, or a butcher’s knife.” There was a sudden change in atmosphere on the makeshift scaffolding tower. The banter had gone. Now the pathologist was deadly serious. “And I should say—mind you, Sloan, I’m speaking without a microscope—”

  “Yes, Doctor?” Out of the corner of his eye Sloan could see Crosby poised at the top of the ladder listening too.

  “—that the head came off in one fell blow,” said the doctor chillingly.

  Sloan absorbed the information without comment. Even some professional executioners hadn’t managed that. Something gruesome about the beheading of one of the wives of Henry the Eighth came into his mind. Or had it been Mary, Queen of Scots?

  “An axe, you said, Doctor,” murmured Sloan. The police needed to know what to look for. And where to start looking. Firemen had axes, didn’t they? Even part-time firemen.

  “I can’t tell you exactly what was used.” Dr. Dabbe frowned. “Something heavy and sharp.”

  “It was a clean cut, anyway,” said Sloan. Somehow “clean” didn’t seem quite the right adjective but he couldn’t call another, better one to mind just at this moment.

  The pathologist nodded. “Between Atlas and axis, if you really want to know.”

  It would come up as something quite different in Dr. Dabbe’s report to the cononer, Sloan knew that.

  Dr. Dabbe grinned. “The first cervical vertebra and epistropheus, actually.”

  “Does that presuppose any sort of knowledge on the part of who did it, Doctor?”

  The medical man considered this. “I daresay most farmers pick up a working knowledge of anatomy over the years, Sloan. And, of course, there used to be a fair bit of pole-axeing in the old days.” He prepared to follow Crosby down the ladder. “My guess is that when you find the head you’ll find the cause of death—unless it was a straightforward decapitation, that is.”

  “Yes, Doctor.” Instituting a search for a severed head was something else to be done with all possible speed. And this time they couldn’t exclude wooded land. A human agency had been involved. Unlike crows, human beings weren’t afraid of predators.

  The pathologist took one last look at the bones on the barn roof. “A good thing that those crows had been properly brought up, Sloan, isn’t it?”

  “Beg pardon, Doctor?”

  “They left something for Mr. Manners, like Nanny always said.”

  “But not a lot,” said Crosby, disappearing down the ladder.

  TWELVE

  O let no evil dreams be near

  “Mrs. Mellot didn’t say a word,” said Detective Constable Crosby to Sloan as they walked back across the farmyard towards the house and parlour. “Not a word. Not all the while I was there, anyway.” He sniffed. “Mum’s the word with her all right.”

  “Actions speak louder than words,” said Sloan firmly. There had been no disguising the swift rush of blood from Meg Mellot’s face when naked fear had struck. As Sloan stepped over the farm threshold now something came back to him over the years from an English lesson—something that that arch-observer William Shakespeare had noted. It had been in one of those plays that for some reason teachers of English literature lingered over—he of the two parts, King Henry the Fourth.

  “The whiteness of thy cheek

  Is apter than thy tongue to tell thy errand.”

  He remembered the fight scenes, too. They were really what made it a good play for boys—and the part of Sir John Falstaff inevitably going to the fattest boy in the class …

  “She didn’t speak, you said,” murmured Sloan to Crosby. Something else that came welling out of his subconscious was the wartime slogan “Be like Dad, keep Mum.”

  “There wasn’t a dicky-bird out of her,” said Detective Constable Crosby, who had not been thinking about either Shakespeare’s plays or propaganda posters. “The dog would have barked, sir, for sure, though, if anyone else had humped that body up on the roof. That was what it was there for—to bark.”

  “A watch-dog,” said Sloan precisely. He’d seen a hole in a wall for a watch-dog once and the phrase had fallen into place in his mind. It had been in the ruins of an abbey which he and his wife, Margaret, had visited one holiday. There had been an elliptical gap at the height of a dog exactly opposite the abbey gate and the dog was expected to bark when anyone came near. They had had a death’s door there, too. For a moment Sloan had thought that the abbey custodian had been joking.

  He wasn’t. He’d led their party to the wall of the north chancel and pointed. “There you are,” he’d said for all to hear. “Death’s door.”

  It was the custodian’s party piece and he had done it well. It was, he had explained, a door in the abbey wall which led directly to the abbey cemetery. It was only opened on the death of a monk to let the body and its cortége through for burial. All that Sloan had been able to think about at the time had been the hoary—and very irreverent—medical chestnut about the patient “being at death’s door but the doctor hoped to pull him through.” The sight had stuck in his memory all the same.

  There was another phrase though—a more modern one—that was rather more germane to the present. It came straight from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

  “‘The curious incident of the dog in the night-time,’” quoted Sloan from Silver Blaze.

  “That’s right, sir.” Crosby scratched his brow. “Why didn’t the Mellots just say they’d heard Fido barking? That’s all they needed to do, isn’t it?”

  “It may not have been true,” said Sloan mildly. There was something in the Bible about that. He quoted it. “What is truth? saith Pilate.”

  Crosby looked distinctly doubtful.

  “Moreover,” pointed out Sloan, “the body may not have been put up on the roof at night.”

  “But—”

  “We don’t know for certain that it was.” Sloan tightened his lips. Actually they knew very little for certain at the moment and that was a worry in itself.

  Crosby looked even more doubtful. “If it went up there—”

  “Was put.” Sloan corrected him at once. Life was quite complicated enough without bringing levitation into the picture—even for “the friendless bodies of unburied men.”

  “Was put up there in daylight,” said Crosby, “and the Mellots didn’t know, then that means that Len Hodge did—does
—know. Bound to.”

  “He might have been got out of the way,” said Sloan, leading the way down the passage.

  “He knows something, sir,” insisted Crosby. “Ted Mason says so.”

  Sloan nodded. An interview with Len Hodge had a high priority. But so did further words with George and Meg Mellot. He pushed open the garden door and said, “Feeling better now, are you, madam?”

  Meg Mellot nodded, her face still a chalky white. She was sitting bolt upright on the couch now but she still did not look well.

  Sloan began the interview without preamble. “I’ve been finding out a little more about Mellot’s Furnishings.”

  “Upholsterers to the Nation,” responded Crosby upon the instant, demonstrating that he was as susceptible as the next man to a good advertising slogan.

  “Ivor Harbeton’s company,” went on Sloan, gritting his teeth and rising above the television demotic, “made a bid for Mellot’s Furnishings at the end of April this year.”

  “Conway’s Covers,” said George Mellot wearily. “That was the company that Harbeton used for the attack.” The farmer was sitting on the sofa beside his wife looking years older than he had done the day before.

  Sloan continued his narrative. “Mellot’s Furnishings turned down their approaches flat.” It was company mergers that could be compared with marriages, wasn’t it?

  George Mellot stirred himself. “Absolutely flat,” he agreed. “Tom wouldn’t hear of it. The firm was his baby and he wanted to keep it that way.”

  “So Conway’s Covers tried again,” said Sloan. Take-overs had more in common with shotgun weddings than with arranged marriages.

  Mellot moistened his lips. “That was at the beginning of May.”

  “With a higher bid,” added Sloan. A marriage of convenience, perhaps.

  “If at first you don’t succeed,” interposed Crosby sententiously, “try, try again.”

  Detective Inspector Sloan bit back the first response that came into his head and said instead, “That’s just what Harbeton did.” Marriage à la mode, that was it.

  “He kept on coming back,” said George Mellot dully.

  His wife said nothing.

  Crosby looked quite interested for once. “And what did Mellot’s Furnishings do?”

  “Fought it tooth and nail,” said Sloan succinctly. The man in the City had promised to let him have copies of the series of letters to shareholders and the newspaper advertising campaign that had constituted the ammunition of war. Bid followed by counterbid. Salvo by countersalvo. Or had it really been dowry all the time? Pretty reading, the City man had said they made. Pleas for support from shareholders from the embattled Board of Directors of Mellot’s Furnishings; bait laid in front of those same shareholders by the predatory Conway Covers board, chaired by Ivor Harbeton; appeals to sentiment; appeals to greed. He turned to George Mellot. “I’m not boring you, sir, I trust.”

  “No, Inspector,” replied the farmer with all the searing astringency of rhatany root, “you’re not boring me. I’m listening.”

  “Who won?” enquired Detective Constable Crosby as if the saga had the simplicity of a bedtime story.

  Detective Inspector Sloan switched his gaze from one man to the other and regarded his subordinate with a certain academic interest. Not for Crosby the majestic cadences of the Edwardian versifier whose sentiments seemed to be the hallmark of every speech on every Speech Day. “He marks—not that you won or lost—but how you played the game.”

  Perhaps it was as well. Take-over battles did not sound particularly sporting—or sportive—affairs.

  “The goodies or the baddies?” asked Crosby before he could speak.

  That simplified the situation still further. Crosby’s interest though was better than the monumental indifference of the sheep in the next field at the Battle of Hastings that Sloan’s history teacher had brought to the attention of the class. He had been pointing a different moral, of course. “Always remember,” the schoolmaster had been fond of saying, “that while one of the most decisive battles in English history was being fought out the sheep in the next field went on eating. Before, during and after the battle.” And a young Christopher Dennis Sloan had dutifully remembered, though for the life of him—then or now—he wasn’t sure what to think about it.

  Detective Inspector Sloan, working policeman on duty, couldn’t let a little philosophy come between him and the business at hand. He said courteously, “Perhaps Mr. Mellot would like to tell us who won.”

  The farmer said, “It isn’t as straightforward as that, Inspector.”

  “No?” said Sloan pleasantly. “No, perhaps not. Your brother Tom gave Ivor Harbeton a run for his money, though, didn’t he?” There, for a wonder, was a cliché that filled the bill.

  “He did,” responded Mellot with spirit. Meg Mellot still stayed silent and withdrawn.

  “Bully for him,” said Crosby laconically.

  Sloan resumed his role as narrator. It seemed easier. “So Ivor Harbeton tried something different.”

  “Robert the Bruce’s spider,” remarked Crosby unnecessarily, “just went on.”

  “A dawn raid,” said George Mellot dully. “That was what came next.”

  Detective Constable Crosby brightened immediately. They had dawn raids in the police force: exciting, truly clandestine affairs, when hardened criminals were tumbled out of bed in the middle of the night. He said so.

  “Not that sort of dawn raid,” said Detective Inspector Sloan, very nearly at the end of his patience with his subordinate. The man in the Fraud Squad had just explained to him the City’s version of the tactic. It was rather different from the police one.

  It wasn’t very long before he found himself explaining it to Superintendent Leeyes too.

  “The buyer, sir,” Sloan informed him presently down the telephone, “starts the whole thing by building up various small holdings in the company that they want to buy.”

  Like Mr. Dick, Superintendent Leeyes was more interested in a head. “It must be somewhere, Sloan,” he insisted. Some there be that have no Memorial but not King Charles the First.

  “Yes, sir,” agreed Sloan at once. “Naturally.”

  His superior officer’s voice came testily down the telephone line. “I hope you’re looking for it then.”

  “I am in the process of making arrangements to do so, sir.” It would be the superintendent’s King Charles’s head if they weren’t careful.

  “That means you haven’t started yet,” pounced Leeyes, who had not risen to the rank of superintendent by the exercising of the gentler virtues.

  “Not exactly started,” agreed Sloan. “Not yet. But it is at hand.” He tried not to sound too defensive. “It’s a matter of arranging for a special photographic survey of the area.” Sloan did not pretend to understand the technicalities of infra-red cameras but there were modern—ultramodern—methods available now for spotting patches of land where earth had been disturbed.

  Leeyes grunted. “When I was a constable we looked the hard way with water-jugs.”

  “Sir?”

  “You’re too young to remember,” said Leeyes loftily. “A straight line of men pouring water on the ground out of jugs as they walked forward, that’s how it used to be done.”

  “But—”

  “If the ground hadn’t been touched,” Leeyes informed him, “the water ran straight off.”

  “I see, sir.”

  “If it had been turned over to bury something,” swept on Leeyes, “the water soaked straight in. You’re a gardener, Sloan. You should know that.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Cheaper, too.”

  “We haven’t defined the area that needs searching, sir, yet. Not for the head.”

  Leeyes grunted unhelpfully. “I must say a farm’s a fine place anyway to be looking for ground that’s just been turned. They’re always having a go at it on a farm.”

  “There’s the wood, too, sir,” Sloan reminded him. “There’s som
ething in the wood and the cameras aren’t going to help there.” The wood was one of his worries. He shot out his wrist and looked at his watch. It was too soon for more news from Dr. Dabbe. “What we need is daylight and there won’t be enough of that now until tomorrow.” Some things, though, could go ahead. He’d sent Crosby up to Stanestede Farm and put out a general alert for Tom Mellot. He could explain about Ivor Harbeton to the superintendent, too, if only he would let him.

  He tried again.

  “As I said, sir,” he began smoothly, “the buyer starts the whole thing by building up various small holdings in the company that they want to buy.”

  “Mellot’s Furnishings,” grunted Leeyes. “Go on.”

  “They were cast in the role of victim,” agreed Sloan.

  “And the raptor was Ivor Harbeton’s company, I suppose,” said Leeyes.

  “Beg pardon, sir?”

  “Raptors are birds of prey, Sloan.” One memorable winter the superintendent had attended a series of evening classes on ornithology. This had had two unfortunate results. He became known among the younger constables as the Birdman of Berebury, which was bad for discipline, and he fell out with the Town Council, which had a bylaw prohibiting the feeding of pigeons in public places. This was bad for everyone.

  “The company doing the buying,” Sloan forged on, “hopes that nobody will notice what they are up to.”

  “Ha!”

  “Sometimes,” continued Sloan doggedly, “they even sell some of their holdings, too, to stop anyone becoming suspicious.”

  “Makes larceny seem quite simple, Sloan, doesn’t it?”

  “Some stockbrokers won’t do it,” pointed out Sloan fairly.

  “And some, I suppose,” remarked Leeyes genially, “specialise in it.”

  “It is a white-collar crime,” agreed Sloan tacitly.

  “Fraud usually is,” commented Leeyes at his sagest, “unless you count the three-card trick.”

  Sloan kept steadfastly to the business at hand. “Of course, they don’t do the buying in their own names.”

  “Aliases?” said Leeyes alertly. “Do they use aliases?”

  “They call them nominees,” said Sloan delicately.