Passing Strange Page 15

  Anyway garrotting wasn’t difficult. It didn’t take practice. It had been so common in the London underworld – and the early thief-takers so unpopular among its members – that Sir Robert Peel’s policemen had worn collars on their tunics four inches high just to make it more difficult for the criminal classes to kill them that way. Suddenly, silently and from behind.

  Those high collars – hated and uncomfortable – had stayed that height until 1840. Then London had got more peaceful or perhaps only fashion in crime had changed. Anyway, methods of killing policemen had shifted their pattern and the collar had come down a couple of inches. But it hadn’t gone. Some of that stand-up collar had remained and had even been around when Sloan was a boy. Collar-and-tie policemen marked more than social change. They were the end of an era that had begun with patrolling the dark alleyways of the stews in 1829 – at risk.

  “The man or his horse,” Crosby was saying on quite a different subject, “leaves a track behind him. That’s how they know which way to go.”

  “I should have thought of that,” said Sloan humbly. A certain simplicity of approach had a lot to be said for it.

  Whoever had killed Joyce Cooper had left remarkably little in the way of tracks behind them. Perhaps a set of fingerprints on a reel of wire. Perhaps not. Or perhaps there were tracks to be found on the ground that Sloan did not recognize. Somewhere in the mixture of inheritance and planning someone stood to gain.

  Or lose.

  He mustn’t forget that last.

  There were always those who had a vested interest in the preservation of the status quo as well as those who stood to gain by change.

  The politicians never forgot that either. Whole parties made it their platform.

  But Maurice Esdaile insisted that everyone would benefit from the new development at Home Farm. His plans, he had told Sloan, satisfied every statutory requirement, pacified the Council for the Preservation of Rural Calleshire, conformed with all the Bye-Laws, fulfilled every planning regulation, and – God forbid that he should ever be so unlucky – weren’t over some archaeological site.

  “The Romans can still ruin a man, Inspector,” he had said. “Did you know that?”

  And Esdaile Homes would leave a farming tenant glad to have less rent to pay and an owner with much-needed extra income in hand – to say nothing of an assortment of Harolds and Hildas with the retirement home of their dreams.

  Miss Tompkins and her Almstone Preservation Society weren’t happy but Sloan had an idea that they never would be. And if they hadn’t existed they would probably have had to have been invented. Without their opposition the housing development would have sounded altogether too good to be true. Now there was a Puritan expression if ever there was one. Nevertheless, in spite of all that, he, Detective-Inspector Sloan, would just have a quick look at the County Council Planning Committee’s Minutes.

  It was sad but true that you couldn’t always leave either the democratically elected or the nepotically appointed to take care of corruption in either legislators or administrators. Detective-Inspector Sloan saw himself a representative of the people every inch as much as a local Councillor did: when a whisper went round that this regulation or that had been unexpectedly waived Sloan always listened.

  Maurice Esdaile might not be a man of substance either. That possibility Sloan hadn’t overlooked. Someone else had been detailed to go round and knock up the keyholder at Companies House in the City of London. If Maurice Esdaile was a man of straw Sloan would know by tea-time.

  Stephen Terlingham had led him to think that things would stay the same whether Richenda Mellows or Mrs Edith Wylly inherited. Mrs Wylly, he said, was too old to want to make great changes, and Richenda Mellows too young to be allowed to. Trustees were responsible for everything until the girl reached twenty-five. And if they weren’t the traditional Three Wise Men, at least they were as disparate and apparently disinterested a group as any testator could devise.

  If, thought Sloan cautiously, Stephen Terlingham had been mishandling the Priory funds he would want the status quo to last for a very long time. Mrs Wylly’s lifetime at least. All the malefactors that Sloan had ever known had shared a delusion that a postponed Day of Judgement was a Day of Judgement that might somehow be persuaded to go away. And the long widowhood and illness of Mrs Agatha Mellows had demonstrated that – in Edward Hebbinge’s experienced hands – the Priory estate could practically run itself.

  From where Sloan viewed things it looked as if Stephen Terlingham of Messrs Terlingham, Terlingham and Owlet had sole custody of the Priory estate all the while he acted as sole executor but much less of a say as one of three trustees. He would still – he said – be its legal adviser if Mrs Wylly inherited. If the solicitor had sticky fingers he, Sloan concluded, would want Mrs Wylly to inherit.

  Sloan would have to think about that. Certainly no one was better placed to cast doubt on the identity of the girl who said she was Richenda Hilary Pemberton Mellows. Just as no man was a hero to his valet, so no member of a profession was sea-green incorruptible to a policeman. Superintendent Leeyes always said that the only Latin a policeman needed to know was ‘Quis custodiet ipsos custodes’, loosely translated behind his back as ‘Who takes care of the caretaker’s daughter while the caretaker’s daughter’s taking care?’

  But it didn’t mean that at all. It meant something much more difficult to answer: who shall guard the guards themselves?

  Stephen Terlingham had been at the Flower Show – Hebbinge had told him that and Terlingham himself had mentioned it. So, of course, had Maurice Esdaile. And Edward Hebbinge and Cedric Milsom and Herbert Kershaw – to say nothing of Nettle and Dock, and old Uncle Tom Cobbleigh and all …

  And if Richenda Mellows had much to gain she also had much to lose – and she, too, had been there.

  Sloan cleared his throat. “These tracks that you were talking about, Crosby, in these Westerns of yours. How do they know what they mean?”

  “Easy, sir.” The constable steered the police car in through the Priory gates. “They always have a friendly Indian around who tells them.”

  “Of course,” said Sloan gravely. “I was forgetting they spent all their time in Indian country.”

  14

  Vox humana

  Norman Burton was always a conscientious man. He was also – in the way of the conscientious – both methodical and meticulous. This meant that he was ideally cast for his role in the world as village schoolmaster. ‘A man among boys: a boy among men’ ran the unkind aphorism. Norman Burton preferred to think of himself as a man guided by two great precepts. ‘If a job was worth doing it was worth doing well’ was one. No less important was its corollary about a hand once being set to the plough …

  The irritating meticulousness that other men dismissed as petty and feminine was an important part of the make-up of the exemplar. When he thought about himself, which was not often, Norman Burton excused almost all the traits that went with schoolmastering as necessary ‘pour encourager les autres’.

  Too detached and sensible to see himself as an Atlas carrying the world on his shoulders, he settled on filling the lesser role of the vertebra next to Atlas. That was the one known as Axis – the bone of the spine on which the head revolved. The Almstone and District Horticultural Society was one of the several village organizations which revolved round Norman Burton and he did the job of Secretary well because he saw it as one that was worth doing. Otherwise, of course, as he frequently remarked, he wouldn’t have done it.

  It was the part about once putting one’s hand to the plough that caused him to work this Sunday afternoon. The murder of Joyce Cooper – someone whom he had known for years and someone too with a firm place in the established order of things in Almstone – was something that he was only going to be able to begin to assimilate slowly. So, like a domestic cat which was able to attack a sparrow while it ignored a pheasant, he turned his mind away from the greater evil of murder to tackle the lesser discrepancy concern
ing Ken Walls’s tomatoes.

  Mr Harvey McCurdle had been the judge of the Fruit and Vegetable Section. He had been invited out from Berebury to do the judging at Almstone, regardless of expense. A prophet might not be without honour save in his own country: the judge at a Horticultural Show was at considerable risk in his. That went for Baby Shows, too. Distance not only lent enchantment to judgements – after all, even St Paul had appealed to Rome, hadn’t he? – but it also made for a certain amount of highly desirable unapproachability on the part of the judge.

  It said much for Mr McCurdle’s reputation in the horticultural world that it never for one moment occurred to Norman Burton that Harvey McCurdle’s judgement might not have been reached impartially. That he might have made a genuine mistake Burton felt he had to allow for. After all ‘to err was human’ and – dedicated dominie that he was – Burton knew all about mistakes. In Almstone Primary School they came in three sizes – mistakes, careless; mistakes, ignorant; and mistakes, contumacious.

  Sunday luncheon over and his wife settled comfortably with the newspaper, he got out his own copy of the Flower Show Schedule. Mr Harvey McCurdle, experienced judge that he was, had not only marked his own schedule with the names of the winners but left a second copy for Norman Burton. He spread out his papers on the dining-room table. That copy should be with them.

  And so it was.

  Burton opened it at the second page and ran his eye down the column – past Parsnips, Peas (ten pods), Potatoes (white), Potatoes (coloured) to Shallots (exhibition) and Tomatoes (six, outdoor).

  ‘First prize,’ read Norman Burton to himself in the quiet of his own dining-room, ‘Mr Kenneth Walls.’

  He looked swiftly at the names of the second and third prizewinners. Mrs Eleanor Wellstone’s entry was not even placed. Her tomatoes had certainly never been awarded the first prize. The path of the Secretary of the Horticultural Society – never an easy one – had become positively stony. Harvey McCurdle hadn’t made a mistake at all. Someone had switched the labels on the entries.

  Human nature had its seamy side.

  A lifetime in the schoolroom had taught Norman Burton that.

  It had also taught the schoolmaster not only how to look for trouble, but where. Just as he had dismissed Harvey McCurdle from his considerations so now he also excluded Mrs Eleanor Wellstone. The Derek Turlings of this world might use furniture polish to bring out a greater shine on their competition apples, the Mrs Wellstones, anxious, tentative and unskilled, would never resort to switching prize labels to bring greater glory unto themselves. It was altogether too short term for an adult mind.

  He knew several young gentlemen, though, who might do just that for pure devilment. He thought carefully. From the Olympian heights of Headmastership he ought at least to be able to narrow the field.

  There was the youngest Carter boy: born to trouble. There was Mark Smithson, whose mother’s turns had to have a cause. Mark Smithson was cause enough for any mother to have turns. There was Peter Pearson, Fred’s grandson. Norman Burton hoped it wasn’t going to turn out to be Fred’s grandson.

  He sat at his dining table for a little while longer, his mind running without effort from memory down the school roll. There were other likely candidates for criminality but they were still down in the lower forms. There were one or two Infants that it would never surprise him to see behind bars eventually but they were scarcely of a height to reach across a trestle table yet. And this sort of prank went with a certain age.

  He put a meticulous question mark beside Tomatoes (six, outdoor), methodically replaced his Show papers in order, said goodbye to his wife and walked out into Almstone village.

  “What I want to do,” said Sloan as the police car reached the Priory, “is to reconstruct the crime at the scene.”

  It never did any harm. If nothing else it brought the investigator nearer to the mind of the victim – to say nothing about the mind of the murderer.

  He was convinced of only one thing as he left the car and started to walk across the Priory garden in the direction of the old stables where Madame Zelda’s tent had been. That sure conviction was that detection was not a contemplative art. It was all very well for Sherlock Holmes and his proponents to grade the difficulty in solving a problem by the number of pipes of tobacco the great detective took to smoke while he reached a correct solution. Sherlock Holmes didn’t have Police Superintendent Leeyes breathing down his neck.

  Only gentle readers.

  “It looks different today,” said Crosby.

  And the Grand Panjandrum himself (‘with the little round button at top’) did, after all, have Dr Watson. He, Detective-Inspector Sloan, only had Detective-Constable Crosby. It was at moments like these when Sloan wondered if the ‘detective’ component of that designation was more of a courtesy title than an accolade of achievement.

  Another thing that made him quite sure that detection was not a purely contemplative art was the amount of legwork involved in cases not solved by Sherlock Holmes. A lot of backroom boys were being very busy on this case already. And two backroom girls.

  Sloan had arranged that the Canon’s widow, Mrs Edith Wylly, should be visited by two lady policemen. No one would ever guess that the angelic-looking Sergeant Polly Perkins could – judo fashion – toss a man to the ground as lightly as she could (and did) whisk an egg. An urgent police interview with the good lady at Calleford was certainly called for before the day was too far advanced – and Polly Perkins was the right member of the Force to be doing it.

  Sloan had been duly cynical of the apparent lack of interest in the Priory estate evinced – according to Stephen Terlingham, the solicitor, that is – by Mrs Wylly. In his experience gift horses were seldom examined too closely in the mouth: so far he took Mrs Edith Wylly, sight unseen, with a large pinch of salt. On the other hand the possession of land – especially entailed land – carried certain inalienable responsibilities. Mrs Wylly, clergy widow to boot, came of a generation that would know that.

  He would have been more sceptical still had she been younger. He knew, though – he was old enough to have learned that – that by the time some sixty winters had besieged a person’s brow their lifestyle was ordinarily a settled thing. Usually all that the middle-aged and – normally – all that the old asked of their manner of living was that it got no worse with the passage of time. Whatever that style of living was, it was the one that they were used to and by then that was what counted with them.

  There could be one other good reason why old Mrs Wylly wasn’t pressing her suit. That was because she felt that the girl calling herself Richenda Hilary Pemberton Mellows was exactly who she said she was – the only child of Richard Charles Mellows, explorer, and great-niece of Richard Mellows, Brigadier.

  “It’s not really the same without the tents, is it, sir?” said Crosby prosaically.

  They’d reached the piece of ground just in front of the old stables. It wasn’t ‘a fair field full of folk’ now. It was empty of people. The spot where the Fortune Teller’s tent had stood was still marked out with pegs and orange string, though.

  “Use your imagination, man,” adjured Sloan briefly. He swept his arm round the now bare site. “Just visualize the poor woman sitting there in her tent waiting for the next person to come in, thinking of something prophetic to say to them.”

  “I don’t know how they do it every single day in the newspapers.” Crosby went off at a chatty tangent. “Taurus and Libra and that lot. My auntie always …”

  Navigation was the only use that Sloan had for the stars: that and an occasional contemplation of them for æsthetic reasons on a really velvety night. Once a man had done his turn on night duty he looked on a clear sky as a policeman’s friend.

  “Nurse Cooper would have known almost everyone who came in, don’t forget,” mused Sloan. “Man and boy, probably.”

  He’d never been as far as Greece but he didn’t suppose that in its day Delphi had been so very different from Madame Zeld
a and her crystal ball. Or the Zodiac. You had your gnomic utterance and you made what you could from it.

  Or what you wanted to.

  “And they’d all know Nurse Cooper, too,” Sloan reminded Crosby. That was something else to be taken into account. Madame Zelda’s clothes had been sort of fancy dress parody: not a proper disguise at all. Her homely face had been partly veiled but there mere token subterfuge had ended.

  “Bound to, if she’d been in Almstone all those years, agreed the constable.”

  Whoever had killed her had known her.

  Sloan reached that conclusion without surprise. Time and again he’d heard people ask those theoretical questions about killing unknown Chinese. If, the hypothesis ran, you could press a button, kill an anonymous Chinaman and collect a million pounds to do what you liked with, would you do it?

  Sloan had never heard anyone say they would.

  Perhaps, instead, if you asked a person if they would kill someone they knew in cold blood for smaller sums there would be more takers. Sloan had known several. Sometime soon he hoped he was about to be able to confront another.

  Crosby was still looking round. “She’d started telling fortunes at two-thirty when the Show opened. They said there was a bit of a rush to begin with …”

  Nostradamus appealed to everyone to begin with.

  “… then it eased off,” said the detective-constable.

  “The Mellows girl said she went in between three o’clock and three-fifteen, didn’t she?” Sloan fished his notebook out of his pocket. “Then, according to her statement …”

  Richenda Mellows had written out her version of events in a clear, bold hand, signed it without hesitation and handed it over to Sloan before she, too, had left the Police Station at Berebury.

  “… she went off to see the Morris Men dance,” concluded Sloan.

  Crosby sniffed. “Funny thing to do, sir, wasn’t it, seeing as how Nurse Cooper had just been able to corroborate her claim to the Priory. You’d have thought,” said the constable, “that the first thing she’d have done was gone straight off and told somebody.”