Parting Breath Read online

  Sloan grunted. Love wasn’t the only thing that laughed at locksmiths. ‘So you think he found what he was looking for?’

  ‘In the last book,’ continued Crosby tenaciously.

  ‘That was where I came in,’ snarled Sloan. ‘Remember?’

  ‘I think that the last book, sir, was’ – Sloan heard him rustle the pages of a notebook – ‘called Catch-22, by Joseph Heller.’

  ‘Was it?’ Sloan ground his teeth. He must have babies on the brain. Why in the world when he came to name two books to Crosby, of all people, did a pair of children’s ones come unbidden into his mind? At this rate he’d be the laughing-stock of the force long before his baby was born. With an effort he brought his mind back to the job in hand. ‘Anything obviously missing?’

  ‘Miss Moleyns says not that she knows about. Mind you,’ qualified the constable, ‘she’s in no real state to say. Not now. She’s wandering about the house still trying to take it all in, poor woman.’

  ‘First the boy, then the house,’ said Sloan, glad that Crosby was at least a man of feeling. They had some men on the strength without compassion. After a while you didn’t know which cases to put them on. The public, of course, thought they knew which they had.

  Traffic.

  ‘That’s right,’ said Crosby, oblivious of this.

  ‘Fingerprints?’ asked Sloan from force of habit.

  ‘Not so much as a smudge,’ said Crosby. ‘A real professional job.’

  ‘Just like the murder,’ said Sloan, unsurprised. ‘What in the name of goodness is a man who knows how as well as that doing at a university?’

  ‘Aftercare?’ suggested Crosby.

  ‘They do have some dotty schemes,’ said Sloan grimly, ‘but I don’t think they are as daft as that yet.’ The despairing part was that you could never be sure with do-gooders. Never.

  ‘I’ve heard,’ said Crosby, ‘that the Russians go in for rehabilitation in a big way.’

  ‘That,’ retorted Sloan smartly, ‘only goes to show that you shouldn’t believe all that you heard.’

  ‘No, sir.’ He coughed. ‘Shall I stay on here?’

  ‘No. What I want you to do, Crosby, is to lay on someone from Luston to keep an eye on things over there – particularly Miss Moleyns – until morning and for you to make your way back here.’

  To help Battling Bertha, sir?’

  ‘It doesn’t look as if she needs it.’

  ‘She never has,’ said Crosby.

  ‘I wasn’t thinking about her being a fine figure of a woman,’ said Sloan: the Amazons had certainly made their mark on the world.

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘It’s just that no one’s been near the sanatorium so far.’

  ‘Someone didn’t need to worry about Moleyns’ last words, then, did they, sir?’

  ‘He’d got eyes, Crosby,’ said Sloan irritably. ‘He wasn’t stabbed in the back. He must have seen who did it.’

  ‘If he did,’ insisted Crosby doggedly, ‘then he didn’t know them, sir, did he, or he would have said, wouldn’t he, to that girl who found him.’

  ‘Bridget Hellewell,’ said Sloan, following the convolutions of the sentence as best he could.

  ‘Instead of what he did say,’ said Crosby.

  ‘Did you try the words “twenty-six minutes” on the aunt?’

  ‘Yes, sir. They didn’t mean a thing to her.’

  ‘Nor to me,’ said Sloan, adding obscurely, ‘nor to anyone else we’ve asked, which by no means means that it doesn’t mean anything at all.’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘On the contrary,’ said Sloan, thinking as he said it that he was beginning to sound like one of the dons himself. (He put this down, quite illogically, to his sybaritic surroundings.)

  ‘Yes, sir.’ Crosby cleared his throat. ‘Sir …’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘There was one thing.’

  ‘It is already late,’ remarked Sloan, ‘so if you would get to the point.’

  ‘I asked Miss Moleyns for a photograph of the deceased, like you said.’

  Sloan had made it standard practice years ago. Sometimes photographs were more than relatives could bear. They went home from the police mortuary and tore them up. All of them. Straight away.

  ‘Well?’ he asked.

  ‘She went to have a look and then what with the chaos everywhere she didn’t quite know where to begin.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So she said that of course there would be one in his passport and she did know where he kept that.’

  Sloan groaned. ‘Don’t tell me …’

  ‘It wasn’t there,’ said Crosby.

  ‘Was it here, then?’ said Sloan. ‘In his room at Tarsus?’

  ‘No,’ said Crosby positively. ‘I would have found it if it had been there.’

  Sloan conceded this at once. ‘This place that Henry Moleyns kept it …’

  ‘Top drawer of the little desk in his room,’ said Crosby promptly.

  ‘So that, at least, would have been found straight away.’

  ‘If it was there.’ Crosby was beginning to argue like a professor, too, now: taking nothing for granted.

  ‘And it wasn’t the passport that was in the book?’ Had it really been Catch-22?

  ‘No. The aunt thinks the passport was in the drawer the day after Henry Moleyns went back to University. She tidied the room after he’d gone and put something else in the drawer. She can’t swear to it but she’s almost sure she noticed the passport then.’

  ‘He’d been somewhere, then,’ concluded Sloan flatly. ‘Crosby, do you realise that this means …’

  The quiet of the don’s room at Tarsus and the ordered business-like tenor of Detective Inspector Sloan’s telephone conversation with his constable in Luston were interrupted by the alien sound of the bleep of Sloan’s personal radio. He put the telephone down and turned his attention to the new speaker.

  It was Police Constable Carpenter calling him up from the darkness of the bushes near the University Sanatorium.

  His voice came over full of suppressed excitement.

  ‘Someone came out of the Tarsus quadrangle, sir. About a minute ago. He kept out of the light – he took good care about that, so I can’t tell you anything about him … then he disappeared along the edge of the building.… I couldn’t see where he went after that … ah … oh …’

  There was an indeterminate sound that could have been a scuffle.

  ‘Carpenter!’ snapped Sloan urgently.

  There was another confused sound that could have been anything at all and then the radio went quite dead.

  14 Corps-à-corps

  His son would play on the wing. He was sure about that now.

  At various times in the past few months Sloan had toyed with the idea that it might be in other positions on the Rugby field. After all, the halves held the team together and the centres were vital to good play and it was universally agreed that nobody could easily do without a stouthearted full-back.

  But it was as he bolted out of the room at Tarsus that was doing duty as a murder headquarters and shot down the corridor towards the College quadrangle at great speed that he finally decided that his unborn son would play as a wing three-quarter.

  As he reached the quadrangle he was confronted with the same choice that several other people had had to make before him earlier that evening: whether to cross the quadrangle diagonally in the dark, which was quicker, or to go round the two sides of the square, which were the better lit.

  He hesitated there for a split second, highly conscious of all the others who had also had to choose between the same two options that day. What they had decided then had made a difference. For one thing, it had made a difference to what had been found and when.

  Bridget Hellewell for one. Her choice had been to go round the quadrangle and the consequence of her making that particular choice had been the discovery of a dying man: a dying man whose last words had not been to name his murderer, a dying man
whose last words had been confusing, to say the least.

  Miss Hilda Linaker for another.

  The don had opted for the shorter route across the quadrangle because she was not frightened of the dark, because she was as familiar with Tarsus by night as by day, because … because … because … He didn’t really know what had prompted her selection.

  Polly Mantle, too.

  Polly Mantle, who seemed to be totally unconnected with anybody or anything in the situation, had entered upon the scene at that moment. Superintendent Leeyes – or rather William Shakespeare – would have underlined that with a stage direction: like ‘enter Ghost, armed.’ That had been the Superintendent’s favourite in Hamlet. Sloan’s own choice, when magnanimously offered it by the Superintendent, had been ‘enter two Clowns, with spades,’ but Polly Mantle had just appeared without benefit of playwright, so to speak. She had, apparently quite fortuitously, met up with Miss Linaker and set off with her across the quadrangle. This, the essential policeman in Sloan told him, could mean practically anything at all – or nothing.

  The spin-off of the selection made by the distaff side had been the finding of the property which had been taken from Colin Ellison’s room the night before, and thereby the helping to pin-point the time at which all of it had been left by the fountain. The books and papers had not been there for very long – or they would indubitably have been discovered earlier. Stephen Smithers, for instance, would have seen them as he scuttled by.

  Smithers was another whose choice had made a difference. The boy with hay-fever and a face like a rabbit’s had passed this way, too, at what court reporters would always insist on calling the material time. Sloan flipped back in his mind what Smithers had said in the same way that readers turn over the pages of a book looking for what they remember reading. Smithers had said that he had seen – among others – Colin Ellison as he crossed the quadrangle to the Madrigal and Glee Club meeting.

  Sloan called Colin Ellison to mind without difficulty. What was more difficult about Colin Ellison was placing him in a picture which included murder. Colin Ellison, victim of temporary and apparently meaningless theft, pacifist and active non-demonstrator – if such a hybrid animal existed, clever dick (had that – could that – expression possibly be associated with the police or was he getting fanciful now?) – a habitual late-for-supper man, who, whatever he was telling them about ‘where he was and when,’ wasn’t telling them the truth. Colin Ellison had been in the vicinity of the quadrangle, too, though, at about half past seven.

  And did half past seven really mean twenty-six minutes past? Sloan didn’t know.

  Another face swam into his mind.

  Henry Moleyns.

  Not for one moment had Detective Inspector Sloan forgotten Henry Moleyns. The dead student, too, had exercised his option. In mid-step Sloan wondered why Moleyns had gone round and not across the quadrangle: and then the answer came to him. There hadn’t been any need for a real choice on Moleyns’ part, not when he came to think of it. The Chaplain’s office whither he was bound was to be reached only down that side of the quadrangle if Moleyns had been approaching – and a hundred to one he had been – from the Porters’ Lodge and the main part of the College. There would probably have been no need for Henry Moleyns to have decided that one at all.

  And that would have made the choice of someone else quite easy.

  The murderer.

  Sloan hadn’t forgotten the murderer, either. He was prepared to bet now that the murderer had known which way Henry Moleyns would come because he reckoned that the murderer knew all about the appointment with the Chaplain. Just as the murderer had known enough about Moleyns’ attempt to see the Professor of Modern History to abstract the letter making that appointment from the student’s pigeon-hole. Someone hadn’t wanted Moleyns to see Professor Watkinson and had no intention of letting him see the Chaplain, either.

  But by letting that appointment with the Reverend C. A. T. Pollock stand, that person had known exactly which way his victim would come and almost as precisely when.

  All this was no more than a few quick flashes through Sloan’s mind – which was by now thoroughly awakened – as he pounded towards the quadrangle from his murder headquarters. In the event, he himself went round, not across – his son would be a winger all right – speed was the thing and the quadrangle was faintly better lit. Bridget Hellewell had been right about this – and he didn’t want to end up in the fountain with the goldfish.

  As he sped along the paving stones towards the far end where the quadrangle yielded to the archway that led to the grounds and then to the sanatorium beyond, Sloan felt for his torch. He had it in his hand before he decided not to switch it on. Instead he put a brake on his run and listened. Then he came out of the lighted quadrangle both cautiously and quietly.

  He moved out into the night himself and waited for a moment until he could see better.

  There were no flashing lights that he could see and no sounds coming from anywhere in the grounds. He glanced quickly up to the sanatorium window. There were no lights on there and no shouting or other disturbance emanating from that direction. It looked as though Battling Bertha was undisturbed – for the time being, anyway.

  Once his eyes had adjusted themselves and he had orientated himself in the near-darkness, he looked towards the spot where he had last seen Constable Carpenter and started to make his way towards that. With Red Indian stealth, he put one foot in front of the other, keeping the tree that he had noticed earlier well in view. It was as he approached it that he heard a most curious sound – a sort of slapping.

  He could see better now.

  There was a figure supine on the ground and another figure bending over it: doing something.

  Sloan changed his mind about his son being a wing three-quarter at much the same time as he launched himself in the direction of both figures. There was no doubt about it. His boy was going to be a scrum half.

  ‘Got you!’ he said, landing fairly and squarely on the upper figure of the two.

  ‘But I didn’t mean to hurt him,’ gasped Colin Ellison, from under the weight of a well-built Detective Inspector of Police. ‘Honestly!’

  ‘Let me see, now,’ said Superintendent Leeyes heavily, ‘Colin Ellison is the one who claimed to be a pacifist, isn’t he?’

  ‘He is,’ agreed Sloan: Constable Carpenter was going to require quite a bit of convincing on that point.

  The night was really getting on now but he had known that Leeyes wouldn’t have gone home. Nor would he have come to the scene of the crime, of course. That sort of work he always insisted was routine and, like all routine work, best left to those used to doing it. ‘The greatest danger to good investigation,’ he would pronounce in rare moments of expansion, ‘is the fingerprints of top brass who are underfoot.’ Sloan agreed with the sentiment, however expressed, and had telephoned him at the Berebury Police Station confident that he would still he there.

  ‘Hardly a progress report, is it, Sloan?’ he remarked unhelpfully when he had heard the story through.

  ‘He hit Carpenter,’ said Slogan doggedly.

  ‘That means something,’ agreed Leeyes, ‘but what?’

  ‘He says that he just stumbled on him in the dark, didn’t know who he was or what he was doing there and hit him to be on the safe side before Carpenter had time to clobber him.’

  ‘Assaulting a police officer in the execution of his duty,’ intoned Leeyes.

  ‘He said,’ murmured Sloan neutrally, tempering what the angry student had naturally declared with great vigour, ‘that he couldn’t be expected to know that a man sitting under a tree on a dark night contemplating he knew not what was a police officer executing his duty or anything else.’

  ‘For a pacifist he must have packed quite a punch,’ observed Leeyes appreciatively. ‘Carpenter’s a big man. Mind you, remember some of the peace lovers on some of those early nuclear protest marches.…’

  ‘Carpenter can’t remember what hit h
im,’ said Sloan, ‘but he’s still cross.’

  Cross constables never had disturbed the Superintendent: he’d never have been promoted if they had. ‘And what,’ he asked, ‘does Ellison say he was doing in the College grounds at this hour of the night?’

  There was always this feeling in police minds that what went on after dark as opposed to in daylight needed a second look. The law had taken note of the difference, too.…

  ‘He won’t say,’ answered Sloan. It was, in fact, the only point that the student was prepared to be silent on. ‘He just tells me that he doesn’t have to answer any enquiries that are put to him or to make a statement if he doesn’t want to or to come to the Police Station unless charged.’

  ‘That’s what education does for you,’ said Leeyes. ‘I always said it was a bad thing.’

  Sloan wondered if he should point out that it was Judges’ Rules that did that for you but decided against it.

  ‘What about your set-up in the sanatorium?’ enquired the Superintendent.

  ‘No one’s been near the place,’ said Sloan, still puzzled about this. ‘Smith and Collet and the others heard Carpenter on their radios and were on their toes waiting for the attack –’

  ‘I remember waiting before we went ashore at Walcheren, Sloan –’

  ‘And it didn’t come,’ interposed Sloan swiftly. ‘If Ellison was meaning to get into the sanatorium, all I can say is that he didn’t go ahead. He told me he just bent over Carpenter, slapping his face, and was trying to bring him round. That’s when I found him.’

  ‘Would he,’ asked Leeyes with great pertinence, ‘have had time to get back to Berebury and attack Carpenter after turning over Henry Moleyns’ aunt’s house in Luston?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Sloan unhesitatingly. ‘It’s not all that far. You’d need transport, of course.’

  That was one of the things he should be getting someone to look into now: he needed to know who of all those they were concerned about had the means to get over to Luston from Berebury. Not, of course, he reminded himself, that he had had all that much time to spare since Constable Crosby had rung.