Past Tense Read online

  ‘Put out a general call for him – and for this William Wakefield,’ commanded the superintendent.

  Wisely, Sloan forbore to say this was something that he had already done.

  ‘And pull Joe Short in for questioning as soon as he gets back from London just to be on the safe side.’

  Sloan thought it better not to say that this, too, had been on his agenda for action for some time now.

  Chapter Nineteen

  ‘So what’s to do, then, Tod?’ Somehow Detective Inspector Sloan had fitted in a quick visit to the undertaker’s premises before going on to Dr Dabbe at the mortuary. ‘And why did you need to see me in person? Wouldn’t a phone call have done? Or I could have rung you.’

  Standing at his side, Crosby shook his head. ‘Might have wakened the dead, though,’ he muttered irrepressibly.

  ‘It wasn’t that, Inspector,’ said Tod seriously. He ignored Crosby, gallows humour not going down very well in an undertaker’s office. ‘It was that I needed to see you here.’

  ‘They say that a mobile phone can find you anywhere in the world,’ went on Crosby, undeterred.

  ‘Why here, Tod?’ asked Sloan again. He wished he hadn’t brought the detective constable with him now.

  ‘This world, of course,’ Crosby added a coda of his own.

  ‘Come and have a look,’ said Tod, leading the way through to the back premises. Their route lay through the firm’s coffin store, rows of boards of varying heights being propped up against the walls. Crosby stepped aside and stood up in front of one of them.

  ‘Too short,’ called out Tod without looking round. ‘Try the next one down. That would fit you better.’

  Suppressing the temptation to add anything about the sooner the better, too, Sloan said, ‘You must have to be quite good at estimating measurement, Tod, in your line.’

  The young undertaker nodded. ‘You learn early in this trade. Comes naturally after a bit. A man’s height is seven times the length of his foot. Did you know that?’

  Detective Constable Crosby had paused at the end of the row where the coffin lids had got smaller and smaller, the awareness that these were for children visibly dawning on him and reducing him to silence.

  ‘And at two and half years old a lad is already half his adult height,’ said Tod over his shoulder. ‘Now, come out the back and take a look at something.’

  He opened up a pair of double doors and led the way outside. The yard behind Messrs Morton & Son’s premises was large enough for a stately hearse and two black limousines. Beyond it was a shed with an open side, shelved for flowers, with some wreaths already stacked there. Tod pointed. ‘Here, Inspector, take a look at these marks. I’d only spotted them myself just before I rang the police station.’

  Detective Inspector Sloan regarded a series of scratches on the outside woodwork of one of the windows with professional interest. ‘Could be an attempted break-in, I suppose.’

  ‘Thought it would be easy here, I expect,’ observed Crosby.

  Detective Inspector Sloan stood back and regarded the damaged woodwork. ‘I’m sorry, Tod, we should have checked on this as soon as the graveyard business cropped up. I reckon that whoever it was broke into the coffin at Damory Regis tried to get in here before the burial.’

  ‘Nobody’s perfect,’ said the young undertaker philosophically. ‘Until they die, of course. Makes you a bit cynical, do some eulogies.’

  ‘I guess,’ said Crosby.

  ‘Now, gentlemen, like I said, take a look at the doors, too,’ said Tod, getting back to business. ‘See where someone’s tried to lever them open?’

  ‘I do.’ Detective Inspector Sloan looked round. ‘So how did whoever did this get into the yard? It looks pretty secure to me.’

  ‘It is – up to a point, that is. It can be done, but that’s why we’ve got those high railings on the walls over there. You’d be surprised how many youngsters try to get in here. Especially round about Hallowe’en.’

  ‘For fun?’ said Sloan. He didn’t think the marks on the undertaker’s door had been made for fun: they had a purposive look about them.

  ‘For a bit of a dare, I guess,’ said Tod, shrugging his shoulders. ‘What they expect to see I don’t know.’

  ‘Bodies,’ supplied Crosby lugubriously.

  Detective Inspector Sloan snapped his notebook shut. ‘We’ll send the Scene of Crime people round soonest, Tod, so don’t touch anything, but I don’t think they’re going to find much. Not now.’ Once back in the police car he said to Crosby, ‘I suppose it’s a reasonable assumption that whoever broke into the nursing home and went through the matron’s desk was after those same rings, too.’

  ‘But the old bird must have flown by the time he got there,’ said Detective Constable Crosby as the car picked up speed.

  ‘Or she,’ Sloan reminded him.

  ‘But they did get them in the end, didn’t they?’ said the detective constable. ‘The dead end, you could say, sir.’

  ‘I shouldn’t say it at all, Crosby, if I were you,’ advised Sloan.

  Miss Florence Fennel gave her customary light tap on the door of the room of her employer before entering, notebook in hand, ready to start work. ‘I’m sorry for disturbing you, Mr Puckle, but I’ve just had Mrs Linda Luxton on the phone. If you remember, she’s the matron of the Berebury Nursing Home…’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ he said, looking up. ‘And what does she want?’

  ‘Apparently they have a new patient – someone rather ill – whom they say needs to occupy Josephine Short’s room as soon as possible. Rather urgently, in fact. And I gather you’d told young Mr Short that he could remove anything still there in his grandmother’s room since it was of no intrinsic value.’

  ‘I did indeed,’ he concurred readily. ‘I was assured it didn’t amount to much and we have all the documentation we need for probate here already.’

  ‘Well, apparently at first the police had said nothing was to be removed until they’d examined the room again after the break-in, but they have now and they’re happy for anything still in there to be released.’

  ‘Good, so…’

  ‘Although why he didn’t take everything before, I don’t know. But I understand Mr Short can’t be contacted by the matron.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So Mrs Luxton wants to know if she can send anything there over to us.’

  ‘I suppose so.’ Simon Puckle sighed. The firm were still holding a pair of skis for a gunner officer posted to sub-Saharan Africa during the war and several sporting trophies from a big game shoot of yesteryear whose protagonists were now as dead as their victims.

  ‘She says it’s not a lot, but reading between the lines I’d say it’s that she doesn’t want Mrs Wakefield back there. All it amounts to are half a dozen books and a packet with old photographs and so forth in, some letters and a few personal belongings.’

  ‘I suppose you’d better tell her to send them over here, then. Joseph Short can go through them before he goes back to Lasserta. He’ll be coming in quite soon anyway to sign those papers for me.’ He looked up and went through his customary ritual of saying – as they both knew – quite unnecessarily, ‘They’ll be ready for signature soon, I take it?’

  ‘Of course, Mr Puckle,’ she answered in the same spirit. ‘Very soon.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Dr Dabbe pleasantly as the two policemen reached the pathologist’s mortuary, ‘Burke and Hare have arrived, I see.’

  Detective Constable Crosby shook his head. ‘No, Doctor,’ he said, serious for once. ‘The subject is an elderly woman called Josephine Eleanor Short.’

  ‘So I am told,’ said the doctor. ‘And only lately buried, too, I hear.’

  ‘The day before yesterday,’ said Detective Inspector Sloan. He found it difficult to believe that it had only been a matter of two days before, so much had happened since.

  ‘Ah, too soon for adipocere, then,’ said Dr Dabbe.

  Crosby cocked his head enquiringly.

&nbs
p; ‘Grave wax,’ said the pathologist.

  ‘In the churchyard of St Nicholas at Damory Regis,’ went on Sloan, sticking to the point as best he could.

  ‘A pair of resurrectionists,’ said Dabbe, still jovial. ‘That’s what you two are.’

  ‘Exhumed on the orders of the coroner, permission confirmed with the appropriate certificate from the Home Office,’ said Sloan stolidly. Humour as a displacement activity he could understand; this was something else.

  ‘And presumably,’ went on the pathologist, ‘you have your reasons for raising the dead, so to speak?’

  ‘Yes, Doctor. The grave would appear to have been opened after the original burial and it is possible that some valuable rings that were said to have been buried with her have been removed.’

  ‘And you two gentlemen want to know what she died from, I suppose?’

  ‘Among other things, Doctor,’ said Sloan.

  ‘What did the acte de décès say?’

  ‘Beg pardon, doctor?’

  ‘The death certificate.’

  ‘Left ventricular fibrillation.’

  ‘The heart of the matter, you might say. And did her own doctor issue it?’

  ‘Yes. Dr Angus Browne.’

  The pathologist tilted his head forward the better to tie his facial mask on. ‘Usually sound, although you can always have a good man on a bad day.’

  That, as far as Sloan was concerned, was perfectly understandable in any doctor – except that he didn’t want that bad day to be one on which he or his wife and son consulted him. Or her, he added automatically, even though Crosby couldn’t read his thoughts.

  ‘And what about the other things you want to know?’ the pathologist asked in a now somewhat muffled voice.

  ‘There are thought to be three rings missing from the body. We have been told that the deceased was wearing them at the time of her death, and this was confirmed by the nursing home in which she died and the undertakers, but it does matter whether they were removed before she was…’ Sloan paused while he tried to think of the right word.

  The pathologist supplied it. ‘Encoffined.’

  ‘Exactly. Thank you, Doctor,’ said Sloan. ‘Alternatively we need to know if they were removed before she was buried.’

  ‘A la Hogarth,’ said Dr Dabbe.

  ‘Pardon, Doctor?’

  ‘In his painting of A Rake’s Progress they didn’t wait for the undertaker. The midwife had the rings off the rake’s wife’s fingers the minute she died.’

  ‘Not very nice,’ said Crosby.

  ‘We have, of course,’ said Sloan austerely, ‘also to make absolutely sure that the undertakers are not implicated.’ The matching memory to the pathologist’s Hogarth picture that came to Sloan’s mind was the morbid vision that had so frightened Charles Dickens’ character, the dying Ebeneezer Scrooge. It was when seeing in the vision of the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come that all his worldly goods – even his bedclothes – were being stolen the minute he died. Or had it even been before he’d died? That morbid scenario was an ever-present worry for policemen.

  ‘Your pigeon that, old chap,’ said Dr Dabbe amiably. ‘I only deal in what I can find.’

  Detective Inspector Sloan, head of the Criminal Investigation Department of ‘F’ Division of the county force, would have liked to be able to say the same but detection wasn’t like that. It was instead a mysterious compound of fact, speculation, good working practices, pure instinct and downright luck.

  ‘And I can tell you one thing,’ went on the pathologist, pulling down an overhead lamp, ‘this isn’t going to be anything like that painting Stanley Spencer did of the Resurrection at Cookham, when they all stand up out of their coffins as was.’

  ‘No, Doctor,’ agreed Sloan. He hadn’t thought it would be. ‘More “things ain’t what they used to be”,’ murmured Crosby, beginning his customary withdrawal to the sidelines of any post-mortem.

  It was very nearly an hour later before the pathologist straightened up and said, ‘Angus Browne was quite right in what he certified. I can confirm that the subject died from heart failure and that the post-mortem lividity and the condition of the body is exactly what I would have expected in the circumstances that you have indicated to me. I can say that there is no reason for me to believe that death was other than from natural causes.’

  ‘And?’ said Detective Inspector Sloan. He had seen the pathologist examine all Josephine Short’s fingers with great care.

  ‘And that two digits on the left hand show signs of having had rings removed rather roughly. The skin under where they would have been is considerably whiter than on the other fingers and I would say that whoever removed them…’

  ‘Yes, Doctor?’

  ‘Did so after death.’

  ‘And after burial?’

  ‘That, Inspector, I cannot say.’

  Chapter Twenty

  Detective Constable Crosby had visibly relaxed as soon as Sloan left the office. In theory he should have been drawing up a written list of what had happened in the case, setting out in neat parallel columns the movements of all the various participants. It was a theory in which he was well versed. What he wasn’t so skilled at was the practice.

  He had to remember, of course, that those he was writing about weren’t to be called suspects, this being deemed politically incorrect at this stage of the investigation. Actually he wasn’t absolutely sure which investigation he was supposed to be concentrating on at the moment.

  He sighed and reluctantly started at the top of the page, as instructed, with the possible – no, probable – encounter between Lucy Lansdown and Josephine Short in the hospital over at Calleford when Lucy, the deceased, that is…he stopped and chewed the end of his pencil and reconsidered this. They were both deceased, weren’t they? Lucy Lansdown and Josephine Short, a nurse and a patient, who might have – could possibly have – met when the nurse was still in training. If they had known each other then, this fact was something that mattered now. He was sure about that.

  Then there seemed to have been a gap of three years in which nothing at all of any particular significance had happened – at least nothing that he, Crosby, knew about. He had a shot at writing the word ‘hiatus’ but soon gave up and wrote ‘the death of Josephine Eleanor Short’ down instead, now able to put ‘from Natural Causes’ after that. Somehow that fact had made the case even more confusing.

  He searched his memory for something else he had been taught to consider. ‘Events triggered by the death’ – that was it. He gave this due consideration and a moment later wrote down ‘funeral’. After a minute or two he crossed this out and wrote down ‘return of Joseph Short from abroad’. ‘Abroad’ he considered a better word than Lasserta since he didn’t know where that was exactly.

  Then he crossed out the word ‘funeral’ once more and put down the break-in at the Berebury Nursing Home since that had happened sometime during the night before the funeral. The matron had seemed pretty sure about that. Someone looking for something. The rings perhaps. Perhaps not. He didn’t know.

  He next put down on his list the return of William Wakefield from South America. According to both his wife and the man himself, that hadn’t been triggered by Josephine Short’s death because he hadn’t been intending to come home. Or had he? That wife of his would have let her husband’s nearest workstation know for sure by email, even if she or they hadn’t been able to get in touch with him. And had that really been the reason why he had come home? And why hadn’t he come straight home the night he arrived in London?

  Then he wrote down ‘the funeral’ again, this time more firmly.

  What had happened after the funeral was easier to get in the right order. The wake at the Almstone Towers after the funeral – to which Lucy Lansdown hadn’t gone. Why she had gone to the funeral in the first place was still a mystery. So was the reason why she hadn’t put her name on one of those dinky little attendance cards the undertaker had been so pleased to hand over to Janet Wakefiel
d afterwards. She hadn’t done so, they knew now, because all the women who had been there and had filled in a card had been systematically eliminated from all police enquiries. He liked the phrase and wrote down that all the male attendees had been eliminated from their enquiries, too. Even that old schoolmaster, Sebastian Worthington, from out Kinnisport way, had been adamant that he hadn’t ever set eyes on the girl with the auburn hair before the funeral.

  Now, where was he? Crosby stared down at his notebook. Ah, yes. And then the very same night of the funeral the girl had been killed. Odd, that. And why she had been killed was an even greater mystery than why she had gone to the funeral. A worried brother in the North, even now making his way to Calleshire, hadn’t been able to throw any light on this over the telephone. That there had been a love affair that had been broken off a couple of years ago at least, he knew, but in the way of brothers he was sure she’d got over that. In any event, he didn’t know that she hadn’t, since she had never been one to wear her heart on her sleeve. Perhaps the two events weren’t connected. Perhaps they were.

  Both William Wakefield and Joe Short could in theory have slipped out of their respective hotels and met her at the bridge at Berebury, and Matthew Steele’s movements were customarily so fluid he could have been anywhere and done anything without his mother or anyone else knowing.

  And after that? After Lucy Lansdown’s body had been found, that is.

  Crosby frowned prodigiously. After that – or perhaps even the night before – some person or persons unknown had desecrated the old lady’s grave and removed three rings from the body. If they were the same person or persons who had just murdered Lucy Lansdown and thrown her body into the river, then they had been working to a very tight timetable indeed. And they’d have been pretty tired by morning. Especially if they’d been busy breaking into the Berebury Nursing Home the night before. Crosby gave a yawn himself at the very idea.

  Then, he decided, things had gone remarkably quiet. True, Joe Short had had his passport stolen, which was why he had gone to London, but he didn’t think that particular event came into his schedule. Matthew Steele had gone missing, which Crosby was quite sure did. And both the Wakefields had left their home today and nobody knew where they had gone or why.