Stiff News Read online

  ‘But…’ prompted Sloan gently. There were some things almost too difficult to put into words, and he suspected this was one of them.

  ‘But as for the rest…’ He opened his hands in a gesture of despair.

  Lionel Powell demonstrated beyond all reasonable doubt that he was Gertie’s son by asking with tactless clarity, ‘Captain Markyate, are you trying to tell us that the marriage was not consummated?’

  ‘Gertie was a great girl, always,’ Markyate said obliquely, ‘but I’m afraid I wasn’t ever – er – a great chap.’

  ‘And,’ amplified Powell unnecessarily, ‘that means, of course, Inspector, that there were no children of the marriage.’

  ‘So…’ invited Sloan.

  ‘So we were divorced,’ said Peter Markyate simply. ‘And then Gertie married Hubert Powell.’

  ‘That’s a relief, I must say,’ said Lionel Powell, a touch of acid in his voice. ‘But why all the secrecy? That’s what I don’t understand.’

  ‘Hubert’s family would never have let him marry a divorcee. Not in those days. It was all a long time ago, remember, and they were always a stuffy lot, the Powells. A very long time ago,’ he added, staring into the distance as if he could see the past before his eyes, just as Maisie Carruthers had done.

  ‘Could they have stopped him?’ came back Powell swiftly. ‘Presumably he was of age.’

  ‘Hubert’s father held the purse strings,’ said the Captain. He gave Lionel Powell a diffident smile. ‘It was a very large purse and Gertie liked the good life, remember.’

  Lionel Powell jerked his shoulders in grudging agreement of this. ‘Naturally that is a factor for which my wife and I have always had cause to be grateful.’

  Detective Inspector Sloan’s mind was concentrating on something quite different.

  ‘The late Mrs Powell’s letters, gentlemen,’ he said, ‘which would seem to have been taken from her bedroom soon after her death…’

  ‘They were,’ said Peter Markyate. ‘But not by me. They weren’t there.’

  ‘You went into her room for them?’

  ‘I went there to try to retrieve my letters to her,’ he said. ‘Better not seen, you know.’

  ‘That figures,’ said Sloan.

  ‘But they’d already gone, Inspector.’ He shrugged his shoulders. ‘I’d been beaten to it but by whom and why I can’t tell you.’

  ‘And the amulet?’

  ‘I cleaned my fingerprints off that.’ He gave them both a shy smile. ‘I always patted it when I went in to see Gertie. For old times’ sake, you know. And it made her laugh.’

  Sloan stood up. There must be rhyme and reason to all this if he could just put his finger on it. He turned to Lionel Powell. ‘And you, sir, were seen with Walter Bryant when his wheelchair took off down the drive.’

  ‘That’s right, Inspector,’ said Powell at once. ‘I gave him a push.’

  ‘Why?’

  Powell looked pained. ‘Because he asked me to, of course. He thought he’d get there quicker with a good shove.’

  ‘Walter spotted the missing dirk while he was in here with his daughters,’ explained Markyate, ‘and we both went looking for Hamish.’

  Detective Inspector Sloan stared at him, light beginning to dawn at long last. ‘Tell me, what did the Brigadier do at Wadi el Gebra?’

  The library was suddenly very quiet again except for the fly that was still buzzing at the window.

  ‘He ran away,’ said Markyate simply.

  ‘But…’ began Sloan, who thought wartime deserters were shot. At dawn. Not at eight o’clock. Eight o’clock had given time for a reprieve to reach a place of civil execution. There was no reprieve from a firing squad.

  Markyate intruded on Sloan’s private thoughts. ‘But Walter and I caught him and brought him back.’

  ‘To fight another day?’

  ‘He did very well in Italy,’ said Markyate. ‘Made up for it there, all right, and later on in Normandy.’

  ‘So nobody knew?’

  ‘Not outside the Regiment,’ said Markyate.

  * * *

  ‘Sir…’ Crosby came after Sloan down the corridor, a plate of chicken pie balanced precariously in one hand. ‘I think something funny’s been going on here for a long, long time.’

  ‘So do I,’ said Sloan grimly.

  ‘Something secret…’

  ‘Too many things are secret here. That’s the whole trouble.’ Sloan didn’t slacken his pace. ‘Which one do you have in mind, Crosby?’

  ‘All those deaths here. And then there’s Mrs Forbes. She’s the old woman who won’t die even though she could easily.’

  ‘Easily could,’ Sloan corrected him, ‘is the name of that game. Put that plate down and follow me.’

  The room that he made for was on the first floor and belonged to Brigadier Hamish MacIver. The old officer was lying on his bed rather than in it, Constable Wilkins on bedwatch beside him.

  ‘It is time we had a talk, Brigadier,’ said Sloan.

  ‘Nothing to say,’ growled MacIver.

  ‘About the work of the Escape Committee.’

  ‘Nothing to say,’ he repeated.

  ‘I think,’ said Sloan, ‘that here at the Manor your Escape Committee helped the incurably ill and old to die if they wanted to.’

  The Brigadier said nothing.

  ‘And you instituted something called the Pragmatic Sanction whereby residents gave the Escape Committee their blessing for being helped out of this world as and when their infirmities got too much for them.’

  ‘Vets,’ remarked the Brigadier offhandedly, ‘do it all the time.’

  ‘True. But it is not yet legal here and therefore naturally Judge Gillespie did not approve of it.’

  ‘He’s always been an old stick-in-the-mud.’

  ‘The Judge kept a list of those residents whom he suspected of having been killed in this manner in his old coat…’

  The Brigadier sat up suddenly. ‘He did what?’

  ‘Mrs Powell,’ said Sloan, ‘was afraid that she might be killed in that way, too, and, as a noted lover of life, she, too, disapproved of the practice. She tried to draw attention to it after she was safely dead.’

  ‘From beyond the grave,’ said Crosby. ‘Except that she didn’t get there…’

  MacIver wasn’t listening. ‘What did you say was in the Judge’s coat?’

  ‘A list of all those who had died here – except Mrs Powell.’

  He sank back on his pillows, a little smile playing on his lips. ‘Really?’

  ‘You went looking for what you thought was in that coat on Friday evening.’

  The Brigadier jerked his head up.

  ‘Which was,’ said Sloan inexorably, ‘the same thing that you thought the late Mrs Powell might have kept among her letters, which you stole…’ The Brigadier moistened his lips. ‘An account of your attempt at desertion in the face of enemy fire at the Tinchel.’

  The Brigadier’s lips might have been dry but his old eyes were becoming suspiciously rheumy.

  ‘But when Mrs McBeath saw that someone had slashed the Judge’s coat,’ said Sloan, ‘she naturally assumed that someone had found that list and might very well try to kill her, too, since she would be presumed to have come across it when mending the coat, as indeed she probably had.’

  ‘Very unlikely, I should have thought,’ the Brigadier said, apparently unconcerned at this hypothesis.

  ‘Unless she saw that the dirk had been taken from the library and took fright about that instead,’ said Detective Constable Crosby.

  ‘A possibility, of course,’ said MacIver.

  ‘And so for the second time,’ said Sloan in a steely voice, ‘one of your brother officers – Walter Bryant – had to save you from yourself. He noticed that the dirk had gone missing and guessed you’d gone hunting Mrs McBeath in case she’d found out about your dereliction of duty.’ Sloan paused, a steelier note coming into his voice. ‘I think Mrs Carruthers had her fears, too.’


  Hamish MacIver raised his head at this.

  ‘She knew about Wadi el Gebra – as did the wives of all the officers serving there. And she wondered – like Gertie – if you were intent on making away with everyone who had known about your defection under the guise of euthanasia.’

  His head sunk slowly downwards between his hands. ‘I knew she knew and she knew I did…’

  ‘That’s why she couldn’t understand about Mrs McBeath being in danger.’

  ‘McBeath was the Staff,’ said the Brigadier thickly. ‘Never saw action.’

  ‘But Gertie’s husband at the time wasn’t. He was there and she knew, too.’ In Sloan’s considered view ‘the bubble reputation’ had a lot to answer for. ‘But Mrs Chalmers-Hyde didn’t. Her natural death fooled Dr Browne and allayed his suspicions.’

  MacIver didn’t seem to be listening any more.

  That didn’t stop Sloan from going on. ‘When Walter Bryant saw you, he got Lionel Powell to speed him downhill towards you to stop you doing anything misguided with that dirk…’

  The Brigadier seemed to be beyond speech.

  ‘Lionel didn’t know what it was all about and being a good civil servant simply removed himself from the scene of the action with all possible speed.’ Detective Inspector Sloan, investigating officer, didn’t go on. There was no need now. There was only a broken man to talk to.

  * * *

  ‘What did you say describes the situation best, Sloan?’ snapped Superintendent Leeyes down the telephone. ‘Never heard of it.’

  ‘A double helix,’ said Detective Inspector Sloan, forbearing to remind the superintendent about the instruction on DNA testing that they’d all had in the Force.

  Leeyes grunted.

  ‘But,’ hastened on Detective Inspector Sloan, back in Matron’s sitting room now, ‘I think that the real trouble was that the Brigadier imagined it was something quite different that the Judge was keeping hidden and he acted accordingly.’

  ‘Wheels within wheels is what you call that,’ said Leeyes. ‘Not all that fancy stuff about DNA.’

  ‘He must have thought instead that the Judge had written down for posterity a full account of the action at Wadi el Gebra.’

  Sloan took an instant policy decision against saying anything about ‘the cannon’s mouth’. He doubted if his superior officer was sufficiently familiar with Shakespeare’s ‘Seven Ages of Man’.

  ‘About which you say there was this schoolboy conspiracy of silence,’ barked Leeyes.

  ‘Moreover, sir,’ went on Sloan steadily, ‘he also feared that the deceased – Gertie Powell…’

  ‘I thought we were losing sight of her in all this, Sloan.’

  ‘… might have had something about his desertion in her letters so he took those from her room after she’d died. Her first husband had been at the action there, too, you see.’

  Leeyes grunted.

  ‘I understand, sir, that Mrs Powell, even though she was very ill, had made it abundantly clear that she hadn’t wanted any part in their Escape Committee’s Pragmatic Sanction.’

  ‘And did that save any of ’em from being done away with?’ Superintendent Leeyes arrived unerringly at the kernel of the argument with his customary precision.

  ‘I don’t know how we can possibly tell at this stage, sir.’ He cleared his throat and said, ‘It isn’t so much a case of time being of the essence as timing. They were all dying anyway.’

  Leeyes grunted again. ‘Surmise, most of it, Sloan.’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ admitted Sloan. ‘We don’t actually have much in the way of evidence.’

  ‘Is that good or bad?’

  Detective Inspector Sloan, police officer, said, ‘That is not for me to say, sir.’

  ‘The law,’ said one of its professional upholders, ‘is an ass.’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ said Christopher Dennis Sloan, man.

  It was a little later when the telephone in Matron’s sitting room rang again. Detective Inspector Sloan reached over to pick up the receiver. It was Dr Angus Browne.

  ‘That you, Inspector? Good. I’m ringing from Larking. I’ve got one of my patients at the Manor here in my consulting rooms. She says she’s run away from there. A Mrs Morag McBeath. What’s that you say? No, she’s not injured but she’s a bit tired and shaky and she’s babbling about being in danger from someone unspecified.’

  ‘Not any more she isn’t, doctor,’ said Sloan vigorously. ‘You can tell her from me that she’s got nothing to worry about any more. Nothing. She can come back now. The Manor’s quite safe again now.’

  ALSO BY CATHERINE AIRD

  The Religious Body

  A Most Contagious Game

  Henrietta Who?

  The Complete Steel

  A Late Phoenix

  His Burial Too

  Slight Mourning

  Parting Breath

  Some Die Eloquent

  Passing Strange

  Last Respects

  Harm’s Way

  A Dead Liberty

  The Body Politic

  A Going Concern

  After Effects

  Injury Time (short stories)

  STIFF NEWS. Copyright © 1998 by Catherine Aird. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

  eBooks may be purchased for business or promotional use. For information on bulk purchases, please contact Macmillan Corporate and Premium Sales Department by writing to [email protected].

  First published in Great Britain by Macmillan Publishers Ltd

  First U.S. Edition: January 1999

  eISBN 9781466873544

  First eBook edition: May 2014