Losing Ground Read online

  She applied herself to the telephone again, listening rather more carefully when it became apparent that the newspaper reporter knew quite a lot.

  ‘Oh, I see,’ she said at last. ‘Quite a small fire, confined to the old billiard room by the fire brigade. That’s all right, then.’ There was a pause. ‘Why what? Why is it all right? Because the billiard room’s only Victorian.’ She stiffened and said coldly down the telephone. ‘Of course our society is interested in the preservation of Victorian buildings, too, it’s just that Tolmie Park is basically an older building.’

  There was another pause while Wendy listened rather more attentively.

  ‘Yes,’ she said eventually. ‘We know all about the planning application to build all those houses in the grounds – yes, that’s right – they call it enabling development. That’s so they can spend the money they make on those houses on restoring the house. In theory,’ she added richly.

  It became evident that the newspaper reporter had not needed having this spelt out for him.

  ‘Our concern,’ said Wendy loftily, overlooking this, ‘is that Tolmie Park becomes a jewel in Calleshire’s crown once again.’

  The telephone crackled.

  ‘No,’ she said firmly, ‘not even with enabling development. Nobody wants dozens of nasty little houses all over the park spoiling the whole ambience.’

  Paul Pullman looked distinctly uneasy as she replaced the telephone. ‘I’m not sure you should have said that, Wendy.’

  ‘I shall deny that I did,’ she said serenely. She blew him a kiss. ‘And say I was misquoted. Or taken out of context. That’s what they always say, isn’t it? You didn’t hear it anyway, did you, darling?’ She picked up the telephone again. ‘I’d better ring Jonathon back and make sure he doesn’t do anything silly this time.’

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Detective Inspector Sloan stepped gingerly over the fire hoses, trying in vain to avoid the puddles of water in between. He heard Dr Dabbe and his perennially taciturn assistant, Burns, arrive at Tolmie Park long before he saw the consultant pathologist’s car come round the corner of the building at a smart pace and screech to a halt.

  ‘Ah, there you are, Sloan,’ said the doctor, climbing out of his vehicle and slamming the car door behind him. ‘Now, what have you got for us this time?’

  ‘Not a lot, I’m afraid,’ said the policeman.

  ‘Size is immaterial in pathology,’ said Dabbe jovially. ‘That right, Burns?’

  ‘Yes, doctor,’ said his assistant, before setting about unpacking some rubber boots from the cases he had brought along.

  ‘You’d be surprised at how small some of the evidence I deal with is,’ said the pathologist chattily. ‘Take microbes, for instance…can’t get much smaller than them and they kill quicker than most.’

  ‘All we’ve got to go on here,’ said Sloan, sticking to the matter in hand, ‘is what we – that is, the fire people and ourselves – saw before the roof went.’

  ‘And that was?’ asked the doctor, starting to struggle into white overalls.

  ‘Bones,’ said Sloan. ‘They were in a small heap in the middle of the floor.’

  ‘Now you see them, now you don’t,’ murmured Detective Constable Crosby to no one in particular.

  ‘The fire,’ hurried on Sloan, ‘has been confined to a later addition to the house – a billiard room at the back.’

  ‘The Victorians slapped them on,’ said the pathologist, ‘for their angry young men.’

  ‘Come again,’ said Detective Constable Crosby, perking up. ‘Nobody ever put up a building for me.’

  ‘Billiard rooms,’ said the pathologist succinctly, ‘were an early form of birth control.’

  ‘Pull the other one,’ murmured Crosby almost under his breath.

  Dr Dabbe said solemnly ‘It’s true. They used to put their sons in there with a billiard table and no women. Kept their hands busy.’

  ‘But…’ began Crosby.

  ‘And,’ swept on the doctor, ’since quite a lot of them were called Septimus and Octavious you can see their problem.’

  ‘Our problem…’ started Sloan.

  ‘Is a burnt offering now, I should say from the looks of things,’ said Dabbe, taking in the charred beams and a building open to the sky in one swift glance.

  ‘Now, perhaps,’ pointed out Sloan. ‘The bones didn’t look all that burnt when I saw them.’

  ‘Not a lot to go on, then, Sloan,’ said the pathologist. ‘A memory of bones.’

  ‘No, doctor.’

  Dabbe stroked his chin. ‘I don’t think we’ve ever had as little as that for starters, have we, Burns? Just a memory.’

  His assistant shook his head and said lugubriously. ‘Not so far, doctor.’

  ‘And was, as the Old Testament puts it so well, Sloan, the knee bone connected to the thigh bone, so to speak?’

  ‘Not that I saw,’ said Sloan a little stiffly, ‘but as I said, doctor, I didn’t get a really good look.’

  ‘Dem bones…’ began Crosby until quelled into silence by a look from Sloan. ‘Sorry, sir.’

  ‘All I know is that the fire officer over there,’ Sloan waved in the direction of Charlie Burton, ‘is talking of a suspicious cause for what he calls this minor conflagration.’ Every calling had its own argot and the Fire and Rescue Service was no different from all the others. Doctors and lawyers were worse. They spoke in theirs all the time.

  ‘What sort of bones?’ asked Dr Dabbe. ‘We’re not talking of a tramp’s supper gone wrong, are we?’

  ‘I don’t know, doctor,’ said Sloan. ‘All we saw was this heap in the middle of the room. The fire chap with a camcorder – they video everything these days, you know – tried to get a decent picture but the roof fell in while he was doing it.’

  Dr Dabbe stared up at the charred rafters of the billiard room. ‘Didn’t this place have a bit of a reputation at one time?’

  ‘A long time ago,’ said Detective Inspector Sloan. If it had one now he, as head of the tiny Criminal Investigation Department at F Division at Berebury, would have heard of it, even if it had not yet come to the official attention of the police. For starters, the local bobby would have been sure to have mentioned the fact in one of his reports. And rumour, that swift, if not sure, traveller, would have brought news of any strange goings-on to his attention very soon. ‘Once. In history,’ he added for good measure. ‘Not now.’

  ‘In the field of forensic pathology, Sloan, we only ever deal in things that have already happened,’ said Dr Dabbe amiably. ‘That right, Burns?’

  ‘Yes, doctor,’ responded the man dutifully. ‘Your thermometer…’

  ‘In our line of country we leave the present and the future to others,’ said the pathologist, nevertheless peering acutely at the smouldering detritus on the floor of the billiard room and advancing to record the ambient temperature.

  ‘Your rubber gloves, doctor,’ said Burns, delving into his bags and coming up with a succession of items for all the world as if it were a lucky dip.

  ‘I don’t know that I’m going to need them,’ said Dabbe. ‘Not until everything cools down a bit.’ He cast his eyes round the site again and then pointed towards Charlie Burton. ‘Have the fire people got any ideas on where the seat of the fire was?’

  ‘It’s a bit strange, that.’ Sloan frowned. ‘Their first thoughts – they won’t say for certain, naturally – is that it was started…’

  ‘Was started?’

  ‘They think they’ve found evidence of an accelerant…’ said Sloan.

  ‘I never did believe in spontaneous combustion,’ said Dr Dabbe.

  ‘…In one of the corners furthest away from the main building.’

  ‘Not under the bones, then.’

  ‘It would seem not.’

  ‘If the intention was to incinerate them,’ mused the pathologist, ‘then they didn’t go the right way about it.’

  ‘Our thinking, too,’ said Sloan magnanimously, since as far as he could
tell, Crosby hadn’t had any thoughts at all. It was a point to be noted, though.

  ‘But if the intention was that the bones were to be seen at some point…’

  ‘Ah,’ said Sloan.

  ‘Then starting the fire at a distance…’

  ‘And alerting the fire brigade,’ put in Sloan.

  ‘Then you achieve your object,’ observed the pathologist astutely. ‘Interesting, that, Sloan.’

  ‘And so is the fact that the fire didn’t get to the main building before the fire engines got here,’ said Detective Inspector Sloan, making another note.

  ‘That you, Stu?’ called out Jason Burke throatily as Bellamy came through the door.

  ‘It is. What’s up?’ said Stuart Bellamy. He knew the sound of Burke’s voice well enough by now to recognise when a certain tone meant trouble.

  ‘What have you been and gone done now, Stu?’ asked Burke silkily.

  ‘Me? I haven’t done anything, Jason. Why?’

  ‘Someone has. And if it isn’t you then I don’t know who it is.’ Burke seized a nearby guitar and began to play a tune on it.

  ‘Who has done what?’ demanded Stuart in matching forthright tones.

  ‘I said buy it, man, not burn it down.’ The strumming increased in volume.

  ‘I still don’t get it, Jas,’ said Bellamy, hanging his jacket over the back of a chair. ‘Burn what down?’

  ‘Tolmie Park.’

  ‘Strewth. You mean they’ve…?’

  ‘Set Tolmie Park on fire. They’ve just said so on the local news.’ Jason Burke belonged to a generation that couldn’t manage without background noise. He kept the radio on all the time. He didn’t diminish the volume of his guitar-playing.

  ‘Well, it wasn’t me, I can promise you, mate.’

  ‘You’re sure you haven’t gone and done it so you don’t have the hassle of buying the place?’

  ‘Quite sure,’ said Bellamy, as ever surprised by his employer’s limited horizons. ‘All I did was write and tell the head honcho at Berebury Homes that we wanted to buy the estate, like you said.’

  ‘So why would they try to burn it down just when I wanted to buy it?’ Burke, always inclined to the personal, sounded puzzled rather than cross.

  ‘Search me, Jason. I just asked them to tell me who we could talk turkey with. That’s all. I promise you.’

  ‘What did they say?’ Burke appeared now to be giving all his attention to an iPod but Stuart Bellamy knew him too well to be taken in by this.

  ‘They said they weren’t selling,’ said Bellamy. ‘Not no way. Their boss man – he’s called Lionel Perry – rang me up. He got quite upset at the idea of parting with the place.’

  ‘You didn’t tell them it was me, did you?’ Jason Burke, who had an excellent instinct for personal publicity, also knew very well the importance of keeping a low profile when he wanted to buy anything. This, the young star was well aware, was a time that called for keeping the well-known head well below the parapet.

  ‘ ’Course not,” said Bellamy. ‘That would have pushed the price up like anything. We both know that. No, I only used my own name and that wouldn’t have meant a thing to anyone.’ There were some occasions when he was very glad about that and this was one of them.

  ‘I know there are people who don’t enjoy our sort of concert,’ went on the pop musician earnestly, still puzzled, ‘but blow me, not enough to want to burn a place to the ground so I can’t buy it, surely.’

  ‘Sure, Jas.’ Stuart Bellamy saw no point in trying to explain to the pop star that not everyone liked the decibel levels reached by the famous Kevin Cowlick events and that the Summer of Love hadn’t gone down too well with the older generation.

  ‘That’s just what makes Tolmie Park the perfect spot for concerts,’ explained the pop musician. ‘The isolation. Not having anyone living near enough to have a reason to complain will be a great help.’

  ‘I can see that,’ said Stuart Bellamy, accountant marque. For a boy from the back streets of the industrial town of Luston, Jason Burke also had a very good grasp of what constituted a viable business proposition. ‘No one would have heard a thing from Tolmie Park, it’s so far out in the country.’

  ‘A bit less of that “would have”, Stu, if you don’t mind,’ said Jason, demonstrating that he had a better feeling for the English language than might have been thought by most of his audiences, especially after a vocal event, ‘because I still want it. Ruin or not. And not just because it’s a good place for a rave…’ he grinned and looked suddenly quite sheepish. ‘Sorry, I’ve got to say “festival”, haven’t I? Not rave.’

  ‘You have if you want to get it past the council’s committees,’ said Bellamy feelingly. ‘They’re mostly of an age to have Woodstock engraved on their hearts, remember.’

  ‘Right. Festival, it is. But I still want Tolmie Park. That understood?’ There was no mistaking the undertone of menace in his voice now.

  ‘Perfectly.’

  ‘And Stu…’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Go find out who started that fire.’

  ‘Will do.’

  ‘And pronto.’

  ‘Sure thing. And I’ll try to find out as well why they did, Jason. That matters, too, don’t forget.’ Stuart Bellamy pulled out his chair and sat down. As he did so he reminded himself of that aphorism that the familiar is not necessarily the known. If anything described his relationship with Jason Burke, that was it.

  How Melanie Smithers, Berebury Council’s conservation officer, got through the cordon of tape Crosby had put up round the burnt shell of the billiard room, Detective Inspector Sloan never knew. The first he saw of that young woman was when her well-covered figure appeared at his elbow, hard-hat, steel-capped boots and all.

  ‘I’m afraid, miss, that whoever you are, I must ask you to leave,’ he said, putting up an arm to stop her advancing any further towards the smouldering building. ‘At once.’

  ‘Please, I just want to see…’

  ‘I must warn you, miss,’ Sloan interrupted her sternly, ‘that if you don’t go straight back to the main road, you could be at risk of prosecution for interfering with the police in the execution of their duties.’

  ‘And the police could be accused of interfering with me in performing mine,’ she countered unexpectedly, ‘if you don’t let me stay.’

  ‘And what might they be?’ he enquired, interested in spite of himself.

  ‘Making sure that the fire brigade doesn’t do any more damage than they need to,’ she came back swiftly. ‘Or the developers. Give either of them half a chance and they’ll be getting a structural engineer round to say that they should be knocking down what’s left of this end of the house on safety grounds even though it’s a listed building before I’ve had a chance to take photographs and do some measurements. I know what they’re like. Both of them.’

  ‘All the while this is a crime scene nobody’s touching anything until I say so,’ pronounced Detective Inspector Sloan, his authority grounded in statute law. ‘That goes for you, miss, and the fire brigade and everybody else.’

  It didn’t, unfortunately, seem to have gone for Dr Dabbe. The pathologist was now lying flat on the ground on his tummy, a pair of binoculars glued to his eyes. They were pointing in the direction of a pile of charred rafters heaped on what had been the parquet floor of the billiard room. ‘I just need to get them properly focused,’ he said to nobody in particular, ‘and I might see something.’

  ‘That’s all I want to do, too,’ pleaded Melanie Smithers, still at Sloan’s elbow. ‘See something.’

  ‘Back to the main road,’ repeated Sloan. ‘Now.’

  ‘Please, Inspector – it is Inspector, isn’t it? – all I need is a really good look at exactly where this new building joins on to the old one before anyone starts knocking it about.’

  ‘What new building?’ asked Sloan.

  ‘The Victorian one.’ She dismissed the wrecked billiard room with a wave of her hand. ‘It�
�s very important that I take a look now.’

  ‘And why won’t it wait?’ asked Sloan with professional curiosity. The good books on policing stressed that note should always be taken of all those at the scene of any incident, but especially those very near and anxious to speak there and then. ‘Everything’s going to be much too hot to touch for hours.’

  ‘Because the developers will want as much of the building pulled down as soon as they can,’ she said. ‘I’m the local conservation officer and I know just how they operate.’

  ‘Fast?’ suggested Crosby, drawn to Sloan’s side and his interest engaged by the presence of a pretty young girl.

  ‘They’ll get some demolition people in with the speed of light if they possibly can,’ she said, ‘and get the work all carried out with the speed of light under any pretext they can dream up.’

  ‘It’s a white elephant, then, is it?’ said Crosby, waving an arm in the direction of the house.

  Melanie Smithers made a face. ‘If you ask me, as far as the developers are concerned the whole of Tolmie Park here isn’t so much a white elephant as an albatross round their necks.’

  Detective Inspector Sloan’s mind had been working along quite different lines and the Rime of the Ancient Mariner hadn’t come into it. He said casually, ‘Could the house that you’re talking about by any chance have been the one shown on the painting of Tolmie Park in the museum?’

  She turned an eager face to him. ‘That’s right, Inspector. How did you know that? In the Filligree portrait there. But this later part…’

  ‘Later?’ he said.

  ‘Well, Victorian, anyway…’ she nodded quickly. ‘We think that at the point where it was joined on to the old building that you ought now to be able to see the obscured parts of an even older building. The original core, so to speak.’

  ‘The nearly new, the old and the very old,’ remarked Crosby.

  ‘The very oldest parts were probably the remnants of a cross wing,’ said Melanie Smithers, taking this seriously. ‘With a bit of luck they were still visible as part of the existing Tolmie Park when the painting was done.’ She sniffed. ‘Most of the remains were probably cleared away when they put up the billiard room. They were so ignorant in those days.’