Little Knell Page 15

  ‘No … no, I suppose not.’ Howard coughed. ‘Are you sure you’re all right?’

  ‘And I can’t help it if she died and left me her precious old Bentley, can I?’

  ‘No, but…’ He had another burst of coughing.

  ‘The police seemed to think I could have done,’ said the curator unhappily. ‘They said it was an aspirational car, whatever that might be.’

  ‘Look here, Marcus, this isn’t some ridiculous ploy to do with your favourite author, is it?’ He coughed again. ‘Because, if so, I think it’s in pretty poor taste with that poor girl lying murdered in our mummy case.’

  ‘Favourite author?’ It was Fixby-Smith’s turn to sound bewildered. Then he relaxed. ‘Oh, you mean P. G. Wodehouse. No, no.’

  ‘You told me he was into aunts.’ Howard Air sounded breathless. ‘I wouldn’t know myself.’

  ‘Nothing to do with him. It’s the police,’ he said hollowly. ‘They didn’t believe me when I told them my aunt left me the Bentley.’

  ‘They can always check if they want to,’ said Howard.

  ‘And then,’ quavered Fixby-Smith, ‘they wanted to know where I’d been last night.’

  ‘That’s different,’ said his chairman alertly. ‘What happened last night?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Fixby-Smith miserably. ‘They wouldn’t tell me, but it must have been something very serious because they took my fingerprints. And, Howard…’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I think I’m going to have to see my solicitor.’

  ‘Why?’ enquired Howard Air bluntly.

  ‘The police asked me if I was taking drugs.’ His voice rose almost an octave. ‘Me!’

  ‘And are you?’ countered the businessman, a trifle maliciously.

  ‘No, of course not.’

  ‘Half Calleshire seems to be on one or the other of them so you can’t blame the police for asking,’ said Howard Air.

  ‘But not me,’ averred Marcus Fixby-Smith with unexpected emphasis. ‘Drugs are for failures. And, anyway, they might affect my judgement.’

  ‘That would never do, would it?’ murmured the Chairman of the Museums and Amenities Committee. ‘But, all the same, Marcus, I think you can handle this on your own. I’m up at four o’clock every weekday morning and I’m just not going to get up for you now. This time the Curator of the Greatorex Museum’ll just have to manage as best he can without his committee chairman.’

  * * *

  ‘Traffic,’ said a voice. ‘Inspector Harpe speaking.’

  ‘That you, Harry? Seedy here. Harry, that man you were telling me about: the one who was hit by another car at the crossroads who’s still unconscious…’

  ‘You mean David Barton?’

  ‘That’s him,’ said Sloan. ‘Tell me, has he been tested for drugs at the hospital?’

  ‘And alcohol,’ said the traffic man succinctly. ‘Routine procedure these days after all road traffic accidents. No arguing with a blood test, you know.’ He paused. ‘It doesn’t stop some of ’em from trying, though.’

  ‘Well? What was the outcome?’

  ‘No trace of either drugs or alcohol in him,’ said ‘Happy Harry’ immediately. ‘The other man was well over the drink limit, though. It’ll be an open-and-shut case as soon as we can get to court with it.’

  ‘Some people have all the luck,’ said Sloan.

  ‘What, me?’ said Happy Harry indignantly. ‘Let me tell you, Seedy, that I’ve been…’

  ‘Some other time, Harry. Some other time.’

  * * *

  River Street, Berebury, was busier on a Saturday morning than on any weekday but Crosby still found parking the police car easy. There was no traffic warden in sight to say them nay when he drew the vehicle to a standstill outside the offices of Pearson, Worrow and Gisby.

  Jim Pearson might have been the firm’s senior partner but he made no fuss about being doorkeeper as well this morning.

  ‘Cheryl’s here, Inspector,’ he said as he admitted them, ‘and our office manager is on his way in.’

  ‘Good, good,’ said Sloan. ‘Now, what I want to know is how your costing system works.’

  Whatever question Pearson had been expecting, it wasn’t this one. He looked blankly at the two policemen.

  ‘When someone sneezes,’ said Detective Constable Crosby, ‘how does it get on their bill?’

  ‘On a time basis,’ said Pearson hastily.

  ‘But how?’ asked Detective Inspector Sloan.

  ‘If it’s on the telephone, then Cheryl, our girl on the switchboard, makes a note of the name called and that of the member of staff handling the query.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And passes on that list on a daily basis to our office manager who costs it out according to the length of the conversation and the seniority of the person speaking at this end.’

  ‘That’s what we thought,’ said Sloan. ‘Now, what about internal calls?’

  Pearson licked lips unaccountably dry. ‘The senior of the two people talking takes the responsibility for booking out any charges to the client, should he or she think an additional cost appropriate.’

  ‘What we want is a list of any telephone calls made or received by Jill Carter in the week before she was murdered.’

  ‘No problem,’ said Jim Pearson weakly. ‘We should be able to pull them out easily enough.’ He moistened his lips again. ‘Was there any name in particular that you were looking out for?’

  Sloan fell back on a time-honoured formula: ‘I’m afraid that that is something I am not at liberty to discuss with you…’

  ‘… at this stage.’ Detective Constable Crosby completed Sloan’s sentence after the manner born.

  * * *

  ‘Where to, now, sir?’ asked Detective Constable Crosby, when they had emerged from the accountants’ offices with several pieces of paper.

  Sloan didn’t answer.

  After studying the list of telephone calls made in the course of her work by Jill Carter – only one was to Colin Thornhill and that presumably was in the course of true love, not accounts – Sloan sat for several minutes in the police car without saying a word. This was still parked outside the premises of Pearson, Worrow and Gisby, Chartered Accountants.

  The Saturday shoppers eddied round the car like the ebb and flow of the tide at Edsway while Sloan sat and thought about fungible economies and the legitimization of money; about death and taxes; about one accident, one death from natural causes and two murders; and about one man nearly, but not quite, dead from heroin addiction.

  Two small boys came up and stared at the two policemen, sitting silent in their car, and for a moment considered pulling faces at them but thought better of it and moved away again.

  Sloan went on to think about more than one disturbance in the night at an animal sanctuary; about an animal reserve abroad whence came edible substances; and above all about the unlimited resources at the beck and call of the money-launderer.

  There were some things which ready money couldn’t buy, but there were also a lot of things that money and the promise of drugs could procure: odd things, such as a person to follow Jill Carter from her place of employment at short notice; and another stranger, or perhaps the same one, to invent a cock and bull story for the benefit of a public house landlord – and anyone else who might later care to enquire – about a quarrel over curtains that had never taken place.

  And another to chat up his wife about the proclivities of one, Christopher Dennis Sloan.

  Unlimited money could buy even odder things: such as an endowment insurance policy no longer of value to a dying policyholder but with considerable potential benefit to whomsoever owned it at the time of the policyholder’s death, benefit in the way of the ability to convert suspect money in cash to funds with inbuilt probity: money-laundering, in fact.

  And it could buy patio roses and superlative specialist holidays with a tailor-made significance to their recipients well beyond the substance.

  He
straightened up in the passenger seat and said, ‘It’s all right, Crosby. You can get going now.’

  ‘Where to, sir?’ The engine was purring on the instant.

  ‘Back to the station for a search warrant.’

  ‘Where for, sir?’ He wheeled the car round in a tight circle against the traffic in a manoeuvre which, performed by anyone else, would have produced shaking fists from other motorists.

  ‘For evidence,’ said Detective Inspector Sloan.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Corners Blunted

  ‘It was a couple of things that Crosby said, sir, that put me on to it.’ Duty-bound, Sloan had reported to the superintendent as soon as he could.

  ‘I don’t believe it.’ Leeyes sounded astounded. ‘Crosby? About Howard Air?’

  ‘No, sir. About money.’

  ‘Crosby? Are you sure, Sloan?’

  ‘First of all, sir, he said something about the professions even charging you for sneezing.’

  ‘That’s fair enough.’ Leeyes snorted. ‘Nothing too clever about that.’

  ‘And then he repeated that old saying about death and taxes being the only things that are certain in life.’

  ‘Benjamin Franklin.’ Leeyes, autodidact, identified who had said that very swiftly.

  ‘And when you started to think about it, sir, all Howard Air wanted to do was to pay tax on as much of his income as he could, and then it was safe from suspicion and sequestration.’

  ‘Sounds funny to me,’ said Leeyes.

  ‘Laundered to perfection, in fact.’ Air’s actions met all the requirements that Jenny, the forensic accountant with the luscious voice, had laid down for a successful transformation of funds illegal, to funds absolutely respectable.

  ‘And are you going to tell me how he did it, Sloan, or do I have to guess?’ asked Leeyes acidly.

  ‘He did it by sending money out to the Lake Ryrie Reserve in Lasserta.’

  ‘That doesn’t make it respectable.’

  ‘No, sir, but what Howard Air did was send out money only ostensibly to the reserve. It didn’t stay there. It went on to the fruit and vegetable growers of Lasserta.’ It had been the ambassador, Anthony Heber-Hibbs, hadn’t it, who had reckoned that a little corruption was good for an economy. He was probably right.

  ‘I know, I know, Sloan, and you’re going to tell me they sent it back cleaned and ironed.’

  ‘Not quite, sir. The growers in Lasserta sent back fruit and vegetables in exchange but what they didn’t send were any invoices for the goods.’ This was something that he had already checked with Ickham and Grove, which staid firm had been shaken to the core by the perfidy of their client. They were busy explaining that someone wanting to pay more tax rather than less had been, until now, quite outside their experience.

  Leeyes grunted.

  ‘You see, sir, Howard Air’s income was inflated, but his money was to all intents and purposes squeaky clean because of his having paid tax on it.’

  ‘I may not be an accountant, Sloan,’ said the superintendent dangerously, ‘but I am not a fool. Surely that sort of money would show up in the figures?’

  Detective Inspector Sloan sighed. ‘I’m afraid, sir, that the figures for the Lake Ryrie Reserve were wrong. And it was when they showed up wrong that the trouble began.’

  ‘And that’s what the girl spotted?’

  Sloan nodded sadly. ‘I expect she thought it was just a simple clerical error so she made the mistake of telephoning Howard Air to check.’

  ‘And wrote her own death warrant by doing so?’

  ‘I’m afraid so. The telephonist at Pearson, Worrow and Gisby had noted the call, though.’

  ‘And all Air had to do in response to Jill Carter’s query was agree with her that there had been a mistake?’

  ‘I’m sure that’s what he did in the first place. Probably laughed it off and blamed the typist.’

  ‘And whom should he have blamed?’ Leeyes never ever for one moment took his eye off the ball.

  ‘The accident to the senior audit clerk at the accountants, David Barton. That was what started it all. He was the one there who Howard Air was in cahoots with. Not the partners.’

  ‘The man who’s still unconscious?’

  ‘Him. It was that and the fact that Wayne Goddard went to look at Whimbrel House on Tuesday with Sid Wetherspoon that really sent the balloon up.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘We don’t know for certain but I imagine that Goddard, who was a drug pusher in a very small way, recognized all the signs…’

  ‘And smells. Don’t forget that some drugs smell, Sloan.’

  ‘And then made the mistake of telling someone higher up the drug chain that he now knew where their distribution was done from.’

  ‘Not very clever.’

  ‘He wasn’t. But someone was. Very.’

  ‘So both the people who knew anything were killed then?’

  ‘Yes, sir. We think the girl was abducted in the pub car park as she left – Nigel Worrow stayed on a bit and didn’t see the going of her – and that she was killed at Whimbrel House.’

  ‘She would have accepted the offer of a lift home from the Ornum Arms car park from Howard Air,’ agreed Leeyes sagely. ‘Only natural.’

  ‘So her body was at Whimbrel House, which they were going to have to stop using pretty soon anyway.’ Sloan attempted to continue his narration.

  ‘Because Wayne Goddard knew about it?’

  ‘That’s one reason,’ said Sloan.

  ‘Everyone would know Goddard wasn’t reliable,’ pointed out Leeyes. ‘Stood out a mile. I can see that he would have to go.’

  ‘There was another reason,’ said Sloan, explaining that sooner or later Peter Caversham would have to be accepted as the legal owner of Whimbrel House. ‘And he would be even less reliable,’ said Sloan. ‘He’s a total wreck, but that wouldn’t have stopped him inheriting the settled estate.’

  ‘From what you say about him, Sloan, the drug people would have known that themselves.’

  ‘Yes, sir. Getting Jill Carter’s body out of the house in the mummy case was a good way of starting a fresh hare as well.’

  ‘When in doubt,’ declared Superintendent Leeyes, a long-term veteran of the Berebury Town Council’s Watch Committee, ‘confuse the issue.’

  ‘Stirring up the coroner did that, too,’ said Sloan. ‘Queered the pitch nicely by making us suspect Marcus Fixby-Smith, among other things, but the real reason was so that Howard Air would know how the investigation was going. Don’t forget he was Chairman of the Museum Committee.’

  ‘I wonder if Locombe-Stableford’s taking drugs,’ said Leeyes thoughtfully. ‘You never know these days, do you?’

  Sloan hurried into speech. ‘This man Barton, sir, from the accountants…’

  ‘Ah, yes. Where does he come in?’

  ‘He prepared the Lake Ryrie figures for Jim Pearson to sign.’

  ‘I thought you said they didn’t amount to much.’

  ‘They didn’t on the accounts Jim Pearson signed off.’

  ‘But?’

  ‘But the accounts that went to the Calleshire County Bank to authorize sending the money out to Lasserta had three zeros restored to the top of the column.’

  ‘Three zeros.’ The superintendent raised a podgy hand. ‘Don’t tell me, Sloan. Let me guess. Standing for thousands, I take it?’

  ‘That’s right, sir. Jim Pearson didn’t expect to find them on his copy and they weren’t there. The bank did and the thousands sign was at the top of the columns on the copy that went there. The bank, you see, had reason to know that Howard Air was both rich and generous.’

  ‘That should have alerted them,’ said Leeyes unfairly. ‘It’s not a combination you often see.’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘Simple, when you come to think of it.’

  ‘Well, it’s one way to launder more than three-quarters of a million pounds each year,’ said Sloan sedately.

  ‘No wonder
he could afford to try to bribe you, Sloan.’

  ‘Peanuts to him, sir.’ He took a breath. ‘But I should have spotted that Air was up to mischief myself earlier: there was no call for him to have been at the accountants’ yesterday when we got there.’

  ‘That’s not evidence.’

  ‘And, sir, I should have picked up that he was coughing a lot then.’ The hospital had told him that earlier diagnosis probably wouldn’t make any difference to the dolorous outcome of Howard Air’s chest illness. ‘I didn’t think…’

  ‘Coughing? What on earth are you talking about, Sloan?’

  ‘Howard Air was ill in bed when we got to his house, sir.’

  ‘Nothing trivial, I hope?’

  ‘Very serious indeed, sir, the hospital say. He’s caught anthrax from handling the mummy. The pulmonary variety. It’s like pneumonia, only worse. Dr Dabbe says the disease is always on the cards if you don’t take the proper precautions when handling the contents of a mummy case.’

  ‘The curse of the Pharaohs, Sloan.’ The superintendent didn’t sound unduly regretful.

  Detective Inspector Sloan, still smarting at the insult of attempted bribery, said, ‘I rather like to think of it as the long arm of justice myself, sir.’

  * * *

  ‘Another way, Crosby, in which Howard Air was able to convert cash into an asset,’ said Sloan, ‘was by buying the Kirk sisters’ nephew’s endowment insurance policy from him.’

  ‘I don’t get it, sir.’ The detective constable’s brow clouded over.

  ‘It’s known as a viatical settlement,’ said Sloan, fresh from a tutorial from a mightily relieved Jim Pearson. ‘And it’s quite legal.’

  ‘Come again, sir.’

  ‘When Derek died, all that Howard Air had to do as the last owner of the policy was to send Derek’s death certificate to the insurance company and sit back and wait for a large cheque to come through.’

  ‘Nice work, if you can get it,’ said Crosby.

  ‘Of clean money,’ underlined Sloan. The superintendent had cottoned on to this more quickly than Crosby had but Sloan was still feeling benevolent towards the detective constable.

  ‘Smelling of roses, I shouldn’t be surprised,’ said Crosby. ‘Like his aunts. They didn’t have a clue that the heroin was parked at their sanctuary when it came ashore.’