Passing Strange Page 14

  13

  Vox angelica

  Detective-Constable Crosby did not like the press. He sat, unmoved and unmoving, through the press conference at the Police Station.

  Detective-Inspector Sloan did not like press conferences, especially when he was giving them. He was conscious that it was something that he did not do well. The sight of men from the papers writing down what he had just said sent cold shivers down his spine. There were glamour boys in the Force who liked nothing better than to trip out into the limelight and exchange witty backchat with the gentlemen of the press but Sloan was not one of them. Superintendent Leeyes, that wily old administrator, never gave Press Conferences at all.

  “It was murder,” Sloan said to the assembled throng.

  He realized immediately that it was a bad beginning. They knew it was murder: that was why they had come. Robbery with violence sometimes drew them – if the robbery was big enough and the violence on a grand scale. Treason and rumour of treason, he was happy to say, still brought the press out in its hordes. Perhaps that was something that that crusty diehard Superintendent Leeyes should be grateful for.

  “Murder,” he repeated shortly. “No doubt about that at all.”

  A barrage of questions was promptly shot at him.

  He gave them the bare facts.

  That didn’t do at all.

  What the press wanted was the varnish as well.

  “No,” he said in answer to the loudest question of all, “there was no evidence at all of there having been any sexual attack on the victim.”

  That usually cooled things a little.

  “She was middle-aged,” he added.

  That always cooled things a lot. Attacks on the young and the old usually touched a chord. The middle-aged were expected both to know better and to look after themselves.

  “And unmarried,” he said dampeningly.

  That cut out a whole range of cynical questions about where the husband of the deceased was said to have been at the time of the murder.

  ‘Village spinster,’ wrote one reporter without having stepped foot in Almstone.

  “She was a nurse,” Sloan informed them.

  The press brightened visibly at that. The word ‘nurse’ went well on a headline. It was short and every reader knew what it meant. Moreover it conjured up instant images of nubile young girls. That this image would be dispelled in the fourth paragraph troubled the newspapermen not a jot. Survey after survey assured them that only a fifth of their readership ever followed a story beyond the third paragraph.

  Sloan carried on in a matter-of-fact voice, “She’d been the District Nurse at Almstone for over twenty years.”

  The reporter who had written ‘village spinster’ in his notebook crossed it out and wrote ‘much loved visitor to every home’ instead.

  “Motive?” called out someone quick-thinking from one of the dailies. The specialized Sunday newspapers – those, that is, which specialized in the seamy side of life – had only sent their stringers along. Today’s issue had been on the streets for hours. By next Sunday the murder of Joyce Cooper might be over and done with. The local weekly paper did not come out until Friday. Its reporter, too, had plenty of time in which to see how events turned out. The dailies hadn’t.

  “What do you know about motive?” repeated the man.

  “The murder,” said Sloan, “was apparently motiveless.”

  Might he be forgiven.

  ‘Police Puzzled,’ wrote one newspaperman.

  ‘Senseless Killing,’ put down another.

  “Nobody loose?” asked another man laconically. He drafted a tentative headline on his notepad; ‘Mad Killer At Large?’

  “Not that we know about,” said Sloan. “We’ve done a quick check, naturally.”

  There had indeed been a few police-inspired roll-calls in places where those known to find women’s necks irresistible were in custody of one sort or another.

  “Funny sort of place for a murder,” said a reporter too young to know that murders were committed in all sorts of places. “A flower show.”

  “The setting was unusual,” admitted Sloan unwillingly. He launched into a description of Madame Zelda and her Fortune Teller’s tent.

  “Any sign of the Ace of Spades?”

  Sloan ignored this. Instead he expanded on the colourful disguise worn by the District Nurse.

  One journalist had already started to write his story. ‘Bizarre killing …’

  The man from the big daily still had his eye on the ball. “Clues?”

  “Not many,” said Sloan cautiously. The newspapermen reminded him of the birds of the raptor family: hawks poised above their petrified prey, coming down to strike in their own good time.

  “Would it be accurate to say that the police are baffled?” asked a man with a high nasal voice who had a reputation for being able to needle ill-advised comment out of the calmest of men.

  “The police,” rejoined Sloan evenly, “are pursuing their enquiries.”

  The time-honoured reply did not satisfy the man.

  “But are they making any progress?” said his would-be tormentor. “Are they getting anywhere? How far have they got anyway?”

  “Not very far,” said Sloan. That was genuine enough. So far he could say that he knew a lot about one girl’s claim to an estate and very little about a murdered woman and not even if the two were connected at all.

  “Got anyone in mind?” said another man. His paper carried no words of more than three syllables if it could possibly help it. This naturally led to a certain simplicity of approach by its staff.

  “Not yet.” Sloan shelved his conscience with the thought that Richenda Mellows couldn’t have stolen the reel of wire because she was in custody at the time. He didn’t exclude complicity, though. That would account for the total silence she had kept up since she heard about the death: complicity between her and some person or persons unknown.

  “What’s your next step, Inspector?” called out a third man. His copy had to be written to the reading level of a twelve-year-old child. His paper’s circulation was enormous.

  “My next step,” said Sloan swiftly, “is the reconstruction of the murder.” He wondered if this was what it felt like to be caught in cross-fire.

  “Then what?” demanded someone.

  Or perhaps be at the receiving end of a firing squad. “Say, Inspector, had you thought of this being a contract killing?”

  “No,” said Sloan truthfully, “I hadn’t.”

  Contract killings were the ‘in’ things at the moment. Getting someone else to do your dirty work for you – like the Plantagenets – had come back into fashion. Sloan didn’t know what it did for the quasi-murderer’s conscience – the one once removed from the action – but it made the work of detection a good deal harder for the police. He’d once toyed in his imagination with the surrealistic sort of outcome that you might get if you interrogated the murderer – the murderer with the ‘hands on’ experience, you could call him …

  The dialogue could well run like this. ‘What did you kill him for?’

  ‘Five thousand pounds.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘It’s the going rate.’

  Laughter in hell.

  Someone at the Press Conference jerked him back to the present.

  “Any arrest imminent, Inspector?”

  “No,” said Sloan firmly. “I wish I could say there was.”

  He wondered how long he’d got before the press-hounds got on to the trail of Richenda Mellows.

  It would be a different story when that happened.

  He’d got a lot to do before then.

  Richenda Mellows entered the interview room with an aplomb apparently not disturbed by a night in the police station. Sloan observed that she walked on the balls of her feet as he imagined the natives walked and she moved with all the pent-up energy and lithe grace of a young leopard. Sloan didn’t know if they had leopards in Brazil.

  He invited her to sit
down.

  She scowled at him but she did at least sit, wrapping her woollen jacket tightly round her body like a mantle as she did so. It seemed to be a gesture more to exclude the world than to keep out the cold.

  “As you know, miss,” he began, one eye on the clock, “I detained you yesterday evening …”

  She looked at him expressively but without comment.

  “… for questioning,” he forged on, “in connection with the death of Joyce Mary Cooper.”

  She remained silent. And watchful.

  “But now,” said Sloan with empressement, “I’m going to release you.”

  “It’s a trick!” she burst out at once. She looked angrily from him to Crosby and back again. “A trick,” she repeated. “That’s what it is.”

  “On the contrary, miss. British justice …”

  “British justice! I know what it is. You’ll release me and then follow me wherever I go, that’s what you’ll do,” she exploded bitterly. “I know the police and what they’re like.”

  “Much as I should like to keep you where I can find you,” began Sloan.

  “There!” she interrupted him. “What did I say?”

  “I cannot detain you in custody without charging you.”

  “Well?” she shot the word at him.

  Perhaps, thought Sloan, the leopard had been caged and had not liked it after all.

  “I am not,” he said, “prepared at this stage of my investigation to charge you.”

  “Why not? Tell me that!”

  “No,” he said mildly. “I don’t think I need to discuss my reasons with you.” The risks if he kept a suspect in custody without charging them came from the infringement of Judges’ Rules, but he didn’t need to discuss that with her either.

  “How do you know,” she cried passionately, “that I didn’t kill her?”

  “I don’t,” he said at once.

  “Well, then …”

  “But if you did, miss …”

  “What then?”

  “Then you’re not in any danger from anyone else, are you?”

  It took a moment or two for the import of this to sink in. Two bright spots appeared in the centre of her cheeks and a flush spread across them as she realized what it was that he was saying.

  “Unless you had an accomplice,” he added neatly. He tacked on to that something else that he had found over the years to be true. “Dangerous things, accomplices.”

  “I didn’t kill her,” she said tonelessly.

  “In that case,” said Sloan, “I think you ought to be offered police protection until we find out who did.”

  “No!” It came out as a cry.

  “I’m taking a great risk in letting you go,” he said and added impressively, “And so are you.”

  That did silence her for a minute.

  “Someone saw you going into that tent,” said Sloan deliberately.

  “I didn’t creep in,” she said at once. “I just got fed up with all the delay and messing about. I came down to Almstone to see if I could find somebody who could remember something. I certainly,” she added defiantly, “didn’t creep in anywhere.”

  “No.”

  “Or out.”

  “I didn’t imagine that you had, miss.”

  “And I didn’t tell anyone what Nurse Cooper had said.” Suddenly she looked very young indeed. “I went away to think about it.”

  “You didn’t need to tell anyone, miss.” He looked at her. “Someone who had been watching you …”

  She moistened her lips. “Watching me?”

  “Watching your every movement,” he said soberly. “And when they saw you come out of Madame Zelda’s tent …”

  “They went in?” she said.

  “Just to check, probably. To be on the safe side.”

  She shuddered. “She was so nice and kind.”

  “That’s what everyone says,” said Sloan.

  “She was pleased to have been of help, too,” the girl said.

  “She sounded like that sort of a person,” said Sloan awkwardly.

  “And someone killed her because she remembered the shape of a birthmark?”

  “Because she remembered the fact of the birthmark,” said Sloan. Hawk or handsaw. Camel or weasel. Or whale. The shape didn’t matter. If Joyce Cooper had remembered the shape, too, that was so much gilt on the gingerbread. It was the fact that mattered. If the girl was speaking the truth.

  He mustn’t forget that she had a lot to lose and a lot to gain.

  “She would have told –” she hesitated, and went on delicately – “the next person she saw … the person who came after me … about me too, wouldn’t she?”

  “She wouldn’t have known not to,” said Sloan quickly. “Would she?”

  “She was so pleased, you see.” Richenda Mellows pushed some hair back from her forehead and Sloan realized that she was vulnerable in more ways than one.

  “Nurses feel like that about the babies they have delivered,” he said improvising.

  Richenda Mellows looked stonily at the floor. “She remembered my mother, too.”

  “Miss,” Sloan seized his moment. “Will you do what I want you to? And keep your head down for a bit?”

  Afterwards it was Detective-Constable Crosby who introduced another touch of theatre to the situation. When the interview was over he slapped his notebook shut and said “Will the real Richenda Mellows please stand up?”

  To the outward eye the village of Almstone looked calmer than it had done the day before. The day before there had been the confusion and crowd of the Flower Show. The village street had been littered with cars all trying to get into the Priory grounds and the grounds themselves had been jammed with people all trying to see everything.

  There was none of that today.

  The church congregation – who believed in safety in numbers – had departed and there was an apparent emptiness in Almstone. Sloan was not deceived. He knew that his progress up the High Street would have been as well-marked as if a spotlight had been trained upon him; that only the windows without curtains wouldn’t have people behind them twitching them. That was because those inhabitants could monitor what he was doing without having to twitch a curtain.

  Moreover he knew, too, that behind each front door would be found seething rumour and counter-rumour.

  And fear.

  People feared murder more than they feared bronchitis.

  Perhaps that was why there were more policemen than there were doctors in the country.

  Which was irrational because less than five hundred people died by murder each year. Fifty times as many were claimed by chronic bronchitis. And that without a single question being asked in Parliament of the Home Secretary into the bargain.

  It didn’t make sense.

  Crosby, too, was aware of the emptiness of Almstone. He steered the police car steadily up the deserted village towards the Priory.

  “It’s like this in Westerns, too, sir, after someone’s pulled a gun.” He hauled the steering-wheel over for a bend.

  “Is it?”

  “There’s never a soul in sight by the time the Sheriff’s posse rides in,” said Crosby confidently. “I expect you’ve noticed.”

  “Not really,” said Sloan, aware of a need to be careful. The constable probably had a rich fantasy life …

  “It all goes quiet and still,” he said.

  “Then what happens?” He mustn’t tread on anything treasured.

  “Everything’s sort of transfixed for a bit.”

  Sloan glanced round. “Even in a one-horse town?”

  “Then the men come out of the saloon to see what’s going on.”

  Sloan took a look at the King’s Arms public house. He reckoned that there would be a fair amount of chat going on in there this lunch-time. The Press would be buying drinks all round. Even so, they’d stop serving smartly on closing time today for sure. It was Sloan’s experience that when there had been a murder in their midst people observed laws
that they hadn’t bothered about in years – as if to appease some ancient God angry at the violation of one of his oldest prohibitions.

  There wouldn’t be any petty crime in Almstone for weeks.

  That didn’t make sense either.

  “Then the men from the saloon go over to see who has been killed,” continued William Edward Crosby, film fan.

  “That figures,” said Sloan.

  “While the Sheriff asks which way the man who shot him went.”

  That begged an awful lot of questions.

  “What happens,” enquired Sloan with genuine interest, “when they haven’t got a witness?”

  No one had seen Joyce Cooper being killed. All that Sloan knew was that it had happened after half past three when Edward Hebbinge had taken her a cup of tea, and some time before four o’clock when Norman Burton had found her tent empty. And that she had drunk her tea – because her cup had been empty when it had been collected from her tent.

  He corrected himself. The cup of tea had been drunk. He did not know for certain that it had been drunk by Joyce Cooper – only that it had not been emptied on the ground inside the tent because Crosby had checked that. He must be more careful about that sort of assumption, though it would have been no good asking the pathologist about the tea. That wouldn’t have shown.

  There was one assumption that he did feel free to make. Joyce Cooper had known who it was who had killed her because she had let that someone come close enough to slip some wire round her neck. Someone she didn’t suspect of anything at all had been able to walk behind her and snare her as simply as they would have snared a rabbit.

  Or someone too respectable to worry about.

  Richenda Mellows had snared more than rabbits in her time in Brazil. He mustn’t be beguiled by youth or innocence. No self-respecting policeman automatically bracketed them. If he did he was asking for trouble. Any girl literally brought up in the jungle must have known as much about killing with a snare as any poacher. He, Sloan, had already caused a man to be sent to the Greatorex Library to start checking the papers of Richard Mellows for such detail but he didn’t need to wait to know the answer. He could guess. And any girl who had studied jungle lore without ever going to Brazil would at least be sound on theory.