Passing Strange Read online

  “Too clever,” said Sloan promptly. “That girl’s got brains.”

  She had spirit, too, but that was another matter.

  “Stands to reason, sir,” said Crosby mulishly, “that she’d want to tell somebody.”

  “She might have told the wrong person and I reckon she’d worked that out. She didn’t know who’d been putting all these obstacles in her way, did she? All she knew,” said Sloan, warming to his theme, “was that she wasn’t getting anywhere fast. Not who was stopping her inheriting the Priory. Besides, she wanted to see the Morris Men. She said so.”

  “I know, I know,” said Crosby in a resigned voice, “on account of them being an ancient survival from the past too. Like this tribe of Fred Flintstones she and her dad had been living with.”

  “Meanwhile,” said Sloan heavily, “someone who has seen her leave Madame Zelda’s tent slips in themselves.”

  “And says ‘What’s new?’” suggested Crosby vividly.

  “His very words, I’m sure,” said Sloan.

  “Nurse Cooper – all excited – says, ‘It’s all right, I can prove the girl’s who she says she is.’”

  “All innocent, too,” said Sloan soberly.

  Crosby nodded. “‘Good for you,’ says our friendly neighbourhood murderer. ‘Hang about while I go and find a weapon to kill you with.’”

  “Or words to that effect,” said Sloan.

  “So off he goes to look for the wherewithal to kill her.” Crosby sketched a quick noose in the air with his forefinger.

  “To kill her quietly,” said Sloan, completing the word picture. The thought alone was enough to send a trickle of ice up and down the spine. “It had to be quietly. A scream or a struggle would have been heard very easily, remember. He’d got to think of that.”

  “So he strolls round the Show keeping his eyes skinned.”

  “It’s got to be done quickly, too,” said Sloan. “He hasn’t a lot of time either.”

  “Before she spills the beans to someone else,” said Crosby: some of the films he saw were very old ones.

  “Quite so,” said Sloan sedately.

  “Then,” said Crosby, quite carried away with his reconstruction, “in the Flower Arrangements tent he spots this reel of Mrs Millicent Kershaw’s wire.” He paused.

  “The very thing, he says to himself,” supplied Sloan, since it seemed expected of him.

  “Yes. And he picks it up and –”

  “No.” Sloan brought the Walter Mitty dream sequence to an abrupt halt.

  “No?”

  “Don’t tell me he’s going to risk walking around with that reel in his hand. Someone would be bound to see and remember.”

  Crosby paused for thought. “He would have had to have covered it with something or carried it inside something.”

  “He would. It was too big for his pocket and he couldn’t break off a length in full view of everybody either. I don’t know what he put over it or it in but – all right – leave that for now and carry on.”

  But the illusionist’s spell had foundered on the hard rocks of reality. The constable’s spontaneity had all gone. “He brings it back to the tent, sir, hangs out the ‘engaged’ sign, breaks off the length of wire he needs and …”

  “Well?”

  “Kills her.”

  “Yes,” said Sloan consideringly, “I think that’s exactly what happened.”

  Detective-Constable Crosby added something else straight from the celluloid world. “Lynching never takes long.”

  “That was why it didn’t do,” said Sloan gravely. Retribution was one thing. Over-speedy execution of it was quite another. “Then what, Crosby?”

  “He takes the reel back to where he found it.”

  “Ah.”

  “Only to find Mrs Kershaw’s basket had gone. She’s put it in the boot of her husband’s car.”

  “Bully for Mrs Kershaw,” said Sloan absently. “So …”

  “So he looks round for somewhere else to park it. Somewhere safe where he can collect it later.”

  “He chooses the Fruit and Vegetable Tent,” said Sloan. “We don’t know why yet. But …”

  “But?” Crosby looked quite blank.

  “He couldn’t collect it later,” Sloan said. “We know that, too, don’t we?”

  It didn’t seem as if Crosby did.

  “He couldn’t collect the reel when he wanted to,” expounded Sloan patiently, “because he had to steal it back later on, didn’t he?”

  Crosby’s brow cleared.

  “Unfortunately for him,” said Sloan without noticeable pity, “half-a-dozen people had seen it in the meantime.”

  Crosby perked up and made his own contribution. “And that let the Mellows girl out, too, didn’t it?” he said.

  “It did,” said Sloan meaningfully. “Up to a point.”

  “Seeing as how she was under lock and key at the material time,” said Crosby. “Our lock and key.”

  “Being in police custody is one alibi that does seem to stand up,” murmured Sloan ironically. In his time he’d known a lot of alibis that hadn’t done but he’d never known that one to fail yet.

  “Unless she’s in it with him, sir? Is that what you mean?”

  Sloan nodded. Collusion had always been on the cards. “Sometimes,” the detective-inspector said profoundly, “it takes more than one to set up fraud.”

  Organized deceits often needed two pairs of hands. With murder you were better off on your own. First and Second Murderers belonged more to the plays of William Shakespeare. In real life the most successful killers were men on their own – partnership in that sort of crime didn’t stand the strain of union well.

  “Her being let off the hook like that,” said Crosby, “was another stroke of bad luck for him, whoever he is.”

  He, too, did not sound particularly sorry. “And now she’s on her own,” said Sloan. Richenda Mellows wasn’t safely in baulk any longer.

  She was back in play …

  Whether she was playing ball was another matter altogether.

  Up at Abbot’s Hall Farm Mrs Millicent Kershaw was anxious to get at least one thing straight. She’d attempted to do so the night before after that disquieting interview over the reel of wire with Detective-Constable Crosby, but then her husband had been too abstracted to give her his full attention. Later still she’d tried again, choosing her moment with care.

  She’d raised the subject in that normally relaxed period of the day when a long-married couple – yawning – prepared themselves for the night; when, in theory, at least, the cares of the day were cast aside with the day’s socks. Herbert Kershaw, usually only too happy to deliver himself of an opinion on anything from the shortcomings of the Government of the day to the weaknesses in the Fat Stock Market, had been strangely silent. In the connubial bed, too, he had stayed taciturn. Mrs Kershaw, who didn’t even know of the existence of the word ‘coverture’ – let alone its meaning – did, on the other hand know all about her own husband. She knew, for instance, that he slept scarcely at all that night. She certainly knew better than to press him about this or anything else.

  Instead, like a good general, she marshalled her forces and bided her time: and then struck later.

  “Do you mean to say, Herbert,” she said, giving him a healthy serving of his favourite pudding, (after an excellent bœuf carbonado) “that if I hadn’t picked up that trug of mine and put it in the boot of your car when I did, that that reel of wire of mine would have been back in it with my other flower-arranging things?”

  “I do,” said her husband thickly.

  She winced. “Without anyone being any the wiser?”

  “Not quite anyone,” pronounced Kershaw. He’d really eaten rather well – and for once in a while said so.

  Millicent Kershaw was not to be diverted. “Not quite anyone?”

  “Someone knew,” said Kershaw heavily.

  She gave a fastidious shudder. “I’m glad I moved my basket, then.”

&nb
sp; “Someone wasn’t glad,” observed Kershaw.

  “I shouldn’t have wanted to go on using that wire knowing that it had been used to … on … for …”

  Her husband plunged into the void. “You would never have known. Don’t you see, Millie? None of us would have known whose wire had been used. There’s plenty of the same stuff around. And now we all do …” His voice trailed away and he fell unwontedly silent again.

  “Oh dear, oh dear, Herbert,” she said.

  That did rouse him.

  “It could be very important, Millie. Mark my words, someone wasn’t glad that you’d shifted your old trappings at the wrong moment.”

  Millicent Kershaw had long ago got used to her husband’s manner of speaking. It had ceased to register with her as other than normal. But she was no fool. “Why,” she asked, “didn’t whoever had taken it just leave it near where he’d found it?”

  “What he needed,” pronounced her husband sagely, “if he couldn’t put it somewhere safe from suspicion was a chance to wipe his fingerprints off it.”

  She felt suddenly chilled. “And that’s what he didn’t get, isn’t it?” she said softly.

  Her husband’s head came up with a sharp jerk. “How do you know that?” he snapped.

  “Come along, Herbert, I can work that much out for myself.” She peered at him across the table. “And so can you.”

  “Yes,” he said grudgingly.

  “If his fingerprints weren’t on it,” she said, “it wouldn’t have needed to have disappeared for a second time, would it?”

  “It could have been found any time then,” he admitted, “without any harm being done.”

  “I don’t know what you mean by harm,” she said astringently. “There was enough harm done to poor Joyce Cooper.”

  “I mean,” he corrected himself hastily, “that if it had been clean it could have been found anywhere.”

  She looked at him. “So what did happen to it?”

  “I reckon someone tucked it away in the Fruit and Vegetable tent. Fred Pearson said it had been near where Ken Walls’s tomatoes had been.”

  She nodded. So that was what he had been talking so earnestly about to Fred Pearson after church.

  “If someone had parked it there,” said her husband, “they wouldn’t have stood much chance of getting it back without being seen.”

  “Not with those two around,” agreed Mrs Kershaw, her mind elsewhere.

  “They’d practically mounted guard over that stall.”

  “What about when it came to stealing it last night?” In her own way Millicent Kershaw could be single-minded too.

  “Anyone could have taken it then.”

  “Only if they were there,” said Millicent Kershaw logically. “Who was?”

  “Pearson and Walls,” he said readily, “Edward Hebbinge, Mr Burton –” almost no one in Almstone called the Headmaster by his Christian name – “Sam Watkinson and …” He paused.

  “And?”

  “Cedric.” Herbert Kershaw looked through his dining-room window in the direction of Dorter End Farm and his neighbour. “And Cedric,” he repeated.

  Millicent Kershaw wasn’t worrying about Cedric Milsom. She was worrying about her husband. “Herbert,” she said, her voice sharpened by anxiety, “Herbert, how do you know who – all were there last night?”

  “Pearson told me,” mumbled Herbert Kershaw. His colour changed, though, giving the lie to what he had said.

  “The trouble, Herbert,” said his wife and helpmeet unemotionally, “is that I know you too well.”

  He pushed himself away from the table and said angrily, “All right. Have it your own way, then.”

  “You went down there last night?” Her voice had sunk to a whisper.

  “After I heard about Joyce Cooper,” he said. “Well, wouldn’t you have done?”

  “You said you were going up on the hill after the new ram.”

  “Well,” he said with an irritation born of consuming fear, “I went down in the dale instead.”

  There was a long pause and then Herbert Kershaw said in a small, very different voice indeed, “And now I wish I hadn’t.”

  15

  Corno di bassetto

  Detective-Inspector Sloan was playing a game of consequences. And he was playing it with Superintendent Leeyes.

  Any connection between those who had to comfort the patriarch Job and Superintendent Leeyes of the Berebury Division of the Calleshire Police Force was more than coincidental. Sloan’s mother had always set great store by the Bible and Sloan had no difficulty at all in placing his superior officer’s attitude when he telephoned him.

  He had rung the Superintendent at the Club-house. Leeyes always liked to get in two full rounds of golf on a Sunday. The first was an early one and then – after a pause for suitable refreshment – he played another. Not too long after the first, of course, because it had to be started before – in the Superintendent’s own gallant and inimitable words – “the damn women started to clutter up the course.”

  Edward Hebbinge had unlocked the Priory for him. The agent had turned up soon after the police car had reached the Priory and waved Sloan towards his own office and telephone. “Carry on, Inspector. You know the way by now.”

  He had known the way.

  “There’s no one to disturb there now,” Hebbinge had called after him.

  There was no one to disturb. Crosby had gone to try to rustle up some food at the King’s Arms. Hebbinge had disappeared somewhere inside the Priory.

  Superintendent Leeyes was listening to Sloan with barely concealed melancholy. “I hope you know what you’re doing, Sloan.”

  “It’s a chance, sir,” he said.

  “Chances don’t always come off,” the latter-day comforter reminded him. “And if not …”

  “Yes, sir.” Sloan didn’t need any of the possible sequels to the failure of his plan spelling out for him.

  “It’s a very long shot.” The idiom might be modern. The sentiment was pure Old Testament.

  “I know that, sir.” He didn’t need reminding that he was steering a perilous course between Mother Cary and her storms and Davy Jones and his fathomless locker. He knew only too well. But a detective had to steer somewhere in a murder case. To stand still was to go back. “But I’m worried …”

  All that the murder of Nurse Cooper would seem to have achieved for the murderer so far was the preservation of the state of things as they were. If it needed a murder to keep things as they were then there was something wrong with the present state of things. He tried to say this to the Superintendent.

  “Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose,” said the Superintendent loftily.

  “Er – quite, sir,” murmured Sloan. The Superintendent was a great one for attending evening classes in the winter. ‘Beginner’s French’ had been one of the more traumatic courses for everyone at the Police Station. And that had included a merchant seaman from Marseilles arrested on a charge of illegally attempting to enter the country at Kinnisport on the Calleshire coast. The Frenchman had invoked Notre Dame all the time and after the Superintendent had spoken to him had muttered, ‘Malheur ne vient jamais seul’ as well.

  “But …” began Leeyes.

  But me no buts, pleaded Sloan: but silently. He was beginning to hate Edward Hebbinge’s office. He directed a malevolent stare at the great glossy estate map on the wall. He didn’t need reminding how the land lay.

  “… If anything should happen to the girl,” said Leeyes, an almost palpable dubiety travelling down the line.

  “If anything should happen to anyone,” said Sloan. The dark night of the police soul was when any crime at all that could have been prevented was perpetrated. In Sloan’s credo you could – without recourse to pedantic rhetoric – read ‘should have’ for ‘could have’ any time. Under his breath he said to himself, “A murder is a murder is a murder,” though to be quite honest he’d never really understood the same saying about a rose being a ro
se that got quoted so often.

  “You could have gone on questioning her, Sloan,” pointed out Leeyes.

  “I don’t think, sir,” rejoined Sloan, “that you could really say that I’d started.”

  “So long as you hadn’t charged her,” he grunted.

  “It wasn’t only that,” said Sloan. Ancient mariners insisted that the only certain cure for seasickness was to go and sit under a tree. Sloan had prescribed a similar change of situation for Richenda Mellows and deadlock.

  “Then,” said Leeyes, pursuing his own pessimistic line of thought, “you wouldn’t have had anything to reproach yourself for, would you?”

  Sloan bit back a rejoinder that drew attention to the fact that he hadn’t actually got anything to reproach himself for.

  Yet.

  Superintendent Leeyes would have countered that with all manner of predictions of gloom and doom. He was a man who insisted that despair was the only proper human condition. That conviction was based, he always insisted, on the strength of the available evidence provided by a lifetime in the Force.

  “Instead, Sloan,” continued the voice from the golf club, grandly going on to tack two metaphors together, “you’ve gone and let her off the hook to go and be a sitting duck.”

  “I’ve been thinking,” said Sloan steadily, “of exactly what difference the murder made.”

  It was another game of consequences that they were playing now.

  “To Joyce Cooper,” said Leeyes acidly, “quite a lot.”

  “Granted,” said Sloan immediately. “She wasn’t the only one affected, though, was she?”

  “I would like to think,” said the Superintendent sanctimoniously, “that it’s made a difference to the murderer’s conscience …”

  Sloan hoped he wasn’t counting on that.

  “If,” he said to the Superintendent, “Richenda Mellows can’t prove she’s the proper legatee then she can’t inherit.”

  “I should hope not, Sloan,” Leeyes intoned sonorously.

  “Another consequence, sir, would be that Maurice Esdaile couldn’t go ahead with his building development. At least for quite some time, anyway.”