Chapter and Hearse Read online

  ‘Beg pardon, sir?’

  ‘Baucis and Philemon were Ovid’s couple to whom the gods gave the gift of growing old together like entwined trees.’

  ‘Ah.’ Sloan’s brow cleared. He should have remembered that the Assistant Chief Constable was a classicist first and a policeman a long way second. ‘I’m with you, sir. The “Lonely Hearts” columns…’

  ‘I understand there was no shortage of volunteers for the research,’ said the Assistant Chief Constable drily, ‘but much good it did ’em…’ He paused and then, scholar that he was, added punctiliously, ‘In that respect anyway.’

  ‘Radio transmitter?’ suggested Sloan.

  ‘First thing they looked for.’ The Assistant Chief Constable wrinkled his nose. ‘Old hat anyway, these days.’

  ‘Internet?’ Sloan made another effort to come into the twenty-first century.

  The Assistant Chief Constable said ‘They’re quite sure that Mata Hari – sorry, but that’s how they will refer to their female suspect – doesn’t have access to it.’

  ‘Don’t they have Internet Cafes now, sir?’

  The Assistant Chief Constable said gloomily, ‘They’ve been tailing her for weeks … Mata Hari, indeed. You’d have thought they’d have been a bit more original, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘And her opposite number?’

  ‘Always male so far.’

  ‘How do they refer to him?’

  ‘You’re not going to like this either, Sloan.’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘They’re calling him George.’

  ‘They do have a precedent,’ Sloan conceded stiffly. The boundaries between spy, traitor, defector and double agent were something that in the ordinary way he didn’t have to explore. But, like those between crime and sin, they were as intertwined as that couple with the odd names whom the Assistant Chief Constable had just mentioned.

  ‘And they’ve seen him once – but so briefly that it didn’t help much.’ The Assistant Chief Constable waved a memo in the air. ‘They got a camera shot of his back, here in Berebury, that’s all.’

  ‘But they exchanged something?’ Detective Inspector Sloan, like most policemen, remained ambivalent in his attitude to criminologists, but Loccard’s famous exchange principle that all contacts left traces on both objects, inanimate and otherwise, had been ground into him when a young constable as firmly as the twelve times table.

  ‘He came up behind her and took something out of her hand without speaking or looking at her, and then walked on without a pause or looking back either.’

  ‘So he knew where she would be and when,’ concluded Sloan without difficulty.

  ‘And conversely, presumably she knew when and where he would come,’ said the Assistant Chief Constable, ‘because I gather she didn’t even look up as he lifted whatever she had for him … She just went on strolling along.’

  ‘But what nobody knows is exactly how they made the arrangements … Is that it, sir?’

  ‘The problem in a nutshell, Sloan.’

  ‘And,’ pointed out the Detective Inspector, ‘they think that George was probably aware that she – er – Mata Hari, that is – was being kept under close observation.’

  The other man nodded. ‘That’s right. Because by approaching her from behind, he didn’t let our people see his face.’ He straightened up. ‘Except we must remember that they’re not really our people, Sloan.’

  ‘No, sir.’ That was the trouble with the secret services. No one was ever really sure whose people they were …

  ‘How they think we can help, I don’t know.’ The Assistant Chief Constable scratched his chin. ‘I can’t see the point of waiting by the spot where the exchange happened to see if it happens again, can you?’

  ‘No,’ said Sloan, adding vigorously, ‘and in any case, sir, if that’s what these types want, I can see no reason why they shouldn’t do the surveillance themselves. It’s the force who are short of man power.’

  ‘Quite, quite,’ said the Assistant Chief Constable pacifically. ‘On the other hand, it would be good to get them off our backs so that we could all return to proper policing.’

  ‘So it therefore follows,’ said Sloan, in the manner of a schoolboy proving a theorem, ‘if the secret services are so sure that Mata Hari and this character whom they call George haven’t been in touch by any other means, that there must have been a sign or a plan, separately visible to them both, bringing them together in some other way.’

  ‘We’re all agreed on that, Sloan, but their people have looked everywhere and can’t find one.’ The Assistant Chief Constable squinted modestly down his aquiline nose. ‘That’s why they’ve come to us, and we don’t want to let them down, do we?’

  ‘So when and where did all this happen, sir?’ enquired Sloan stolidly. The larger question of whether or not the police wanted to help the secret services, he left unanswered.

  The Assistant Chief Constable waved the message sheet in his hand. ‘Outside St Aidan’s Church at ten o’clock on Tuesday morning last week … and I may say they mounted a watch there too on Tuesday this week.’

  ‘No joy?’

  ‘Not there. All the action was over at St Barnabas’s at twelve noon instead.’

  ‘The other side of town.’

  ‘That’s what’s irking them, Sloan. As you know, Berebury’s by no means short of churches. Comes of being an old medieval settlement, I suppose.’

  ‘And their next encounter?’

  ‘Just in front of St Ninian’s at nine yesterday morning.’

  ‘That’s my mother’s church,’ remarked Sloan absently, his mind elsewhere. ‘I suppose they could be going through all the churches in Berebury alphabetically. That would be easy enough for anyone to arrange.’

  ‘They’d thought of that. You’re forgetting St Catherine’s.’

  ‘So I am, sir.’

  Detective Inspector Sloan had been doing his best to forget the ultra-modern St Catherine’s Church ever since it had reared its ugly metal spire in the middle of the old market town. Even worse than the tower was the series of shiny spikes where a traditional church would have had flying buttresses.

  ‘But it was the rendezvous at St Peter’s at nine this morning that got the secret service boys really wound up, Sloan. You know, that old church down by the riverside that isn’t used any more…’

  ‘Redundant,’ said Sloan pithily, ‘although if you ask me there’s more sin down in that part of the town than anywhere else.’

  ‘Quite so. Well…’

  ‘If ever a patch needed a church,’ averred Sloan feelingly, ‘it’s the Water Lane district.’

  ‘Perhaps.’ The Assistant Chief Constable frowned. ‘They tell me Mata Hari and someone else…’

  ‘Who wasn’t George?’

  ‘A new face – or, rather, a new back. They did their exchange dead on the first stroke of the church clock.’ He scratched his chin. ‘From all accounts it went like clockwork too, which is more than it did one day last week…’

  Detective Inspector Sloan looked up. If there was one thing every police officer found worth investigating it was a deviation from the norm. ‘What happened last week?’

  ‘Apparently, Mata Hari was outside St Olave’s all that morning, but no George. It was raining and she got soaked, but he never showed and neither did anyone else.’

  ‘And next time?’

  ‘Your guess is as good as mine, Sloan.’

  ‘Actually, sir, the time and place might be a guess,’ said the Detective Inspector, ‘but, if past performance is anything to go by, the meeting will be outside a church.’

  ‘Ye-es, I suppose that’s so.’

  ‘And on the hour.’

  ‘That too, Sloan, now you come to put it like that.’

  ‘On past performance alphabetically, saving St Catherine’s –’ Sloan knew what it was those high spikes there reminded him of, so many mantraps – ‘it should be St Thomas’s…’

  ‘Mata Hari and her friends do
seem to need a church, all right,’ agreed the Assistant Chief Constable pensively, ‘which is funny, when you think about it.’

  ‘They seem to need the outside of one, sir, anyway,’ amended Sloan.

  ‘And something by way of a clock.’

  ‘St Ninian’s doesn’t have one,’ said Sloan, almost without thinking. His mother’s arrival there went by the sound of the church bells. All he ever had to do was to get her to the church door on time. She was always telling him it was an interesting church doorway, but he couldn’t for the moment remember why.

  ‘Right.’

  ‘And it can’t be the church bells,’ said Sloan knowledgeably, ‘because St Olave’s doesn’t have a ring any more.’

  ‘Nowhere near enough young bell-ringers coming forward these days, Sloan. Too much like hard work – pulling a rope and counting.’

  Sloan paused. ‘There’s one more thing, sir…’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘All these meetings you’ve told me about have been in the morning.’

  ‘So they have, Sloan.’ He tapped his pen on his desk. ‘Now, why should that have been, I wonder?’

  ‘Perhaps this precious pair need daylight to come together, sir.’

  ‘Good point, Sloan.’ The Assistant Chief Constable leaned back in his chair. ‘But not for recognition…’

  ‘The recognition would seem to be a bit one-sided, sir. That’s if Mata Hari only has something lifted out of her hand from behind.’

  ‘True, but – er – George must know whose hand from which to do his taking.’

  Sloan wrinkled his brow. ‘On the other hand, she may not need to know who’s coming up behind her to collect the – er – dibs. It might even be safer that way.’ Dibs wasn’t a word he relished using. Like the name Mata Hari, it smacked of an earlier, more melodramatic era.

  ‘Perhaps, Sloan, there’s something else they need…’

  ‘Fine weather?’

  The Assistant Chief Constable nodded. ‘Could be, Sloan. Now what sign, I wonder, could there be which doesn’t work in the rain.’

  ‘There must be something,’ said Detective Inspector Sloan. There was a pair of tribes in Borneo he’d read about which only went to war in daylight – that was because they were frightened of the dark – and in fine weather because the rain spoiled their martial feather head-dresses. ‘They’ll have a reason for using the front of all those churches … bound to.’

  ‘Something which needs the sun perhaps?’ The Assistant Chief Constable frowned. ‘There can’t be that number of handy sundials in the middle of Berebury, though.’

  ‘And the sundial only tells the time, sir. It wouldn’t tell them when to meet.’ The rim of the sundial in the municipal park said something sententious about its only recording the sunny hours, but he did not say this. ‘These meetings, sir, that the secret service said were all outside churches…’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Did they mean outside the church doors?’

  ‘I’m not sure if they were as precise as that, Sloan.’ The Assistant Chief Constable peered at the notes on his desk. ‘Why?’

  ‘Churches usually face east…’

  ‘Agreed. So?’

  ‘So their entrance doors are usually on the south and north sides.’

  ‘Granted.’

  ‘Although sometimes, of course,’ went on Sloan, ‘they have a west door too…’

  The lean, intelligent face of the Assistant Chief Constable took on a look of close interest. ‘Are you telling me, Sloan, that none of the action will have been on the north side of any of these churches?’

  ‘If that is the case, then it might perhaps indicate that we are thinking along the right lines, that’s all, sir.’

  A little smile played along the other man’s lips. ‘Am I then right in thinking that an extension of this proposition would be that our two suspects wouldn’t have met on the west side of any of the churches either?’

  ‘Yes, sir. Not if the meetings all took place in the morning, sir, which you said they did. The west side only gets the afternoon and evening sun and the north side none at all.’

  ‘I did say they were in the mornings,’ said the Assistant Chief Constable. ‘All of ’em.’

  ‘And if their signal needs the sun, that would explain why the meeting outside St Olave’s was fouled up by the rain.’ Like the warriors of Borneo, Mata Hari’s contacts too would have had their reasons for not liking bad weather.

  The Assistant Chief Constable stroked his chin. ‘Go on.’

  ‘But if they’re working their way round the Berebury churches alphabetically, it wouldn’t explain why they left St Catherine’s out,’ said Sloan. He’d learned long ago not to bend facts to suit a theory. Defence counsel always found a chink in faulty armour.

  ‘They didn’t leave St Peter’s out though,’ remarked the Assistant Chief Constable, ‘just because it’s not being used now.’

  ‘So, sir, it wasn’t something hidden in the church notices in the porches…’ His own mother, now, was always able to draw accurate conclusions from innocent-looking flower rotas.

  ‘That follows, Sloan. St Peter’s in, St Catherine’s out…’ He sat back and regarded his notes with a pensive air. ‘Doesn’t make sense, does it? We’re like those chaps looking for a sign from the East.’

  ‘The Three Wise Men…’ There was something beginning to niggle at the back of Sloan’s mind now.

  ‘Well, it looks as if we two wise men can’t help our – shall we say our “confrères”? – with the answer to their little problem after all.’

  The niggle at the back of Sloan’s mind was turning into a positive irritant.

  ‘Pity, that, Sloan,’ murmured the Assistant Chief Constable wistfully. ‘I should have liked the force to have come up with…’

  ‘St Catherine’s Church is post-war,’ Sloan said suddenly.

  ‘The 1960s architects have a lot to answer for,’ observed the classicist urbanely.

  ‘But the other churches are all old and Anglican,’ said Sloan.

  ‘I don’t know that that gets us very far, Sloan…’

  ‘Before clocks, sir, churches had to have ways of telling folk when to come to services … those who couldn’t read anyway.’

  ‘Agreed, but what about it?’

  ‘They had something called mass clocks on the church masonry.’ The niggle in his mind had clarified into a memory. ‘Usually on the porch door.’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘The priest put a little wooden peg into a hole in the stone and then scratched a line outwards from the hole.’

  ‘But I don’t see…’

  ‘The congregation would know it was time for church when the shadow from the peg fell on the line.’

  ‘Are you telling me that there’s one of these mass clocks on all these churches?’

  ‘There’s one at St Ninian’s,’ said Sloan. ‘Scratch dials, they’re sometimes called.’ He paused and then said, ‘It would be easy enough to make a little hole and draw a line on the stonework of the others if they hadn’t got one already.’

  ‘Except St Catherine’s, which hasn’t got any stonework.’

  ‘All metal and glass,’ agreed Sloan, ‘more’s the pity.’

  ‘And no one would ever notice something like that on an old church, would they?’ The Assistant Chief Constable reached for the telephone. ‘Right, Sloan, we’ll tell these intelligence types where the next meeting will be…’

  ‘And when, sir…’

  ‘Amazing where a bit of ratiocination can get you, isn’t it?’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘A Latin word,’ said his superior officer airily, ‘for a conclusion reached by reasoning.’

  Cold Comfort

  Sixteenth-century Scotland

  Sheriff Macmillan hadn’t at first heard the sound of the approaching bagpipes but the hall-boy at Drummondreach had. Upon the instant, the lad uncurled himself from the rush-strewn floor and reached for his own set of pipes, l
istening intently the while. He began to pump up the bag under his arm even as he scrambled to his feet, making ready to carry out his duty of first identifying and then heralding any new arrivals at the policies of Rhuaraidh Macmillan, Sheriff of Fearnshire.

  Cocking his ear in the direction of the distant pipes, the boy echoed his response with the preliminary notes of a lament. That sound, though, brought the Sheriff to the entrance hall of his dwelling place quickly enough, even though the other bagpipe players were still a mile or more away.

  ‘They’re playing “The Fearnshire Lament”, my lord,’ said the boy, his own acute hearing demonstrating one of the many advantages of youth to the older man. ‘I ken it well…’

  ‘Aye,’ said the Sheriff crisply. ‘I hear it quite clearly myself now…’

  Rhuaraidh Macmillan stepped back more than a little thoughtfully while the hall-boy took up the bagpipes’ chanter again and made to answer those heard from afar but as yet still unseen. The playing of that melancholy tune carried its own sad significance to the Sheriff. It meant not only that those coming near approached in sorrow rather than in anger but that a man was untimely dead somewhere nearby and within his jurisdiction.

  It meant more than just dead, of course.

  That particular lament told both Sheriff Macmillan and the hall-boy at Drummondreach that the death being announced by the playing of the dirge was of a known clansman. It was not some enemy or stranger of no consequence who was being thus sung. It foretold rather that a man had died from within the tight little circle which comprised the close-knit aristocracy of the Fearnshire clans.

  ‘Who’ll it be this time?’ he pondered aloud. The Sheriff’s writ ran among clansmen all tied by generations of auld alliances and ancient fealties. Rumour had it that the new Queen in Edinburgh – she who had lately come over from France – had referred to them as unruly tribes, but that was not to understand their allegiances to the land and its people, both of which had been established in these northern parts for time out of mind.