Learning Curve Page 17

Detective Inspector Sloan, Head of the CID in ‘F’ Division said that the roadworthiness of cars was not his province.

  ‘Some women have pretty poor spatial awareness, you know,’ said Sharp.

  Detective Inspector Sloan did know that but felt it was as much as his life was worth to say so in some quarters, notably anywhere within the hearing of female Police Sergeant Perkins. Known in ‘F’ Division as Pretty Polly, she could be more than forthright in anything touching on the comparative abilities of men and women.

  ‘It’s the supermarkets,’ sighed Sharp. ‘She needs more space and they don’t always have it in their car parks.’

  ‘And your own car, sir?’ asked Sloan, undiverted.

  ‘Mercifully she doesn’t drive that one. Says it’s too big for her.’

  ‘I meant where is your own car now?’

  ‘Having a new gearbox fitted.’

  ‘Since when?’

  ‘Since the day before yesterday. Is it important?’

  ‘Could be,’ said Sloan. ‘When did you get back from Ornum last night?’

  He frowned. ‘About ten. Honley didn’t want to say too much. He said it was a bit soon to come to any conclusions about anything in our firm until he’d picked up all the threads.’

  ‘Surprise, surprise,’ muttered Crosby from the sidelines.

  ‘I take it your wife can confirm the exact time you got home,’ said Sloan, not very hopeful. Even when sworn, the evidence of wives was not always considered sound by those involved in law enforcement.

  Pour cause.

  Jonathon Sharp came back with surprising swiftness. ‘I’ll say she can. She was a bit cross, actually. I interrupted her ladies bridge when she was playing a risky three no trumps with a singleton heart.’

  Detective Inspector Sloan put his notebook away. ‘Thank you, sir. That’s all been very helpful.’

  It was only when they were back in the police car that Detective Constable Crosby, still very much a bachelor and no player of the game of bridge, turned to him and asked, ‘What’s a singleton heart, sir?’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  In many workplaces the advent of Friday afternoon betokened an almost palpable lowering of tension. As often as not, the big bosses had already headed off for long weekends in the country while lesser mortals compiled lists of unfinished work under the heading of what needed to be done first thing on Monday morning. Having thus metaphorically – if not actually – cleared their desks they then either joined colleagues for a lunch break more prolonged than usual or foregathered after work to complain about the frailties of their bosses.

  It wasn’t like that at Berebury Police Station. Already members of the uniformed branch were beginning to report for late duty since these days Friday nights on the streets were nearly as demanding as Saturday nights. Anyway, as far as Superintendent Leeyes was concerned, the weekend didn’t really begin until he stood on the first tee of Berebury Golf Course on Sunday mornings. He always held as he stood there, number one wood in hand, ball on tee, that detection had no time boundaries.

  ‘My view, Sloan, is …’ he was saying now – and at length.

  Detective Inspector Sloan had long ago decided that there was only one thing to do when the superintendent was pontificating and that was to appear to be listening attentively. Any other course of action was ill-advised since his superior officer had a tendency to stop suddenly and make sure that all those present were paying attention – usually just as the thoughts of his listeners had started to wander.

  ‘Don’t you agree, Sloan?’ he barked presently.

  ‘Er – yes, sir, of course, sir,’ said Sloan hastily, hauling his thoughts back from trying to decide exactly where he was going to plant a new floribunda rose in his garden. There was a spot just inside his front gate that needed a bit of colour … ‘Very important, sir.’

  ‘No stone should be left unturned.’

  ‘Certainly not, sir,’ said Sloan, pulling his thoughts back with a jerk. ‘Or avenue unexplored,’ he added to himself.

  ‘Or avenue unexplored,’ said Leeyes aloud. ‘So I agree that the only realistic course of action left for you to take now is to go out to the bridgeworks and interview the driver who hit Thornycroft’s car. You’d better tell Calleford Division that you’re going there. Strictly speaking the south end of the bridge is in their manor.’ He grimaced. ‘Professional courtesy and all that.’

  ‘Of course, sir,’ said Sloan, only too aware of the view the superintendent took of any invasion of his own territory. He coughed and went on, ‘We’ve already checked that the man who was driving the earthmover is still over there and that Jonathon Sharp’s car was indeed in the garage having a new gearbox fitted at the material time just as he said.’ There was someone else he wanted to see but he didn’t say this to the superintendent.

  Leeyes grunted. ‘There aren’t any other loose ends that I can see, more’s the pity.’

  ‘What we can’t do, sir,’ went on Sloan regretfully, omitting any mention either of something else that had occurred to him to check, ‘is to watch Paul Tridgell for twenty-four hours a day, even though I’m sure he holds the key to the whole situation. I’m planning to interview him again first thing tomorrow morning – he should be feeling a bit better by then – but I don’t hold out much hope of getting anything more out of him.’ He paused and then said, ‘After that, sir, I’m afraid we appear to have come to a full stop.’ The spectre of the Ponzi scheme at Pelling was already beginning to raise its ugly head.

  Leeyes grunted again.

  ‘It seems, sir, that all we can go in for now is masterly inactivity.’ It was an expression Sloan’s old station sergeant – that incomparable mentor – used to use when he couldn’t quite decide what to do next. ‘Watchful waiting’ was another such.

  ‘Or wait for someone to make a false move,’ said Superintendent Leeyes neatly, ‘which comes to much the same thing.’

  ‘It would help,’ agreed Sloan.

  It was not long after that when Detective Constable Crosby turned the police car in the direction of the south side of the River Calle. He was exhibiting a noticeable lack of enthusiasm because, once out of Berebury, the roads on the south side of the river were a jumble of winding country lanes created by years of old track ways, of farms expanding and declining, of neighbours disputing boundaries and of awkward-sized inheritances.

  ‘I expect,’ said Sloan sympathetically, ‘that they’ll build new roads over here when the bridge is finished.’

  ‘I sure I hope so,’ said Crosby, slowing down and changing gear for a corner that could well have had its origins as the boundary of a Norman manorial holding. ‘About time, too. All we need now is a flock of sheep on the road.’

  ‘All we need now, Crosby,’ said Sloan with some asperity, ‘are some real live clues to what Derek Tridgell meant. If anything, that is. It might just be that his mind had succumbed to all the drugs he was on.’ Sloan voiced this, though, without believing it. At the back of his own mind he was still aware of a little anomaly in what had been said to him. He couldn’t quite account for it and that worried him: there had been something that didn’t quite tie up which, try as he might, he couldn’t pin down. There was, though, something he could do. ‘When we get back to the station, Crosby, I want you to set up a meeting with the treasurer of the Larking village hall.’

  ‘Yes, sir. Soonest, sir.’

  As the car rounded the bend the beginnings of the rising brickwork of the new bridge came into view. Crosby said, ‘The work’s much further forward on this side of the river, sir, than the other, isn’t it?’

  ‘It’s because it’s sunnier on the south side,’ said Sloan.

  ‘Really, sir?’

  ‘I was joking, Crosby.’

  ‘Yes, sir. Sorry, sir.’

  Deciding not to say anything about looking to their muttons, further mention of sheep being likely to be misconstrued, Sloan reminded the constable that what they were looking for was an earthmover driver cal
led Charlie Barton. ‘Sent over here this morning from the north end but we don’t know why. Or by whom.’

  Charlie Barton wasn’t sure either. ‘I just got a message to get over to the south side and check that the machine here was in good nick and ready for action because it was going to be needed first thing on Monday morning.’

  ‘And is it?’ asked Sloan with a well-concealed forensic curiosity. ‘I mean, in good condition.’

  ‘It looks OK to me,’ growled Charlie Barton.

  ‘And is it going to be needed on Monday morning?’ asked Sloan even more pertinently.

  ‘Search me. I haven’t got my orders for next week. Why?’

  Sloan produced his warrant card.

  ‘A detective inspector asking about a little bump to a posh car on a building site?’ exploded Barton when he saw it. ‘What do you think I am? Stupid?’ His lip curled. ‘So it’s all going to be my fault, is it? That’s the trouble with the big boys. They make sure they’re always on the winning side and that they never get the blame whatever happens.’

  ‘Not necessarily,’ said Sloan when he could get a word in edgeways.

  ‘I can see where this is going,’ swept on Charlie Barton bitterly. ‘By hook or by crook, that man over there is going to get the firm to pay for his repair. I know, I know. Well, all I can tell you is that I don’t even know when it happened. I didn’t feel a bump or anything.’ He hunched his shoulders and jerked his thumb in the direction of the giant earthmover. ‘You don’t when you’re sitting in the cab of one of those beauties. I didn’t know anything about it at all until the geezer started banging on my cabin door and shouting at me. Mind you, these big old beasts are pretty sturdy and I daresay his precious car isn’t.’

  ‘Could be,’ said Sloan pacifically.

  Charlie Barton waved an arm in the direction of the earthmover. ‘But these are too big to miss unless you’re really travelling.’

  ‘Or not looking where you’re going,’ contributed Crosby.

  ‘Heads in the clouds, some of the big bosses,’ muttered Barton. ‘All they do is pore over pieces of paper. They need to come down to earth sometimes.’

  ‘He did say it was you who was moving,’ pointed out Sloan. ‘Reversing, actually.’

  ‘Did he now?’ said the man sarcastically. ‘Well, I didn’t feel him or hear him myself but then I wouldn’t, would I? Not in one of these. They make enough noise on their own as it is and they make you wear ear defenders into the bargain.’

  ‘True,’ said Sloan, nodding in agreement.

  ‘Should have gone to Specsavers,’ concluded Detective Constable Crosby, thus demonstrating, if nothing else, his own susceptibility to the power of modern advertising.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Kate Booth had made an early start the next morning, knocking on the Thornycrofts’ front door in Berebury with her usual vigour. She was rejuvenated by its being a Saturday and thus a holiday from scrutinising other people’s draft annual accounts. She was barely recognisable as a qualified accountant today. Gone were the businesslike suit and long-sleeved white blouse. In its place she was wearing a scruffy shirt and well-worn and not very clean trousers.

  Her knock was answered by young Lucy Leaton. ‘My faux pas has gone out,’ announced the girl.

  ‘Who?’ asked Kate Booth blankly.

  ‘Daddy. I’m supposed to call him Daddy but he isn’t my real daddy.’

  Kate Booth’s brow cleared. ‘Oh, you mean Simon.’

  ‘He went out early. Something to do with hiring another car while his is mended.’ She turned. ‘Mummy’s in the kitchen. I’ll get her for you. Mummy …’ she called out.

  ‘Who is it, Lucy?’ a voice came from behind her. ‘Oh,’ smiled Amelia Thornycroft, ‘it’s you, Kate. Do come in. You’ve called to collect some spare caving kit, haven’t you? Simon said he’d left it out in front of the garage for you to pick up as he wasn’t going to be here when you came. An earthmover backed into him yesterday on the North Bridge site and he’s taken my little car into town to try to hire a car while his is being repaired.’

  ‘Bad luck.’

  Amelia laughed, her eyes dancing. ‘I must say he put it a bit more strongly than that but you know what men are like with cars.’

  ‘They’re their babies.’ She grinned. ‘Men are babies sometimes, too.’

  Amelia didn’t respond to this. Instead she said, ‘Help yourself to the stuff out there and then come in for a coffee.’

  Kate Booth shook her head. ‘No, thanks, Amelia. I thought I might just give Paul Tridgell a ring this morning and ask him if he wants to come over to Chislet Crags for a bit of abseiling practice. It’s a good day for caving – no rain forecast anywhere at all in Calleshire.’

  Amelia Thornycroft frowned. ‘Kate, haven’t you heard? Paul and his sister were knocked down in the road the other night.’

  ‘No! I don’t believe it. Poor them.’

  ‘And poor Marion,’ said Amelia with feeling.

  ‘What on earth happened?’

  ‘They were on their way back from the pub out there and a car came up behind them and knocked them over.’

  ‘Phew,’ she whistled. ‘Were they badly injured?’ Her distress was evident. ‘I do hope it wasn’t serious.’

  Amelia Thornycroft paused and said thoughtfully, ‘Fortunately they’re both just very shaken and bruised, though Paul’s wrist was badly wrenched. Although it’s not broken it must be pretty uncomfortable still. What happened was very serious in one sense, though.’

  Kate Booth looked at her interrogatively, eyebrows raised. ‘Tell me.’

  ‘Paul’s quite sure someone tried to run them down,’ she said slowly.

  ‘No! I can’t believe that.’

  ‘Unlikely as it sounds, I must say he seems quite convinced.’

  ‘Who on earth would want to do something like that?’ asked Kate.

  Amelia shook her head. ‘I can’t imagine myself and neither can Marion.’

  Nobody had ever called Kate Booth slow on the uptake. ‘Can Paul?’ she asked pertinently.

  ‘If he can he’s not saying.’

  ‘Amelia, that could be quite dangerous,’ she said.

  ‘I know that. And so does Marion.’ She shivered. ‘I do hope he’s being very careful.’

  ‘So do I,’ echoed Kate fervently.

  Amelia said, ‘You know what he’s like. He’s not the most – what shall I say? – biddable of young men. He’s quite hot-tempered and he can be quite difficult.’

  Kate Booth grinned for the first time. ‘You can say that again. He flies off the handle more quickly than anyone else I know. No caving for him today, anyway,’ she said, starting to heft a bundle of equipment into her car. ‘Never mind, there’s always another day.’

  Amelia Thornycroft sighed. ‘It’s what one always says when something’s gone wrong, isn’t it?’

  Kate Booth, who knew quite a lot of other things that were said in her office by some of her clients in exculpation when wrongdoing had surfaced during her scrutiny of that client’s accounts, merely nodded. ‘I think I’ll have that coffee with you after all, Amelia, and then I’ll just pop over to Friar’s Flensant to see how they are this morning. Thank Simon for his stuff for me when he gets back, will you?’

  Detective Constable Crosby had collected Sloan from the police station promptly at nine o’clock the next morning. He was patently disgruntled. ‘None of my mates has to work on a Saturday morning, sir, like me,’ he grumbled. ‘It’s not fair.’

  ‘Life isn’t,’ said Detective Inspector Sloan, older and wiser. ‘It’s lesson one, actually.’ Now he came to think of it, it was a lesson that he could wish some of the miscreants who caused them so much trouble down at the police station had learnt at their mother’s knees. If they had had mothers, that is. Sometimes he wondered if some of them were truly just limbs of Satan. ‘And deserts aren’t always just,’ he added for good measure, some judgements at the Berebury Magistrates’ Court still ranklin
g. ‘Something else for you to remember, Crosby.’

  ‘I tried the coffee at the canteen this morning instead of tea,’ said Crosby, ignoring this and still aggrieved. ‘It’s rubbish.’

  ‘Stick to tea,’ advised Sloan. ‘And get me out to Friar’s Flensant while you’re about it. I need to talk to Paul Tridgell again.’ What he really needed was some sort of lead in the case but he didn’t say so.

  ‘Yes, sir,’ said the constable, engaging gear and nudging the car’s nose none too gently into the swirling traffic beyond the police station car park. ‘Now, that girl in the wheelchair, Elizabeth Shelford, she knows how to make coffee.’

  Mentally, Detective Inspector Sloan chalked up the fact that the girl in question had yet another admirer in Crosby. And that human personality could transcend all manner of disabilities. ‘Does she, indeed?’ he murmured, his mind more on how much information he would be able to extract from a recalcitrant Paul Tridgell.

  ‘She made a lovely mug of it when I was there. Her mother was teaching that day and her father was away … Did I say that her father works abroad a lot?’

  ‘No, but it doesn’t matter. Go on …’

  ‘She can move everywhere she needs to in her wheelchair on the ground floor.’

  ‘I’m glad to hear it,’ responded Sloan absently, his mind still on other things. ‘I wonder,’ he mused aloud, ‘if she was the driver?’

  In spite of being trained never to do any such thing, the detective constable took his eyes off the road and turned to snatch a quick look at Sloan’s face. ‘Elizabeth Shelford, sir?’ He brought the car to a halt for a red traffic light that even he could think of no good reason for jumping.

  ‘Someone was at the wheel,’ said Sloan ineluctably.

  ‘You don’t mean her surely, though, do you, sir?’

  ‘It’s one of the reasons that might explain the closing of the ranks,’ spelt out Sloan. ‘Simple chivalry, perhaps,’ he added, trying to equate the young men who had been in the car that night with knights in shining armour. It wasn’t easy.