Passing Strange Read online

“What we need,” said Walls grimly, “is the police.”

  “And fast,” said Pearson. His reluctant eye had just taken in that the patch of brown that he had been looking at was not cotton material at all but hair and that the terrible Stygian purple beside it had been Joyce Cooper’s face …

  By common consent the two men gently lowered the tarpaulin back over the body of the District Nurse. It was not a pretty sight.

  3

  Claribel flute

  “Almstone,” repeated Police Superintendent Leeyes to Detective-Inspector Sloan. “Get out there as quickly as you can, will you?”

  “Whereabouts in Almstone?” asked Detective-Inspector Sloan. He was in charge of the Criminal Investigation Department of the Berebury Division of the Calleshire Force, and had been called back on duty.

  “Didn’t I say, Sloan? In the Priory garden there.”

  Sloan made a quick note. “Right, sir, I’ll …”

  “At the Flower Show.”

  “The Flower Show?” Sloan’s pen came to an abrupt standstill.

  “Yes, yes,” said the Superintendent impatiently. “I should have thought that you of all people, Sloan, would have known about the Almstone Show. Surely you go in for that sort of thing, don’t you?”

  It was true that Detective-Inspector Sloan grew roses as a hobby. He had long ago discovered that growing roses well was one of the few hobbies compatible with police life and its peculiar exigencies. Occasionally he entered Horticultural Shows as well for the sport. But entering Shows was not usually considered a blood sport, so to speak …

  “They’re quite sure it’s murder, are they, sir?” he said: and immediately regretted speaking. Murder wasn’t usually something about which mistakes were made. Not if it wasn’t thought to be an accident, even to start with. You could begin with what you thought was an accident and only find out afterwards that it had been murder all the time. It didn’t often happen the other way round.

  “Blue murder,” said Leeyes vigorously.

  Sloan made another note. Now and again passions ran high among the pumpkins but not that high as a rule.

  “That’s what the man who rang us said,” Leeyes told him. “Blue murder. Kept on about it.”

  Sloan flipped over a message sheet. “I’ve got his name, haven’t I?”

  “It would be a Saturday,” said Leeyes, pushing the papers about on his desk in an irritated manner.

  Sloan kept silent. Police work went in cycles. There was never a lot of crime first thing on Monday morning but you couldn’t always say the same about last thing Saturday night.

  The Superintendent grunted, “I could have done with a quiet weekend.”

  Sloan still kept silent. It took more effort this time. The person who for certain – dead certain – wouldn’t be having a quiet weekend was himself, Detective-Inspector C.D. Sloan – known as Christopher Dennis to his wife and family and ‘Seedy’ to his friends. It would be business as usual for Sloan and golf as usual for the Superintendent on Sunday morning.

  “Perhaps it’ll be open and shut,” said Leeyes hopefully, one eye on the sunshine streaming in through his office window.

  “You never can tell, sir, can you?” said Sloan, gathering up his notebook and pen. “Murder doesn’t keep to the rules.”

  That was something he’d learned over the years. Murder was a different crime from the others in the book. As a rule murderers were not habitual offenders. They had no pattern of early crime that could be usefully studied – and studying form was by no means confined to the followers of horse-racing. Penologists, psychiatrists and politicians did it too – not to mention reformers. Sloan wasn’t very keen on reformers.

  He made for the door.

  Murderers, he reminded himself, were usually men in settled jobs, married men, with families, men with a lot at stake …

  He paused and turned back to the Superintendent.

  “You did say it was the District Nurse, sir, didn’t you?”

  “I did, Sloan,” said Leeyes, “but remember she’s dressed as Madame Zelda, the Fortune Teller, won’t you?”

  There was no real answer to that.

  “Is she?” Sloan said thoughtfully instead. “H’m.”

  “And I’m afraid you’ll have to take Detective-Constable Crosby with you because it’s Saturday afternoon and there isn’t anyone else.”

  There was no answer to that either.

  The Criminal Investigation Department at Berebury was not a large one. Detective-Constable Crosby had his foot on the bottom rung of the Department’s ladder. So far he hadn’t managed to get any higher. He was, however, still hanging on: which was something.

  Sloan shut the Superintendent’s office door behind him.

  Nobody at the Priory at Almstone had felt inclined to lift the tarpaulin so carefully lowered back by Fred and Ken. And yet to move totally away seemed the wrong thing to do, too. There would have been a certain disrespect about that. Instead four men subconsciously treated the tarpaulin as a pall and stood sentinel – but uneasy – at each corner.

  “We can’t very well carry on clearing up, can we?” said Ken Walls awkwardly.

  “Better not move anything at all,” advised Edward Hebbinge.

  “Did she have anyone?” asked Norman Burton, the schoolmaster. “Anyone close, I mean …”

  “A cousin, that’s all,” said Fred Pearson, who always knew about these things. “Over the other side of Calleford. Great Rooden way somewhere.”

  “Someone will have to …”

  The men settled back. This unhappy duty would not be theirs. Not with this sort of death.

  “On her mother’s side,” continued Fred. Details of family relationships might only be set out in print in books such as Debrett and Burke’s Peerage but people like Fred Pearson carried them effortlessly in their heads when they concerned people whom they knew.

  Burton nodded. “The doctor’ll need to know, too, won’t he? And soon.”

  “She’s dead,” said Fred Pearson flatly. “You can take my word for it that she’s dead.”

  “And mine,” said Ken Walls, shuddering.

  “I didn’t mean that,” said Burton hastily. “I was thinking of poor old Charlie Whittaker. Nurse Cooper’s been seeing to his bad leg each night, hasn’t she? Someone will have to …”

  It seemed to be his theme song.

  “I’ll ring the doctor,” offered Hebbinge. “After … when … as soon as …”

  The sentence hung unfinished.

  “They shouldn’t be long,” said Ken Walls.

  They weren’t. Minutes later a police car swung off the road and nosed its way through the Priory gates. All the men relaxed a little. The impromptu lying-instate of the District Nurse was over.

  Detective-Inspector Sloan began by listening.

  And then he started looking.

  After that he issued a string of instructions – for all the world like a film director ordering a re-run of a scene that had been badly played.

  “Lift the tarpaulin exactly as you did before,” he commanded, “and stop when I tell you.”

  Fred and Ken bent obediently towards the canvas tarpaulin.

  Having come, listened, and seen, Detective-Inspector Sloan did eventually speak too. He spoke first on the telephone to the Consultant Pathologist to the Berebury District General Hospital, Dr Dabbe. If that worthy physician and surgeon was displeased at being summoned from his garden at the end of a summer Saturday afternoon he did not sound it.

  He brushed away Sloan’s routine apologies. “What if it is Saturday?” he said genially. “Named after Saturn anyway – unrestrained licence and revelry. What have you got for me this time?”

  “Murder,” said Sloan. And told him where.

  “I’ll be right with you. Alert Burns, will you?”

  Burns was Dr Dabbe’s assistant.

  “He won’t mind,” said the pathologist.

  Sloan did not know how Dr Dabbe ever knew if Burns minded or not since th
e man seldom spoke. Being driven about the County of Calleshire by the fastest driver in that county without a conviction had long ago reduced him to silence. The pathologist redressed the balance, of course.

  “Throttled, you say?”

  “Some form of strangulation,” said Sloan cautiously.

  “When?” asked the pathologist. “You chaps always get so excited about the time factor.”

  “She was alive at half past three,” said the policeman, refusing to rise to that particular fly. “We’ve got a witness to that.”

  “Ah.”

  “A man called Edward Hebbinge took her a cup of tea about then,” Sloan told him, “in between clients, so to speak.”

  “Clients?” said the pathologist alertly. “You didn’t say, Sloan, that she was …”

  “Not that sort of client,” said Sloan repressively. Everyone – but everyone – always had to beware of letting their minds run in well-worn grooves.

  “Women who have been strangled usually only have one sort of client,” said Dabbe impenitently.

  “She was the local midwife and district nurse.”

  “Have things changed, Sloan? When I was a medical student we used to call our customers patients, not clients.”

  “She was telling fortunes, Doctor.”

  “We called that prognosis.”

  “Quite so, Doctor.”

  “All right, Sloan,” he said breezily. “I’m on my way.”

  In fact the police photographer and his assistant reached Almstone before the pathologist got there – but only because they were nearer to start with.

  “What I need as well,” said Sloan to a harassed Norman Burton, “is a sketch plan of where all the tents were before you struck them.”

  The Show Secretary nodded. He seemed quite genuinely bewildered by all that was going on. “Of course, Inspector. I’ll do it now before I forget where everything was.” He moistened his lips. “Have you fin … when will you be moving her?”

  “Presently,” said Sloan. “Tell me, who pitched the tents? No, Crosby, not there! Over here, man.”

  Detective-Constable Crosby was examining the ground round about where the body was lying.

  “She wouldn’t have been killed under the tarpaulin,” said Sloan.

  “No, sir.”

  “She would have been killed in the tent.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And dragged out under the tarpaulin at some stage.”

  “At any stage,” put in Norman Burton.

  Sloan looked at him enquiringly.

  “The back of her tent was pretty well up against the old stable wall,” said Burton. “There’d be no call for anyone to go behind it.”

  “If anyone did,” said Sloan, “who would have been able to see them?”

  “Only someone else who was round there at the same time.”

  “That’s what I thought,” said Sloan.

  Norman Burton moved forward. “Her tent would have been just here …”

  “Careful, sir,” Sloan adjured him quickly. “Don’t stand there … Yes, Williams, what is it?”

  The police photographer had approached. As usual, he was hung about with cameras, while his assistant fiddled with a tripod. “We’ve got you some nice pictures of the victim, Inspector.”

  “Good.” Sloan didn’t suppose for a moment that the pictures that Williams had taken were nice: but a man was entitled to praise for a job well done.

  “I did some colour work, too,” said Williams, casting a completely professional eye over the scene. The natural artistry of his work suffered from an inherent inability to set the scene for himself and the fact that his subjects were usually beyond saying ‘Cheese’ or even looking at the camera. He made up for it with transcending technical skill. “This new fast film is good stuff.”

  Sloan reluctantly brought his own gaze back to the ungainly body on the grass. He could see why Pearson and Walls had shouted Blue Murder and why Williams had gone in for colour pictures. The Fortune Teller’s garb had been designed to be colourful and colourful it was. Not to say garish. Her mock finery looked infinitely pathetic now, her turban askew, her face the suffused puce of those who had died for want of air.

  Williams hitched his second camera higher up his shoulder. “Anything else you want taking?”

  “A general view,” said Sloan.

  “I get it. Landscape with figures.”

  “Landscape without figures, I think.” Sloan waved everyone temporarily into the background while Dyson brought his tripod forward.

  “Right,” said the cameraman obligingly.

  “And take some of the grass, too, will you?” Sloan pointed to an area not far from the nurse’s feet. “It should be bent about there.”

  Williams dutifully recorded the way in which the grass had been flattened within an area bounded by a series of holes in the ground made by the tent pegs holding up the Fortune Teller’s tent.

  Sloan watched with approval. At least they knew the whereabouts of the scene of the crime, which was an improvement on some cases with which he had had to deal in his time. Bodies dumped in remote woods were a real problem.

  “And where the tarpaulin was, too, please. Then Crosby can get on with examining everything properly.” Sloan hoped that the detective-constable was really listening and had got the message. Properly meant properly in the police force. He pointed to the tarpaulin. “Does this belong to the Priory?”

  Edward Hebbinge started. “No … no, Inspector. It’s not ours.”

  Sloan turned. “Is it the Horticultural Society’s, then?”

  “Certainly not, Inspector,” said Norman Burton hastily. “I’ve never set eyes on it before.”

  “That tarp’s from Mr Milsom’s lorry,” declared Fred Pearson. “To cover the load. First thing we took off the back when they brought the tents. That right, Ken?”

  Ken Walls nodded. “We put it there so that it was out of the way and there when we needed it again.” He cocked an eye at the policeman. “Helps keep a load steady, does a good tarp, if you take my meaning.”

  Detective-Inspector Sloan took his meaning all right. Inspector Harpe, who was in charge of the Traffic Division of the Berebury Division of the Calleshire Force, was a great crusader against unsafe loads.

  “We also reckoned,” chimed in Fred Pearson, “that if anyone had a mind to help themselves they’d have a job to do it if we put it there.”

  Sloan agreed. It had been a good place. The tents had been pitched as near the old stable wall as possible. Something placed between tent and wall would be out of sight and very difficult to drag out unobtrusively.

  “A good tarp’s hard to come by these days,” remarked Walls.

  “Who,” enquired Sloan, “said where each tent was to go?”

  Oddly enough the question had much the same effect as the throwing down of a knightly gauntlet in a medieval tournament.

  Four men all spoke at once.

  “I did,” said Edward Hebbinge, as one rising to a challenge. “The Priory grounds …”

  “I did,” said Norman Burton flatly. “The Committee …”

  “We put them the same as we always put them,” said Fred Pearson. Pearson clearly constituted himself in the role of inherited race memory.

  “Except the Fortune Teller’s tent,” said Ken Walls. “That was new this year.”

  “It was, was it?” said Sloan. “And whose idea was that, may I ask?”

  “Nurse Cooper’s,” said Norman Burton promptly. “She wanted to do something useful.”

  “Useful?” Sloan had never thought of Fortune Telling as one of the Useful Arts before.

  “That’s what she said,” replied Burton. “She wasn’t one to go in for Flower Arranging and she hadn’t much of a garden round at her place.”

  Sloan nodded, taking in something else as well. Usually people went on speaking of the very newly dead as if they were still alive. None of the four men presently about the late Joyce Cooper were likely to do t
hat. Not now they’d seen her.

  “She wasn’t much of a cook either,” said Ken Walls awkwardly.

  “Trust Ken to know that,” jeered Fred Pearson, sweeping his eye over his friend’s over-generous figure. “If it’s anything to do with food he knows all about it.”

  “I only meant,” protested Walls, “that she wasn’t one to go in for the Fancy Cakes Competition either.”

  “Not the sort,” agreed Burton.

  “Too busy, I should think,” opined the Priory agent briefly. “Almstone’s a big village now and she never knew when she was going to be called out to a patient.”

  “She had to leave the church in the middle of the Te Deum last Sunday morning,” remarked Norman Burton. “We all went quite flat without her. Sam Watkinson did his best but he’s no singer.”

  Sloan turned an enquiring eye towards him.

  “She was playing the organ, Inspector, when they sent to say that Dora Smithson was having one of her turns again.”

  Sloan drew breath. Superintendent Leeyes, sitting at his desk in Berebury Police Station, would be allowing only so much time and no more for the absorption of local colour. After that he’d be wanting hard facts. “I’ll want to know the names of everyone who consulted her this afternoon,” he said.

  “Take a bit of doing, that will,” said Pearson.

  “That’s going to be difficult,” said Burton simultaneously. “The place was crowded. Best Show ever …” His voice drained away and he said in a hollow voice “In terms of attendance, that is.”

  “I’d been to her,” admitted Ken Walls unexpectedly into the little silence that fell upon them.

  “Go on!” said Fred Pearson.

  “Just for a bit of fun,” said the big man.

  “What did she say?”

  Walls looked embarassed. “She said my future was a bit cloudy.”

  His audience regarded him with silent interest.

  “Unless I lost weight,” said Walls.

  Pearson hooted derisively. “That’ll be the day.”

  Sloan, who felt that Health Education was getting out of hand these days, took up the reins again. “I’d like you to try to remember who else you saw waiting to see her.” He turned to Edward Hebbinge. “And I’ll need to see all over the Priory grounds, too, if you don’t mind.”