His Burial Too Page 6

  That was all she knew.

  That was all he had told her.

  She took a deep breath now as he entered the room. “Well?”

  “Have you got any friends, miss, here in the village?”

  She felt a cold shiver run up and down her spine. She shook her head mutely.

  “Someone who would come round,” he continued kindly, “to be with you today.”

  “Not really. You see, I’ve only just come home from Italy. And I’ve been away so much.”

  “A friend of your father’s, perhaps, then, miss? Who you would like to be with you …”

  Obediently she cast about in her mind and then shook her head again. Marcia Osborne was a friend of her father’s, all right, but Fenella couldn’t see Marcia’s charm. It was too brittle. George Osborne was a poppet, but he would be teaching now. There was always old Professor Berry, of course. He’d be up and about by now. But she could hardly expect him to be a prop and stay. Not at his age. And Miss Holroyd—staunch, rocklike and competent—Miss Holroyd would have enough on her hands as it was.

  Police Constable Hepple was saying something.

  “You were out with a friend last night, miss, I understand …”

  Fenella looked up quickly. The constable might have seemed quiet and slow but …

  “That was an Italian friend,” she said, “called Giuseppe Mardoni. But he’s gone back to Italy. He went last night. After we’d had dinner. He had to catch a plane. A night flight.”

  She was talking too much. She knew that.

  To stave off the moment when the policeman said what he wanted to say.

  What he had to say, sooner, or later.

  “You see,” she said, “I’m quite alone now.”

  “I see, miss. Well, then, in that case …”

  “I think,” said Fenella with a visible effort, “that I’d rather be told anything you know now …”

  Hepple told her.

  By the time Detective Inspector Sloan got back to the church the real experts in death had begun to arrive.

  Constable Crosby might have fancied his fast driving but it wasn’t a patch on that of Dr Dabbe. The Consultant Pathologist to the Berebury and District Group Hospital Management Committee was the fastest driver in the county of Calleshire. There was no doubt about that. Strong men had been known to blench when offered a lift by him. Those who incautiously accepted them were rumoured never to be the same afterwards. The Dean of Calleford, a blameless man whose faith was seemingly as firm as that of anyone in the diocese, had once tried to get out of Dr Dabbe’s moving car, wishing he had led a better life the while. The doctor’s assistant, Burns, who went with him everywhere, had been shocked into silence by it long ago and rarely spoke.

  Sloan greeted him inside the church.

  “I’m sorry, Doctor. We’ve got a body here for you all right but we can’t get near it. And all we can see is an arm.”

  “No sword?”

  “N … no, Doctor.”

  Dabbe gave a sardonic grin. “I was thinking of Excalibur.”

  “No, Doctor. No sword.” Sloan managed a wan smile. The pathologist was always like this. He had a sense of humour fit to make your blood run cold. “The arm’s lying quite flat, actually. Not—er—er brandishing anything.”

  “Ah …” Dr Dabbe advanced towards the tower doorway. “And all I’ve got is a sort of leper’s squint, is it?”

  “I’m afraid so.” Apologetically. “They’ve sent to Berebury for some heavy welding equipment. They’re going to try to cut the door hinges off from this side.”

  Dr Dabbe bent down and looked into the tower through the gap in the doorway while Sloan and Crosby stood to one side and Burns busied himself with some wire and arc lamps.

  “Ah,” said the pathologist again. “And not clothed in white samite either.”

  “Grey suiting,” said Sloan automatically.

  “So I see.”

  “Not a lot to go on, I’m afraid, Doctor. Just an arm.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” said the pathologist easily. “I’ve had less in my time.”

  “This arm …” began Sloan. Once started on his bizarre reminiscences there was never any stopping the Doctor.

  “Had just an ear once,” Dabbe said.

  “On its own?” asked Crosby, clearly fascinated.

  “Lonely as a cloud,” said Dabbe poetically.

  “This arm, Doctor,” interrupted Sloan more firmly. He wasn’t interested in unattached ears.

  “This ear was …”

  They were spared more by a light springing to life. While they had all been talking the ever-silent Burns, the doctor’s assistant, had rigged up a powerful spot lamp and focussed it on the protruding arm. It more than made up for the missing light bulb. As soon as it was ready the pathologist—diverted from his ear story—applied his eye to the partially open door and gave the arm a long, long look.

  “It’s hairy, Sloan, so it’s not a Chinaman.”

  “No, Doctor.” That was the least of Sloan’s worries.

  “It’s probably male all right.”

  Sloan hadn’t been worried about that at all.

  Dabbe grinned. “The apparel oft proclaims the man,’ eh, Sloan? Not any more, it doesn’t. But the fourth finger is longer than the first.”

  “Yes, Doctor.”

  Out of the corner of his eye Sloan saw Crosby glance down at his own hands and register the surprised look at one who finds that a natural rule applies to oneself as well as to everyone else.

  “He’s no horny-handed son of the soil,” went on the pathologist.

  “I was afraid of that,” said Sloan.

  “But he’s used his hands …”

  “Yes.”

  “The interdigital muscles are well developed. Nails well kept …”

  Dabbe altered his stance a fraction. “No signs of disease manifesting itself in the hand—no clubbing of the fingers, no concave fingernails. No nicotine stains …”

  Sloan made a note of that.

  “And he didn’t spend yesterday sun-bathing. In fact, I’d say he spent more time indoors than outside.”

  That would fit.

  “No rings, wristwatch, or scars,” the pathologist continued his observations. “A good tailor but an old suit,” he added for good measure. “One button missing from the cuff.”

  “We know all about that.”

  “You do, do you? Your province, of course.” Dabbe grunted and peered more closely still. “Can’t tell you his exact age yet. The subcutaneous fat has started to go from the back of his hand. The skin doesn’t look as if it’s got the elasticity it used to have either.” He paused. “Let’s say not old, not young …”

  “That would fit, too,” said Sloan.

  Dabbe straightened his bent back. “And you won’t be unbearably surprised to know, Sloan, that he wasn’t a mental defective either. As far as I can see from this side there are the regulation number of lines on his palm.”

  “Quite so,” murmured Sloan. He could see Crosby glancing down at his own hands again. He wondered what comfort he would find there.

  “Cause of death,” continued the pathologist in a businesslike manner, “not immediately apparent. Crush injuries, I suppose, but in this job you never can tell.”

  “No, Doctor.” Sloan was with him there: every inch of the way. The marble looked enough to kill anyone, but you never could tell.

  Dr Dabbe took a last look through the narrow slit of open door and then straightened up again.

  “A classic case, you might say, Sloan, of Death, the Great Leveller.”

  I SAW HIM EVEN NOW GOING

  THE WAY OF ALL FLESH.

  7

  There was something teasing about talking to a total stranger on the telephone. A man’s voice didn’t tell anything like as much as did his appearance and his actions. Sloan had never even spoken to the writer of the anonymous letters over at the village of Constance Parva but he would stake his pension that the holder
of the pen would be thin and angular; spiky and mean of spirit.

  Henry Pysden just sounded cautious.

  “He left here a little before six o’clock last evening, Inspector. Like he usually did. We were naturally afraid that something might be wrong when he didn’t come in this morning. Not like him at all …”

  “There was a Mr Cranswick over at Cleete this morning, sir, who seems to have been expecting him to be there, too.”

  “Ah,” said Pysden regretfully, “I’m afraid I was rather busy when he called here. On an important experiment with a built-in time factor. On a refractory material. Seawater magnesia. I couldn’t leave it and he wouldn’t wait.”

  “I wanted to ask you about your work,” said Sloan. “What do Struthers and Tindall do?”

  Pysden hesitated. “What we do is rather difficult to describe, and we are—er—ah—um—a little—what shall I say?—er—reticent about the exact nature of our work.”

  “Any confidence will, of course, he respected as far as possible,” murmured Sloan diplomatically, “but we must know.”

  “Quite. Quite. I see that.” The voice at the other end of the telephone line suddenly hurried into speech. “Shall we say—to put it in a nutshell …”

  “Yes, sir?” Sloan was all in favour of that.

  Always.

  “I think Mr Tindall would not mind my telling you that what we do is other people’s research and development for them.”

  Sloan wrote that down.

  “Only in certain fields, naturally, Inspector. Now, about Mr Tindall …”

  “Research and development, sir. Should I know what that means?”

  The voice relaxed a little. “Not really, I suppose. No reason why you should. Research and development—R and D, it’s usually called—is carried out by nearly all big firms these days. Mostly to make sure they’ll have marketable products in five years’ time.”

  “I see, sir.”

  It was different in the police force.

  Market trends in crime changed, of course. One sort of mischief often surged to the forefront—became fashionable, you might say—while another receded for a while. But down at the Police Station they weren’t troubled by the thought of running out of work five years hence.

  In any number of years, come to that.

  Short of the politicians finding Utopia, of course.

  Or the scientists discovering a cure for Original Sin.

  Or—more probably—the millennium arriving on the doorstep of the Home Office, so to speak.

  Sloan didn’t think that was likely either.

  Henry Pysden was still talking. He’d got an unaccented voice, a bit on the reedy side.

  “The work we do can amount to almost anything, of course, but firms usually stick to their own line. So that they can use their existing plant if possible. Saves retooling—that does cost a lot of money.”

  “And where exactly do Struthers and Tindall come in, sir?”

  “Struthers and Tindall come in, Inspector, where you have a firm which doesn’t have its own research and development department.” He coughed. “Where one of these firms needs some specific work done—say when they’ve got a good idea and no facilities for following it through—then we do it for them. Or …” the reedy voice stopped.

  “Or?” prompted Sloan.

  Henry Pysden hesitated again. “Or when it has something very secret indeed which it wants an opinion on.”

  “Even,” asked Sloan, anxious to get at least one thing in the case quite clear, “when it has a research and development department of its own?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “Why?”

  “A lot of reasons,” said Pysden carefully. “They may have someone in their own firm whom they are—er—ah—um—not absolutely sure about …”

  Sloan groaned inwardly. That was a point tailor-made for any policeman to take. Even Detective Constable Crosby should be able to pick that one up for himself.

  “Or they may feel,” went on the cautious voice at the Berebury end, “shall we say they may have reason to fear—that their own internal security isn’t too good. Then they would use us instead …”

  That, decided Sloan, was going to be a great help, that was.

  “Inspector, there is just one thing at this end …”

  “Oh?”

  “We’re a little bit concerned about one of our confidential reports.”

  “Yes?”

  “One of our highly confidential reports.” With emphasis.

  “What about it, Mr Pysden?”

  “We can’t find it.”

  Miss Hilda Holroyd might not have wanted the police sent for in the first place. As the morning wore on, though, she positively began to look forward to their arrival.

  She was having a trying time.

  Besides having had Mr Tindall’s visitor—Mr Gordon Cranswick—darting in and out like an urgent gadfly—there was her usual work piling up. She had already postponed the rest of Mr Tindall’s appointments for the morning.

  “Urgent personal and domestic reasons,” she lied gallantly into the telephone, promising to ring back later.

  She had also parried the Head of the Testing Department, who had technical problems; fended off young Mr Blake, who didn’t seem to have enough to do; dispatched two optimistic young salesmen who wanted Struthers and Tindall to buy brand-new equipment which would halve their expenses—or so they said; and—probably most important of all—successfully placated the office cleaner and tea lady.

  “Report?” Mrs Perkins was indignant. “I haven’t seen no report.” She was a small wiry woman with the vigour of ten. She advanced down the corridor, broom rampant. “And I haven’t touched it neither.”

  “We’ve misplaced it, you see, Mrs Perkins.”

  Grudgingly. “What’s it look like?”

  “Green,” said Miss Holroyd. “It’s a green file.”

  Mrs Perkins sniffed. “I never touch nothing with writing on it.”

  “There would just be a number on the outside, that’s all.”

  “That’s writing, isn’t it?” said Mrs Perkins incontrovertibly.

  “We had it yesterday.” Miss Holroyd did her best to sound soothing. “It’s rather an important one …”

  “Well, it wasn’t nothing to do with me.” Mrs Perkins rammed the broom on the floor with quite unnecessary force. “But if I should ’appen to see it …”

  “Thank you.”

  “I done Mr Pysden,” said the cleaner obliquely.

  “Good,” responded Miss Holroyd warmly, bearing in mind that while clever young scientists could be recruited with ease cleaners as reliable as Mrs Perkins were thin on the ground.

  “Not that he noticed.” Mrs Perkins sniffed. “He was that stuck in his experiment. If you was to say to him had I bin in I bet you he wouldn’t know one way or the other. Not Mr Pysden.”

  “Oh, Mrs Perkins, surely not.”

  “Head that buried in his papers,” declared Mrs Perkins, “you wouldn’t credit it. Not like young Mr Blake. I should like to know when he gets any work done.”

  “I’m sure,” interjected Miss Holroyd swiftly, “that Mr Pysden’s room is all beautifully neat and clean since you’ve been in there, anyway.”

  “Well,” Mrs Perkins seemed faintly mollified, “it’s better than it was. I will say that.” She brought her broom to attention at the perpendicular and said grandly: “If I should happen to see this green file which you’ve lost I’ll let you know …”

  But not even the argus-eyed Mrs Perkins could locate the United Mellemetics file anywhere in the works of Messrs Struthers and Tindall.

  Miss Holroyd and Mr Pysden met again about this.

  “It would have to be the United Mellemetics report,” said Henry Pysden gloomily. “Of all the people I’d rather not have to tell, Sir Digby Wellow comes pretty near the top of the list.”

  Miss Holroyd was sympathetic. Sir Digby Wellow was one of the country’s more colourful industria
lists. And vocal to disaster-point.

  “Was it,” she ventured, “going to be a favourable report?”

  “No, it was not,” said Henry Pysden. “That’s what’s so worrying. Sir Digby sent it to us because he thought there might be something funny going on in United Mellemetics.” He adjusted his glasses. “And according to Mr Tindall he wasn’t wrong.”

  “Oh, dear.”

  “It’s all very awkward, Miss Holroyd.”

  “We’ve never—er—misplaced a report before,” she said. “You don’t think—possibly—just this once—Mr Tindall took it home with him?”

  “Perhaps. Not like him, though. He’s never done it before. And it’s against all the rules.”

  Miss Holroyd sighed. “It would be the one day when he isn’t here to ask. I don’t quite know what we should do next.”

  “I do,” said Henry Pysden grimly. “Get me United Mellemetics on the phone at Luston. A personal call to Sir Digby Wellow, please, Miss Holroyd.”

  It was a full minute after the workmen had finished welding before those watching it could see anything at all. The inimical glare of the fierce heat had stained the vision of everyone in the church who wasn’t wearing goggles.

  “Here she comes, mate.”

  “Easy there.”

  “Watch your end, Joe.”

  Joe apparently watched his end all right for—very slowly—the great oak door leading into the tower from the church started to move. Willing hands caught it and laid it down in the nave. A small shower of broken marble came spattering down with it.

  Sloan stood well to one side, just looking.

  So did the pathologist, Dr Dabbe.

  The workmen trudged up and down the nave, seeing that the big door was safe where it lay. Already, in the way of optical illusions, it looked too big for the hole that it had left behind it. “Not so deep as a well, not so wide as a church door,” thought Sloan involuntarily. Now where had that saying come from? His mother, probably. She was a great one for old sayings.

  “What do you want doing now, guv’nor?”

  “Nothing, thank you,” said Sloan, his eyes once more rivetted on the arm. The solitary arm exhibited a dreadful fascination. It was thrust out through the debris for all the world like that of a drowning swimmer calling for help.