Passing Strange Read online

  “Do your best, Harry,” he said persuasively. “You must have a good friend somewhere.”

  He had.

  Inspector Harpe came back over the air in record time. “I struck lucky,” he said. “I got on to the right man first time. We Traffic men hang together …”

  “No problem?” asked Sloan. The investigation of murder was not something that should hang upon pleasantries.

  “When I mentioned Berebury all he said was, ‘That’s where the birds sing, isn’t it? The country. Up here they cough.’”

  Sloan let out a sigh of relief.

  “The car hire people, Swallow and Swallow, have twenty-six red Minis out at the moment from their London branches,” crackled Harpe’s voice over the radio. “They’re pulling a full list for us now. Sixteen are on hire to foreign tourists through a travel agency, five are out to commercial firms – they use the bigger vehicle more – and five are being used by individuals.”

  Sloan pulled his notebook out and balanced it on his knee. “Thanks, Harry.”

  “The individuals are four men and a woman. Was it a woman’s job?”

  “It was murder,” said Sloan briefly.

  “The men’s names are Mortimer, Smith …”

  Sloan said something unprintable about the commonness of the name Smith.

  “Wilson,” continued Harpe imperturbably, “and Carson. Do you want the woman’s name too?”

  “Just for the record,” said Sloan.

  “Mellows,” said Inspector Harpe. “Miss Richenda Mellows.”

  5

  Bourdon

  When Detective-Constable Crosby instituted a search he made a good job of it. Granted he might not be swift but he was undoubtedly thorough. His instructions had been to search the ground round about where the victim lay and this is what he set about doing now. He brought out a length of coloured twine and some pegs from his own particular scenes-of-crime bag.

  “Want a mallet?” offered Fred Pearson promptly.

  Crosby took a swift look at the body and another at the hand mallet. No way had Joyce Cooper died from a blow from a blunt instrument.

  “Thanks,” he said.

  He proceeded to stake out an area of ground well clear of the body. Inside this he marked out a smaller rectangle where the tent had been.

  Ken Walls and Fred Pearson watched him. Norman Burton was crouching down somewhere not far away, trying to sketch out from memory a plan of the layout of the tents and stalls at the Flower Show, but the other two men – Walls and Pearson – looked on, absolutely fascinated by the sight of the policeman at work.

  “That last peg wants pushing out a bit more to the left,” observed Walls presently.

  Crosby obediently pushed the last peg out more to the left. Then he began his examination of the ground within the area outside the smaller square.

  “Nothing there, is there?” said Pearson a little later.

  “Not a thing,” said Detective-Constable Crosby. He did not find it necessary to add that not only was there nothing there but that the ground within this inner patch was also quite dry. The cup of tea that Edward Hebbinge had taken Joyce Cooper at half past three had not been spilled on the grass within the tent.

  “There wasn’t a lot that could be there, was there?” demanded Ken Walls of his friend. “Stands to reason.”

  “He might have found some tea leaves,” said Pearson, standing his ground.

  Detective-Constable Crosby said nothing.

  “Tea leaves?” echoed Ken Walls. “What would she have been doing with tea leaves?”

  “Reading them,” said Pearson on the instant. “Isn’t that what she was doing? And charging for it into the bargain.”

  “She had a crystal ball,” said Ken Walls stolidly. “I saw it, remember? When I went in there for my ten pennorth.”

  Detective-Constable Crosby, having completed his examination of the area where the tent had been, widened his search.

  Fred Pearson and Ken Walls, nothing loath, extended their area of interest too.

  They saw the constable pick up and label first a drinking straw and then a short length of binder twine.

  “Do you think,” began Pearson, “that that binder twine’s what –”

  “No,” said Walls repressively, “I don’t.”

  “He’s found a couple of empty cigarette packets now,” observed Pearson in the manner of a radio commentator at the races.

  “I’m not surprised,” said Walls stoutly. “You know that Almstone’s never going to win the Best Kept Village Competition.”

  “No.” Pearson turned to the constable and asked him curiously, “Will those things be of any use to you?”

  “Too soon to say,” answered Crosby importantly. He added a phrase dinned into him at the Police Training School. “But the Forensic Scientist is only as good as the material provided for him.”

  Pearson nodded. Everyone knocked scientists.

  “’Course,” remarked Walls conversationally, “if the police do get stuck over a search they can always call in the Potato Marketing Board.”

  “Come again?” said the constable. If the police were at a loss the popular press did not as a rule call for the Potato Marketing Board to be brought in. Not that Crosby had noticed, anyway.

  “Big Brother,” contributed Fred obliquely.

  “The Potato Marketing Board?”

  “Always watching,” said Fred.

  “By aeroplane,” said Ken.

  “They take photographs,” said Fred.

  “What of?” asked Crosby.

  “Potatoes,” said Ken simply.

  “Checking,” said Fred, “that you haven’t got more planted than you’ve said.”

  “Or less,” put in Ken. “That’s as bad.”

  “Not too little, not too much …” began Fred.

  “But just right,” said Ken, demonstrating that advertising slogans can and do enter into the language of men.

  “It’s one way of keeping tabs on things, I suppose,” said the detective-constable. “We usually manage to do it from the beat but it takes all sorts.” He picked up something else and regarded it curiously.

  “That’s a horse-shoe nail,” Walls informed him. “Don’t see many of them about these days.”

  Crosby labelled that too, and put it in a bag. He cast about again.

  “Nothing else, is there?” said Pearson, still supervising all the constable’s activities.

  Crosby picked up some lengths of what looked like long dead grass that were lying on top of the ground. He held them in his hand for a long moment.

  Ken Walls enlightened him. “That’s funeral wheat, that is.”

  “Funeral wheat?” The constable’s mind spun towards wreaths.

  “Funeral wheat,” said the countryman flatly, “is wheat that has died rather than ripen.”

  “I don’t believe it,” said Herbert Kershaw.

  “At the Flower Show,” said Mrs Kershaw.

  “I just don’t believe it.”

  “Eileen Milsom said it was true. She told me.” The Milsoms at Dorter End Farm were the Kershaws’ nearest neighbours.

  “How does she know?” challenged Kershaw immediately. “If it isn’t a Horse Show Eileen Milsom doesn’t go to it.”

  “Cedric lent them his lorry for the tents.” Mrs Millicent Kershaw was accustomed to having to back up her statements with chapter and verse. “He heard when he went down to see if they were ready for the lorry.”

  “That doesn’t make it gospel,” said the farmer irritably. His first action after criticizing the bearer of bad news was to disbelieve it.

  “It makes it likely,” said his wife without rancour. “Besides, Eileen’s not one to exaggerate.”

  “But who on earth –” he opened his hands wide – “would want to kill Joyce Cooper?”

  Mrs Kershaw tidied away some of the accoutrements of her flower-arranging and said she didn’t know.

  “Joyce Cooper of all people!” exclaimed Herbert Ker
shaw.

  “Who would want to kill anyone?” shuddered Mrs Kershaw. She was a stiff woman of immaculate grooming. Her flower arrangements reflected this. They tended to be formal set pieces, faultlessly executed.

  “And why?” demanded Kershaw. “Tell me that!”

  But this Mrs Kershaw couldn’t do either.

  Her husband began to pace up and down the large farm kitchen while his wife busied herself between larder and sink.

  “It’s only a cold supper tonight, Herbert, because of the Show.”

  He acknowledged this with a gesture of indifference, his mind clearly elsewhere. “Cedric Milsom …”

  “With Eileen at the Cullingoak Pony Show,” said Millicent Kershaw swiftly.

  Too swiftly.

  “All the time?” queried Kershaw.

  “Most of the time,” qualified Millicent Kershaw. “Eileen says he was there most of the time.”

  “He doesn’t usually go to Shows,” observed her husband. Cedric Milsom’s proclivities lay not with the horses but with the ladies.

  “I don’t think he strays too far in the afternoon,” said Millicent Kershaw. She was an unimaginative, literal-minded woman. As far as she was concerned the only reason that the Adam and Eve and Serpent scenario in the Garden of Eden had been played in daylight was the purely practical one of the difficulty of portraying temptation on canvas in darkness.

  But Herbert Kershaw was thinking about something else. “There was someone strange at the Show, Milly.”

  “A stranger, you mean?” she said, putting out a salad. “There must have been plenty of those. It was very crowded.”

  “Both a stranger and someone strange,” he said enigmatically.

  “Who?”

  “Maurice Esdaile. I saw him there myself.”

  “Will you have cider tonight, dear?” She cast her eye over the meal. “Who’s Maurice Esdaile?”

  “Maurice Esdaile,” said her husband, “is the leading light of the firm of Mitchell Esdaile, Ltd; property developers.”

  “Oh, them … I’m sorry, it’s only cold chicken.” She tweaked a piece of lettuce into better shape from sheer force of habit – flower-arranger’s habit. “Why shouldn’t he come? If they’re going to build all those houses down by the Priory he’s entitled to come to village things, isn’t he?”

  “I suppose so.” Herbert Kershaw frowned heavily. “But what on earth did Joyce Cooper want to go and get herself killed for?”

  There had been another car standing beside the police car, one which Detective-Inspector Sloan recognized without difficulty.

  Dr Dabbe had arrived. By the time Sloan got back to where the Fortune Teller’s tent had been the Consultant Pathologist to the Berebury District General Hospital was staring down at the body.

  “Nasty,” he said to Sloan. “Very nasty.”

  “Yes, Doctor.” Sloan hadn’t put his notebook away. Not with the name of Mellows in it.

  The doctor’s assistant, Burns, was recording the temperature of the atmosphere.

  “You can cry ‘Murder’ all right, Sloan,” said the pathologist immediately.

  Sloan nodded. Dr Dabbe never forgot that the Police Surgeon was first and foremost an arm of the law.

  “All right if I go nearer?” asked Dabbe.

  It was Detective-Constable Crosby who said “Yes” to that. “I’ve been over the ground, Doctor.”

  Just as the most important principle of medical care was “First do no harm,” Dr Dabbe never forgot either that the most important principle of forensic medicine was “Thou shalt not destroy evidence.”

  The doctor moved forward now and crouched down beside the body of the District Nurse.

  “She won’t have known very much about it,” he said after one swift glance at her neck and hands.

  Sloan made a note in his book. Arm of the law rather than patient’s friend the police surgeon might be but a man was a man for all that.

  “In fact, Sloan, ‘No pain felt she …’”

  “I’m glad to hear it,” said Sloan. If there could ever be such a thing as a credit side to murder that entry could go on it.

  “‘I am quite sure she felt no pain’.”

  “Good,” said Sloan, faintly puzzled. No one had ever called the pathologist a man of feeling.

  “Porphyria’s Lover,” said Dabbe.

  “I don’t think, Doctor, that there is any question of …”

  “Robert Browning, Sloan,” said Dabbe. “Poet.”

  “Ah …”

  The pathologist continued to give the body his attention. “Someone stood behind her, Sloan, and pulled something tight.”

  Sloan made another note.

  Dr Dabbe stroked his chin. “Sorry to sound like a government spokesman but I can’t say very much more than that at this stage.”

  “Could anyone say that she wasn’t expecting an attack?”

  “I can say she didn’t put up a fight,” said Dabbe. “Is that any good to you?”

  “Could be,” said Sloan moderately.

  “It looks,” pronounced Dabbe after giving the victim an even closer visual examination, “as if she let someone walk right up beside or even behind her. I’ll tell you which presently.”

  “Thank you, Doctor.”

  “And whether they were right-handed.”

  “Anything would be useful,” said Sloan warmly. “Anything.”

  “But I can’t tell you whether they had jug-handled ears or sugarloaf heads.”

  “No, Doctor.” Cesare Lombroso might have studied the physiognomy of men who had erred and strayed but Sloan, like most policemen, could be described as belonging to an earlier school of thought. What might be called the Macbeth one. Where there was ‘no art to find the mind’s construction in the face.’

  “And you’ll have to look for the murderer’s fingerprints yourself.”

  “Yes, Doctor.” Nowadays those who would find the answer to everything looked at chromosomes, not faces. He coughed. “What about sex, Doctor?”

  The pathologist opened his mouth to speak, looked at Sloan’s expression and changed his mind. Instead he peered even closer at the late Joyce Cooper’s neck, motioning Burns to hold a piece of her costume to one side.

  Presently he said, “You don’t need a lot of strength to kill someone this way. That’s what you mean, isn’t it?”

  “Or skill?” enquired Sloan. There had been a spate of murders after the war which Defence Counsel had seemed quite happy to lay at the door of Commando Training Schools.

  Dabbe shook his head. “It’s very simple, you know, to loop something over a woman’s head and tighten it.”

  “What about practice?” Sloan felt he was fighting a losing battle. Murder, he reminded himself yet again, was usually committed once in a lifetime. For both parties, so to say.

  “It helps, of course,” said the pathologist, “but you could probably manage something like this at your first attempt easily enough.” He pointed a bony finger. “The neck is the body’s most vulnerable place.”

  “She would have been sitting, too I expect,” said Sloan as the pathologist bent even closer to the victim. The irony of it was that Joyce Cooper could well have seen her own fate in her own crystal ball clearly enough. Her immediate future would have been reflected briefly in the polished glass as someone approached her …

  “I can’t tell you much about the weapon at this stage, Sloan,” said Dabbe over his shoulder.

  Sloan pulled his thoughts together. Sooner or later he, C. D. Sloan, working detective, was going to have to put a name to the face that had appeared in that crystal ball at the time of the murder.

  “But,” added the pathologist handsomely, “I’ll present it to you on a charger by morning.”

  “Thank you,” said Sloan temperately.

  “Even if deodand has gone out.”

  “Beg pardon, Doctor?”

  “The instrument of death,” Dabbe informed him, “always used to become the property of the Crown.”
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  “‘In good King Charles’s golden days’?” enquired Sloan ironically. He mightn’t know his Browning but he reckoned that everyone who had to do with government – let alone with local politics – ought to know The Vicar of Bray by heart.

  “Whatever had caused the death,” said the pathologist getting back to his feet, “was automatically forfeit to the Crown.”

  It would be an old custom, decided Sloan to himself. There was always an undercurrent of a more glorious past in the speech of those who were fond of talking about times gone by. Unless they were sociologists.

  “And the practice,” said Dr Dabbe, dusting his trouser knees, “was called deodand.”

  “Really, Doctor?” said Sloan. There was a variety of offensive weapons in the Station Sergeant’s drawer at Berebury confiscated without the backing of any law at all under a system called Common Sense. Catapults were having a bit of a vogue at the moment; flick knives weren’t so popular.

  “Queen Victoria put a stop to it.”

  Sloan wasn’t surprised. As a young constable he’d had to learn a lot of laws. Queen Victoria’s name was attached to quite a number of them.

  “After she’d been frightened by a railway engine,” said Dabbe.

  “What was that, Doctor?” It hadn’t occurred to Sloan that in Sixty Glorious Years Queen Victoria had been frightened of anything.

  “As the system stood, Sloan, if there had been a railway accident and someone had been killed in that accident, by rights …”

  “According to law and custom,” put in Sloan. The word ‘Rights’ was an evocative one. They weren’t allowed to use it at the Police Station.

  “According to law and custom,” agreed Dabbe amiably, “the Crown would have had to have the instrument of death as deodand.”

  “The railway engine?”

  “Nothing less. She changed the law pretty quickly, I can tell you,” said the pathologist, “once the railways really got going. Didn’t want Stephenson’s Rocket cluttering up Windsor Castle.”

  “No.” For a brief joyous moment Sloan wondered if Her late Majesty just might have been wrong. If every motor vehicle that killed someone automatically belonged to the Crown after the accident Inspector Harpe might not be such a soured man.