Amendment of Life Page 14

  ‘Can’t think of everything,’ said that worthy blithely.

  ‘That’s just where’re you’re wrong, Crosby,’ he said sternly. ‘You have to in this job, and the sooner you realize that the better.’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ Crosby said with unusual meekness. ‘What exactly am I checking?’

  ‘When all this nonsense with rabbit’s bones and pentagrams started and whether anyone else heard the goat bleating while Collins was there on Sunday evening. The Bishop said he didn’t.’

  ‘The Bishop’s wife heard it the next morning,’ the Constable said.

  ‘That’s different.’ Sloan sat up. ‘And your goat lady didn’t miss Aries until the morning, did she?’

  ‘Not for certain.’ Crosby wrinkled his brow. ‘All she said was that she thought she would have missed Aries if he hadn’t been there.’

  ‘Suppose’, said Sloan slowly, ‘the goat hadn’t been put into the Canon’s garden until much later—’

  ‘Then David Collins couldn’t have heard it,’ said Crosby, puzzled. ‘But he said he heard it.’

  ‘Exactly, Crosby. He said he heard it, but we don’t know for certain that he did. We have no real proof that he heard it or that anyone else did until the next day, have we?’

  ‘We don’t need proof, do we, sir? We already know that David Collins was there then. The Bishop and the Dean saw him.’

  ‘Or someone impersonating him.’ As Detective Inspector Sloan pushed his hands against the edges of his desk to get to his feet, his telephone rang.

  Detective Constable Crosby picked it up.

  ‘It’s the Superintendent, sir,’ he said to Sloan. ‘He wants to see you now.’

  * * *

  ‘Milly, are you there?’

  ‘Yes, Miss Daphne, I’m here. Is there something you want?’

  ‘Milly, I’m a daft old woman who’s lived too long.’

  ‘No, you’re not, Miss Daphne,’ said the carer stoutly.

  ‘And I should have been dead years ago. Easier for everyone.’

  ‘No, you shouldn’t, Miss Daphne.’

  ‘I’ve been very silly.’

  ‘Not you…’

  ‘Yes, me. I should have realized that everything was getting too much for Master Bevis.’

  ‘He’s still young,’ said Milly indulgently.

  ‘Young?’ Daphne Pedlinge almost reared up in her wheelchair. ‘Why, when I was half his age—’

  ‘That’s part of the problem, Miss Daphne.’ Milly Smithers struggled to put her thoughts into acceptable words. ‘You’d grown up – had to, more’s the pity – by the time you were as old as Master Bevis is now.’

  The old woman grunted.

  ‘He’s still a little boy who wants everyone to be happy,’ said Milly.

  ‘He’s let everything get him down,’ snorted the old lady unsympathetically. ‘And that’s no good in this life. It doesn’t do, you know. No matter what.’

  ‘Master Bevis doesn’t know yet that everyone can’t all be happy. Not at the same time, anyway. Specially that Amanda.’

  ‘Hrmmph. As for Amanda…’

  ‘I dare say’, said Milly percipiently, ‘when he married her he thought she was just a bit of fluff and she isn’t.’

  ‘She’s pure steel,’ said the pot, paying due tribute to the kettle.

  ‘There you are, then,’ said Milly. ‘You don’t really think he had anything to do with the dead woman in the maze, do you, Miss Daphne?’

  ‘Certainly not. He wouldn’t hurt a fly,’ said his great-aunt, spoiling any suspicion of benevolence by adding, ‘that’s his trouble.’

  * * *

  ‘We’re just checking on one or two points, miss,’ said Detective Inspector Sloan to Sharon Gibbons when he and Crosby got to the offices of Double Felix Ltd. ‘Going over the same ground again, you might say.’ In a bruising encounter with him before he had left the police station, Superintendent Leeyes had called the proposed interview something very different when Sloan had suggested it. But he did not mention this to the secretary.

  ‘I’m afraid there’s nobody here but me,’ she said apologetically. ‘Poor David isn’t coming in today, of course, and Eric’s gone over to Aumerle Court to see what he can do about their sound and lighting production instead. Time’s getting very short, you see, and it’s important.’

  ‘So it’s quite soon, is it, miss, this effort of theirs?’

  She nodded. ‘It’s already being heavily advertised, that’s the trouble. “A Pageant of Light”, it’s called. David had naturally done a lot of the work beforehand, that is before…’ Her voice fell away and she became silent.

  ‘What sort of work?’ he asked encouragingly. As things stood, the Criminal Investigation Department of ‘F’ Division at Berebury was interested in anything – but anything – that David Collins had done at Aumerle Court beforehand or not.

  She stared at Sloan. ‘Why, designing and preparing the lighting circuits, of course. And setting them up. That’s his job.’

  ‘I’m afraid, miss, I don’t understand your sort of thing.’ In a lifetime in the Police Force Sloan had always found a statement of ignorance – genuine or assumed – to be a very real help. ‘Tell me what it’s all about.’

  Sharon Gibbons sat back, ready to explain exactly what it was that Double Felix did. Her own mother didn’t quite understand either, so she chose her words with care. ‘We make lighting do what we want,’ she said with a simplicity which would have appealed to Michael Faraday himself. ‘You know, bend it, throw it about, make it come up here and there.’ She looked from Sloan’s deliberately uncomprehending face to Crosby’s genuinely uninterested one and tried again. ‘Make things seem to be there when they’re not really … if you understand.’

  ‘I understand,’ breathed Detective Inspector Sloan.

  ‘They’re going to have a pretend Cavalier…’ Sharon warmed to her theme as Sloan got to his feet. ‘And a Roundhead…’

  ‘Come along, Crosby,’ he commanded.

  ‘It’s called a hologram,’ she called out after them.

  But the two policemen had gone and, just like the characters in Shakespeare’s play Macbeth, they had not stood upon the order of their going.

  Chapter Eighteen

  ‘And he didn’t resist arrest?’ enquired Superintendent Leeyes with professional interest.

  ‘He came very quietly,’ said Detective Inspector Sloan.

  ‘That can be a bad sign, Sloan.’

  ‘Yes, sir, I know.’ It wasn’t a case of ‘eenie, meanie, miney, mo’ any longer. Not now he knew exactly how David Collins could for all intents and purposes have appeared to have been in one place when at the same time he had actually been somewhere else.

  ‘Did he say anything?’ The Superintendent was a great believer in noting down the first response of the accused to a charge: usually to be used in evidence against them.

  ‘He seemed resigned – no, that’s the wrong word, sir.’ He frowned. ‘More satisfied.’

  ‘Satisfied that he’d killed his wife?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Because she’d had an affair?’

  Sloan shook his head. ‘No, no, sir. Not just for that. I don’t mean that that’s insufficient reason,’ he added hastily, since the Superintendent’s views on the sanctity of marriage were widely known. Or, perhaps, they were his wife’s views …

  ‘What then?’ Leeyes sniffed.

  ‘For making him have a vasectomy in case he carried a gene for the child’s condition, when he wasn’t the father of the child concerned.’

  The Superintendent leaned back in his chair and puffed out his cheeks. ‘As motives for murder go, Sloan,’ he said judiciously, ‘it would command a lot of sympathy from a male jury.’

  ‘It’s as good as any I’ve met,’ agreed Detective Inspector Sloan, husband and parent.

  ‘He wasn’t tempted to make away with Captain Prosser as well, do you suppose?’

  ‘We can’t be absolutely sure of th
is, sir, but it is entirely possible that Collins didn’t know that Prosser was the father of James.’ Sloan flipped over a page in his notebook. ‘According to the interviews we’ve conducted, the only genetic information that Collins can possibly have been given was that he was not the father of James. Not who was.’

  ‘It’s a wise child who knows its own father,’ observed the Superintendent.

  ‘Obviously the tests don’t extend as far as that and Prosser is adamant that Collins didn’t know he was the guilty party.’ He looked up. ‘Their continued working and social relationship would tend to confirm that.’

  ‘No struggle, then?’ The Superintendent sounded disappointed.

  ‘No, sir.’ A struggle and a heated denial – or better still, the spilling of beans – were seen as welcome indicators of guilt by some law enforcers. ‘As I said, he came very quietly.’

  ‘You’re quite sure of your case, I hope, Sloan?’

  ‘Quite sure, sir.’

  ‘And the charade with the Minotaur over at Aumerle Court?’

  ‘Miss Daphne, I mean Miss Pedlinge, explained that. It was part of his plan to make his wife’s death seem like suicide as well as creating a time-frame. So was the nearly empty cup of sedative. Reaching the centre of the maze is a metaphor for death.’

  Leeyes grunted.

  ‘And if he hadn’t bumped her face on the stone as he laid her there, he might well have got away with it.’ Detective Inspector Sloan, upholder of the law, had to admit this.

  ‘Manhandling an unconscious woman takes a bit of doing,’ agreed Leeyes as if it was something he did every day. ‘How did you say Collins rigged his famous alibi over at Calleford?’

  ‘In several ways, sir. Firstly, he said he had seen the Bishop and the Dean walking past, talking together, after Evensong.’

  ‘Not unlikely that they would, I suppose,’ admitted Leeyes grudgingly.

  ‘They’d done it every Sunday since the Dean lost his wife and the Bishop’s wife gave him supper. I expect Collins had checked on this. Then Collins mentioned to his partner that he’d heard a goat bleating when he hadn’t actually tethered the goat there until much later on in the night. Nobody else heard it until the morning, but the presumption was that he and the goat had both been there earlier.’

  ‘Can’t abide goats myself,’ said Leeyes irrelevantly. ‘And what else?’

  ‘A very clever set-up indeed, sir. He fixed up a hologram image of himself just inside the entrance to the slype at the Minster, working off a time-switch.’

  ‘Ah, a hologram.’ The Superintendent nodded sagely. ‘Tell me, how precisely will you explain that to the Crown Prosecution Service?’

  ‘Easy, sir.’ He grinned. ‘As a way of producing with laser beams a three-dimensional image that isn’t there.’ The Crown Prosecution Service probably wouldn’t need it explaining to them. He was prepared to bet, though, that the Superintendent did. He coughed. ‘DC Crosby came quite near to guessing the answer early on.’

  ‘Crosby?’ echoed Leeyes in patent disbelief.

  ‘He suggested that it had been done with mirrors.’ For a delicious moment Sloan toyed with the idea of saying that this reflected great credit on Crosby, too, but decided against it. Instead he went on, ‘Collins, who is, of course, a very highly skilled lighting engineer, set up the hologram gear on the Sunday after he’d dumped his unconscious wife over at Aumerle Court and on the Monday morning he dismantled it all, loaded the equipment on to his van and took it away again under everyone’s eyes.’

  ‘I suppose there was no one there who would have recognized it anyway, if they had happened to spot it,’ said Leeyes loftily.

  ‘Almost certainly not for what it was, if they had,’ agreed Sloan. ‘The firm of Double Felix had been asked to put lighting in that area anyway, and I doubt if anyone at the Minster would have suspected anything.’

  ‘In my experience’, said the Superintendent largely, ‘the clergy aren’t good with material things.’

  ‘No, sir.’

  The clergy were good on logic, though.

  Very good.

  * * *

  ‘I take it, Inspector,’ said the Bishop a little later, ‘that the – er – unChristian intrusions into the gardens in the Close were part and parcel of the man’s attempt to establish an alibi – the pentagram, dead rabbit and so forth?’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ said Sloan.

  ‘And the goat?’

  ‘That, too. We reckon that this was all a meticulously planned affair. He starts to distribute all these symbolic … er … anti-Christian artefacts around the Close a week or so earlier so that you would take action on the assumption that some group or other was attacking the Church…’

  ‘I’m afraid that does happen from time to time, Inspector,’ said Bertram Wallingford gravely.

  ‘Which strengthened the likelihood of your getting something more done about the lighting,’ said Sloan.

  ‘True.’ The Bishop gazed round the ancient Close. ‘I fear that this man Collins must have felt a very deep hatred of his wife to have done all this, not in the heat of the moment, so to speak, but after much thought and calculation.’

  ‘He did,’ said Sloan simply.

  ‘And at a time when his child was so ill. My wife knew all about that from the nursery school, you know.’ He looked across the Close. ‘I’m sorry she’s not here now, but she’s just gone out to buy me a new dressing gown.’

  ‘I’m afraid the illness had something to do with it,’ said Sloan. ‘We’re only just beginning to put the whole story together, but we think that James’s illness was the catalyst…’ He stopped. ‘No, not the catalyst – that’s when something happens that leaves the agent of change unchanged itself, isn’t it?’

  ‘It is.’ Bertram Wallingford said, ‘I think the word you may be looking for is synergist. Where the combined action of the parts is greater than the sum of the individual parts and both are changed in the process.’

  ‘Then I’m not sure,’ Sloan said honestly.

  ‘I thought that was the marriage value,’ put in Detective Constable Crosby unexpectedly.

  ‘Anyway,’ Sloan struggled to get back to the matter in hand, ‘the significant thing was that James’s particular illness can have an hereditary component…’

  ‘So my wife tells me,’ said the Bishop. ‘She’d taken an interest in the family since she heard about his eye.’

  ‘As a consequence of which’, continued Sloan carefully, ‘David Collins took steps to see that he didn’t have any more children.’ The Greeks probably had a word for this: Shakespeare had simply caused Richard III to declare among his other physical deficiencies, ‘I, that am rudely stamp’d, and want love’s majesty’, which was explicit enough.

  The Bishop of Calleford nodded. ‘That is quite understandable in the circumstances.’

  ‘But,’ plodded on Sloan, ‘in the course of James’s treatment he then found out quite conclusively that he wasn’t James’s father.’

  The Bishop raised both his hands in front of him in a gesture that might have been a blessing. ‘That would be a very difficult one for any man – especially a husband – to live with,’ he conceded.

  ‘It seems that the parents had both gone in for some genetic testing after the child’s diagnosis had been made and this got married up with the results of some similar examinations the hospital had done on the boy.’ Detective Inspector Sloan had moved from considering a little learning being a bad thing, to deciding that even more learning was an even worse thing. Medical science and doctors could go too far.

  ‘That was when the situation changed, I take it?’ said Bertram Wallingford quietly.

  ‘And the rot set in,’ supplemented Crosby.

  The Bishop of Calleford said almost petulantly, ‘I do wish people would leave vengeance to the Lord. The Bible tells us clearly that it is His. Quite clearly.’

  * * *

  ‘So, Inspector,’ concluded the old lady at Aumerle Court, ‘my great-nephew w
as simply not up to the pressures of today and sought consolation elsewhere.’

  ‘They don’t make them like they used to, Miss Pedlinge,’ said the policeman.

  ‘True, very true.’ She swung her wheelchair away from him and stared out at the maze. ‘And I should therefore be tempering the wind to the shorn lamb, should I? Is that what you’re saying?’

  ‘To two shorn lambs, madam…’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘I think you will find your agent a somewhat chastened man.’

  ‘Ha! So he comes into this debacle, too, does he?’

  ‘We don’t know to what extent and he declines to tell us anything more.’

  ‘At least one person round here can keep their mouth shut—’

  ‘Now, Miss Daphne…’ began Milly Smithers.

  ‘But there is a rumour going around,’ said Sloan carefully, ‘just a rumour, mind you, that Captain Prosser has made himself responsible for the expenses of little James Collins’s upbringing.’

  Detective Inspector Sloan found himself the recipient of prolonged scrutiny from a pair of shrewd old eyes. ‘That, Inspector, is what I would call really confusing the issue.’ She gave a high cackle.

  ‘In both senses,’ agreed Sloan appreciatively.

  ‘So I’ve got to be kind to him, too, have I?’

  ‘Now, Miss Daphne,’ said Milly Smithers, ‘there’s no call for you to get excited.’

  ‘More’s the pity,’ said the figure in the wheelchair.

  * * *

  Eric Paterson swung round on his swivel chair at the offices of Double Felix to face the two policemen. ‘I was beginning to wonder about David myself, Inspector, and then when Sharon told me you’d taken off at the mere mention of holograms, I guessed, too.’

  ‘If you would explain a little more about them it might help,’ said Sloan.

  ‘I’ll say,’ said Crosby.

  Paterson tilted his chair back. ‘It’s essentially a photograph produced without a lens, by the interference between two split laser beams, which … oh, good, coffee. Thanks, Sharon … sugar, anyone?’