A Late Phoenix Page 5

  “Really, sir?”

  “Saxon art is a study of its own …”

  “I’m sure it is, sir,” said Sloan hastily.

  “Can’t understand it at all.” Fowkes frowned. “I still think there should have been something here.”

  “Something Saxon,” interposed Sloan.

  There had, after all, been something there all right.

  “I worked it out most carefully. Sat up most of the night, if you must know, Inspector.”

  “Did you, sir?”

  “I only got wind of the work starting so soon on the Thursday. You know what it is. We have all this elaborate business of someone in the Council Office giving us museum people fair warning, and when it comes to the point some little office girl forgets and the whole machinery breaks down.”

  “Yes, sir.” Their instructions at the police station had been equally firm. Ever since a police constable had put a piece of perfect Roman glass in the dustbin. Esmond Fowkes, though small, had torn a stripe off no less a person than the Chief Constable. “How did you happen to hear in the end?”

  “I got a whisper in the Goat and Compasses, if you must know.”

  Sloan nodded. He knew that pub, all right. Just off the Market Square.

  “Then I got straight on to Garton. Blew him up good and proper, I did …”

  Sloan could well imagine it. A mere builder would be nothing to a man who had presumed to reprimand the Chief Constable.

  “… but he said Reddley had said he’d notified the council. Anyway, Garton told me I could do what I liked on the site as long as I’d got it done by eight o’clock on Monday morning.”

  “But you had to go to London,” prompted Sloan. He was anxious to get on. To talk to this receptionist, to find out who used to live here and to clear up the case. Then he could get back to more pressing problems. Like the goings-on in Dick’s Dive.

  “That’s right.” Fowkes tugged at his beard. “So I did the paper work Thursday night, and Friday I got the caretaker at the museum to give me a hand with the pegging out. Rigden came along first thing Saturday morning with his team and started digging.”

  “I see, sir. Now if …”

  Fowkes shook his head sadly. “This is all a big disappointment to me, Inspector, because of the church.”

  “The church?”

  “I’m doing a monograph for the Calleshire Archaeological Society on St. Luke’s Church.”

  “Really, sir?”

  The curator waved an arm to take in the whole area. “The one good thing that came out of the bombing.”

  “And what would that have been, sir?”

  “They got St. Luke’s Church,” he said simply. “Victorian, it was. It all went except for the tower.”

  Sloan observed that towers always seemed to last well.

  “They stood up to blast,” said the archaeologist academically. “The thick walls and great weight were just the thing for that, though their builders could never have known.” He sighed. “But it made them chimney shafts at the same time.”

  “Chimney shafts, sir?” Sloan changed his weight from one foot to the other. He should have left the site before Mr. Fowkes arrived. He would know another time.

  “That’s right. Drawing up the flames from the body of the church.”

  “I see.”

  “Then the wooden bell frames went and the bells came crashing down.”

  “That wouldn’t help.”

  “And then you lost your cupola.”

  “Did you?”

  “But afterwards …”

  “Yes?” Sloan supposed he should be taking an interest in anything that happened in St. Luke’s after the bombing.

  “Afterwards,” said Fowkes, “we found a Saxon doorway in the tower of St. Luke’s.”

  “Did you, sir?”

  “Together,” said Fowkes, “with portions of a Saxon cross of rather rude sculpture. The modern architect often used the lower part of the existing wall if it was sound, you know.”

  Sloan nodded. “So you wanted to connect the Lamb Lane site with this in your paper, sir?”

  “Naturally,” He sighed. “And I thought I was on safe ground.”

  In the event, thought Sloan, the Lamb Lane site hadn’t turned out to be safe ground for someone else either.

  Whoever she was.

  “Perhaps,” suggested Sloan, “your original peg marks would have been better after all.”

  The spade beard came up with a jerk. “My original peg marks, Inspector?”

  “Yes, sir. You know. The first set by the wall. Before you moved them.”

  Fowkes stared at him. “I didn’t move them, Inspector. I put them in by the wall.”

  Scrape and wash the bones and saw in half across

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Miss Tyrell answered the policemen’s ring at the surgery door of Field House. She was still in her white coat.

  “The houses opposite, miss,” said Sloan, when he had explained their errand, “can you tell us …”

  “Draycott, Masters, Waite, and Crowther were the people who used to live there, Inspector.”

  “Thank you. That’s a great help.” Sloan scribbled rapidly. “Now, about the actual night of the bombing … it was night, I take it, miss?”

  She nodded, a faint smile on her lips. “A Wednesday night.”

  “You remember it well,” offered Sloan.

  “It’s not the sort of thing you forget easily.”

  Sloan tried again. “What do you remember about it most clearly?”

  “The nightingales,” she said without hesitation.

  “What about them?”

  “They wouldn’t stop singing.” She adjusted her glasses more firmly on the bridge of her nose. “It was quite heartbreaking. They were so lovely—and so unconcerned about all the death and destruction. I’ve never heard them sing like it …”

  “A Wednesday, you said it was?” That would give them something to go on. Something that the coroner could write down. For the record.

  “That’s right. There was a good moon so we guessed—Dr. Tarde and I—that there would be a bad raid. He was on duty at the First Aid Post. I stayed here.”

  Sloan twisted his pencil. “The moon helped the planes to see where they were going, I suppose, miss …”

  Miss Tyrell’s thin lips twitched. “What we had that night was worse than that, Inspector. What we had was moon after rain. That’s what suited them best.”

  “Moon after rain?”

  “Especially if the moon wasn’t too high in the sky. That way,” said Miss Tyrell, “the shadows cast by the buildings together with the moonlight reflected from the wet streets gave them all they needed.”

  “What you might call a Hunter’s Moon, miss …”

  “A Bomber’s Moon, Inspector. That’s what it was.” She looked at him wryly. “Dangerous Moonlight.”

  Dangerous Moonlight. The phrase rang a bell in Sloan’s mind, but he couldn’t immediately place it. “I see. Now, miss, can you remember if anyone was killed or missing opposite?”

  “No,” she said positively. “Not there. Corton’s had a lot of casualties that night and so did the railway station but there was no one missing at the time from over there.”

  “The people,” he said. “Where were they?”

  “In their shelters at the bottom of the garden.”

  “And they were all right?”

  “Oh, yes. Those houses have long narrow gardens, Inspector. There’s more land to the site than you’d think at first. And the shelters were at the far end.”

  “And they all got there in time?”

  What in a mellower person might have passed for a smile flitted across Miss Tyrell’s face. “Certainly, Inspector. Even Mrs. Crowther.”

  “Mrs. Crowther?”

  “It was a standing joke. Mrs. Crowther was never out of Dr. Tarde’s surgery. If it wasn’t her rheumatism it was her heart and if it wasn’t her heart it was her weight. If you’d listened to all h
er ailments you’d have thought she couldn’t walk a step.”

  “And?”

  “And none of them ever stopped her getting to the shelter first.”

  “You didn’t shelter?”

  “Not that night. Sometimes, you know, they were only on their way to Luston. We lie between Luston and France, you see, so you could waste a lot of time in the shelter if you weren’t careful.”

  Sloan regarded the gaunt, rather uncompromising woman in front of him and wondered how the crowd from Dick’s Dive would get on under fire; whether they would feel they couldn’t spare the time to shelter …

  “Sometimes, of course, Inspector, they couldn’t find Luston.”

  “The bombs on the moor,” he said suddenly.

  “That’s right. I believe they’re still finding them. Sometimes, of course, they just didn’t want to go on—there were guns and searchlights on the moor—so they bombed us instead, and sometimes,” she finished simply, “they just bombed Berebury because they wanted to. Corton’s was doing war work, of course. They may have known about that.”

  Sloan turned the conversation back to the houses opposite. He did it carefully. No one except the police as yet knew that the skeleton had been female.

  “You’re sure no one was killed or missing over there?”

  “Oh, yes, Inspector. I should have known, you see. They were all patients here.”

  Sloan’s spirits sank. If the dead woman had been just a passerby taking shelter in the nearest house in a bad raid their task might well be a hopeless one …

  “The Waites, Miss Tyrell. Do you remember them?”

  “Certainly, Inspector. They were a nice old couple.”

  “Family?”

  “Two sons.”

  “No daughters?”

  “No.”

  “Mr. and Mrs. Waite—are they still alive?”

  She shook her head. “No. They were getting on in the war, you know. Losing their house didn’t help either. The man went first—heart failure”—Miss Tyrell obviously had a card-index brain—“and then his wife. Chronic nephritis, I think she died from. They were pleasant people. You know—decent and undemanding.”

  Sloan nodded. From a doctor’s receptionist the word “undemanding” was high compliment.

  “The Waites’ sons,” he said. “What sort of age would they have been in the war?”

  “Army age,” responded Miss Tyrell promptly. “Harold—that was the elder one—did well. He ended up as a sergeant in the West Calleshires. The younger boy—Leslie—went off into the Navy if I remember rightly, though I can’t imagine why. They weren’t seafaring people at all.”

  “Didn’t want to be pushed about by his elder brother in the West Calleshires, I expect.” Sloan grinned. “I guess, miss, he made the mistake of thinking they didn’t have sergeants in the Navy.”

  “Perhaps, Inspector.”

  “What happened to them?”

  “They both came back but after that I’m not very sure. I don’t think Berebury was ever the same for them, you know, after the family house went. They both moved away when the old people died, what with there being no real home here any more to speak of …”

  Sloan turned and looked out the window at the empty space that had been number one, Lamb Lane. “I can quite understand that, miss. Where did they go to?”

  “Harold went to Luston, I think, to work there. He’d been with Corton’s before the war but he was one of those who couldn’t settle afterwards. There were quite a few of them, you know.”

  “I can believe that, miss.” Sloan himself wasn’t at all sure that he would have settled down to a dull routine job in Berebury after five years in the Army in wartime. “Did he have an exciting war, then?”

  “Dunkirk, Tobruk, and then the Second Front,” said Miss Tyrell astringently. “Corton’s seemed too big a change for him after that. He came to see Dr. Tarde quite often about then and I think he advised him to move.”

  “Did he now?” murmured Sloan absently. “That’s interesting.”

  “Thought perhaps he should get away. A complete change, you know, instead of trying to pick up the broken threads.”

  “Did that do the trick?”

  “I never heard, Inspector. He certainly didn’t come back to Berebury, that’s all I know.”

  “And the younger son? Leslie, did you say his name was?”

  “Leslie Waite.” Miss Tyrell sniffed. “When he came out of the Navy the only thing he couldn’t settle to was work. Work in any shape or form. Never had. Never could.”

  “And what became of him?” enquired Sloan with genuine interest. He himself had been sternly brought up to “Go to the ant, thou sluggard: consider her ways and be wise” and occasionally—when sorely overworked—wondered what would have happened to him if he hadn’t. It was an eternally tantalizing line of thought and he wasn’t entirely convinced that the ants had it.

  “I have an idea that he settled Kinnisport way. Something,” Miss Tyrell said vaguely, “to do with boats, but I’m not sure what. He wasn’t cut out for success anyway.”

  Sloan glanced out of the window again. The driver of the articulated machine in the road was still sitting in his cab, reading his paper, totally undisturbed by the delay. Mark Reddley and the man Garton didn’t seem quite so calm. Even at this distance it was possible to see that they were not entirely happy. While he watched them they parted abruptly and drove off in their respective cars. Mr. Esmond Fowkes on the other hand looked quite absorbed. Sloan could see him pottering happily about the site.

  “Was either son married, Miss Tyrell, at the time of the bombing?” He’d been lucky to find this woman. She was a great time saver.

  “No,” she said decisively. “I’m sure they weren’t. Harold married afterwards. When he came home. I remember the wedding quite well. He married the daughter of the draper in Shepherd Street. Well set up girl. Used to teach in the Sunday school.”

  “And Leslie?”

  “Leslie wasn’t married at all while he was here in Berebury that I know of.”

  “Oh?” Sloan caught her tone, not her choice of words.

  “That is not to say,” went on Miss Tyrell censoriously, “that it was for lack of interest in the subject.”

  “One for the girls?” suggested Sloan lightly.

  “Always. From about the age of fourteen he always had one or two of them in tow.”

  “Every nice girl,” observed Sloan, “loves a sailor …”

  Miss Tyrell looked disapproving. “If you ask me, Inspector, being in the Navy got him out of a lot of difficulties. Those leaves of his …”

  “Like that, was he?”

  “Then he’d go back to his ship and next time it would be someone quite different.”

  “Inconstant,” agreed Sloan, making a note.

  Their own next port of call was the police station.

  “After the post-mortem,” said Sloan to Crosby, as they passed the site, “I reckon we should be able to give the builders the go-ahead.”

  Which was where he was wrong.

  Detective Constable Crosby did, in fact, succeed in getting Harold Waite’s address from the Luston Police quite quickly.

  “Dead easy, sir. They found him and his wife on the electoral register straight off.”

  “And his wife?” repeated Sloan. In his experience of all categories of human relationship wives were the most at risk.

  “That’s what they said, sir. Man and woman, both of the name of Waite living at 24, Bean Street, Luston.” Crosby shut his notebook with an audible snap.

  “We’ll get there now,” decided Sloan.

  Before the superintendent had time to ask him why he hadn’t been.

  The kindest thing that could be said about the suburb of Luston where Harold Waite lived was that it was probably awaiting redevelopment. It had not been made more salubrious by the fact that the adjacent suburb had already been razed to the ground and looked as if some particularly vicious war of attrition had
been fought to the finish there. The only positive sign of regrowth was a block of flats tottering towards the sky.

  That was when they stopped to ask a point duty policeman the way.

  “Keep your backs to Babel and you’ll soon find it.”

  “Babel?”

  “You strangers here in Luston?”

  Sloan nodded.

  “I thought so,” said the man. “Everyone in Luston knows Babel’s what those flats are called. Not really. They’re named after the mayor. But everyone calls them Babel. You keep the car so you can’t see them and you’ll soon be in Bean Street.”

  “That’s something, I suppose,” said Sloan unenthusiastically as Crosby turned the car away from the flats and plunged it into a maze of crisscrossed streets of terraced houses.

  He was devoutly thankful that he did not live here.

  It was all too apparent that Luston—like Topsy—had just growed. He could see how the houses—barracks of industry—had erupted in response to the quick pressures of the Industrial Revolution. There was no method about the layout of the huddled streets, and Bean Street—when they found it—was no different from all the others.

  As the police car slowed down outside number twenty-four lace curtains twitched all the way down the street.

  A thin, spare woman, her hair scraped well back from a bony forehead, answered their knock. She grudgingly admitted to being Mrs. Waite and that her husband was at home.

  “He’s just got up, if you must know. Ready for his dinner. He’s on the twilight shift this month—he’s going to work at five. If he’s spared …”

  She showed them into a front parlor of depressing respectability. It was so clean as to be almost sterile. The dustless grate had been covered with a paper fan of red crepe, pleated to fit the space. It didn’t even give a successful illusion of warmth and the whole room had the chill of disuse about it.

  “Sit down,” she said. It was more of a command than an invitation. “And I’ll fetch him through.”

  “Proper home from home, sir, isn’t it?” said Crosby chattily as soon as she was gone.

  Sloan looked at the uncreased cushions and decided against disturbing them. He wandered instead towards the bay window. There was a large Bible on a lace-covered table there.