Losing Ground Read online

  ‘I see,’ said Sloan. He didn’t see anything except that it was important to her. And therefore perhaps to the police. That is, if the portrait missing from the museum with its old view of the house had anything to do with the fire and the bones. Melanie Smithers didn’t know about the bones. At least, he hoped she didn’t.

  ‘What sort of old building would it have been you were looking for, miss?’ he asked.

  ‘Early medieval.’

  ‘Early Filligrees?’

  ‘No, no. Not the Filligrees,’ she said dismissively. ‘They were only sixteenth-century parvenus.’ She looked at the two policemen. ‘You know, Johnnies-come-lately.’

  ‘Up like a rocket, down like stone,’ intoned Crosby.

  ‘A lot of people made money then,’ she said seriously. ‘Mostly under Henry the Eighth.’

  Detective Constable Crosby started to hum the ditty, “I’m ’Enery the Eighth, I am, I am”,’ under his breath.

  ‘And Queen Elizabeth,’ said the young woman. ‘The Filligrees tried to curry favour with her by raising a regiment here at Tolmie.’

  ‘Good Queen Bess,’ said Crosby.

  ‘The document’s still in the archive. “For the Lords of the Privy Council having sent to Francis Filligree as well as others to get the militia in a readiness, he made a muster at Tolmie” in 1599.’ She scowled. ‘The Muster Green is one of the places the developers want to build on.’

  ‘So…’ began Sloan.

  ‘It was the Tolhursts who were the really old family here,’ she said, ‘but you know very few families last longer than three ash trees.’

  ‘Three ash trees?’ said Detective Constable Crosby, while Sloan added an ash tree to a mental list of bizarre English measurements that started with the length of Henry the Second’s foot and thumb.

  Melanie Smithers smiled sweetly at the detective constable and explained that ash trees seldom lived longer than a hundred years.

  Crosby’s face cleared, while the conservation officer turned back, looked up at Sloan and said earnestly, ‘So you see, Inspector, how important it is that we find out for sure about the first building, don’t you?’

  ‘But you’re just guessing about there being bits of an old building here, aren’t you?’ said Sloan, deliberately provocative. They had a very different benchmark of importance down at the police station and that didn’t include the early medieval.

  Or the jumped-up.

  No, that wasn’t true. The jumped-up caused problems all of their own.

  Melanie Smithers rose to her full height. ‘I’m certainly not guessing. There’s an old document in the Calleshire archives that’s been dated to about 1430 which refers to “Tymbr for ye Roffs at Tulmie” and that’s ages before this Tolmie Park was built – and then in 1441 Sir Lambert Tolhurst received a licence from King Henry VII to enclose, crenellate and furnish with towers and battlements his manor at Tolmie.’

  ‘Was that to pour the boiling oil out of?’ enquired Crosby with interest.

  ‘Probably.’ Melanie Smithers grinned. ‘You had to get your permissions even then. It didn’t all begin with the 1947 Town and Country Planning Act, you know.’

  ‘And why is it so imperative that you find traces of this old building?’ Sloan asked, undiverted. ‘Isn’t Tolmie Park old enough for you?’

  ‘Sixteen hundred and something isn’t as old as fourteen hundred,’ she said ineluctably.

  ‘Granted, miss,’ said Sloan, ‘but it doesn’t answer my question.’

  ‘If there was a really ancient site here,’ she said, ‘it would need excavating before there was any further development and that would help in our battle to keep the developers up to scratch as well as insisting that there is a full archaeological survey carried out before work gets started.’

  ‘I see.’ Wheels within wheels was what Sloan would have called that.

  ‘They won’t like it, of course,’ she said.

  ‘I can see that they mightn’t,’ said Sloan moderately, making another note.

  ‘Besides…’ her voice trailed away and she suddenly looked younger still.

  ‘Besides…?’ prompted Detective Inspector Sloan, a man experienced in picking out useful leads arising during the questioning of suspects – and a great practitioner of what was known as repetitive listening. It was surprising what an echo brought out: often enough more than a question did.

  ‘Besides,’ she grinned suddenly, ‘I’m doing a master’s degree in the medieval houses of Calleshire and being the first to record this one would be a real feather in my cap.’

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The second meeting to be held in the offices of Berebury Homes Ltd that day was more focused but not so well-structured as the first one had been. For one thing, the meeting hadn’t actually been called by anyone but had just grown rather like Topsy as news of the fire at Tolmie Park had spread through their building.

  ‘Fire?’ snapped Derek Hitchin, their project manager. ‘You’re quite sure, are you, Auriole?’

  ‘The Berebury Gazette have just rung me for a quote on it,’ said Auriole Allen, adding ironically, ‘I don’t know how sure that makes it but I told them that it was certainly news to all of us here at Berebury Homes and they could certainly quote me on that.’

  ‘Let’s hope it was,’ said Robert Selby, the finance man, sourly. ‘There’ll be hell to pay if not.’

  ‘Where’s Lionel?’ asked Randolph Mansfield.

  ‘On the golf course,’ chorused Derek Hitchin and Robert Selby in unison. ‘Need you ask?’

  ‘Should we tell him, I wonder?’ mused Auriole Allen thoughtfully. ‘It might be better if he didn’t know just yet. Until he’s been properly briefed and we’ve dealt with the press, I mean.’

  ‘Rather you than me,’ said Hitchin, in whom the instinct for self-preservation was strong. ‘He won’t want anyone to think we’ve done it.’

  ‘As we haven’t, I don’t think we need worry about that,’ said Randolph Mansfield. He looked round at the others. ‘Well, we haven’t, have we?’

  ‘No, of course not,’ said Auriole Allen soothingly. She immediately undid the effect of this anodyne statement by going on, ‘but we’re bound to be suspected. You must see that.’

  ‘Being the only outfit with anything to gain from a fire there,’ said Robert Selby flatly. He always insisted that realism was part of his stock-in-trade and in any case also always insisted he was a man who thought solely in terms of gains and losses and that was what he was there for.

  ‘Are you quite sure about that, Robert?’ Hitchin said, studying the tips of his fingertips with unusual intensity. ‘What about Calleshire Construction? They might find a hostile take-over a lot easier if we’d been wrong-footed somehow at Tolmie by the Conservation people.’

  ‘Hit us when we were down, you mean?’ said Randolph Mansfield.

  ‘It’s less trouble then,’ said Robert Selby, adding sourly, ‘you learnt that at school, remember?’

  ‘Surely not, Derek,’ protested Auriole Allen. ‘You don’t think that…?’

  ‘I don’t think at all,’ said Derek Hitchin, ‘but their boss-man isn’t known as Tiger for nothing.’

  ‘And we don’t know for sure,’ pointed out Mansfield, staring at the ceiling with apparent concentration, ‘that it is actually a hostile bid that they’ve made. We only know about Calleford Construction’s bid exactly what Lionel chooses to tell us and nothing whatsoever more.’

  A little silence fell on the group. Then Robert Selby said ‘I think I’ll just get young Ned to run over to the clubhouse and leave a note on Lionel’s locker there. Then he won’t be taken by surprise.’

  There was another short silence broken this time by Hitchin saying slowly, ‘Good idea.’

  Having thus minded their backs so to speak, the four of them settled down to explore the new vistas opened up by the news.

  ‘How much damage?’ asked Randolph Mansfield.

  ‘Confined to one part of the building, they say,’ s
aid Auriole Allen. ‘The newspaper has got one of their photographers on his way there now.’

  ‘Which part?’ asked the architect urgently.

  ‘The back.’

  ‘That’s good.’ Randolph Mansfield heaved himself to his feet. ‘Well, I suppose I’d better be getting over there myself to see what’s what.’

  ‘I’ll come with you,’ said Derek Hitchin, although normally he avoided the other man’s company. ‘A fire might affect things – open up possibilities and all that. You never know.’

  ‘Just a minute, just a minute,’ said Robert Selby. ‘If we didn’t do it and we suppose that Calleshire Construction didn’t do it, then who did? This guy Bellamy?’

  ‘My money’s on that daft bananas outfit,’ said Derek Hitchin.

  ‘I don’t know anything about a bananas outfit,’ protested Auriole Allen.

  ‘Yes, you do,’ insisted the project manager. ‘They call themselves the Berebury Preservation Society.’

  ‘I still don’t get it, Derek,’ said the public relations woman. ‘What’ve they got to do with bananas? Or are you saying they’re just plain barmy?’

  He spelt it out for her. ‘ “Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anyone”. Bananas. Got it now, Auriole?’

  Her face cleared and she nodded. ‘I see.’

  ‘And their Jonathon Ayling’s quite up to a diversionary tactic like this,’ said the project manager.

  ‘Remember how he tried to save that old forge in Cullingoak?’ said Selby. ‘By getting a pal of his in the rubber trade to make the biggest balloon in the world. Then they fixed it to the end of the bellows.’

  ‘And when they’d done that,’ contributed Mansfield, ‘they blew it up to show their message writ large.’

  ‘Something rude?’ hazarded Auriole.

  ‘Very,’ said Mansfield shortly.

  ‘I’ll say,’ muttered Hitchin. ‘About the conservation officer who wouldn’t put a preservation order on it and the planning officer who let them build flats where the old forge had been.’

  ‘Melanie Smithers and your old friend Jeremy Stratton?’ hazarded Selby.

  ‘How did you guess?’ drawled Hitchin, unabashed.

  The senior staff of Berebury Homes Ltd were not the only people considering the possible activities of Jonathon Ayling in connection with the mysterious fire at Tolmie Park. The members of the Berebury Preservation Society, too, were making quite sure that their backs were covered.

  ‘Not me, guv,’ said that young man to the hastily assembled committee of the Society, giving them his usual charming smile. ‘Honest.’

  ‘I must say that setting the building alight didn’t seem the action of a dedicated preservationist,’ said Paul Pullman austerely. In spite of being married to Wendy he still valued logical analysis of all situations.

  ‘Whatever anyone says,’ pronounced someone else with apparent irrelevance, ‘there are always wheels within wheels.’

  Jonathon Ayling said in his customary engaging manner, ‘In the vernacular all I can say is “I never”.’

  ‘Then who did?’ demanded Wendy Pullman.

  ‘Ah, now you’re asking,’ he said turning his frank gaze on her. ‘And that I can’t tell you because I don’t know.’

  ‘Honest, Jonathon?’ Had she but known it, Wendy would have made a good nursery school teacher. ‘You’re not leading us on, are you?’

  ‘Cross my heart, Wendy, and hope to die. All I know is that it wasn’t me.’

  Paul Pullman asked sternly ‘Or anyone you know?’

  Jonathon Ayling shook his head. ‘My mates are always willing to help the cause, naturally, but I don’t think they’d have set a place on fire without being asked.’

  ‘That means,’ concluded Paul Pullman ineluctably, ‘that they would have done it if you had.’

  ‘Sure,’ the young man said easily. ‘That’s what friends are for, isn’t it?’

  ‘Well, then, Jonathon,’ temporised Wendy, ‘we’ll just have to take your word for it, won’t we?’

  He gave her the sweetest of smiles. ‘That’s right, Wendy.’ He looked round at the assembled company and said, ‘That’s if you all still want me on board.’

  ‘Of course we do,’ said someone at the back. ‘We’d never have saved the Larking windmill without you.’

  ‘And without our back-up campaign, too,’ put in Wendy a little indignantly. ‘Don’t forget that. We wrote all the letters, remember…’

  ‘But it was Jonathon perching on the cap on the top of the windmill that got the television people interested,’ persisted the woman at the back.

  ‘I don’t think we should be fighting old battles…’ began Paul Pullman, who thought of himself as the voice of reason.

  ‘Did the trick, though, didn’t it?’ grinned Jonathon.

  ‘Is this fire going to save Tolmie Park though?’ asked Wendy Pullman in an attempt to resume the initiative.

  ‘Only if we can utilise the delay to our advantage,’ said another committee member.

  ‘And step up our campaign,’ seconded the woman at the back.

  ‘Unless Jonathon has something up his sleeve?’ suggested someone else hopefully.

  ‘Something legal,’ put in Paul Pullman.

  Jonathon Ayling contrived to look injured. ‘I haven’t been caught doing anything that isn’t straight-up yet, have I?’

  ‘I wouldn’t know,’ said Paul Pullman, ‘would I?’

  His wife quite spoilt the effect of this by saying, ‘And we don’t want to know, either.’

  ‘I don’t think,’ said the woman at the back seriously, ‘that Jonathon should take that as our giving him carte blanche to act in whatever manner he thinks fit.’

  ‘Of course not,’ said Wendy instantly. ‘We will always act within the law.’

  ‘What would be a help,’ said her husband acidly, ‘is if everyone else did.’ He turned to the young man at his side. ‘And that goes for you, too, Jonathon, remember.’

  Detective Constable Crosby was bored. Standing on sentry duty to one side of all the action was not his idea of fun – or policing. He therefore looked up with interest at the approach of a fresh face, and a fairly young one at that.

  ‘Sorry, sir,’ he said to the new arrival. ‘No admittance beyond this point.’

  ‘That’s OK,’ said Stuart Bellamy. ‘I just came to see what’s going on here.’

  ‘A lot of fire-raisers do that,’ remarked Crosby in an offhand way. ‘They like to see the fire engines and the flames. Touches the spot or something.’

  ‘I know arsonists are usually male,’ said Stuart Bellamy. ‘It’s not women’s work and all that.’

  ‘So what brings you?’ asked Crosby, taking out his notebook. He wasn’t hopeful of gleaning much useful information since the man had left his car in clear view but from force of habit he wrote down the registration number of the vehicle.

  ‘Curiosity,’ replied Stuart Bellamy immediately. ‘You see, I’d just made an offer to buy the place…’

  ‘Rather you than me,’ said Crosby. ‘I mean, just look at it – it’s practically falling down as it is.’

  ‘And it’s beginning to look as if someone doesn’t want me to have it,’ said Stuart Bellamy, continuing his own train of thought.

  ‘Does a bit, doesn’t it?’ agreed Crosby, looking over his shoulder at the smouldering building, and making a mental note to tell his superior officer just that. ‘You can see that even without the fire that it’s going to cost a pretty penny to put it right.’

  The cost of repairing Tolmie Park was something Stuart Bellamy hadn’t raised so far with Jason Burke. He knew what his answer would be if he did because it happened every time his manager warned the musician about spending big money. Jason would first quote his old granny, who had always said that it was your economies that you regretted, and then he would sing a couple of lines of an old song beginning, “There’s a hole in your bucket, dear Liza, dear Liza.”

  This would evoke the peerless
follow-on by Jason himself in a different key of “Then mend it, dear Liza, mend it, dear Liza,” and a little lecture about if you had the money then there was no point in not spending it, was there? Even if Bellamy had finished his articles with the accountancy firm, he felt he would have had no answer to this.

  Stuart Bellamy said aloud to Crosby now, ‘And I wondered if you people had any idea of who might not want me to buy it?’

  ‘Not at this stage, sir,’ said Crosby magisterially. ‘And, of course, if we had, I wouldn’t be in a position to tell you. Now, if you would tell me your name and address I’ll pass it on to the inspector in charge and keep you informed.’

  In another part of the forest of charred timbers that had once comprised the roof of the billiard room at Tolmie Park, someone else besides the conservation officer was trying to wheedle his way past authority.

  ‘No, doctor.’

  ‘Just a few yards,’ pleaded Dr Dabbe. He had risen to his feet, dusted off the trouser legs of his white suit and made for a point even further into the ruined room than before. ‘I only want a coup d’oeil.’

  ‘No, doctor,’ repeated Charlie Burton, the fire officer. ‘Whatever one of those may be, you can’t have it.’

  Undeterred, Dr Dabbe said ‘I think if I went in only a little further up here, I might just get a slightly better look…’

  ‘No, doctor.’ The fire officer shook his head. ‘Everything’s still much too hot.’

  ‘You see,’ went on the pathologist persuasively, ‘there is something very interesting about the little bit of bone that I can see from here.’

  ‘That’s as may be,’ pronounced Charlie Burton authoritatively, ‘but since there’s no question of human life being at stake, it would be as much as my job’s worth to let you get yourself burnt.’

  ‘If what I’m looking at is the distal end of a femur,’ continued Dr Dabbe as if the man had not spoken, ‘then it’s got a very funny medial condyle.’