Little Knell Read online

  ‘Where was this body going?’ asked Sloan, since there was no point in getting embroiled in differing views of Douglas Stuart. As Sloan had confirmed for himself a long time ago, one man looked up and saw stars and another looked down and saw mud. Stars or mud, he would talk to Stuart first.

  ‘Not going,’ said Leeyes gloomily. ‘Gone. And that’s only half the trouble.’

  Sloan raised an eyebrow interrogatively.

  The trouble with the drug dealing that was so much on his mind was that it had suddenly burgeoned out over Calleshire from the urban area around the industrial town of Luston. And that was what he should be working on now. He hadn’t time to be playing about with arcane old statutes for sake of an outworn argument.

  ‘It’s already been taken over to the Greatorex Museum,’ said Leeyes. ‘And Marcus Fixby-Smith – apparently he’s the head honcho over there – won’t play ball.’

  Detective Inspector Sloan said he could see that there might be difficulties.

  ‘Difficulties!’ trumpeted Leeyes. ‘You haven’t started to appreciate quite how many difficulties there are yet, Sloan.’

  ‘Sorry, sir.’

  ‘Apparently, the curator doesn’t want to part with the mummy because exactly how you first begin to go about examining these old things is very important.’

  Sloan said that he could see that it might be.

  ‘And he doesn’t want anyone else messing about with it until he and his archaeological pals have had a go.’

  Sloan said he could see that, too.

  ‘You may be able to, Sloan,’ said Leeyes with heat. ‘All I can say is that the coroner can’t.’ He sniffed. ‘Or won’t.’

  ‘Do we know what it is exactly Mr Locombe-Stableford wants?’ asked Sloan. Something – he didn’t know quite what yet – didn’t add up here. Especially that business about acting on information received. That sort of information usually reached the police long before it got to the coroner.

  ‘Trouble, that’s what he wants,’ muttered Leeyes, tersely. ‘If you ask me, he’s out for blood. Preferably mine. And, as he never fails to remind me, he has the last word.’

  That was the other rub.

  ‘So, Sloan,’ carried on Leeyes, ‘you’d better get over to the museum and sort things out as quickly as possible.’ He paused and added with a fine show of magnanimity, ‘You can take Constable Crosby with you. We don’t need him here today.’

  Chapter Three

  Defective

  ‘Hullo, there!’ hollered Horace Boller, as he pushed open the dilapidated wicker gate at the Calleshire Animal Sanctuary at Edsway.

  He was greeted by a cacophony of barks from the assorted dogs in residence.

  ‘Quiet!’ he bellowed.

  This made the dogs bark even more loudly.

  Usually, by this time, a woman’s head would have come round the back door with the offer of a mug of tea and a shouted command to the dogs to surcease. Horace suspected that his usual welcome at the animal rescue place owed more to the fish he brought with him than to himself, but he did not very much care. A mug of tea was, after all, a mug of tea. And, anyway, stinking fish would have been a nuisance to him in his cottage, let alone to his neighbours.

  He advanced on the back door, calling out, ‘Anyone at home?’ There was still no response but the door was ajar so he let himself in. Unexpectedly, he found the two sisters who ran the sanctuary sitting at the kitchen table doing nothing. This was so uncharacteristic of them in the middle of the day that he looked from one to the other and asked, ‘What’s up?’

  Alison Kirk, the elder of the two, answered him. ‘We’ve had a bit of bad news, Horace.’

  Boller set his creel down in the kitchen sink and accepted the proffered mug of tea. ‘Your nephew?’ he said.

  She nodded, brushing a solitary tear from her cheek. ‘Derek, our sister’s son.’

  ‘He died yesterday,’ said Jennifer Kirk, harder-hearted and dry-eyed.

  ‘Poor boy,’ said Alison. ‘I’m glad now his mother isn’t still alive.’

  ‘Silly fool,’ said Jennifer.

  ‘You shouldn’t say that, Jennifer.’ Alison admonished her sister. ‘We don’t know what makes people be like Derek. It isn’t as if he could have helped being like he was.’

  ‘He knew the score,’ said Jennifer Kirk.

  ‘He knew there was no hope,’ said Alison, while Horace spooned a large quantity of sugar into his tea. ‘They told him up at the hospital months ago that they couldn’t do any more for him.’

  ‘Just to go on taking the tablets,’ said Jennifer astringently.

  ‘And that wasn’t easy,’ protested the older and gentler Alison. ‘He had to take so many of them you see, Horace. Thirty a day, would you believe it?’

  Horace nodded behind his mug of tea.

  ‘But like it says in the Bible,’ said Jennifer, ‘as you sow, so shall you reap.’

  ‘I really do think you should be a little more charitable, dear,’ murmured her sister.

  ‘He did sow some wild oats, though,’ said Jennifer. ‘And in some funny places.’

  ‘And how!’ muttered Horace under his breath.

  Alison, who hadn’t heard what he’d said, went on. ‘Don’t forget, Jennifer, that there, but for the grace of God, go us all.’

  Jennifer gave a rather unladylike snort. ‘I think it’s really rather unlikely in the circumstances that either of us could ever have behaved like Derek.’

  ‘And in any case,’ said Alison, ducking this issue, ‘one shouldn’t speak ill of the dead.’

  Horace Boller offered what comfort lay within his own hedonistic philosophy. ‘He had a good run for his money anyway.’

  ‘Yes, that was nice, wasn’t it,’ said Alison Kirk sentimentally. ‘That he could enjoy his last year like he did, I mean. He even gave us some money for the sanctuary.’

  ‘Well, as Derek so often said,’ commented Jennifer drily, ‘he couldn’t take it with him.’

  ‘He lived it up while he could,’ grunted Horace Boller, refilling his mug without asking. ‘Or so they told me over at the Ornum Arms at Almstone.’

  ‘It was one of his favourite places,’ said Alison wistfully. ‘He really liked it there. It was very popular, he told us. Lots of people he knew always in the bar…’

  Jennifer Kirk remained unimpressed. ‘Drink never helped anyone. And not him, ever.’

  ‘If you want all your cats to have a bit of fish,’ interrupted Horace Boller, pointing in the direction of the basket he had brought, ‘then you’d better get that big ginger tom off it pretty smartish.’

  * * *

  ‘We’ve got to go where, sir?’ Detective Constable William Edward Crosby, by no means the brightest star in the detective firmament of F Division, was always keen to travel anywhere, provided only that he could drive a police car there at the fastest possible speed.

  ‘The Greatorex Museum,’ said Sloan, adding by way of self-preservation that there was no hurry about getting there. ‘No hurry at all, Crosby, seeing that what we’re going over to the museum to take a look at has been dead and gone a very long time and is still in its coffin.’

  By rights, Detective Sergeant Gelven, competent and experienced, should have been at his right hand but Detective Sergeant Gelven had gone sick of the police palsy or its modern-day equivalent and Sloan had been left with Detective Constable Crosby, inexperienced and incompetent, in his stead.

  ‘And what we should actually be doing,’ said Sloan tightly, ‘is anticipating the trouble likely to be caused by a sudden and severe shortage of heroin in our patch and doing something about it ahead of the action.’

  ‘I don’t see why that should be our worry, sir.’ Crosby pulled the steering wheel round with two fingers of one hand before remembering that both hands should have been on the wheel in the classic ten minutes to two o’clock hold. He hastily assumed this position.

  ‘Oh, you don’t, don’t you?’ said Sloan with some acerbity. ‘And why not, may I
ask?’

  ‘Because the junkies can’t get their hands on the heroin if it’s safely over at the analysts.’

  ‘Had it occurred to you, Crosby, that if the new supplies aren’t available, something might happen to the price of what stock the dealers have still got?’

  The constable changed down a gear for a tight bend ahead. ‘It’ll go up, I suppose.’

  ‘It will go up by leaps and bounds. And,’ Sloan forecasted, ‘something else will happen to it, too.’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘It’ll be adulterated down to make it seem to go further. And that, Crosby, means trouble. Big trouble. All round.’

  ‘But, surely, sir,’ Crosby objected naively, ‘that’s not our problem either.’

  ‘Think again,’ advised Sloan.

  ‘It’s not us who are buying the stuff.’ He sounded mulish now. ‘It’s the addicts.’

  ‘For starters,’ spelled out Sloan, ‘it means much more acquisitive crime in the area to raise money to pay the dealers more for a less pure drug…’

  ‘Yes, sir, but…’

  ‘Remember, the heroin habit is still going to need feeding whatever the state of the supply.’ The expert who had come down to Calleshire to lecture to the force about drugs had taken a line from one of Shakespeare’s sonnets as his text, ‘Feeding on that which doth preserve the ill’, but Sloan forbore to remind Detective Constable Crosby of this. Instead he said, ‘And so it means some addicts will lose their wick without their usual fixes. Turn very nasty, some of them will if they’re cut off from the stuff.’

  The drugs expert had gone on a bit about fungible economies as well but Sloan had decided that while perishable goods consumed in use might well be a problem down Mexico way, they weren’t in Calleshire.

  ‘We could pick a few of ’em up now, sir,’ suggested Crosby with something approaching animation. ‘Before they turn nasty. There’s that little runt, Goddard, who hangs about under the railway arches most nights…’

  ‘Ah,’ said Sloan with satisfaction, ‘I knew I’d heard the name before. No, Crosby, he’s only small fry. And so, in a way, is Horace Boller. The excise people have let him think they’ve accepted his story about not knowing what was in his lobster pot because it’s the big fish we’re after. He might even lead us to him,’ he added without much hope.

  ‘We could always arrest Wayne Goddard for possession with intent to supply, sir.’

  ‘It wouldn’t get us any nearer the people we really want.’ They hadn’t needed that expert on drugs to tell them this in Calleshire.

  Crosby’s face cleared. ‘I get you, sir. You want us to sit back and see where any trouble from this missing consignment leads.’

  ‘You’ve got it in three,’ said Sloan unkindly. ‘By the way, Crosby, if you had a vast amount of money in small denomination notes what would you do with it?’

  The constable sounded quite reproachful. ‘Buy a blue Jaguar XKR, sir, naturally.’

  ‘Naturally.’ Sloan sighed. ‘Look, there’s the road for the Greatorex.’

  ‘So why are we going there, then, sir?’ asked the constable, disappointed. Granary Row, where the Greatorex Museum was situated, was nowhere near far enough away from the centre of Berebury for his taste. Crosby liked long, fast journeys against the clock, or, better still, hot pursuits; not sedate progresses round the built-up parts of the market town at moderate speed.

  ‘I think we could call it an ego trip,’ murmured Sloan caustically. As far as he was concerned he would only be really interested if the mummy were stuffed full of heroin.

  ‘If I had lots and lots of money, sir,’ said Crosby, as they entered the museum car park, ‘really lots, then I’d have one of those, too.’ He pointed to a vintage green Bentley with polished coachwork and gleaming chrome headlamps. ‘Just for show, of course.’

  ‘Naturally,’ said Sloan again. ‘And a TVR Grantura for Sundays, I suppose.’

  The curator of the museum, like Sloan, lost no time at all in categorizing the police visit as a sheer waste of time and public money. ‘It’s bureaucracy gone mad, Inspector,’ declared Marcus Fixby-Smith heatedly. He turned to his deputy, a thin colourless woman, who flanked his desk. ‘I’ve never heard such utter nonsense, have you, Hilary?’

  Hilary Collins shook her head.

  ‘I can assure you, Inspector,’ said the curator, ‘that every single piece of Colonel Caversham’s legacy to the museum here is only of archaeological interest.’

  ‘And archival,’ put in his deputy in support. ‘I’m afraid, though, we haven’t had time to go through all of the written material yet, let alone begin to catalogue the collection. There’s rather a lot of it.’

  ‘The colonel’s early travels are particularly well documented,’ said Fixby-Smith. ‘He was a pioneer in his day.’

  ‘A true explorer,’ said Hilary Collins reverently. ‘They don’t come like that any more.’

  ‘Which is why we’re so pleased to have this legacy of all the artefacts in his collection,’ said Fixby-Smith. He gave Sloan a remarkably shrewd look. ‘I promise you, Inspector, that it’s got very little intrinsic value outside the museum world.’

  Detective Inspector Sloan, who had been a policeman long enough to know that everything – but everything – had some value to someone, somewhere, duly made a note.

  ‘Presumably,’ went on Fixby-Smith, ‘that’s why he left it all to the Greatorex in the first place.’

  ‘The family might have chucked it, you mean?’ asked Detective Constable Crosby insouciantly.

  ‘They might,’ Fixby-Smith said, adding disparagingly, ‘You never can tell with people who don’t know the first thing about artefacts.’

  ‘But the relations get the real money, do they?’ enquired the detective constable.

  The curator stiffened. ‘I couldn’t tell you who the residuary legatees are. We at the museum haven’t been informed.’

  ‘I don’t think that’s our concern anyway, at this stage, sir.’ In principle, Detective Inspector Sloan was all in favour of ‘blue skies research’ – finding out all you can before you begin an inquiry – but that was something that didn’t seem to apply here.

  Hilary Collins said diffidently, ‘But surely, Inspector, we can do what the coroner wants and certify that the mummy is merely an ancient survival? After all, even if we don’t know the exact provenance we do know that it’s Egyptian.’

  ‘I’m afraid, madam,’ said Detective Inspector Sloan with genuine regret, ‘that the coroner requires rather more than your formal certification.’

  ‘Ancient isn’t the right word anyway,’ interrupted Marcus Fixby-Smith. ‘Even without seeing any radiocarbon datings I am prepared to state on paper, on the basis of its style and condition alone, that the mummy in question is definitely in the region of three thousand years old. Isn’t that good enough for the man?’

  ‘What the coroner is asking for,’ said Sloan, euphemistically paraphrasing as best he could as he went along, ‘is the written opinion of a registered medical practitioner.’

  ‘Then I only hope,’ said Fixby-Smith acidly, ‘that that practitioner has some idea of how much damage can be done to a mummy like this just by starting to open it up in the wrong way. I’ve been in touch with a palaeo-pathologist who’s an acknowledged authority on the subject. Miles, that is, Professor Upton, advises me that the whole procedure calls for very great care.’

  ‘I’ll tell the doctor that,’ promised Sloan. ‘You must understand,’ he hastened on, ‘that we’re not in any way doubting the professional expertise of either of you here.’ Sloan looked from one curator to the other and said, ‘But surely, at the moment, your opinion could be based only on a view of the outer coffin?’

  ‘Yes, but no one’s going inside it, no one at all,’ Fixby-Smith started up again with vigour, ‘doctor or not, until it’s been properly X-rayed first. I hope that’s clearly understood. And that whoever does the X-rays is familiar with radioactive isotope techniques.’

 
; ‘I’ll be sure to pass your message on to Dr Dabbe, sir.’

  ‘Dr Dabbe?’ said Fixby-Smith.

  ‘He’s the Consultant Forensic Pathologist to the Berebury and District Hospital Trust,’ said Sloan.

  ‘Then, perhaps,’ suggested Miss Collins timidly, ‘he might be able to tell us the cause of death of the mummy at the same time.’

  Chapter Four

  Stained

  ‘I would be the first to agree, Sloan,’ said Dr Dabbe, with whom the two policemen were discussing the problem, ‘that the cause of death can often be determined in really old bodies.’

  ‘Even after three thousand years, doctor?’ asked Sloan. He and Detective Constable Crosby were sitting in the consultant pathologist’s office at the hospital in Berebury.

  ‘You can tell a lot about illness from some mummies,’ said the doctor. He nodded in the direction of the mortuary beyond his office. ‘More than you can from some modern bodies.’

  ‘I don’t see how that’s possible, doctor.’ Crosby was at his most mulish. As far as the police constable was concerned, being in the pathologist’s office was better than being in the actual mortuary – but only just. ‘Our doctor doesn’t even know what’s wrong with my granny’s stomach and she’s still around.’

  ‘Ah, that’s because mummies are dead before they’re examined,’ said the pathologist by way of professional solidarity. ‘Easier to get at the evidence so to speak. The abdomen in the living is terra incognita. In the dead it’s terra firma.’

  The constable looked unconvinced.

  ‘But,’ continued Dabbe, ‘it’s only in theory, gentlemen, that you can tell a lot about mummies…’

  ‘In theory, doctor?’ Sloan hastened into speech before Crosby’s grandmother’s illness could come back into the exchange.

  ‘In theory,’ repeated the pathologist firmly. ‘And that’s only if we were to open up that mummy over at the museum and I was to examine the remains for you.’

  ‘I rather think that is exactly what the coroner has in mind, doctor,’ murmured Sloan; although he was actually still unsure about this. Finding out was very high on his agenda.