Past Tense Page 3

  Tod Morton handed her into his firm’s large black limousine, waved a gloved hand at the driver and sent her off to the Almstone Towers in solitary splendour. There she was welcomed by the black-coated manager who escorted her in his stately way to a reception room.

  ‘If madam would like to receive the mourners here,’ suggested the manager, ‘they can then go straight on into the dining room…’

  Obediently Janet took up a stance just where he had indicated. As she explained at length to her friend Dawn afterwards, she wasn’t usually so biddable but he wasn’t the sort of man to argue with. The manager clicked his fingers just once and a waiter appeared with a tray of glasses of sherry and took up his stance slightly to one side and a little behind her, advancing with his tray as other members of the congregation arrived one by one.

  The thought that she would have to receive people had not occurred to Janet. She began involuntarily, ‘But her grandson’ll be getting here in a minute…’

  ‘Very well, madam. I’ll see that as soon as he arrives he is told where you are,’ murmured the manager, melting away.

  But it was quite a while before Joe Short turned up at the hotel and when he did arrive he was with Simon Puckle. The solicitor was suggesting to Joe Short that he came to his office at eleven o’clock tomorrow morning for the reading of the will, adding, ‘I take it that this will be all right with you?’

  ‘Sure,’ said Joe Short politely.

  Janet, joining them, said, ‘Will you be staying here?’

  The young man looked round at the Edwardian amplitude of the Almstone Towers. ‘What? Not on my salary. I’m only a lowly mining engineer, you know.’ He grinned. ‘Actually I’ve booked myself in at the Bellingham in Market Street. Granny said she’d heard it was all right.’

  Janet nodded, relieved that he’d found himself somewhere to stay, and thus that she had been saved the worry of whether she should have offered him hospitality. ‘You should be very comfortable there.’

  She turned as Mrs Linda Luxton, the matron of the nursing home, approached her and when she looked back Joe Short had gone.

  Chapter Three

  ‘Ah, there you are, Sloan. I wanted to see you. Come in and sit down.’ Police Superintendent Leeyes waved at a chair in his office. ‘Something very funny’s cropped up at the Berebury Nursing Home. That upper-crust one down the road in St Clement’s Row.’

  ‘I know the place,’ said Sloan cautiously. ‘The Earl of Ornum’s eccentric aunt’s in there. Lady Alice. I met her when they had an outbreak of food poisoning there once.’ It hadn’t been food poisoning but murder, though this didn’t seem the moment to remind his superior officer of this.

  ‘Said to be top of the shop as such places go,’ said Leeyes. ‘Expensive.’

  ‘I’m sure, sir.’ Detective Inspector Sloan – known as Christopher Dennis to his family and ‘Seedy’ to his friends and colleagues at Berebury Police Station – was head of the tiny Criminal Investigation Department of ‘F’ Division of the Calleshire County Constabulary and thus ultimately responsible for looking into most matters illegal in the eastern half of the county. Such crime as cropped up in the superintendent’s manor was therefore usually handed over to the inspector to solve as speedily as possible. ‘Has Lady Alice been up to something, then?’ he asked warily. He devoutly hoped not. Tangling with her ladyship, as he knew from hard experience, could be very time-consuming.

  ‘No, no, nothing like that, and nothing really to get your teeth into either as yet,’ said the superintendent, ‘but you never know.’

  Sloan thought about saying something about great oaks from little acorns growing but decided against it. Instead he waited in silence.

  ‘We’ve just had a report of a breaking and entering there,’ said Leeyes.

  Inspector Sloan did not find this very cheering. The superintendent only used the royal ‘we’ when he wanted to share the responsibility for something difficult with someone else.

  ‘Just that?’ he asked, since simple housebreaking didn’t usually attract his superior’s professional attention – not in the first instance, anyway. Or, come to that, usually his own attention either. He wondered if the presence of the earl’s aunt explained the superintendent’s interest.

  ‘Not quite, Sloan. Constable Simpson, who attended in the first instance, reported that he wasn’t happy about it being just a simple burglary, especially as, as far as the staff there can see, nothing has been taken.’ The superintendent flipped over a flimsy message sheet on his desk in front of him and added sententiously, ‘But you never can tell.’

  ‘No, sir.’ This was very true. Mental inventories always let people down and it was sometimes months after a burglary before the owner realised something really valuable was missing.

  ‘There are, however, grounds for believing that an intruder might have been in at least one resident’s room there.’

  ‘I see, sir.’ That was puzzling. Nursing homes were seldom the subject of acquisitive crime, although the old did tend to take their most valued possessions with them there, hanging on to them until the very last.

  ‘But no immediate signs of anything being taken,’ repeated the superintendent.

  That was puzzling too. ‘I take it, then, that the matron has good reasons for wondering why this should have happened?’ said Sloan, opening his notebook at a new page.

  ‘Yes and no,’ said Leeyes unhelpfully. Ever since the superintendent had attended an evening class on philosophy he had been inclined to equivocation. It had been the tricky proposition that a Japanese Noh play in a knot garden was not a special variety of the double negative that had made the greatest mark on the senior policeman.

  ‘Ah,’ said Sloan, still waiting for elucidation.

  ‘Mrs Linda Luxton – she’s the matron there – got back from attending an elderly resident’s funeral to be told about a broken pantry window and signs that a search might have taken place.’ He grunted. ‘Actually she thinks the intrusion was during the night and has reason to believe it was in the room of the same resident that had died but she says she hasn’t the remotest idea why.’

  ‘Signs?’

  ‘A broken vase…that sort of thing.’

  ‘Someone looking for something in the dark,’ concluded Sloan. ‘And in a hurry,’ he added, since professional searchers seldom left signs of their incursion.

  ‘Exactly. But the matron hasn’t a clue about what it could have been.’

  ‘Therefore she doesn’t know whether or not they found whatever it was they were looking for,’ murmured Sloan, half to himself.

  Leeyes said, ‘No. At least, not yet.’

  ‘I’ll go round there, sir, and see what I can do,’ promised Sloan.

  ‘And as far as I’m concerned, Sloan, you can take that detective constable of yours with you when you go.’ He sniffed. ‘That man’d cause trouble in an empty room.’

  Sloan sighed. It was true that Detective Constable Crosby was by no means the brightest star in the constabulary’s firmament but he didn’t see why it was that he, Sloan, should always have to be the one to do the puppy-walking of the constable.

  ‘Keep me in the picture, Sloan,’ went on Leeyes, waving a hand dismissively. ‘Can’t have this sort of thing going on in a toffee-nosed place like that. Unsettling for the inmates.’

  Detective Constable Crosby’s reaction to a visit to the nursing home was different but instant. ‘That’s what they call God’s Waiting Room, isn’t it?’

  Janet Wakefield could hardly wait to get home from the Almstone Towers Hotel and telephone her friend, Dawn. Avid for detail, Dawn listened spellbound to Janet’s account of the start of the funeral.

  ‘And then,’ said Janet dramatically, ‘you’ll never guess in a thousand years what happened next…’

  ‘So why don’t you tell me now and save time?’ said Dawn.

  ‘This man came and sat beside me in the front pew and said he was Josephine’s grandson!’ exclaimed Janet.

 
‘I thought you said she wasn’t married,’ objected Dawn.

  ‘That’s the thing,’ said Janet eagerly. ‘She hadn’t been…’

  ‘But she’d had children, though?’ deduced Dawn.

  ‘One. A son.’

  ‘Without telling anyone?’

  Janet paused and considered this. ‘I don’t really know about that. My Bill didn’t know, I’m certain about that, but of course my in-laws – his parents – might have done. I don’t know and it’s too late to ask them now since they died before Bill and I were married.’

  ‘Cool,’ said Dawn. ‘For those days, I mean,’ she added hastily, mindful of several of their mutual friends who were single mothers without being in the least bit cool – quite the contrary, in fact.

  ‘Very,’ said Janet, determinedly broad-minded.

  ‘So what is he like, this grandson?’

  ‘Quite nice,’ said Janet, frowning. ‘His clothes were a bit…well, un-English – and they didn’t fit very well. You see, he’s been working out in Lasserta for ages.’

  ‘That’s somewhere in the East, isn’t it?’

  ‘I think so,’ said Janet uncertainly, privately again resolving to get the atlas out as soon as she could. ‘He’s an engineer or something and both his parents were killed in an air crash out there two or three years ago, which is why his grandmother Josephine had to go into the nursing home.’

  ‘That figures,’ said Dawn, adding sympathetically, ‘but it must have been a bit hard, all the same.’

  ‘She was old, of course,’ said Janet a trifle defensively. ‘I mean, if she’d wanted us to visit her there she’d only have had to say and I’m sure we’d have gone. After all, she gave the Berebury Nursing Home our address, so she knew where we were, even if we didn’t know where she was.’

  ‘That’s very odd,’ mused Dawn. ‘I mean, if she hadn’t any other family around you’d have thought she’d have been glad to have had any visitors at all, whoever they were.’ Realising that this didn’t sound exactly flattering, she added quickly, ‘But they say that the very old do get a bit funny, don’t they?’

  ‘All that the grandson – he’s called Joe Short by the way—’

  ‘Just like her,’ observed Dawn.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Didn’t you say she was called Josephine?’

  ‘Oh, yes, I see what you mean now. Josephine and Joseph. All her grandson said to me was that she had got very deaf which had made telephoning a bit difficult as time went by.’

  ‘He could have written.’

  ‘I expect he did,’ said Janet. ‘No, wait a minute. I think they said at the nursing home that her eyesight had gone, too.’

  ‘Sans everything…’ said Dawn.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Shakespeare,’ said her friend dreamily. ‘As You Like It. We did it in year twelve, remember? I loved Rosalind. That was the play with “Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything…” in it. So sad.’

  Janet shuddered. ‘Don’t. It must be awful to get like that.’

  ‘You must be able to eat still, though,’ countered Dawn, who was noticeably fond of her food. ‘Or you’d die.’

  Janet wasn’t listening. She couldn’t get back to telling Dawn about the funeral quickly enough. ‘And afterwards, we went back to the Almstone Towers and then…’ Her voice trailed away.

  ‘And then…’ prompted Dawn.

  ‘He sort of melted away and I didn’t see the going of him.’ She hesitated. ‘Now what I can’t decide, Dawn, is whether to ask him over here. What do you think? He seems to be quite alone.’

  ‘And so are you,’ said Dawn perceptively.

  ‘Exactly,’ said Janet, ‘and I don’t quite like to…not without Bill being here, if you know what I mean.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Dawn. ‘I know what you mean.’

  ‘After all, I don’t know him at all. I didn’t even know about him, did I?’ Janet brightened. ‘I expect he’ll be in touch, though, all the same.’

  She hadn’t realised how soon that would be. She had barely put the telephone down before it rang again and a rather husky voice said that it was Joe Short.

  ‘Hullo, there,’ she said uncertainly.

  ‘I’m sorry I didn’t see you again before you left the hotel,’ he apologised. ‘I got nabbed by an old friend of Granny’s from the Rowlettian Society. I’ve no idea who he was but he said he had known her very well in the past—’

  ‘Hang on,’ Janet interrupted him, suddenly remembering something. ‘I may have the answer to that.’

  ‘You do? How come? I just couldn’t get away from him but now I can’t even remember his name.’

  ‘Tod Morton – that’s the undertaker, you know – handed me a little pile of those cards that people fill in at the funeral to say that they were there. I’ve got them here. I’ve been wondering what to do with them and—’

  ‘What I have been wondering,’ he interrupted her unceremoniously, ‘was whether you would consider having supper with me tonight here at the Bellingham. That’s if you haven’t got children or anything.’

  Janet’s acceptance bordered on the eager. She didn’t say anything about not having children, this being an unspoken sadness that was never far from the front of her mind.

  ‘Good. Then I’ll be waiting for you in the foyer at half past seven,’ he said. ‘I say,’ he added, ‘you couldn’t bring those cards with you, could you? I’d like to know who the old boy was.’ He gave a little laugh. ‘For all I know the man might even be my grandfather. He did keep on saying how well he knew Granny in the past. “Very well indeed,” were his exact words.’

  Mrs Linda Luxton, the matron of the Berebury Nursing Home, was ready and waiting for the two policemen when they arrived. Her funeral-going clothes had been rapidly exchanged for her blue uniform and she was once again on duty and very much in charge of her own domain.

  Detective Inspector Sloan glanced down at his notebook. ‘We understand, madam, that an unauthorised entry to the premises would appear to have been effected through a pantry window.’ Choosing broadly neutral words with care was important at the outset of any investigation; they could always be refined and redefined later when more was known.

  ‘At the back,’ she said at once. ‘It’s just to one side of the kitchen door and it looks as if the window itself has been prised out,’ she added, leading them to the pantry doorway and pointing to a space where the window would once have been. ‘This must be where he got in…’

  ‘Or she,’ put in Detective Constable Crosby, who had just attended an equal opportunities course.

  The matron gave him an odd look but only said, ‘We haven’t gone any further into the pantry than this.’

  ‘Very wise, madam,’ said Sloan, a believer not only in giving praise where praise was due but more importantly in keeping women in uniform onside. In his experience of the female of the species, it was members of this subspecies who were the most frightening.

  ‘And the cook didn’t come in here and notice the missing window until just before we rang you.’ She pursed her lips. ‘I may say she’s not very happy that she can’t get at what she wants now.’

  ‘I can see that she mightn’t be,’ said Sloan. Actually, he could see for himself that she wasn’t because the cook was standing in the kitchen behind them, arms akimbo, visibly idle and anxious about the next meal. ‘We’ll be as quick as we can,’ he promised. ‘Now, has anyone noticed anything having been taken from their rooms?’

  ‘We’ve asked all the residents,’ said the matron, ‘and they say not, but you will understand that not all of them are up to knowing one way or the other.’ She shrugged. ‘We are always reminding them about valuables not being kept in their rooms but some of them like to have them around or on their person. At their stage in life it often becomes important for the old ladies to keep their mementos where they can see them. Sometimes it helps them keep a hold on reality.’

  Sloan nodded.

  ‘Then there’s th
e broken vase,’ said Mrs Luxton. ‘In room 18, that is. No one on the staff admits to having knocked it over, and there certainly wasn’t any reason for anyone to enter that room until Ellen went in this morning to give it a tidy before the family came back again, the resident there having died last week. When we realised that there had been a break-in, though, we left it as it was.’

  Sloan stood in the doorway of room 18 and considered the pieces of the smashed vase on the floor. ‘Quite right. There may be footprints on the carpet…’ Crosby, he decided, could summon up the Scene of Crime people to examine the room after they looked at the back of the building and the missing window.

  ‘She – that’s the late Josephine Short, the resident whose room this was until she died – always had that vase on the edge of her shelf,’ said the matron.

  Sloan nodded. An intruder working in the dark – or at least, in very little light – could have easily knocked it over when feeling along the shelf. It would have been where most residents would have kept their ornamental bits and pieces. He stepped across to a little chest of drawers and opened each in turn.

  ‘As far as we know, Inspector,’ said the matron, ‘the resident here had no real valuables save the rings that she always wore. They were very nice, though, I must say.’

  He nodded and carried on with his examination. The top drawers were full of toiletries and suchlike but the bottom one yielded a tattered brown envelope. He lifted this out and spilt the contents onto the bedside table. They were mostly old black and white photographs. He riffled through them, noting only one newish one. It was of a tall, cheerful, young man, presumably the grown-up version of several ones of a child, including a faded one of a little boy steadying himself beside a table labelled ‘Joe aged two and a half’. There were several of a young couple standing under the canopy of a variety of tree he didn’t recognise and more of the same couple a little older with a small boy standing between them but with a totally different background.