Harm’s Way Read online

  “You will, Constable, won’t you?” she said comfortably, passing the plate.

  Crosby didn’t need pressing.

  “There’s no one missing out this way?” enquired Sloan generally.

  Mason shook his head. “Not that I’ve heard,” he said. “And I think I would have done.”

  Sloan did not doubt that Mason’s intelligence system was as good as any mechanical one. And his retrieval system a good deal better.

  “What about wayfarers?” asked Sloan.

  “We do get a few showing up from time to time even in this day and age,” said Mason. “If the finger is from one of them we may not know for quite a while. One of the old regulars would have to fail to turn up and that might take months. We might never know.”

  “It’s probably,” Sloan repeated his earlier statement, “from some old tramp who wandered into the wood to die.”

  Constable Mason frowned. “That finger may be from some old tramp right enough, sir, but it’s not from a wood.”

  “Oh?” said Sloan, interested.

  Mason shook his head. “Not if a crow had anything to do with it.”

  There was obviously more to being a country constable than just growing cabbages.

  “You won’t catch a crow feeding in a wood, sir,” carried on Mason. “They’d be too afraid of being caught by predators for that.”

  Crosby’s head came up from the scones. “Well, well …”

  “That means—” began Sloan.

  “That means, sir,” said Mason firmly, “that the rest of this body’s probably lying on open ground.”

  “Should be easy to find then,” remarked Crosby indistinctly.

  “No,” said Mason.

  “No?” said Sloan.

  “Stands to reason, sir,” said Mason, “doesn’t it? It’s been lying around for a fair old time for it to get into the state it has. I mean to say, fingers don’t come off a body all that easily, do they?”

  “Another scone, Inspector, or will you have a piece of cake?”

  “Thank you,” said Sloan.

  “So,” said Mason, “I should say that it’s already been lying around for a bit and nobody’s seen it yet.”

  “It could have just been put out somewhere,” suggested Crosby.

  “Difficult to move if it’s in the state that a crow could pick bits off,” said Mason resolutely.

  Sloan was inclined to agree with him. A newly dead body was an awkward enough object to move about: A disintegrating one practically impossible.

  “Mark my words,” said Constable Mason, “that body’ll be on open ground wherever it is.”

  “That should make it easier to find,” said Sloan.

  In the event he had seldom been more wrong.

  “Pass your cup, Inspector,” said Mrs. Mason.

  “This George Mellot,” Sloan said, getting out his notebook, “what can you tell me about him?”

  Constable Mason sat back in his chair. “He runs quite a tight ship at Pencombe. Everything done to a high standard and all that.”

  “What sort of a farm is it?”

  “Mixed,” said Mason. “Mellot’s old man went in for pigs in a big way but you know how it is. Sometimes you do well with pigs and sometimes you don’t.”

  Pigs is equal, thought Sloan to himself. Now who was it who had said that?

  Mason carried on. “The place had got a bit run-down by the time George came to take over. Old man Mellot was a real stick-in-the-mud.”

  Sloan nodded. Stick-in-the-mud was the opposite of evolution.

  “He got like Sam Bailey has got now,” said Mason. “Too set in his ways for the good of the farm.”

  “Wouldn’t change with the times,” said Sloan. It was easier said than done, changing with the times, especially when those times included incomprehensible technology, computers and microchips with everything.

  “There was another thing, sir,” said Mason.

  “What?”

  “Pencombe wasn’t big enough for both of them.”

  “George and his father?”

  “George and Tom,” said Mason. “Oh, didn’t I say? There was a younger brother, too, wanting his share.”

  Sloan geared himself to hear an updated version of the Parable of the Prodigal Son.

  Mason went on speaking. “George bought him out or something and Tom went off to do a Dick Whittington.”

  It was funny, thought Sloan, that there should only ever have been one Lord Mayor of London to get into the history books. Perhaps it was because he had got into a nursery rhyme too.

  “And did he?” enquired Sloan. “Oh …,” Sloan answered himself. “You don’t mean to say that Tom is that Mellot?”

  “Mellot’s Furnishings—Upholsterers to the Nation,” said Mason neatly.

  Not the Prodigal Son then, thought Sloan. More like Joseph …

  “Best thing that ever happened to young Tom Mellot was being kicked out of the farm,” said Mason.

  “Some nestlings thrive on being turfed out,” said Sloan sagely. Now he came to think of it the name of Mellot had been in the news lately. He couldn’t remember the exact connection. He would have to look it up. “Some don’t.”

  All police officers knew that.

  “Tom Mellot did,” chuckled Mason. “I bet he could buy brother George out a dozen times over now if he had a mind to.”

  “A piece of cake, Inspector?” Mrs. Mason hadn’t neglected her duties as hostess for one moment. “I made it this morning.”

  He let her finish plying them with food before he asked to see the finger. Duty, he did know, came first, but there were some things which could wait. Eventually, though, Constable Mason led the way through into his little office and indicated a cardboard box.

  “I’ve got it here,” said Mason.

  The finger had brought out the atavism that lurks just below the surface in every man. For some reason too deeply primitive to explain in words the constable had laid it on cotton wool.

  “It’s adult, anyway,” said Sloan, taking his first look at it and putting ransomed children out of his mind for good.

  “And with a bit of luck,” said Mason, “it might just be possible to get some prints off it.”

  “Too far gone,” pronounced Detective Constable Crosby, taking a quick look and stepping back again.

  “It would save a lot of time and trouble if it wasn’t,” said Sloan automatically. Deep down inside himself he knew that nothing was ever likely to be as easy and simple as finding a fingerprint and a person to match it.

  “Yes, sir,” said Crosby dutifully.

  “And now,” said Sloan briskly, “we’d better see about mounting a search for the body. Who can we call on out here?”

  THREE

  Brethren, be sober, be vigilant

  “This was the exact spot, Inspector,” said Wendy Lamport, pointing.

  “Right, miss.” Detective Inspector Sloan stood on the footpath on Pencombe Farm where the girl had stood earlier. Presently he would get Crosby to take a sample of the grit from the path to compare with any foreign bodies embedded in the skin of the finger. That might help.

  “Look,” she said, “you can see where the other policeman put that little pile of stones to mark it.”

  “Yes, miss.” Sloan had already noted the infant cairn created by Constable Mason. He looked round about him. “Now, you and Mr. Briggs were walking which way?”

  “North-north-west,” answered Briggs before Wendy could speak.

  “Quite so, sir.” Sloan took a quick look at the sun. “So you would have had your backs to the farmhouse?”

  “That’s right,” said Briggs. “We’d come that way, hadn’t we?” He turned to George Mellot for confirmation. “You’d just seen us.”

  The farmer nodded.

  “We were heading for the Little Rooden road,” put in Wendy.

  “And, miss,” continued Sloan, “you’ve no idea at all in which direction the crow had been flying when it dropped the—
er—object?”

  She shook her head. “I didn’t notice.”

  “It would save a lot of time,” said Sloan, thinking of the area to be searched, “if you had done.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said simply. “You see, we didn’t know what it was until after the bird had gone, did we, Gordon?”

  Gordon Briggs said, “No.”

  Sloan turned to George Mellot, who had been standing silently by. He had seldom met a man more continent of speech. “If, sir, you could just show me the lay of the land …”

  The farmer stirred. “Pencombe Farm runs from the Great Rooden road to the foot of the hill over there. That’s where Uppercombe starts.”

  “That’ll be Mr. Hucham’s land, won’t it?” said Sloan, who had done his homework quite well while he was at Constable Mason’s.

  Mellot nodded. “And over the other side to the east is—er—Mrs. Ritchie’s farm. That’s called Stanestede.”

  “And behind us?” said Sloan, turning round.

  “The other side of the road, you mean?” said George Mellot.

  “Where the wood is.”

  “Dresham Wood is Sam’s,” replied Mellot. “All that land over there belongs to old Sam Bailey. That’s Lowercombe Farm.”

  They were some distance from it but even so Sloan could see a man coming out of the wood. George Mellot saw him too and screwed up his eyes.

  “I believe that’s Len Hodge, my bailiff,” said Mellot. “I told him to start to look around.”

  “Good,” said Sloan vaguely. Crows did not inhabit woods—Ted Mason had said so—but Sloan held his peace. It was no part of a detective’s duty to inform. Together they watched the farm worker make his way over the road and onto Pencombe Farm.

  “I started to look in a few places, too,” volunteered Mellot.

  “That’s a help,” said Sloan. Finding out how far a crow flew was high on his own list of priorities. There was a flourishing school of entomologists specialising in the study of insects and the dead. What he wanted was an ornithologist with a similar cast of mind. He turned aside. “Have you got a note of all of this, Crosby?”

  “Yes, sir,” said the constable stolidly.

  “It still leaves a lot of acres,” said George Mellot.

  “Yours and everyone else’s,” said Sloan, making a comprehensive gesture that included the entire landscape. Len Hodge was walking along the footpath to the farm now. Sloan turned abruptly back to the farmer. “I’ll see your neighbours now and we’ll mount a search of as much ground as we can cover tomorrow morning.”

  The farmer nodded.

  “We’ll need volunteers,” continued Sloan. He looked towards Gordon Briggs. “Would your society help?”

  Paul Hucham received Detective Inspector Sloan and Detective Constable Crosby hospitably enough at Uppercombe Farm.

  “Sorry about the muddle,” he said, waving an arm to take in an uncleared table, “but I live alone and the woman doesn’t come on Saturdays.”

  “That’s all right,” said Sloan easily. “We just want your permission to search Uppercombe Farm tomorrow. We’re looking for human remains.”

  “Good grief!” exclaimed Hucham.

  He was, judged Sloan, well under forty and quite good-looking in a saturnine way.

  “Now if you had said a sheep,” responded Hucham when the detective had explained, “I’d have been with you right away. The crows have a dead sheep down to bare bones in no time at all.”

  “It happens then—”

  “It happens all right,” replied Hucham vigorously. “My shepherd has to keep his eyes open, I can tell you. That’s the worst of hill country; there’s no knowing what sort of silly places a sheep will get itself into.”

  Sloan would have given a lot to have known what sort of place a dead man had got himself into.

  Or been put.

  “And if one of the flock goes missing …” The other man’s voice trailed away.

  One of the human flock had certainly done that, decided Sloan. And there was a parable, wasn’t there, about the importance of the missing sheep as well as the one about the Prodigal Son.

  Paul Hucham’s mind was still on crows. “You can take it from me, Inspector, that we don’t have any trouble with the carcass when a sheep dies.”

  “No?”

  The sheep-farmer said grimly, “The birds see to that.”

  Sloan nodded. There had been a horror film once, hadn’t there, about birds. None of your “pretty as a kingfisher” stuff about that, either.…

  “I haven’t noticed anything suspicious myself,” said Hucham, “but there are quite a few nooks and crannies at Uppercombe and I don’t get round them all, even in summer-time.”

  “Quite so,” said Sloan neutrally.

  “But search Uppercombe by all means,” said Paul Hucham. “I’ll give you a hand tomorrow.”

  Mrs. Andrina Ritchie at Stanestede Farm was just as willing. She received Sloan and Crosby in a farmhouse that had been modernised to within an inch of its life.

  “Look where you like, gentlemen,” she said at once. She was small and dark and attractive. “I’ll tell my man that you’re coming, otherwise he’ll think there’s something wrong.”

  “There is something wrong, madam,” said Sloan flatly. “There’s a dead body about this valley somewhere and we don’t know where it is.”

  “Yes, of course, Inspector. I’m sorry. That was silly of me. It was just if Jenkins suddenly saw people everywhere.…”

  “You haven’t got any footpaths over Stanestede then,” divined Sloan.

  “Not public ones, thank goodness. Only our own farm paths.”

  “That explains that,” said Sloan. “Now if you had a public right of way over the farm you would probably be used to people everywhere. You haven’t seen any strangers, I suppose?”

  She wrinkled her forehead. “I can’t say that I have. Not lately. Mind you, Inspector, we’re pretty isolated out here. It’s not like being down in Great Rooden.”

  “All the more reason for noticing strangers, madam.”

  “Of course,” she conceded at once, “but I certainly haven’t. I’ll ask Jenkins—”

  “Jenkins is—”

  “Our—my farm worker.”

  “I see, madam. You have just the one man here, do you?”

  “I’m looking out for another,” she said.

  “I thought,” said Sloan digging into the recesses of his memory, “that Michaelmas was the time for that.…”

  “Not any longer,” she assured him. “Besides, as it happens I need somebody extra now.”

  “You do?”

  She faced him squarely. “I expect George Mellot told you, Inspector.”

  “Told me what?”

  “My husband has left me.”

  Sloan made a neutral noise. “No, he didn’t say.”

  “Walked out, gone,” she said, clenching and unclenching her fists. “Vanished.”

  “When?” enquired Sloan. He was, perforce, interested in anyone who was missing.

  “June the first, it was.”

  The Glorious First.

  “I’m not likely to forget the date,” she added bitterly.

  “No, madam.” He cleared his throat. “Do you know why he went?”

  “Her name,” she said with venom, “is Beverley.”

  “Ah.” This time Sloan made an all-purpose noise in his throat.

  “That’s all I know, Inspector.”

  “Not where she lives?”

  “Calleford.” She snorted. “Where the market is.”

  “What’s that got to do with—”

  “I thought he was at the market, didn’t I?” she said.

  “And he wasn’t?”

  “He was with Beverley, whoever she is,” said Mrs. Ritchie savagely. She sniffed. “Now, Meg Mellot …”

  “Yes?” Sloan was interested in anything to do with the Mellots.

  “She always goes into Calleford on market-day with George. Does her
shopping and has her hair done.”

  “And you didn’t?”

  “Not always.” She drew herself up. “Not often enough, apparently.”

  “I see.”

  “Meg Mellot’s a wise woman.”

  “Quite so, madam.” Sloan stroked his chin. “Tell me, how exactly do you know that your husband went off with—er—Beverley?”

  Her lip curled. “He left me a note, Inspector. In the real old-fashioned tradition of romantic fiction he left me a note.”

  All that Sloan knew about Romantic Fiction was that everything always ended happily.

  Mrs. Ritchie was still speaking. “He put it in front of the kitchen clock, if you really want to know.”

  Sloan did not know if he really wanted to know about the absent Mr. Ritchie or not. “Did you keep the note?” he asked automatically.

  “I threw it straight into the fire,” she said. She gave him a challenging look. “Wouldn’t you have done?”

  “I don’t know, madam, I’m sure.” The prospect of Mrs. Margaret Sloan leaving him was not one he was in the habit of contemplating.

  She tossed her head. “And I changed all the door locks. I’m not having him creeping back when he’s tired of his Beverley.” She gave Sloan a shrewish look. “Or when she’s tired of him.”

  Sam Bailey at Lowercombe Farm could have stood in for John Bull any day. He only needed gaiters and he would have fitted the part perfectly. He shook his head solemnly when he heard Sloan’s tale about the finger.

  “I don’t like the sound of that at all, Inspector. It isn’t natural for some poor creature to be lying out there without a proper Christian burial.” He snapped his fingers autocratically. “Elsie, a cup of tea for everyone.”

  It was always surprising, thought Sloan, what a comforting word “natural” was. Natural causes and natural justice both cropped up in police work.

  So did tea, of course.

  “How old is this finger?” enquired Mrs. Elsie Bailey anxiously. She was quite upset by the visit of the two policemen.

  “We don’t know for certain yet, madam.”

  “Very new?” she asked quickly.

  “Not very new,” said Sloan, “but not very old either.”

  “How new?” she persisted.

  “Don’t fuss, Elsie,” said Sam Bailey. “It’s nothing to do with us.”

  “A few weeks,” advanced Sloan, “at a guess.”