Losing Ground Read online

  ‘Yes, sir.’ Crosby’s frown disappeared. ‘So that was why it was overnight yesterday. Then early this morning the fire got started.’

  ‘No, Crosby, before that – possibly also overnight – was the planting of the non-human bones on some very genuine lobster shells. That could have been done before or after the fire was set but as we don’t know exactly when someone was last in the billiard room we can’t put a date or time on it. Lobster shells don’t grow on trees.’

  Detective Constable Crosby didn’t contest this statement. Instead he applied himself to his own mug of coffee. A muffled sound emerged from its depth. ‘Nor do bones,’ he said.

  ‘True,’ said Sloan. ‘And Lionel Perry didn’t know about the bones or the lobster shells. I’m sure about that. Shaken to the core, he was, when he heard about them. I find that very interesting, Crosby.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’ The detective constable sounded far from riveted. ‘Then what?’

  ‘Not a lot, you might say,’ said Sloan, ‘except an attempt at bribery and corruption – some might call it blackmail – and a little bit of arson. Not a lot of that either, mind you,’ he added thoughtfully. ‘Just enough to delay the development at Tolmie Park without jiggering it completely.’

  Crosby brightened. ‘Sir, is it to do with that thing they’re always saying in court about time being of the essence?’

  Detective Inspector Sloan set his mug back on his desk. ‘You may have got something there, Crosby, but probably not in the way you think.’

  ‘The Preservation Society must want as much time as they can get,’ said Crosby, ‘and Berebury Homes must want to get cracking on building as soon as they can.’

  ‘Someone doesn’t want them to, if what that planning man, Jeremy Stratton, says is true,’ pointed out Sloan. ‘They – whoever they are – said they were prepared to lay out good money in the cause.’

  ‘I thought councils always held things up as long as they could anyway,’ said Crosby. ‘Surely they don’t need bribing to do that.’

  ‘For one so young, Crosby, you are very cynical.’

  ‘Thank you, sir.’

  ‘Which reminds me, Crosby, of someone else who is also prepared to lay out good money.’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘If, Crosby, your employer instructed you to buy a property on his behalf no matter what it cost but the present owner didn’t want to sell, what would be your next course of action?’

  ‘To offer him a bit more,’ said Crosby promptly.

  ‘And if that didn’t do the trick?’

  ‘I’d report back to head office,’ said Crosby, displaying a touching faith in those at police headquarters.

  ‘And if you were then told that your job was on the line because you hadn’t succeeded in getting the offer accepted?’

  ‘I’d lean on the owner all over again.’

  ‘You would, would you?’ murmured Sloan.

  ‘After all, if he was in it for the money, you’d think he’d sell in the end.’

  ‘So you think Lionel Perry is only holding out for a better offer, do you?’ said Sloan.

  ‘Well, wouldn’t you, sir?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Sloan thoughtfully, ‘I think I would, but if that didn’t work? What would you do then?’

  ‘Then I’d smell a rat,’ said the detective constable.

  ‘I think, Crosby, you could be right. I’m beginning to get a distinct aroma of rattus rattus, deceased, too.’ He said, ‘And having smelt a rat, what then?’

  The detective constable frowned. ‘I think I would want to have a good look round for the rat.’

  ‘Well done, Crosby. We need to know why there is a conflict of interest. After all, I suppose you could say that all crime amounts to a conflict of interest,’ mused Sloan, putting this interesting thought aside for further consideration in a mythical future when he himself had more time. ‘And why on earth should anyone be searching for the present Filligree of Tolmie now? Tell me that.’

  ‘Dunno, sir.’ The constable shook his head. ‘Perhaps someone wants to steal his identity. Strikes me as a bit sinister, all the same. I hope we find him before they do, that’s all.’

  ‘Perhaps they needed his portrait to help find him,’ mused Sloan.

  ‘Or not let anyone else find him,’ said Crosby. ‘Had you thought of that, sir?’

  Sloan stared at him.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Stuart Bellamy had never kept the office hours considered sacrosanct – or even normal – by some. He didn’t resent this, having long ago found that working for Jason Burke was more of a way of life than having an ordinary job. There were good reasons for this: the odd hours were important from Jason’s business point of view. Some arrangers of gigs who were anxious for Kevin Cowlick to be with them on the night only came to life themselves after darkness had fallen, some were so crepuscular that if they were rung any earlier in the day they answered the telephone rubbing their eyes open. Neither cohort was as lucid as they would have been if they had been in contact later in the day. Disc jockeys were lucid all the same, which was nearly as bad.

  And gigs and concert performances were the breath of life to Jason and his group as well as their bread and butter. Fixing these engagements up was only one of Stuart Bellamy’s manifold duties. Another was listening to Jason riding one or other of his hobby horses. His leaping from an attack on the Health and Safety Acts to the purchase of Tolmie Park was in a manner that could be compared with a rider leaping bareback from one circus horse to another as they cantered round the ring. It usually caught Stuart Bellamy on the wrong foot.

  ‘How are you getting on with that fellow from Berebury Homes?’ he asked Bellamy, as he strummed a guitar in a leisurely way.

  ‘I’m not,’ said Bellamy shortly. Circumlocution was wasted on the back street boy from Luston. ‘I’ve exactly nix to report, in fact, Jason. Whatever you say to him, Lionel Perry doesn’t want to know and won’t say why.’

  ‘Funny that,’ said Jason, one ear cocked towards his instrument as he picked out a tune on the guitar.

  ‘Not even for funny money,’ said Bellamy bitterly. ‘In fact, funnily enough money doesn’t seem to come into things.’

  It was this aspect of his pursuit of Tolmie Park that immediately engaged Jason Burke’s attention. ‘Doesn’t make sense to me. You’d better find out why not, then, hadn’t you?’ said Jason.

  ‘Like how?’ asked Bellamy.

  ‘Your problem, mate, not mine.’

  Stuart Bellamy sighed. Long ago someone had instilled into the young Jason Burke the importance of not shouldering other people’s burdens and he had learnt the lesson well. As far as his manager was concerned even getting Jason to shoulder his own problems would have been something.

  ‘So go get it sorted,’ said Jason. He hitched himself upright. ‘Hey, before you go, let’s just have a listen to this new disc that’s just come in. I think it’s worth an ear.’

  So it was therefore quite late and quite dark by the time Stuart Bellamy left Jason Burke’s house and made his way back to Acacia Avenue and his home.

  He knew that something was wrong before he had done little more than put his key in the lock in the front door. Fumbling for the light switch in the entrance hall, he found that no light resulted from his touch.

  Cursing at a spent lightbulb he advanced towards a light switch in another room.

  Well before he reached the next light switch he stumbled over something on the floor and fell forwards, conscious of a figure brushing past him in the darkness and out of the front door as he did so. Then all he was aware of was the sound of the door being shut behind him as someone left the house.

  And minutes later he was treated to the sight of a house reduced to chaos.

  Wendy Pullen looked round her sitting room, once more packed with members of the Berebury Preservation Society. ‘We’ve been overtaken by events,’ she declaimed dramatically. ‘There’s nothing more we should be doing to save Tolmie Park for the time
being. Nothing, Jonathon, do you understand?’

  ‘Yes, Wendy,’ he said meekly. This meeting had been called for soon after he had left work.

  ‘Not now.’

  ‘No, Wendy.’

  ‘If the police are involved then there’s no need for us any more.’ Wendy Pullen had once been recorded on video camera by the constabulary when leading a protest march and had never felt the same way again about those guardians of the peace. ‘Our hands are tied.’

  ‘As long as none of us had any hand in the arson, that is,’ added Paul Pullen with his customary exactitude. ‘Or the theft of the oil painting.’

  ‘If we didn’t,’ observed a more percipient member of the group, ‘then it means that someone else also has an interest in stopping the development.’

  ‘Or accelerating it,’ said another speaker, ‘if they were hoping the whole place would burn down.’

  ‘Vested interest, either way,’ said a woman in the front row. The speaker, who lived very well on her unearned income, was touchingly naive about how this income was achieved.

  Paul Pullen quoted an old saw. ‘Hell hath no fury like a vested interest masquerading as a principle.’

  ‘Yes – well,’ said Wendy, ‘I don’t think we need to go into any of this just now. Not our problem.’

  ‘Not our problem.’ Paul Pullen firmly endorsed this. He spent a lot of his time trying to keep his wife from picking up problems that were not hers. The Berebury Preservation Society was one of the safer areas into which he had been able to channel her energies. At least it had been safe until now.

  ‘There’s just one thing,’ said Jonathon Ayling. ‘The police have interviewed me and warned me that I may be charged with breaking and entering.’

  Wendy Pullen bristled. ‘Why?’

  ‘It was because of my shoes.’ There was a mock solemnity about his answer.

  ‘Your shoes?’

  He nodded. ‘My shoes. They found little shards of glass in them…’

  ‘What’s that got to do with…?’

  ‘…that matches the glass in the broken window in the Greatorex Museum.’

  The room fell silent. Then Wendy said grimly, ‘Jonathon, what have you been up to?’

  ‘Trying to save Tolmie Park,’ he said. ‘That’s what you all wanted, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Call coming in from Stuart Bellamy, sir,’ said Detective Constable Crosby, handing over the telephone. ‘He’s just got home from work and found a burglar in the house. At least he thinks it was a burglar. He sounds pretty upset to me.’

  Sloan took the receiver and waited. Nothing about this case would surprise him now. Nothing.

  ‘Absolute chaos, Inspector,’ insisted Stuart Bellamy. ‘It’s absolute chaos here.’

  ‘Go on,’ said Sloan evenly.

  ‘I must have disturbed him, whoever he was, when I opened the door. He scooted off pretty quickly I can tell you. Thank goodness,’ he added as an afterthought.

  ‘Yes,’ agreed Sloan soberly. Tackling burglars was not for your amateur. Any policeman would say that. ‘Anything taken?’

  ‘Who knows?’ wailed Bellamy. ‘The whole place has been turned over. It’s a complete tip. What my wife will say when she gets back from her mother’s I daren’t begin to think. I’ll be a dead man and she’ll go bananas. Do you know, he’s even ripped all the cushions open. What do you make of that?’

  ‘I would say that your intruder was looking for something,’ said Sloan, unsurprised, making a note to send a scene of crime officer around as soon as possible.

  ‘But what?’ asked Bellamy hoarsely.

  ‘I can’t answer that,’ said Sloan, asking pertinently, ‘can you?’

  ‘Me? How should I know what a burglar wanted? I – we – don’t have anything particularly valuable. My wife likes that Moorcroft pottery – but that hasn’t been touched.’

  Somehow Detective Inspector Sloan did not think that some Moorcroft vases had been what the thief had been seeking. ‘But,’ he concluded aloud, ‘we can’t tell yet whether or not he found what it was he was looking for.’

  ‘But why should he want anything at all that we’ve got in our house?’ asked Bellamy.

  ‘I can’t answer that question either.’ Detective Inspector Sloan was beginning to think he could make a sporting guess at it but he did not say so. There was just the one item that he knew of that had gone missing that day.

  A portrait of Sir Francis Filligree, fourth baronet, taken from the Greatorex Museum.

  It was only after he’d rung off that Sloan remembered the Anglo-Saxon artefacts that had gone missing today, too.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Minutes later Sloan was reporting to Superintendent Leeyes.

  ‘So we have to add attempted burglary to today’s activities, do we, Sloan?’

  ‘It looks very much like it, sir.’

  ‘It seems to me, Sloan, as if a thorough grounding in mid-sixteenth century Italian politics would have been a help to you today.’ Superintendent Leeyes was a lifelong admirer of Niccolò Machiavelli. ‘In my experience that’s what you need when local authorities come into things and as for pop stars…’ He rolled his eyes in a gesture of despair.

  ‘Jeremy Stratton, their planning officer, did report the attempted bribe to us, sir,’ ventured Sloan.

  ‘Only when he was threatened by exposure,’ pointed out Leeyes.

  ‘He still needn’t have done.’

  ‘But there’s no evidence anywhere for either, is there?’ said Leeyes irritably. ‘No independent witnesses, for instance. He could have made the whole thing up.’

  ‘In that case,’ persisted Sloan, ‘we would need to be asking ourselves why he did. Knowing even that could be just as important.’

  Superintendent Leeyes blew out his cheeks and pronounced something that had been a lifelong maxim in his own working life. ‘When in doubt, Sloan, confuse the issue. That’s what they might have been doing. All of ‘em.’

  Sloan didn’t know whether this sentiment had come from Machiavelli: it could well have done. ‘I don’t think matters could be more confused than they are at the moment,’ he admitted. Attempted burglary, attempted bribery, definite arson, confirmed burglary all contributed to a melange of broken laws that he could well have done without. And that didn’t include anything that lunatic Jonathon Ayling had in mind.

  ‘Don’t count on it, Sloan, that’s all. That light at the end of the tunnel could well be a train coming the other way.’

  ‘Yes, sir, I’m sure.’ With the superintendent there was always too much hope about. ‘The only thing that seems quite clear at the present moment is that some person or persons unknown want to delay the start of the development at Tolmie Park for reasons that are not immediately obvious to us.’

  Leeyes grunted.

  ‘And that either the same people or others are looking for the present members of the family of Filligree of Tolmie.’

  ‘Then we shouldn’t be surprised at there being backhanders about, should we, Sloan?’

  ‘No, sir,’ he said. The superintendent had never been surprised at the suggestion of backhanders anywhere – everywhere.

  ‘What isn’t at all clear,’ Leeyes rumbled on, ‘is where the theft of the portrait comes into the development question. If it does.’

  ‘In connection with which, sir, we’re just going to execute a search warrant at Jonathon Ayling’s house.’ Perhaps Crosby had been right about someone not wanting the portrait found. Perhaps it was what had been taken from Stuart Bellamy’s house. If something had been.

  ‘About time, too,’ grunted Leeyes.

  ‘And we’ve now had some feedback from Companies House,’ said Sloan, picking up a message sheet. ‘Lionel Perry is the biggest shareholder in Berebury Homes. His wife has a substantial holding, too…’

  ‘That’s a lot of family eggs in one basket,’ observed Leeyes.

  ‘And so has Robert Selby – he’s their finance man.’

  ‘Putting his mone
y where is mouth is?’

  ‘Only in a manner of speaking, sir.’ Sloan countered phrase with fable. ‘He might just have worked out on which side his bread is buttered and he of all people – being in finance, that is – should be in a position to know.’

  ‘Or,’ said Leeyes trenchantly, ‘he might know something that we don’t.’

  ‘All our thoughts on that are still open.’ Detective Inspector Sloan turned back a few pages of his notebook. ‘Nobody else in the top echelons of the firm seems to have more than a token holding.’

  ‘Eggs in other baskets, I suppose.’

  ‘Or no eggs,’ said Sloan. He bent his head over his notebook again.

  ‘Or not wanting to put them in the firm’s basket,’ said Leeyes.

  ‘I can only say that the two things that seem to have really upset Lionel Perry so far are the bones and the lobster shells.’

  ‘Not the fire?’

  ‘No, but I swear he didn’t know about either the bones or the lobster shells until I told him and that shook him.’

  ‘These lobster shells, Sloan,’ Leeyes frowned. ‘What do you make of them?’

  ‘A shot over someone’s bows but who it’s meant as a warning for, I don’t know. And what about, I don’t know either.’

  ‘Then find out, Sloan,’ said the superintendent testily, ‘and soon.’

  After he’d clambered into the passenger seat of the police car Detective Inspector Sloan allowed himself the luxury of a yawn. ‘It’s been a long day, Crosby. We should be able to knock off after this and get some proper food.’

  Detective Constable Crosby, thus encouraged, notched up the speed of the police car.

  ‘Jonathon Ayling should be back home after work by now. After we’ve searched his place we can all go home.’

  Jonathon Ayling was indeed at home.

  And strangely indifferent to the production of a search warrant.

  ‘Too late,’ he said dully.

  ‘Nevertheless…’ began Sloan.

  ‘Come this way.’ He led the two policemen round the back of the house and pointed to a small window. It had obviously been forced and now dangled drunkenly on a broken hinge. ‘Breaking and entering.’