Losing Ground Read online

  ‘Not get nothing,’ interrupted Jason Burke. ‘I want it and I mean to have it. You do understand that, Inspector, don’t you?’

  Detective Inspector Sloan understood a number of things. The one that mattered most was that Jason Burke might well be carefully making his feelings so widely known that no one was likely to take any of his involvement with Tolmie Park as other than an innocent wish to fulfil a childhood ambition.

  And of one thing Sloan was quite sure and that was that Jason Burke was not naïve. One thing that could be said for a backstreet upbringing was that a youth matured early.

  ‘So I told Stu here,’ the pop star said, ‘to get our legal eagles to start to look into their side of things. It’ll save time in the long run.’

  In Detective Inspector Sloan’s considerable experience getting involved with lawyers never accelerated anything, but he was going to let this young man find that out for himself.

  Wendy Pullen, a born conspirator, rang Stuart Bellamy back quite quickly. ‘I’ve come back to you with a plan,’ she said, ‘which I’d like to run past you.’ She was ringing him on his mobile phone and still didn’t know who the man was acting for but she was not going to let a little thing like that deter her from doing anything that might help save Tolmie Park – or indeed stop her from taking action right now. ‘I’ll need your help, though.’

  ‘Go on,’ said Stuart Bellamy warily.

  ‘What I think we – that is, I – should do is to issue a press release to let the whole world know that there is a working possibility that Tolmie Park might be reverting to single occupancy.’

  Bellamy considered the idea, well aware that Joe Public was a fickle friend at the best of times – and also at best a potentially dangerous one. A press release could turn out to be the loosest of loose cannons.

  ‘That way,’ she went on before he could speak, ‘the planning people will be made aware that there is another option besides letting the land go for housing – that of a single owner.’

  ‘True.’ Bellamy tried to sound enthusiastic. ‘Not only all the council, of course, but everyone in Berebury.’

  ‘Exactly,’ she said triumphantly. ‘The developer’s argument for getting enabling permission would be dead in the water once everyone knew that there was something else that could be done with the house and land.’

  ‘Public opinion should be on our side, all right,’ he admitted.

  ‘Actually, you never can tell with public opinion,’ she said honestly. ‘Believe it or not, there were people out there who didn’t think the windmill over at Larking worth saving.’

  ‘Never,’ said Stuart Bellamy, who was actually still wondering if Berebury Homes would be more likely to sell to Jason if they thought they wouldn’t get their enabling permission. His brusque rejection by Lionel Perry at his first approach hadn’t been at all encouraging, but, should the council turn Berebury Homes down, a fresh appeal to sell might make a difference.

  ‘Now,’ said Wendy, all businesslike, ‘what I need to know is how much I can say about this man who wants to buy Tolmie Park and restore it to live in without giving too much about him away.’

  ‘He’s a very successful native of the county,’ said Bellamy, choosing his words with care, ‘having been born and bred in Calleshire.’ He was deliberately unspecific about this. Luston was the industrial part of the county that no one ever boasted of coming from. ‘But he is now very well known internationally.’

  ‘Perfect,’ she said. ‘Any family?’

  ‘Not yet,’ said Bellamy.’ He’s still quite young.’

  ‘Better still,’ said Wendy Pullen briskly. ‘That usually means parties.’

  ‘It does, indeed,’ said Bellamy careful not to describe the sort of parties that Jason Burke liked to give.

  ‘And that means work for local people, too,’ she went on happily, ‘unless that is,’ she added suspiciously, struck by a sudden thought, ‘he’s one of those millionaires who has everything sent down from classy London places.’

  ‘No, no, I’m sure not,’ Bellamy hastened to reassure her. ‘Don’t forget he’s a Calleshire boy, born and bred.’

  ‘That’ll be my heading,’ she said delightedly, ‘I’ll get onto it straightaway.’

  Manners might make the man but in the view of Detective Inspector Sloan it was clothes that made the woman. Or, rather, gave an indication of her cast of mind. In his experience backroom women in cardigans were always the ones with the brains. Naturally, this was no reflection on his wife Margaret, whom he particularly liked to see in a certain mid-blue soft wool dress that went so well with her eyes…

  He pulled himself together and pushed further open the glass front door of Arms and the Man, a genealogical research firm in Luston. At first sight the industrial town of Luston seemed a strange place for ancestor-worship but on second thoughts it didn’t. Self-made men often wanted to know about their roots – when they could afford the time and the money, that is.

  The woman there in the cardigan looked up from her desk as the two policemen went in. She was surrounded by the largest tomes Sloan had ever seen.

  ‘We’re trying to find out about a baronet,’ he said, introducing himself.

  ‘That shouldn’t be too difficult, Inspector. The armigerous are usually fairly easy to find.’

  ‘The armigerous?’ Sloan was too old and too experienced to pretend he knew something when he didn’t. It wasted time.

  ‘It means they’re entitled to a coat of arms,’ she said. ‘It’s the poor old ag labs that sometimes can be hard to trace.’

  ‘Ag labs?’ he queried again.

  ‘Agricultural labourers,’ said the genealogist. ‘Families forget that when it came to the census most people were servants of the plough.’

  ‘Quite so.’ Detective Inspector Sloan, who saw himself as a servant of the Crown, expected that one day his son would be asking about his – and his father’s – roots. He must look into it sometime.

  Not now.

  ‘So who was it you were looking for?’ asked the woman in the cardigan.

  ‘Sir Edward Francis Filligree. The eleventh baronet.’

  The head of the woman in the cardigan came up. ‘Ah, yes. The Filligrees of Tolmie. A rather uncommon shield. Lobsters couchant, as I remember and…’

  ‘We know about the lobster shells,’ said Sloan. ‘In the heraldic sense, that is.’ What the police didn’t know was why they should have been laid out on the billiard room floor at Tolmie Park under a pile of butcher’s bones, but this information was not for this woman.

  ‘The Filligrees have owned valuable lobster fishing rights at Edsway over by Kinnisport from way back,’ she said. ‘That’s how the lobsters came to be on their coat of arms.’

  For one glorious moment Sloan allowed himself the private luxury of considering what he, Christopher Dennis Sloan, would have on his shield in the unlikely event of his ever being awarded one. Truncheons rampant? Crossed warrants? Magnifying glasses couchant…

  ‘And why their motto is “le monde est notre homard”,’ she said.

  ‘Come again,’ said Crosby.

  She turned to him. ‘Roughly translated, constable, it means, “The world is our lobster”.’

  Sloan decided that ‘Plod on’ would do for his motto. Short and sweet.

  ‘What is really uncommon about the Filligree shield is that it carries the Escutcheon of Pretence,’ went on the woman in the cardigan. ‘Most interesting.’

  The detective inspector, a man who in his time had come across cases of pretence in plenty, had not known that they could reach a man’s coat of arms and said so. ‘What had the Filligrees been up to, then?’ he asked.

  ‘Marrying money,’ she said austerely. ‘In the eighteenth century.’

  ‘Not a crime.’ Money, he thought, might well explain the later improvements to the house and the landscaping.

  ‘Not a crime,’ she agreed, ‘then or now but essential in the case of some impoverished families.’


  Sloan supposed that working in family history brought about a realism all of its own.

  ‘The vicissitudes of families,’ she said, demonstrating this, ‘usually involve money or sex and when a man marries an heiress…’

  ‘Which is both money and sex,’ put in Crosby, his attention fully engaged at last.

  ‘Then this can show on his shield,’ she said.

  There were feminists whom Sloan knew who would agree with this as only right. Divorce settlements were something else.

  ‘Fancy that,’ said Crosby.

  ‘It’s a small shield,’ explained the genealogist, ‘containing the arms of the heraldic heiress which is placed in the centre of her husband’s arms in their marital achievements.’

  ‘What are marital achievements?’ asked Detective Constable Crosby.

  ‘Do carry on, madam,’ said Sloan swiftly.

  ‘Marrying an heiress, of course,’ she said, ‘can be quite dangerous to the family line.’

  ‘Dangerous?’ said Detective Inspector Sloan before Crosby could ask about this, too. He himself had met – and faced, which wasn’t the same thing – danger in many forms. Marrying an heiress wasn’t one that sprang easily to mind.

  ‘Heiresses come from families with low fertility,’ said the genealogist.

  ‘Stands to reason, doesn’t it?’ said Detective Constable Crosby unexpectedly.

  ‘Quite so,’ said Sloan. ‘Forgive me, madam, but you seem pretty clued up about the Filligrees of Tolmie.’

  ‘It’s rather strange that you should ask about them now, Inspector. Or perhaps it isn’t,’ she said intelligently. ‘Someone else wanted to know, too. About a month or so ago it must have been.’

  ‘Who?’ asked Sloan, while Crosby stirred at his side.

  ‘I’ve got my notes somewhere.’ She made a move towards a stack of files. ‘Ah, here it is…’

  ‘Name?’ persisted Sloan.

  ‘The name he gave,’ she said carefully, ‘was Smith.’

  ‘Surprise, surprise,’ muttered Crosby.

  ‘Address?’ said Sloan.

  She shook her head. ‘He didn’t leave an address.’

  ‘Or telephone number?’ asked Sloan.

  ‘No, he didn’t leave that either. I checked after he’d rung and found that the number had been withheld.’ She made a moue of her lips. ‘We always do this. I’m sorry to say that people sometimes try not to pay for the research we’ve done – especially when they find that they’re not the long-lost child of a duke after all but someone much lower down the social scale.’

  ‘Or the wrong side of the blanket?’ suggested the detective constable helpfully.

  ‘Not necessarily,’ she said, ‘but in that case they often call it baseborn,’ she said. ‘Or the bar sinister if you’re further up the totem pole.’ She turned to Crosby. ‘Among the nobility that means illegitimate. It shows as a line down the left hand side of the family tree.’

  ‘This Mr Smith…’ said Sloan with commendable attention to the matter in hand, although he was tempted to add something about the Devil always entering stage left.

  ‘He just said he’d ring back,’ she said.

  ‘And did he?’ asked Sloan.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ said the competent woman in the cardigan, consulting her file. ‘I made a note that we couldn’t trace the current holder of the title for him and told him so when he rang.’ She closed the file. ‘I’m very sorry that we can’t help you either, gentlemen.’

  ‘Were you able to tell anything about him from his voice?’ Sloan wanted to know.

  ‘No, Inspector. I think I would have remembered if I had.’

  Sloan thought she would, too. He coughed and asked delicately what had happened in the way of payment.

  ‘He asked our charges and the money was in our letterbox the next morning.’

  ‘In cash?’ said Sloan.

  ‘In cash,’ said the woman in the cardigan.

  ‘Is that Detective Inspector Sloan?’ The voice was stilted, formal even. ‘My name is Stratton, Jeremy Stratton, and I am the planning officer of Berebury Council. I am telephoning you on the advice of the council’s legal department.’ The man paused and then went on at something of a rush. ‘To report an attempt at bribery and corruption in connection with Tolmie Park.’

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  ‘Jeremy Stratton, did you say?’ Detective Inspector Sloan turned over yet another new page in his notebook and wrote the name down. He was in the council offices in Berebury High Street.

  ‘That’s right. I’m the planning officer at Berebury Council.’

  ‘Go on,’ said Sloan, mentally adding the crime of attempted bribery and corruption at Tolmie Park to those he already knew about. It was one of the few crimes still in the book where the attempt as well as the achievement of the offence constituted a crime.

  ‘I have received a thinly veiled offer of financial reward over a planning matter in connection with the proposed development out there.’ Stratton sat straight up in his chair, oozing rectitude.

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘An unusual one,’ said Jeremy Stratton.

  ‘In what way unusual?’ Sloan was beginning to feel that he could no longer be surprised by anything about Tolmie Park.

  ‘It’s usually someone wanting their applications granted when they weren’t going to be or fast-tracked if they were.’

  ‘An assisted passage, so to speak?’ suggested the policeman delicately.

  ‘That is so. This one,’ said Jeremy Stratton, ‘was indicating that if I was prepared to advise my committee to delay a planning decision out there, there would be something in it for me.’

  ‘Delay?’ echoed Sloan, surprised.

  ‘Exactly. That’s what’s so unusual.’ His voice stiffened again. ‘I am, in any case, not for sale.’

  ‘Quite,’ said Sloan absently. ‘And would you have any idea at all of who might benefit by delay in this instance?’

  ‘Pressure groups usually find time helps them raise funds and drum up opposition,’ said Stratton astringently.

  ‘I can see that it would,’ conceded Detective Inspector Sloan. They had an equivocal view about time and crime down at the police station: sometimes the way ahead became clearer as time went by, sometimes a speedy resolution shocked the guilty into an admission of guilt.

  And then there were the cold cases, which were something else.

  ‘Time is what ginger groups usually need most to raise public awareness,’ said the planning officer. ‘And, if they can afford it, getting on with briefing counsel and so forth.’ He tightened his lips and said rigidly, ‘They might feel that palm oil might help their cause, but let me tell you, Inspector, that it wouldn’t.’

  ‘Tell me, this approach – when did it come – before or after the fire?’

  ‘Before,’ said Jeremy Stratton. ‘About three weeks ago, actually.’

  ‘Did you report it?’

  ‘Only to our chief executive.’

  ‘How did it come?’ asked Detective Inspector Sloan with gritted teeth: far too many people thought involving the police more trouble than it was worth, which was sometimes a pity.

  ‘By telephone to my office. A muffled voice that I didn’t recognise.’

  ‘Why tell us this now?’ asked Sloan.

  ‘Because I’ve just had another approach – well, threat, actually.’

  ‘Threat?’

  ‘That I would be accused of misfeasance in public office if I didn’t agree to delay matters.’

  ‘Carrying out a legal act illegally?’

  ‘Exactly,’ said Stratton. ‘The man said it was common knowledge that I was a damn sight too friendly with the project officer at Berebury Homes – a man called Derek Hitchin.’

  ‘But you’re just good friends?’ said Detective Inspector Sloan without any inflexion at all.

  ‘Planning officers can’t afford to have friends,’ said Jeremy Stratton bitterly. He added even more bitterly, ‘They do have relations, thoug
h.’

  ‘Cousin?’ suggested Sloan.

  ‘Worse,’ said Stratton. ‘Brother-in-law. Derek Hitchin.’

  ‘Is there anyone else besides a ginger group you can think of who might benefit from delaying a decision at Tolmie Park?’ Sloan asked, making a note.

  Stratton paused before saying, ‘Theoretically, I suppose a firm’s creditors – their suppliers in the ordinary way – if they have them – might prefer new work not to be embarked upon until they were paid for the old.’

  Detective Inspector Sloan, family man and salaried, conscious as always of his mortgage, was glad he didn’t have any other creditors. The finances of the Sloan household were firmly based on the economic philosophy of Mr Wilkins Micawber.

  ‘On the other hand,’ went on the planning officer, ‘the creditors might want an early profit to be made so that they could be paid. I wouldn’t know about that. Not my pigeon.’

  Sloan made a note to check on the finances of Berebury Homes Ltd. It was something he should have done before. ‘Anyone else you can think of?’

  There was a lengthy pause before Stratton said, ‘Strictly speaking it’s not my business but I did hear on the grapevine that Calleshire Construction is considering a takeover of the firm.’

  Sloan took considerable comfort from the fact that the only outfit that could take over from the police in a democracy were the armed forces of the Crown and that only after the introduction of martial law.

  The offer of palm oil, however, was not unknown to the Constabulary either.

  ‘Presumably,’ Sloan advanced with a certain diffidence, ‘your advice to the appropriate planning committee will be based on the application fulfilling certain criteria?’

  ‘I’ll say,’ said Jeremy Stratton vigorously. ‘It’s called a PPG3 and includes the Rural Exemption Plan.’

  ‘Quite,’ said Sloan. Statute law was codified, too.

  Up to a point.

  ‘As amended, of course,’ said Stratton.

  ‘Of course,’ said Sloan. Magna Carta and the Breach of the Peace Act had both been amended now. Not that anyone was the better for that.

  ‘Planning Policy Guidance Notes, which is what they are. They’re guidance from central government to local planning authorities.’