A Late Phoenix Read online

  Her head came up alertly. “Over there? Are you sure?”

  “Quite sure,” said William. He asked her who used to live in the bombed houses opposite. “Can you remember?”

  “There were four families,” she said, frowning slightly. “Two on each side of the corner. Some people called Masters and Draycott lived in the Conway Street ones. The other two were in Lamb Lane. They were called Waite and … and Crowther. Yes, Crowther. That was the name. The bomb hit the corner.”

  “Where were you at the time?” asked William a little diffidently. Miss Tyrell’s age was something he had not so far fathomed and he didn’t want her to think him curious.

  “Under there, Doctor,” she said in a very dry voice indeed. She pointed to the heavy oak desk in the consulting room; a desk that, like everything else about Field House, seemed to go with the practice.

  William, who had been sitting at the desk, for some reason immediately withdrew his feet from under it.

  “So the third house along from this end … let me see now … that would have been the Waites’?”

  “That’s right, Doctor,” said Miss Tyrell, nodding. “The Waites’ house.”

  No one could have described Detective Constable Crosby as a comfort to have around. Indeed, Sergeant Gelven usually referred to him as the defective constable.

  “St. Luke’s, sir? What have we got to go down there for?”

  “A job,” said Sloan briefly. “And it’s only the other side of town. Not Darkest Africa. So get moving.”

  No sooner were the words out of his mouth than he wished he hadn’t spoken. Young, brash, and the despair of all the ranks above him in the police hierarchy, Detective Constable Crosby had so far shown enthusiasm for only one thing.

  Driving fast cars fast.

  “What sort of job, sir?” he asked, slipping the police car round an articulated lorry and a motorcycle just—but only just—before a large trade van used their road space.

  “Look out, you fool!”

  “Plenty of room, sir. It’s a good road.”

  It was just as well it was. Crosby took the next corner in a manner calculated to bring the heart to the mouth—and in a way which made at least one watching pedestrian resolve to write to the Home Secretary.

  “They all say that,” muttered Sloan irritably, “but I don’t want to die yet, even if you do.” He subsided uneasily back in the passenger seat. “This job has waited thirty years for us, Crosby. Another thirty minutes isn’t going to make a lot of difference.”

  From what he could make of the case at first sight another thirty days wasn’t going to make a lot of difference either.

  “Just a skeleton in the ruins of a cellar. That’s all we’ve got to go on, Crosby.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Not buried deep but definitely underground. At least,” he corrected himself carefully, “under something. Bomb rubble, perhaps. It hasn’t been disturbed for a long time and it’s what you might call settled like earth now.”

  Crosby seemed to be preoccupied with double declutching.

  “The pathologist wasn’t happy about the way the skeleton was lying though,” went on Sloan. “It didn’t have the look of accidental burial about it.”

  “This clutch is a bit sticky, sir.”

  “You don’t say.” There was a legend in Berebury Police Station that Constable Crosby’s promotion out of the uniformed branch had stemmed entirely from some typist’s error: and that somewhere there languished on a lonely beat a man with a name nearly the same. Today Sloan could well believe it.

  The police car turned into Conway Street just as Dr. William Latimer left Field House and set off on his morning visiting round. They saw his car go down the road.

  “Dr. Latimer,” persisted Sloan, “says there were some young archeologists working on the site over the weekend and I know there’s been a fair bit of squabbling about the redevelopment because I’ve read about it in the local paper.”

  “Yes, sir.” Crosby slowed down just short of the monstrous yellow machine that had plucked up the tree yesterday, and pointed. “Shouldn’t be on the road at all, sir, that thing shouldn’t.”

  “I don’t suppose,” said Sloan mildly, “that he wants to be on the road. I expect where he wants to be is on the site and we won’t let him.” He looked round. “There’s a man called Cresswell on duty somewhere.”

  “He’s over there, sir. Near the entrance.”

  Sloan turned. Entrance was rather a strong word for the gap in the chestnut fencing which constituted the way into the site.

  In the daylight it was still possible to see where the doors of the four demolished houses had been. The stone of threshold was usually a substantial affair—it occurred to Sloan, seeing them for the first time isolated as they were—that there was probably a very primitive reason for this. In each case here it had survived the bombing and subsequent demolition. The gap in the fencing, though, was wide enough for machinery and a small army of men to come through.

  Police Constable Cresswell was making no attempt to block it.

  He was just standing there.

  But it was enough.

  Sloan knew how it would be. The deceptively casual stroll towards the first man who tried to walk through, followed by the polite negative. The whole strength of the British police system was exemplified by that very casualness and that politeness.

  Out on the road was the man whom he guessed was Burrows, the site foreman. He was talking to two other men.

  They all greeted Sloan eagerly.

  “Ah, Inspector …” One of them—the tallest—came forward with a brisk step. “I’m Mark Reddley. We’re the site developers here—and this is Garton. It’s Garton’s firm who are building here.”

  “Trying to build, you mean,” said Garton ruefully, “until this business last night put a stopper on it. Burrows here, my foreman, told us about it and so we came round.”

  Garton was shorter than Reddley. He was middle-aged and harassed-looking as if he wasted much time.

  He came to the point at once. “How long do you need here, Inspector?”

  “I couldn’t say, sir. Not yet. We don’t know a great deal about the skeleton yet.”

  Garton’s head came up with a jerk. “Do you need to, Inspector? After all this time?”

  “Of course it doesn’t matter who it was,” interrupted Reddley impatiently. “What matters is that it’s been taken away now and I should have thought that means that we could get cracking on the site.”

  “Not until we’ve completed our investigations, sir,” said Sloan. He could tell that Reddley wasn’t used to being held up. “We’ll be as quick as we can.”

  The developer waved his rolled plans, unappeased. “Time’s money, Inspector.”

  “Very likely, sir,” he said. Reddley’s might very well be. Detective Inspector Sloan’s wasn’t. Sloan’s time and money didn’t come into anyone’s calculations. That was what justice was about.

  “It’s not all that different from being held up by a sharp attack of frost, I suppose,” said Garton, the builder, more philosophically. “That right, Burrows?”

  “Yes, Mr. Garton,” responded the foreman. “Or bricks. I’ve known that happen.”

  “It still costs money,” said Reddley flatly. “And the longer it takes, the more it costs.”

  “We appreciate that all right, sir,” said Sloan, “but the coroner must be informed and …”

  “And someone always has to pay in the end,” said Reddley meaningly.

  “Just a minute.” Garton was starting to look distinctly uneasy. “Just a minute. This is the sort of thing that could happen to anyone …”

  “I hope not, gentlemen,” intervened Sloan firmly. “It’s not every day that a skeleton turns up.”

  “It’s not the skeleton,” retorted Reddley. “It’s the delay. All these men and machines laid on ready to work and a policeman stopping them doing it. Somebody’s got to pay.”

  Sloan took a step
towards Constable Cresswell and the gap in the fence.

  “You’ll have to get someone to read the small print in your contract for you both, won’t you?” He’d been in the force too long to confuse civil law with criminal law and was wise enough never to give an opinion of the former. Besides, the law of contract was quite tortuous enough without the police coming into it. He stepped over the rubble and called back over his shoulder, “There’s bound to be a clause about enemy action in it. There almost always is.”

  This was clearly a new thought to both men.

  Detective Constable Crosby followed close on Sloan’s heels, grinning. “You can see them both working that one out, sir, only they can’t quite remember in whose favor enemy action would be.”

  “Nobody’s, Crosby,” Sloan reminded him soberly. “Ever.”

  Clear as you go

  CHAPTER FOUR

  P.C. Cresswell led them across the site. It was already taking on a smoothed look.

  Except at one point.

  The point which had been first a cellar and then a tomb.

  “We’ve had the press here, sir,” said Cresswell. “I didn’t know quite how you would feel about them but seeing as how I understand it’s a question of identification I didn’t know but that you might think a bit of publicity might come in handy.”

  “Found,” murmured Sloan absently. “One woman.”

  “Yes, sir.” P.C. Cresswell moved ahead. “The ladder’s over here, sir.”

  The ladder was leaning against the only remaining wall of the cellar. Sloan took his bearings all over again in daylight and decided that it had been an outside wall with solid earth on the other side—the solid earth of the garden, in fact. The side of the cellar facing the street had been shored up a little from the inside—presumably to keep the pavement intact. The two walls which were common to the houses on either side had disintegrated completely. You could now step into the cellar of what had been the house next door without let or hindrance.

  But could you have done so thirty years ago?

  Sloan stopped and examined the rubble. He thought he could make out the remains of an old party wall. He had a good look at the trench which had contained the skeleton. It was lying parallel to the remaining wall and about two feet from it. Whatever had buried the skeleton, it had not been the wall immediately beside it.

  “Lying there for shelter, sir?” suggested Crosby. “Along the ground under the wall …”

  “Perhaps,” said Sloan.

  If so, the wall hadn’t given enough protection when the whole house—when all four houses—came tumbling down on the top of the cellar.

  He turned and regarded the other excavation—the one made by the archeologists of last weekend. Saxon remains, wasn’t it, that Dr. Latimer had said that they had been looking for?

  The little trenches of the archeologists followed an entirely different pattern from those of the remains of the Conway Street and Lamb Lane houses. Sloan wondered idly what cataclysmic event had brought the Saxon settlement in Berebury—if there ever had been one—to an end. Before you had high explosives to hand, so to speak. He sighed. He supposed they, too, had had their enemies.

  Everyone had enemies.

  Even Saxons.

  Perhaps especially Saxons.

  Crosby inadvertently dislodged a piece of broken brick with his shoe. It went clattering down into the shallow trench that had been the unknown woman’s grave.

  Perhaps, thought Sloan, still considering, the Saxon settlement here had ended not with the wail of warning and the crash-bang of weaponry but with a whimper.

  He didn’t know.

  He wasn’t an historian.

  Fire and flood and human aggression were enemies common to all history. Perhaps it didn’t matter very much in the long run which you succumbed to. And they were all of them better than some diseases he’d seen.

  “Sir …” Constable Crosby interrupted his reverie.

  “Well?” Perhaps this woman was history, too. Lying waiting for some archaeologist not yet born to come along and disinter her bones and her history.

  “I reckon she took shelter under the stairs.” Crosby pointed to the remains of the wall. “Look, sir, you can see where the staircase would have been.”

  “Yes.” Sloan stirred unwillingly. She had been found a hundred years too soon. That was her trouble. Better by far if she had been undisturbed until she was more definitely history.

  “So she comes down and gets under the stairs,” said Crosby, serenely untroubled by thoughts of the past, ending lamely, “only it didn’t do her a lot of good, did it, sir?”

  “No.” The site looked bleak enough in all conscience now. What it must have looked like just after the bombing was beyond Sloan’s imagining. “No, it didn’t do her a lot of good. The first question, Crosby, is whether it did anyone else any harm at the same time.”

  “Beg pardon, sir?”

  Sloan spelled it out for him. “Was she alone, man, or was anyone else buried at the same time?”

  Crosby scratched his head. “I hadn’t thought of that, sir.”

  “We shall have to make sure.” Sloan dropped to his knees, noting, just as Dr. Latimer had done, the other set of peg marks the archeologists had left behind. “I wonder what made them change their minds?”

  If there really were archeological remains about he would have to check with the curator of the Berebury Museum, Mr. Esmond Fowkes, before any more digging was done. Sloan knew him by repute: a man to whom the past was more important than the present.

  He paced out the small cellar and was glad neither Crosby nor Cresswell had asked him why it was important to find anyone else. If any other bodies were here they were buried in earth and if they were found they would later be reburied in earth …

  Earth to earth, dust to …

  “Blast,” said Sloan enigmatically.

  “Sir?”

  “I expect that’s what killed her without breaking any bones.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  They spent the next half hour in going over the remains of the cellar, gleaning only the knowledge that the floor was compounded of an indeterminate mixture of broken brick and mortar churned with Calleshire clay. Where the rubble ended and the earth began, it was impossible to say.

  Garton, the harassed-looking builder, and the more contained developer, Reddley, were still in the road talking.

  “There is something you two could tell me, gentlemen,” said Sloan, “that might save a bit of time.…”

  “What’s that, Inspector?” Reddley turned quickly. “Anything that will save time.…”

  “This site—who does it belong to?”

  “Gilbert Hodge,” said Garton immediately. “Gilbert Hodge of Glebe Street.”

  Sloan wrote that down. “And what sort of building is to be put here?”

  “The development”—Reddley waved the plans which he still carried in his hand—“is for shops on the ground floor and office space above.”

  “Offices out here?” Sloan looked around. “This far out?”

  The developer smiled. “It can’t stay that way, you know, forever. It won’t be far out soon.”

  Garton tugged at his ear. “I know what you mean, Inspector, and I must say I think it’s a pity all the same. There are some nice old houses in this part of the town.”

  “If you had to pay rent for some of those offices and shops in the High Street,” declared Reddley, “you’d want something less expensive pretty quickly. Farsighted chap, old Gilbert Hodge.”

  “Is he?” enquired Sloan.

  “He bought up a lot of this sort of derelict bomb site immediately after the war. Reckoned he was going to make on it in the long run.” Reddley tapped his plans again. “I should say he hasn’t lost on this one.”

  “’Tisn’t built yet,” pointed out Garton obstinately.

  “You mean”—Sloan attempted to sort out the police wheat from the commercial chaff—“that this Gilbert Hodge didn’t own these hous
es when they were bombed in the war?”

  “Mr. Hodge,” said Garton respectfully, “is a purely postwar enterprise. What he has done began with his gratuity.”

  “Who owned them before?”

  “I couldn’t say, Inspector.” He jerked his thumb over his shoulder. “Try the doctor’s receptionist. She’ll know. She knows everything in these parts. Face like the back of a bus but a memory like an elephant.”

  “Much more important,” agreed Sloan gravely. Faces were deceptive things. Until you considered them all impartially as masks you couldn’t really be said to be a policeman. Then you knew you had first always to get behind the mask.

  Mr. Esmond Fowkes, the curator of the Berebury Museum, was a short man with a neat white spade beard. He was down at the Lamb Lane site within minutes of getting Sloan’s message. He certainly wanted to be present if there was going to be any further digging.

  “The Saxon excavation …” began Sloan, waving an arm towards the cellar.

  “Ah! Most disappointing.”

  “You thought …”

  “Thought? I was sure, Inspector. Ready to stake my reputation on there being a Saxon settlement there.”

  “But …”

  “It was all most unfortunate.” The little man was determined to have his say. “You see, I had to be in London last weekend. No time. They were going to start building work first thing on Monday morning, you know …”

  Sloan said he knew.

  “So I had to drum up help quickly. I got Colin Rigden to arrange the actual dig. He’s a good lad. But they found nothing at all, I’m afraid.”

  “Nothing Saxon,” pointed out Sloan, who was a policeman and not an archaeologist.

  “Not a thing,” declared Fowkes, the museum curator. “And I could have sworn they would. There’s a fair bit of Saxon stuff in Berebury, you know, and I took my bearings from a known settlement. A late one.”

  “Late?” enquired Sloan carefully. “How late?”

  Fowkes waved a hand. “Ninth century.”

  Crosby smothered a snort.

  Only just.

  “Quite so,” said Sloan swiftly.

  “And when they ran the new gas main down Lamb Lane—you can see their trench over there—one of the workmen came up with a disc brooch. Same date. Lovely piece. Silver niellosed.”