Little Knell Page 5

  Nor in any way, either.

  ‘And what does that mean?’ demanded Leeyes trenchantly.

  ‘About a week old,’ said Sloan. ‘At least, that’s what the radiologist – he’s called Dr Meadows – puts it at, although he says the rate of decomposition of human bodies isn’t his speciality. He told us,’ Sloan consulted his notebook, ‘that you have to be anosmic to be a good pathologist and he isn’t.’

  ‘Bully for him,’ said Leeyes morosely.

  ‘Yes, sir. I think it means not having any sense of smell.’

  ‘Well.’ He sniffed. ‘I suppose you could say decomposing bodies are our speciality, Sloan, so you’d better get your skates on and find out who he or she…’

  ‘She.’

  ‘She is.’

  ‘Was,’ amended Sloan. ‘She’s very dead.’

  ‘And,’ continued Leeyes, undeterred, ‘work out who put her there.’

  ‘Yes, sir. And exactly why they put her there, too, of course.’ The word that had come first to his mind about the setting was bizarre, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t a reason for using the mummy case.

  ‘If you ask me,’ said the superintendent, never one to be interested in the rationale of things, ‘people always make too much fuss about the whys and wherefores of crime.’ He sniffed again. ‘Especially defence counsel. They make out that motive’s the be-all and end-all of felony and it isn’t, Sloan. Remember that.’

  ‘No, sir. I mean yes, sir.’

  ‘They’ll say anything in mitigation, some of ’em,’ he grumbled. ‘Anything at all.’

  ‘Yes, indeed.’ Sloan toyed with the idea of mentioning that sometimes, where crime was concerned, if you knew the reason why it had been perpetrated, then you knew who had done it; but he decided against doing any such thing. His superior officer would doubtless mount yet another hobby horse if he did and there just wasn’t time for that now.

  ‘However,’ continued Leeyes, ‘you’d better get on to finding out what gives pretty quickly, Sloan, because a new body in an old mummy is something that the press’ll be on to before you can say Granville Locombe-Stableford.’

  Sloan tightened his lips. It was Granville Locombe-Stableford whom he wanted to talk to most of all. How and why the coroner had come to take an interest in this particular Egyptian mummy was the greatest mystery of all.

  ‘So get moving, man.’

  Sloan, who didn’t need any assistance in imagining the probable headlines in the tabloid newspapers, merely said, ‘Dr Dabbe’s on his way over here now, sir, to see the body in situ before it goes over to the mortuary.’ Marcus Fixby-Smith’s office and its telephone were at a safe distance from the mummy but he would have to go back to the body as soon as the pathologist arrived. He wasn’t looking forward to sharing the available air of the room with the stinking corpse again. He took a deep breath and said, ‘The Scenes of Crime people’ll be here soon, too, sir; although I don’t think the museum was the scene of the actual crime.’

  ‘And then,’ said Leeyes, who was at a safe distance from any unpleasant sights and smells, ‘you’d better start looking into where old Colonel Caversham came into this.’

  ‘If he did,’ murmured Sloan.

  ‘Explorer, wasn’t he? And Egyptologist.’

  ‘Yes, sir. I’ve made arrangements to see his executors. He died months and months ago though, and the house has been empty since.’

  ‘Trust the lawyers to take their time about winding up his estate.’ Leeyes took off at yet another tangent. ‘Half a year or more seems par for the course.’

  ‘But as the mummy came from the colonel’s house only yesterday,’ Sloan promised hastily, before the superintendent could launch into yet another diatribe against the legal profession, ‘we’re going to examine it as quickly as possible. I’ve put a man on guard until we can get over there.’

  ‘You can get up to a lot of no-good in an empty house,’ rumbled on Leeyes. ‘A happy hunting ground…’

  ‘And as soon as we get some information about the body – teeth and so forth – we’ll try to get on with a positive identification.’ Sloan glanced down at his notebook again. ‘All the radiologist would say was that he thought the woman would have been in her early to middle twenties and very much on the small side.’

  ‘I suppose you could say that narrows the field,’ observed the superintendent unfairly, ‘but not a lot.’

  ‘And,’ went on Sloan tonelessly, ‘Dr Meadows also said that in his opinion the cause of death was not natural.’

  ‘Presumably,’ said Leeyes silkily, ‘he has grounds for making that judgement.’

  ‘In spades,’ murmured Sloan under his breath. Aloud he said, ‘Dr Meadows diagnosed a fractured skull.’ He coughed and added, ‘And that is his speciality.’

  * * *

  ‘The heirs of Colonel Caversham?’ Simon Puckle sat well back in his chair in the offices of Puckle, Puckle and Nunnery in Berebury. This distancing served to emphasize further still the intimidating expanse of green leather desktop which lay between himself and the two detectives sitting in front of him. The desk was absolutely bare save for one sheet of paper.

  ‘Or the keys of Whimbrel House,’ said Sloan flatly. ‘Whichever is the quicker.’

  ‘The keys you may have now, Inspector,’ returned the solicitor courteously. ‘I’m afraid that producing the heirs of Colonel Caversham may take a little longer.’

  Sloan’s head came up on the instant. ‘How come?’

  ‘We can’t find them,’ said Simon Puckle.

  ‘Not nowhere?’ intervened Detective Constable Crosby, leaning forward.

  ‘Not yet,’ responded the solicitor obliquely. ‘And it’s not for want of trying.’

  ‘Where there’s a will there’s a way,’ said the constable sententiously. ‘And a relative.’

  ‘You’ve advertised?’ said Sloan.

  ‘Until we’re blue in the face, Inspector,’ said Puckle. ‘Or in the red at the Calleshire County Bank’s executors’ account, whichever way you care to look at it.’

  ‘But items have already been sent to the Greatorex Museum…’ began Sloan. This was true, if unspecific.

  ‘That is, Inspector, we haven’t yet been able to trace the immediate heirs of the colonel’s settled estate – the residuary legatees. Most of that part of the inheritance goes to his male heirs-at-law under an old family trust.’

  ‘But not until you find them,’ contributed Crosby intelligently.

  ‘Precisely, Constable. I may say that handing over the specified non-pecuniary legacies has posed us – that is Puckle, Puckle and Nunnery acting in their capacity as the executors – no problems as yet.’

  ‘I see, sir.’ Detective Inspector Sloan decided, for the time being, against informing the solicitor of the problems already posed by one particular bequest. That could wait.

  ‘The famous Caversham collection of antiquities has gone to the Greatorex Museum in Berebury,’ enumerated Puckle, ‘and the colonel’s library was sent to Almstone College at the University of Calleshire last week. As you may imagine, that was extensive and specialized – and valuable, of course.’

  Detective Inspector Sloan nodded.

  ‘And,’ continued Simon Puckle, ‘the original manuscript of his noted work on Ra’fan in Upper Egypt went to the Society of Calleshire Archaeologists, of which Colonel Caversham was president for so long.’

  ‘So…’ began Detective Inspector Sloan.

  ‘And then,’ swept on Puckle, ‘there were a few bequests to his favourite charities: his regimental association, the Calleshire Animal Sanctuary – he’d been a cavalryman in his time and remained very attached to horses – and the parish church at Staple St James. They’re having trouble with their steeple, you know.’

  ‘Really, sir?’ Trouble with church steeples was happily outside his remit; and, he reminded himself feelingly, sometimes it seemed it was about the only trouble in ‘F’ Division that was. ‘These heirs…’

  ‘Not hei
rs general of the body,’ amplified Puckle. ‘Just the son or sons or grandsons of the colonel’s younger brother’s son.’

  Crosby screwed his face up in thought. ‘His nephew’s family?’

  ‘That’s right.’ Simon Puckle nodded. ‘I’m afraid that in the old colonel’s eyes the nephew was the black sheep of the family.’

  Crosby brightened. ‘A no-good boyo?’

  ‘Not really,’ said the lawyer, recipient of countless family secrets. ‘Not by today’s standards, anyway. The colonel belonged to an earlier age and just didn’t see things the way we do now.’

  ‘What did the nephew do, then?’ asked Crosby with interest. ‘Run off with the family silver?’

  ‘Ran off with someone else’s treasure,’ said Puckle drily. ‘Their daughter. It was a long time ago, of course.’

  ‘Which made it worse,’ agreed Sloan, who sometimes felt he was getting behind the times himself. Marriage, it seemed to him, had come to resemble more and more a game of musical chairs: a change of place – or none – every time the music stopped.

  ‘My grandfather,’ said the solicitor, himself the fifth generation in the legal firm, ‘told me that the girl’s family had had high hopes of an alliance for their daughter with a young sprig of the Ornums at the time when she went off with the Caversham boy.’

  That explained the opprobium to Sloan’s mind. Marriage to the younger son of an earl carried an irreproachable cachet, whoever the Cavershams of Staple St James might have been.

  ‘The Dorothy Vernon touch, you might say,’ murmured Puckle.

  ‘Sir?’ said Sloan.

  ‘A distinguished elopement from Haddon Hall in Derbyshire in the sixteenth century,’ explained Puckle. ‘Dorothy Vernon was an heiress who ran away with her lover during a ball.’

  Sloan nodded. The sixteenth century might have been a world without prohibited drugs but it was before the Married Women’s Property Act.

  ‘Made for a blot on the Caversham family escutcheon though, I’ll bet,’ remarked Crosby.

  ‘They married and disappeared abroad,’ said Puckle repressively. ‘Neither was ever heard from by the colonel again.’

  Crosby hummed the tune of ‘After the Ball was Over’ under his breath.

  Puckle coughed. ‘Gerald Caversham resigned his commission, of course.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Sloan, although he was not quite sure why a love match – let alone marriage – should have rendered Gerald Caversham unfit for military service.

  ‘If alive,’ rejoined Puckle, ‘he’d be in his early seventies by now but…’ He paused.

  ‘But…’ prompted Sloan gently.

  ‘I have to say – and I have had to say this to the ultimate heir – that we are getting increasingly doubtful that he is.’

  ‘So he got cut off without a shilling, did he?’ asked Crosby. ‘The no-good boyo, I mean.’

  ‘No, he didn’t. And the colonel couldn’t have done that even if he’d wanted to,’ said Puckle. ‘The settled estate was entailed…’

  ‘Come again?’ said Crosby.

  Detective Inspector Sloan sighed heavily and hoped that he wasn’t the one who was going to have to explain to Crosby about the fruit of the loins.

  Simon Puckle explained that this entail meant that the colonel’s property had to go to the male heirs of the body male and to no one else, the laws of primogeniture still applying.

  Detective Constable Crosby said that sounded all very unfair to him.

  The solicitor, with distinct echoes of Mae West and goodness, said that fairness had got nothing to do with it. ‘But, remember, the colonel was still a reasonably wealthy bachelor. One supposes,’ Puckle added mildly, ‘that this is how he was able to enjoy as many expeditions abroad as he wanted.’

  ‘Quite,’ said Sloan. His own wistful ambition, when young, had been to explore the Matto Grosso in search of Colonel Fawcett’s body. Sloan, though, had never been wealthy, and had not stayed long a bachelor. ‘And if the immediate heirs can’t be found?’ he asked, conscious that time was passing.

  ‘Should that be the case, and it can be demonstrated beyond doubt that neither Gerald Caversham nor his sons…’

  ‘If he had had any,’ put in Crosby, who gave every appearance of still following the narrative closely.

  ‘If he or they had had any,’ agreed Puckle, ‘and had not left male issue, then the entire Caversham inheritance reverts to the descendants of a remote collateral relative called Peter Caversham who is presently living in Luston.’

  He made Luston sound like one of the Cities of the Plain rather than a prosperous industrial town at the other end of Calleshire.

  ‘Who you say is aware of this?’ said Sloan.

  ‘Very well aware,’ said Puckle drily, ‘even though the colonel tried to have it kept from him.’

  ‘So if we might have the keys of Whimbrel House from you as executors…’ said Detective Inspector Sloan, conscious that he had already sent a man to guard the building.

  ‘Because getting a search warrant takes time,’ added Detective Constable Crosby quite gratuitously.

  Chapter Six

  Marked

  Marcus Fixby-Smith, curator, led the way into his office at the museum.

  ‘Sorry dragging you over here like this, Howard.’

  He paused at the threshold of the room, conscious as always on these occasions of the perennial dilemma of deciding where to sit in the presence of the Chairman of the Museums and Amenities Committee. If he sat behind his desk he automatically put his chairman, older and more senior, in the supplicant’s chair on the other side. If he offered his own seat to Howard Air, he himself felt displaced and ill at ease.

  ‘Don’t worry, Marcus. I get my work done while everyone else is in bed.’ Howard Air gave a deprecating cough and solved Fixby-Smith’s little local difficulty over protocol by perching on the radiator under the window. Where the curator was flamboyant and given to gesture, the fruit importer was compact and controlled. ‘It’s all over in the market for the day by your breakfast time.’

  Fixby-Smith sank thankfully into his chair. ‘Naturally,’ he said, ‘the police won’t tell us anything more at this stage.’

  ‘Naturally.’ Howard Air cocked his head forward, listening attentively to the museum curator. ‘Go on.’

  ‘Before they took it away, all that they would do was confirm that the cartonnage contained the decomposing body of an unknown female.’

  ‘Which you knew already,’ pointed out the committee chairman.

  ‘Too right.’ Fixby-Smith gave a convulsive shudder. ‘But only after it was opened up. I didn’t know before, of course.’

  ‘Of course not. Pull yourself together, man. Nobody will think you did.’

  Fixby-Smith gave no sign of having heard him. ‘And now,’ he swallowed visibly, ‘the police want to know everything there is to know about Colonel Caversham’s legacy to the Greatorex.’

  ‘I’m not surprised,’ said Howard Air. The businessman might not have known much about art but he was a lot stronger on common sense. ‘It’s only what you would expect, surely?’

  ‘But I can’t tell them anything except that all the bequest was brought over from Staple St James by Wetherspoons yesterday.’

  ‘Then you’ll have to tell them that, won’t you?’ Because the man was sitting in the window and with his back to the light, Fixby-Smith could not see his face properly. ‘It shouldn’t be too difficult. The museum’s legacy was quite straightforward, wasn’t it? Surely it’s only the residuary estate that’s got ’em all tied up in knots?’

  The curator jerkily pushed some learned journals about on his desk and squeaked, ‘How was I to know that Colonel Caversham’d gone and left us a dead body?’

  ‘He didn’t,’ said Howard Air reasonably. ‘He left us some mummified remains, which he’d had for years and years at Whimbrel House in a mummy case which you had seen there before. If what you say is correct, whatever’s in there now was put there long after t
he colonel died.’ He looked suddenly serious. ‘Like last week…’

  ‘We’ve had a look in the ottoman and that great Ali Baba jar he was so proud of and even in the pithoi. Silly, I know.’

  ‘You’re not thinking straight, Marcus.’

  ‘It’s all very well for you, Howard,’ said Fixby-Smith, emboldened by the circumstances, ‘but you didn’t see that body and I did. It was all wrapped up just like an oven turkey.’

  Howard Air sat in silence for a moment, deep in thought. ‘It’s a funny business, all the same.’

  ‘I just can’t get it out of my mind.’

  ‘The other funny business is exactly how the police came into it,’ said Air as if Fixby-Smith hadn’t spoken. ‘Something odd must have happened to make them take an interest in the first place.’

  ‘We didn’t send for the police, Howard.’

  Howard Air looked up quickly. ‘That’s what I mean.’

  ‘I just can’t fathom it.’

  ‘Who else knew the museum had been left this collection of the colonel’s?’

  Marcus Fixby-Smith pushed his floppy hair back away from his eyes. ‘I couldn’t say. His solicitors, of course, and the removal people, naturally, and I suppose the other legatees whoever they may be.’

  ‘And your staff here.’

  ‘Of course,’ said the curator stiffly. ‘But we hadn’t made any public announcement yet. If you remember, we planned to make a bit of a public relations splash about the colonel’s entire collection coming to us, but only after it was put on display so that the public could come and see it for themselves.’ He gave a hollow groan. ‘God, Howard, we’ll be making a splash all right and no mistake, as soon as the newspapers get to know about this.’

  ‘It’ll hit the headlines, I dare say.’ The chairman sounded more resigned than particularly perturbed at this. ‘So, our announcement will have to be different, that’s all.’

  ‘You must be joking.’

  ‘You have to ride with the punches in life, Marcus, you know.’ He regarded the museum curator quizzically and decided against proceeding with this line of thought. ‘Look, we’ll have to have something prepared for the sake of the museum, so we’d better get to work on it straight away.’ He pulled a piece of paper out of his pocket. ‘Come along.’