Harm’s Way Read online

  “Can’t say I can,” replied the landlord, wrinkling his brow. “Just the usual Saturday night regulars, I suppose. We don’t get all that many strangers at the Lamb and Flag.” He looked up. “Talking of strangers, Mr. Mason, what’s happening at Pencombe tomorrow? I’ve had a character in here asking if his club can eat their sandwiches in my bar.”

  “That’ll be Mr. Gordon Briggs, that will.”

  Higgins snorted gently. “It’s a fine thing for a house that advertises good food.”

  “The Berebury Country Footpaths Society,” amplified Mason.

  “So that’s who they are, is it?”

  “What did you tell him?”

  “That as long as they drank my beer they could do what they liked with their precious sandwiches.”

  “Good for you, Vic,” said Mason absently.

  “Seems they’ve got something on tomorrow at Pencombe.”

  “They have,” said Mason briefly.

  The landlord reverted to his original point. “Like I said,” he repeated, “we don’t get many strangers at the Lamb and Flag.” He paused and said thoughtfully, “That was what was so funny about Len Hodge having a quarrel with this one.”

  “You must,” persisted the policeman, “remember some of the people who were here the night of the fight.”

  “Same folk as’ll be along presently,” retorted the publican. “Hang about and they’ll be in again. Tonight’s Saturday, too, isn’t it?”

  “The finger,” Detective Inspector Sloan reported back to Superintendent Leeyes, “is from a fully grown male.”

  Leeyes grunted.

  “With dark hair,” added Sloan.

  “And?”

  “And nothing, sir.” Sloan tightened his lips. “That’s all we’ve got to go on at the moment.”

  Superintendent Leeyes chose to be bracing. “You might have less, Sloan.”

  Sloan hurried on without comment. “I’ve had a list of missing persons pulled.”

  “Persons reported as missing,” pointed out Leeyes with academic accuracy.

  “Persons reported as missing,” agreed Sloan. It was at times like these that the Police National Computer came into its own.

  “With the sort of timing Dr. Dabbe is talking about,” said Sloan carefully, “there are four males unaccounted for in Calleshire and a tidy number of girls.” Time was a dimension in every police case.

  “Girls will be girls,” said Leeyes profoundly.

  “And that’s only in Calleshire,” continued Sloan. The territorial imperative was one of the superintendent’s stronger instincts. Sometimes he forgot that there was a wider world beyond the county boundary. Or even the limits of F Division.

  “These four …” The superintendent waved a hand. “Go on.”

  “One old man from the mental hospital who wandered off.” If Sloan had to put his money on someone this would be his choice.

  “They don’t lock the doors any more,” said Leeyes.

  “That makes it difficult to keep them in,” agreed Sloan. It wasn’t only in prison that locks helped those who owed a duty of care.

  “And?”

  “Two loving husbands and fathers who didn’t come home after work.”

  “Swans mate for life,” observed the superintendent cynically. “Very few other species do.”

  “Their wives usually want them back,” said Sloan. Marriage was an honourable estate.

  “They do,” agreed Leeyes, adding sagely, “especially after they’ve been gone a little while.”

  “Yes, sir, I’m sure.” Sloan couldn’t decide if this was a male chauvinistic view or not. He did know though all about the value of a “cooling-off” period. All policemen did. It wasn’t for nothing that prison was called the cooler.

  “That’s three,” said Leeyes.

  “One young person who left home and hasn’t written.”

  “Only one?” said Leeyes.

  “Last seen hitching his way to a pop festival.”

  “If that’s not a fate worse than death,” said Leeyes with emphasis, “I don’t know what is.”

  “We’re going to check on the loving husbands and fathers,” said Sloan. “One was from Calleford and one from Luston.”

  Calleford was the county town where the headquarters of the police force was and Luston was Calleshire’s industrial town in the north—where the trouble usually was.

  “Every avenue should be explored,” said the superintendent, who didn’t have to explore avenues himself.

  Detective Inspector Sloan recollected another avenue—a closed one, this time. “Crosby tried to get a print.”

  “From the finger?”

  “Yes, sir.” Sloan was irresistibly reminded of the picture of the Cheshire Cat in his childhood copy of Alice in Wonderland. All that had been there had been the head. And the grin, of course. With them now all there was was the finger. No, not the finger.

  A finger.

  “Well?” said Leeyes.

  “No joy there, I’m afraid, sir. The skin’s too far gone to take prints from.”

  Leeyes grimaced. “Just our luck.”

  “Yes, sir.” It would be no good fingerprinting the houses of those missing persons that they knew about. Still less running through the records. Even if the owner of the finger had a record …

  “This search, Sloan, that you’ve laid on …”

  “All lined up for tomorrow morning, sir,” responded Sloan. “All available men and the members of the Berebury Country Footpaths Society.”

  “Nice mixture, Sloan.” He coughed. “I’m sorry I shan’t be with you.”

  Sloan did not say anything at all. The superintendent’s Sunday mornings were well known to be sacrosanct. They were spent on Berebury Golf Course.

  “I’ll keep in touch, of course,” said Leeyes loftily.

  “Of course, sir,” said Sloan, his voice utterly devoid of expression.

  “And you’ll let me know if—er—anything turns up, won’t you?”

  “Immediately, sir,” promised Sloan. He didn’t know whether he sounded unctuous or not. He certainly meant to.

  “What about leads, Sloan? Have you got any yet?”

  “Just the one, sir.”

  “Ah …”

  “I don’t know how promising it is.”

  “Well?”

  “There’s a neighbouring farmer whose wife says he has gone off with his lady-love.…”

  “Ha!”

  “She doesn’t seem to want him back.”

  “Don’t blame her,” said Leeyes robustly.

  “She hadn’t reported him missing.”

  Leeyes grunted.

  “That will need checking on,” said Sloan.

  “Routine,” declared Leeyes. “Nothing to touch it, Sloan.” It was his credo.

  “And so will the Mellots,” said Sloan. “We’ll have to find out what we can about them. Always supposing,” he added, “that the owner of the finger is around on their farm. Find him, sir, and we’ll be a big step further forward.”

  “Or backward,” said Leeyes ominously. “Or backward.”

  After the police and the two walkers had been duly seen off Pencombe Farm George Mellot gravitated to the big kitchen. His wife was busy at the stove. She looked up as he came into the room.

  “Supper’ll be a little late,” she said, “what with the police and everything.”

  “It’s not the supper I’m worried about,” said George Mellot. He looked suddenly much older.

  “No,” said Meg Mellot, brushing her hair back from her forehead. “No, I don’t suppose it is.”

  “Tom,” he said urgently. “I must talk to Tom.”

  “That’s always easier said than done with Tom.”

  “You don’t have to tell me that,” he said. “He’s my brother.”

  “Well, you know what he’s like,” she said. “He could be anywhere.”

  Mellot nodded in agreement. “Anywhere.”

  “Especially at the weekend,
” said Meg Mellot, putting a saucepan down.

  “I’ll try his house first anyway,” said the farmer.

  He went off in the direction of the farm office and the telephone. Hanging on the wall of the office was a large scale map of Pencombe Farm. He paused for a long moment in front of it and then he turned abruptly and picked up the telephone. He dialled a number. And then another. Presently he went back to the kitchen.

  “No reply from his house,” he said to his wife. “And his office doesn’t know where he is.”

  “He’s taking a real break then,” she concluded. “And I’m not surprised either. Are you?”

  He did not answer her directly. “I tried to speak to his personal assistant but he wasn’t there either.” He grimaced. “Personal assistant indeed!”

  “Tom’s a busy man these days,” said Meg moderately.

  “So am I,” retorted George Mellot, “but I don’t have a personal assistant.”

  “Oh yes you do,” responded his wife with spirit, “but she doesn’t get paid.”

  He smiled abstractedly, his mind elsewhere.

  “Now I think about it, didn’t Tom say he was going off somewhere to celebrate?” she said.

  “He did,” said her husband. “His exact words were, ‘The strife is o’er, the battle’s done.’ He was in the church choir until his voice broke,” he added inconsequentially. “He looked like an angel in a surplice.”

  “Deceptive things, surplices,” observed Meg drily. “All the same I daresay Tom felt he could do with a holiday.”

  “After everything,” said George Mellot meaningfully.

  “It isn’t every day,” said Meg Mellot, “that you beat off a takeover bid.”

  “Dawn raid,” said the farmer flatly. “That was what that was called.”

  “Dawn raid, then,” she said. “It comes to the same thing in the end.”

  George Mellot nodded.

  She pushed a saucepan over the stove. “And at the end of the day Mellot’s Furnishings still belongs to the Mellots.”

  “And not to Ivor Harbeton.”

  “That’s the great thing,” said Meg anxiously, “isn’t it?”

  Her husband tightened his lips into a grimace. “It wasn’t for want of trying, was it?”

  She shuddered. “It was a nightmare.”

  “Horsewhipping,” growled Mellot, “would have been too good for Ivor Harbeton.”

  “Business is business,” said Meg Mellot. “I’ve heard Tom himself say that often enough.”

  “There are no holds barred in love, war and business,” said George Mellot grimly.

  She looked at him curiously. “Tom certainly found that out the hard way, didn’t he?”

  “You would have thought,” said the farmer, “that when a man had built up a successful business that it would be safe enough.”

  “No,” said Meg Mellot wisely, “that’s precisely when it’s at risk. Nobody wants to buy into a failure.”

  He squared his shoulders. “Ivor Harbeton wanted to buy Mellot’s Furnishings. No doubt about that.”

  “He very nearly succeeded, didn’t he?” said Meg Mellot softly.

  “If he hadn’t taken the heat off when he did—”

  “Mellot’s Furnishings wouldn’t still have been Mellot’s Furnishings,” said his wife flatly.

  “And Tom would have been out on his ear.”

  “That wouldn’t have done for Tom,” said Meg.

  “No, it certainly wouldn’t. He’s a man of action is Tom.”

  She caught something in his tone and looked up. “What do you mean?”

  “Exactly what I say.” He added slowly, “Tom isn’t a man to take anything lying down.”

  “George, what are you getting at?”

  He voiced his thoughts unwillingly. “I just wonder why Ivor Harbeton disappeared when he did, that’s all.”

  His wife stared at him.

  FIVE

  House of defence

  “This way, everybody,” shouted Gordon Briggs, waving an arm encouragingly. “Follow me.”

  The Sunday morning had found the members of the Berebury Country Footpaths Society assembled at the point where Footpath Seventy-nine came out of Dresham Wood and entered Pencombe Farm.

  When the schoolmaster had got their attention he carried on. “Now that I’ve explained to you what it’s all about we can get started.”

  The members of the Society were clustered round the stile on the Sleden–to–Great Rooden road. Gordon Briggs led the way over it.

  “We’re meeting the police at the farm for a briefing,” he announced.

  Wendy Lamport shivered. “I only hope I don’t find anything.”

  “So do I,” said her friend Helen.

  “Once was enough,” said Wendy.

  “Although,” added the other girl more thoughtfully, “if it was me lying out there I’d want someone to find me, wouldn’t you?”

  “I hadn’t thought of that,” said Wendy. All the same she still experienced a frisson of unwelcome remembrance as she set foot on Pencombe Farm again.

  The other members of the society queued up to take their turn in clambering over the stile off the road and onto the footpath.

  Detective Inspector Sloan stood by the barn door with Crosby and watched them approach. The walkers were a disparate group. The long and the short and the tall straggled over the footpath towards the barn. The collection of men who were waiting for them there was composed of policemen who were uniformly tall. George Mellot was present, too, and his bailiff, Leonard Hodge.

  Sloan waited until they had all reached the farmyard before he addressed them. He had clambered up onto the step of a fork-lift tractor to give him height.

  “You are looking,” he announced, “for a body that will have nearly been reduced to a skeleton.” His mind drifted back to an old jingle of his own childhood that had run “The muvver was poor and the biby was thin, only a skelington covered in skin.”

  “It may be,” he continued aloud, “partly covered—”

  “The Babes in the Wood,” murmured someone.

  “Or,” carried on Sloan valiantly, “it may just be lying in the open.”

  Wendy Lamport looked troubled.

  “It won’t be in wooded ground,” said Sloan. There was something in Dresham Wood though, decided Sloan, or Len Hodge would not have gone there first yesterday afternoon. He made a mental note to check there as soon as he could.

  “Whatever you do,” warned the detective inspector firmly, “if you do find it, don’t touch it.” If he remembered rightly the unfortunate baby in the rhyme had fallen down the plug-hole.

  “Dogs,” said one of the walkers in an undertone to Gordon Briggs. “Why haven’t they got tracker dogs?”

  Briggs didn’t answer.

  “If you do find it just stay by it and shout,” adjured Sloan. “Don’t even walk about round it. That will disturb the ground.”

  “Clues,” said another walker knowledgeably to his immediate neighbour. “That will be what they’ll be looking for.”

  Sloan indicated the waiting members of the police force. “Wherever you are searching, there should be a policeman within earshot.”

  “That makes a change, I must say,” said another member of the Berebury Country Footpaths Society in an aggrieved voice. He had once been mugged.

  “If,” continued Sloan, “you see anything in the least suspicious you should point it out to one of them.”

  “Kaarh, kaarh,” croaked a crow above his head in antiphon. “Kaarh.”

  “Is that clear?” asked Sloan.

  There were murmurs of assent from the walkers.

  “Now we’ve got to be systematic,” Sloan said. “A haphazard search isn’t going to get us anywhere.”

  Gordon Briggs nodded approval. He was a methodical man himself.

  “We shall take two fields at a time,” announced Sloan, “and walk across them in a straight line.”

  “It’s how they find people aft
er an avalanche, too,” said a young man in the society chattily, “except that then you have to poke through the snow.” He spent his holidays at winter sports resorts.

  “Remember that you should keep in line,” said Sloan.

  “Trust the police to say that,” remarked a natural rebel in the crowd. “Step out of it and they’re down on you like a ton of bricks.”

  “And keep your eyes open for clusters of crows,” added Detective Inspector Sloan. “There’s no reason why they shouldn’t still be congregating round the skeleton.”

  Wendy Lamport shuddered. “How horrible!”

  “It would mean that we’d found whoever it was, though, wouldn’t it?” said her friend Helen practically.

  “You,” said Wendy irrefutably, “didn’t see the finger.”

  “I think that’s all,” said Sloan to the walkers. The members of the police team had been briefed before the others came.

  Gordon Briggs thrust his way forward to the front of the group and raised his voice. “Remember, everybody, lunch is at the Lamb and Flag in Great Rooden at twelve-thirty sharp. If we’ve found—ah—what we’re looking for this morning, then we’ll have a shortened walk this afternoon. If not, we’ll keep looking. That understood, everybody?”

  There were murmurs of assent from the assembled crowd.

  Detective Inspector Sloan hadn’t asked for questions. The one that he had had already from Len Hodge had been difficult enough to answer.

  “There’s crops in some of these fields, Inspector,” he had said while they had been waiting for the Berebury Country Footpaths Society to arrive. “They’re not all just grass, you know. What about walking over them?”

  In the event it had been George Mellot who had dealt with that one.

  Whilst Sloan had been marshalling his thoughts the farmer had said, “Surely there’s nowhere that you haven’t run over in the last few weeks, Len? Most of the fields have had a dressing of some sort.”

  “That’s right, Mr. Mellot,” said the farm worker quickly. “I hadn’t thought about that.”

  “We can always look it up,” said Mellot, “but I don’t think that there’s any field in crop that hasn’t had a tractor over it since the beginning of the month. And you would have spotted a body, Len, wouldn’t you, even from a tractor?”

  “Oh, yes,” said Hodge vigorously, “I would have seen a body right enough, Mr. Mellot.”