Passing Strange Page 7

  Leeyes started to say something unchristian as well.

  “The Rector was very helpful, sir.” Detective-Inspector Sloan had had a word with that worthy incumbent, not because he’d expected to hear anything uncharitable from him but from a sense of order. In villages the members of each of the caring professions were better placed to judge each other’s work than they were in towns and cities: they, after all, had to make good each other’s deficiencies.

  “Angel of mercy, eh?” said Leeyes.

  “The village,” said Sloan concisely, “seems to consist entirely of grateful patients.” The Reverend Thomas Jervis had remembered Joyce Cooper’s first coming to Almstone. She had been a gauche young girl then, fresh from her teaching hospital; unsure and awkward. She had soldiered on through her best working years, though, to become a very real servant of the parish; skilled and trusted.

  “A lot of help that’s going to be,” pronounced Superintendent Leeyes ungratefully.

  Sloan didn’t say anything. The Rector had called Joyce Cooper a blocked spirallist. That, he said to Sloan, was the fashionable term for someone finding a position early on in their career that suited them – and staying in it. When promotion ceased to be a goal, when place and people began to matter more than climbing up the slippery rungs of the deceptive ladder called success …

  “So we’ve got a devoted spinster on our hands, have we?” said Leeyes, reaching the same conclusion by a simpler route.

  “Looks like it, sir, doesn’t it?”

  “What about family?” the Superintendent asked.

  The question came as no surprise to Sloan. Although the last enemy might be death, in long and sad police experience the first enemy could usually be found – Cain and Abel fashion – within the family circle.

  “There’s a cousin,” said Sloan. “That’s all. A Mrs Conway over at Great Rooden. I’ve had a word with her, sir.”

  This was understatement in a big way.

  The cousin at Great Rooden had been told about Joyce Cooper and had declared herself – at great length – deeply shocked. Nothing like this, Mrs Conway had assured Sloan over and over again, had ever happened in their family before. Theirs was a respectable family. And what Joyce’s poor mother and father would have thought didn’t bear thinking about.

  Sloan had enquired about Joyce Cooper’s mother and father, only to learn that they had Been Taken many years ago and what a blessing that had been now, wasn’t it? Still, she, Mrs Conway, had always said that the Lord worked in a mysterious way and this proved it, didn’t it?

  Sloan hadn’t really had a chance to say anything at that point in reply because Mrs Conway wasn’t one to pause between sentences.

  She’d never thought that the day would ever dawn when she would be able to say that she was glad that Uncle Frank and Auntie Eva had Passed On but – oh dear, oh dear – she was now! Was Sloan absolutely sure about Joyce?

  Sloan, his last sight of Joyce Cooper still an unpleasantly vivid picture in his mind, had said he was absolutely sure.

  But, a flurried and flustered Mrs Conway had insisted, Joyce had been a good girl always. It didn’t seem quite fair.

  Sloan agreed that it didn’t.

  Moreover, he had said, it probably wasn’t fair.

  Fairness implied a just set of rules, and a good referee. Life wasn’t like that. He had a short and well-practised homily on life not being fair on the tip of his tongue. He had to produce it from time to time for the benefit of young constables freshly bruised from some ugly encounter with death – or life. People forgot that both could be traumatic. This set-piece was full of well-turned phrases about the gentle dew of mercy not being the only thing that fell upon the just and the unjust. The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune fell with the same melancholy impartiality. He was always surprised that teachers didn’t make more of this fact at Sunday School … the burden of their song always seemed the other way.

  “The doctor,” Leeyes was saying. “Perhaps he was up to something that only the District Nurse knew about …”

  Sloan said he would look into that, too.

  “Though,” grumbled Leeyes illogically, “nearly all the medical crimes are legal nowadays.”

  Sloan agreed that things weren’t what they used to be in medical ethics and added that from what he’d heard the only thing that really caught the doctor’s interest were cacti.

  “A change from people,” remarked Leeyes realistically. “Still prickly, though.”

  “And he’s fairly new in Almstone,” added Sloan. “The old doctor died.”

  “Ah,” said Leeyes immediately, “so if Joyce Cooper had bathed this girl with the funny name …”

  “Richenda.”

  “When she was a baby: before this great quarrel …”

  “Yes,” said Sloan, though he knew what the Superintendent was going to say next.

  “And the baby had a birthmark …”

  “Or hadn’t,” said Sloan.

  “Then,” concluded Leeyes, “she …”

  “The District Nurse.”

  “She,” repeated Leeyes, who wasn’t as fussy as some about personal pronouns, “might have been able to prove that this Richenda isn’t who she says she is.”

  “That is one possibility,” agreed Sloan moderately. “There are others.”

  “One thing is quite clear,” declared Leeyes ponderously. “You need to pick up Miss Richenda Mellows – if that’s her real name.”

  “We’ve done that, sir,” said Sloan with quiet satisfaction. “Traffic Division put a road block up for us on the London road north of Luston. I reckoned we’d be ahead of her there and we were.”

  As he rang off he heard the Superintendent start to hum an aria from The Gondoliers.

  7

  Quinte octaviante

  There was nothing that Detective-Constable Crosby would have liked more than to have jumped into a police car and sped towards the point on the road to London where Inspector Harpe’s men had pulled in Miss Richenda Mellows.

  “We could meet them more than halfway, sir,” he urged Sloan. “Easy.”

  “I don’t doubt it, Crosby,” said Sloan. “I don’t doubt it at all.” Driving fast cars fast was one thing that Crosby did do well. “In fact I dare say you’d get there before the others were through Luston on their way back.”

  The constable squinted modestly down his nose. “They say that a bit of a towsing’s good for the car, too.”

  “But we’re not going,” said Sloan flatly. He’d made up his mind about that.

  “No, sir.”

  “I want to talk to Miss Mellows here at Almstone,” said Sloan.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Here, where Joyce Cooper died.”

  “Yes, sir,” Crosby shifted his weight from one foot to the other.

  “Exactly where you question someone, Crosby, makes a difference.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Suspect or witness,” said Sloan, “but especially suspect.”

  Crosby looked down at the grass, bare save for its pegs and twine markers. “There’s not a lot to see here, sir, now.”

  “That’s got nothing to do with it.”

  “No, sir,” said Crosby stolidly.

  And it hadn’t either, thought Sloan to himself.

  Surroundings did make a difference. Not that he personally belonged to the school of thought that existed in some quarters down at the Police Station which believed that it was a good thing to go in for intimidation by ambience. There were those – and plenty – who did.

  Costs nothing, they’d say if challenged.

  Doesn’t leave a visible mark, either, the cynics among them would add.

  Nobody, they said, can do you for where you talk to a man …

  Those were the members of the Force who asked a man ‘for the last time’ if he had anything else to add to his statement and when the man said he hadn’t, led him out of the room. They’d then enquire of the first officer whom they met in th
e corridor – in tones overlaid with heavy meaning – if the cellar was free for ‘a little chat with Chummie here’.

  En route they’d say with a conspicuous wink to one passing colleague, “we’re just going you-know-where,” and to another, “I don’t want to be disturbed down there.”

  “We’ll see no one comes in,” was the traditional hearty response to that one.

  As was, “Don’t you worry about that. Not even if we hear anything.”

  And with more nods and winks, “We’re a bit deaf in our department, you know.”

  Interrogator and subject would get to their destination by a prolonged and circuitous route through the building. This was designed purely to make the suspect lose his bearings. And if this trail led through the remote and lonely boiler-room so much the better. A sense of isolation was engendered by suggestion alone. Conversation with the suspect, if any, was heavily larded with phrases about ‘going somewhere quiet where we shan’t disturb anyone,’ with the sinister addition of ‘We’ll be quite alone there.’

  Putting on the heat, they called it.

  Rubber hoses might not actually be on view but the impression that they were ready and waiting in the offing was conveyed with nice subtlety.

  What were on view in the Berebury Station cellar were all the accoutrements of police work – from ‘No Waiting’ cones to spare handcuffs, from riot shields to regulation truncheons. This was hardly surprising since the real function of the cellar was that of store – but the sight of them had much the same effect as the instruments on view at the dentist’s. It didn’t matter that the dentist wasn’t necessarily going to use them on the patient. What mattered was that he might. And that they were there if he wanted to – a sudden whim no less than an unexpected cavity making him reach for a handy weapon of torture.

  That wasn’t all.

  The suspect’s chair would be placed in the centre of the room, and a bare space left round it. The interrogator would begin his questioning face to face with his adversary but soon would start to move round so that the victim had – perforce – to shift his position on the chair to keep his tormentor in view. Swivelling round became progressively less and less easy as the policeman circled the suspect.

  Soon what was going on slipped from questioning to interrogation.

  Before long the behaviour took on a pattern more commonly found in the animal kingdom – with similar results. A bemused and mesmerized victim, threatened beyond bearing, sank into docile immobility: paralysed not by the predator but by the greater enemy of fear.

  And so interrogation merged into intimidation.

  One devotee of the procedure held that he even knew the moment of victory.

  ‘Watch the back of your villain’s neck,’ he’d advise. ‘When you see the little hairs start to stand up you know you’ve got him where you want him.’

  It was primitive: but so, of course, was crime.

  ‘Saves time, too,’ said that school of thought, always ready to advance the eternal argument that the end justified the means.

  ‘Only if nobody finds out, of course,’ they’d usually remember to add.

  Those were the ones who forgot that Civil Liberty wasn’t the enemy …

  “And, Crosby, while we’re waiting for Miss Mellows to arrive –” Sloan brought his attention back to the present – “we will interview the stall-holders who were on each side of the Fortune Teller’s tent.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Crosby glumly.

  “We must check whether they heard anything.”

  “For the record,” agreed Crosby.

  Sloan looked up sharply and said “Routine has its place in all police work, Crosby, but especially in a murder enquiry.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You can tackle the water otter’s tent,” said Sloan basely, “and I’ll take Miss Audrey Tompkins. Where exactly is Blenheim Cottage?”

  After all that, Detective-Inspector Sloan’s undoubted skills in the art of questioning were not even engaged, let alone brought into play. Miss Tompkins could hardly wait to start talking to him.

  She was quivering with indignation.

  “Hear anything? Of course I didn’t hear anything, Inspector. How could I have done?”

  “Miss Cooper was in the next tent,” said Sloan mildly.

  “But that man was in mine,” declared Miss Tompkins histrionically. Her bead necklace contributed to the dramatic effect by swinging energetically from side to side.

  Sloan enquired what man.

  “Maurice Esdaile, of course.” She sniffed. She was an angular, restless woman, everything about her thin and attenuated. “Are you quite sure you won’t try some of my camomile tea, Inspector?”

  “Quite sure, thank you,” said Sloan. “That would be Mr Esdaile of Esdaile Homes, would it?”

  “Him,” cried Miss Tompkins. “How he has the nerve to show his face in Almstone is beyond belief.”

  “Quite so,” said Sloan, fascinated by her sharp, pinched nose and bony jaw. If, in the imperishable words of the poet, everything that Miss T. ate turned into Miss T., then this Miss Tompkins ate some very curious things.

  “And then,” Miss Tompkins drew out the moment in a manner worthy of Eleanora Düse herself, “to force himself into the Almstone Preservation Society’s tent …”

  “Force, madam?”

  Miss Tompkins gave an inch. “He must have known how unwelcome he would be.”

  “Ah.” Carrying the war into the enemy camp was never a popular move.

  “Bold as brass,” sniffed Miss Tompkins. “No sense of shame at all.”

  Sloan didn’t know what the Almstone equivalent of dining out was – afternoon tea-parties, probably – but Miss Tompkins was obviously going to do it on the strength of Maurice Esdaile for some time. Not on the murder of Nurse Cooper.

  Which was interesting, to say the least.

  As far as Joyce Cooper was concerned, Miss Tompkins clearly thought the role immortalized by the poet of a well-conducted person was like that of the Charlotte who went on cutting bread and butter in spite of having seen Werther’s body ‘borne before her on a shutter’.

  “How did you know Mr Esdaile was with you when Miss Cooper was attacked?” asked Sloan. There seemed no need at all for circumlocution with Miss Tompkins.

  “The time, of course,” exclaimed Miss Tompkins.

  “What about the time?” asked Sloan patiently.

  “He came at just the wrong time.”

  Sloan was not surprised. Maurice Esdaile was doomed to do the wrong thing.

  “Don’t you see, Inspector? With him there in my tent I couldn’t do anything, could I?”

  Sloan enquired what it was that she had wanted to do.

  “Do?” The beads gave a dangerous lurch to starboard.

  “Why, go and watch the Morris Dancers, of course.”

  “And Mr Esdaile arrived when they were – er – performing, did he?” Sloan wasn’t sure if ‘performing’ was the right word. He didn’t know a lot about Morris Dancing but he was quite sure about one thing: that Superintendent Leeyes knew less. The Superintendent didn’t have a lot of time for Terpsichore.

  “He came just before half past three,” she said in an aggrieved voice. “I’m sure he did it on purpose.”

  “He knew about the Morris men, I take it?”

  “Everyone knew,” declared Miss Tompkins sweepingly.

  “Did they indeed?” murmured Sloan, making a note.

  “I had to talk to him instead of going over to the lawn to see them. I even missed my tea because Mr Hebbinge thought I was over there. He said so afterwards.”

  “I see,” said Sloan, in what he hoped were suitably sympathetic tones. He cleared his throat. “Might I enquire what it was Mr Esdaile came to the tent for?”

  This simple question threw Miss Tompkins into a confusion compounded by a further dose of indignation.

  “He came,” she said with sharply indrawn breath, “or said he came – I don’t believe a wor
d of it myself …”

  “Yes?” said Sloan encouragingly. He had a lot of work to do.

  “To ask if the Almstone Preservation Society was going to protest about the neglect of Manciple House.”

  Years of training and experience had gone into Detective-Inspector Sloan’s ability to keep his face straight and his voice impassive. He invoked all that he had learnt now. “I see, madam,” he said. “I shall, of course, be interviewing Mr Esdaile myself presently …” Curiosity, let alone duty, would see that he did, too. Criticizing the enemy for inefficiency – and in their own camp too – spoke of confidence of a very high order.

  “It’s an awful old place,” protested Miss Tompkins. “Positively tumbledown. I don’t wonder that the Hebbinges built themselves a modern bungalow instead of living there.”

  “An eyesore?” suggested Sloan.

  “Just what I said myself to that man!” she said triumphantly, the bead necklace entering into the swing of things again.

  “What did he say to that?”

  “Told me it was a very fine old building with timber behind the brick.”

  “Did he, indeed?” murmured Sloan.

  “He had the effrontery to say that something should be done about it before it got any worse.”

  Ay, thought Sloan to himself, there was the rub.

  “Don’t ask me how he knows about old houses.” She sniffed. “If he knows about them, that is …”

  It sounded to Sloan as if Maurice Esdaile might very well know what he was talking about but he kept silent. Salt never did wounds any good.

  “He wants to put up horrible little boxes of houses in the meadow,” complained Miss Tompkins. “I know because I’ve seen the plans. Mark my words, Inspector, they’ll spoil the whole character of the village.”

  Sloan nodded gravely. “You’ve lived in Almstone all your life, madam, I take it?”

  She flushed. “Well, no, Inspector. Not exactly …”

  Sloan was not unbearably surprised.

  It was a phenomenon that Inspector Harpe had noted long ago. It fell to the unfortunate lot of Traffic Division to have to tangle with Local Government Surveyors and Planning Committees over new garage accesses, dangerous bends in roads and the development of housing estates, as well as with Westminster government over trunk roads and motorways, and with local Preservation Societies over practically everything.