Losing Ground Read online

  Not, though, it soon transpired, against fraud.

  ‘Our connection with Tolmie Park?’ Douglas Anderson’s face assumed a regretful expression. ‘Most unfortunate.’ He sighed. ‘Something I’m afraid in the end we had to write off to experience.’

  ‘Write off, anyway,’ offered Crosby inelegantly.

  ‘Indeed,’ agreed the manager. ‘I’m afraid we have been given to understand that the borrower concerned is living in considerable comfort in a country which has no extradition treaties with the United Kingdom.’

  ‘Galling,’ said Detective Inspector Sloan.

  ‘We all make mistakes,’ said Anderson. He coughed. ‘I must say I considered that the board took a very magnanimous view in the circumstances.’

  Magnanimity as a response to failure was not the usual reward down at the police station. Higher ranks didn’t like failure and the press enjoyed a field day and if there was an official enquiry then it was the deputy-heads that rolled.

  ‘But then,’ added the manager shrewdly, ‘most of the board knew the gentleman in question themselves.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Sloan. That would have helped.

  ‘It’s not what you know, but who you know,’ observed Detective Constable Crosby, who cherished the notion that this was why he had not progressed further up the promotion ladder.

  ‘Golf club,’ said the manager succinctly. ‘He was practically scratch, I understand. Actually, that did have some bearing on the circumstances.’

  ‘Circumstances alter cases,’ put in Crosby sententiously.

  ‘The particular circumstance in this case was that the – er – defaulter intended to…’ the bank manager swiftly amended this, ‘told us that he intended – to open a golf course there.’

  Detective Inspector Sloan nodded. ‘Quite a good use for the house and land.’

  ‘That was what my board thought, too,’ said the banker.

  ’So you were halfway there,’ said Crosby, ‘weren’t you?’

  ‘True but in this line of country we all get our fingers burnt from time to time,’ said the manager philosophically. ‘They told me to cut our losses as soon as I possibly could.’

  ‘Fire sale,’ pronounced Crosby knowledgeably.

  The manager looked at the constable curiously. ‘Only in a manner of speaking. We still had the deeds – we’d kept them as surety for the loan for buying the estate and fortunately had only advanced the extra funds for the proposed development.’

  ‘That would have been a help towards balancing the books,’ murmured Sloan, resisting the temptation to say that half a loaf was better than no bread.

  The manager moved a pile of papers on his desk fractionally to one side before saying, ‘So we were able to sell the estate ourselves and recoup half the loan.’

  ‘And keep quiet about the other half,’ pointed out Crosby unkindly.

  ‘It wouldn’t have done the bank any good to go public,’ said the manager.

  ‘That’s true,’ said Sloan. He could see that it would have upset the illusion of security engendered by all that marble and mahogany, but he did not say so.

  ‘That was the board’s view, anyway, when I put it to them,’ said Douglas Anderson a trifle defensively. ‘In fact one of them even quoted an Italian proverb to me – tutti possono sbagliare.’

  ‘Tut tut what?’ asked Crosby.

  ‘It means, “We can all make mistakes”,’ translated the bank manager.

  Detective Inspector Sloan envied him. Those holding the office of constable didn’t have any board behind which to shelter. The responsibilities were theirs and theirs alone whatever their rank. It sounded to him rather as if the board had taken the decision to keep quiet unto themselves. Perhaps, like Sloan, they had all been unduly influenced when young by those lines in Rudyard Kipling’s poem “If” about not breathing a word about their loss.

  ‘So, gentlemen, you will understand why we were very happy to sell Tolmie Park in its existing condition…’

  ‘As was,’ put in Crosby.

  ‘Caveat emptor,’ murmured Sloan in Latin. It didn’t need translating but he did it all the same. ‘Buyer beware.’

  ‘…to Berebury Homes, to help towards recouping our losses,’ said Douglas Anderson. ‘And let them take a punt on getting planning permission. After all they’re long-standing customers of ours with a good reputation in these parts.’

  To sell to them for a song, concluded Detective Inspector Sloan.

  But silently.

  Auriole Allen was waiting for Ned Phillips when he got back to the offices of Berebury Homes from the golf club. ‘How did he take it?’

  ‘The boss? Oh, all right, I suppose.’ Ned Phillips grimaced. ‘He wasn’t best pleased, naturally.’

  She gave him a sharp look. ‘Naturally.’

  ‘Mr Perry’s bound to be a bit upset, isn’t he?’ said Phillips. ‘After all, a fire doesn’t usually help anything.’

  Auriole Allen, the press and public relations specialist, said heavily, ‘Whatever actually happened, I can assure you, Ned, that there are plenty of people out there ready and waiting to put the worst possible construction on a fire in a house when there’s building work in the offing. Whichever way you look at it, a fire can’t be good news.’

  ‘Which is presumably what somebody had in mind when they started it.’ He gave her a bland smile. ‘Or have I got that wrong?’

  ‘It’s certainly going to hold up any development,’ she said.

  ‘But not for long, I hope.’

  ‘Who knows?’ she said enigmatically. ‘The conservation people are quite capable of asking for a completely revised application and that can take forever.’

  Ned Phillips reached back into his car for his jacket. ‘Could it be meant as a warning shot across the bows?’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘The development over there.’

  She shook her head. ‘The only written objection that’s come in has been from the Berebury Preservation Society and that doesn’t mean a lot because they object to everything on principle.’

  The young man shrugged himself into his jacket. ‘Then there’s Calleford Construction sniffing around for a takeover, or so I’ve heard.’

  She narrowed her eyes. ‘And how did you hear about that? You’re supposed to be new here.’

  ‘At the golf club,’ he said.

  ‘Talking of the golf club, is Mr Perry going over to Tolmie first?’ she asked. ‘Derek and Randolph are on their way there now.’

  ‘Nope, he’s coming straight back here.’

  She let out an audible sigh of relief. ‘That’s good. I’m working on a press release now by way of damage limitation and I’d like to run it past him.’

  ‘Better safe than sorry, Mrs Allen.’

  Suspecting irony, she said ‘Talking of safe, how come you’re back here ahead of him?’

  ‘I took a short cut through the woods.’

  Her head came up. ‘I thought you were a stranger to Berebury. You said you were.’

  He flashed an impish grin in her direction and threw up his hands. ‘All right, I give in. You win. It’s just that I’m quicker on the road. I’ve got youth on my side and all that.’

  She cast her eyes in the direction of the vehicle he had been driving and said drily, ‘And a fast car.’

  After Ned Phillips had gone on his way Auriole Allen sat for a minute or two at her desk, scribbling some notes. Then she picked up her telephone and dialled Robert Selby’s office extension. ‘Robert,’ she said, ‘I’m beginning to wonder about that omniscient young man who’s just joined us…your new assistant.’

  ‘You mean Ned Phillips?’ said Robert Selby directly. He was only deliberately obfuscating when it came to figures that he didn’t want anyone else to understand.

  ‘Yes, I do mean him. Well, he knows about this takeover offer we’ve had for Tolmie Park from Calleford Construction and says he heard about it at the golf club.’

  ‘Which offer?’ the finance
director asked. ‘There were two, don’t forget.’

  ‘Oh, yes…’ her voice faltered. ‘I’d forgotten about that man who wrote to us this morning.’

  ‘I hadn’t,’ said Selby pointedly.

  ‘Ned Phillips was talking about the Calleford Construction people, at least,’ she paused, ‘that’s what he said.’

  ‘It would have been more of a help if it had been from the other man – the one called Stuart Bellamy,’ said Robert Selby. ‘We might have got to know a bit more about him if it had. We could do with a handle on our Mr Bellamy, whoever he is.’

  ‘And I could do without a fire to have to deny Berebury Homes starting. I know that’s not good English but you know what I mean,’ she said, squinting down at her notes. ‘No one’s going to believe us.’

  ‘Has anyone said that we did start it?’

  ‘Not yet, Robert, but they will. As soon as the police get round to asking who benefits. It’s only us.’

  ‘Now that’s just where you’re wrong, Auriole. Should they ever get to take us over, God forbid, Calleford Construction stand to be quite considerable beneficiaries of Tolmie Park being burnt to the ground, too.’

  She raised her elegantly arched eyebrows. ‘Too?’

  ‘Too. Remember, they only want the land, just as we do. Not an elegant ruin with a big repair bill supervised by all the conservation and heritage people in the country.’

  She sighed. ‘I suppose you’re right.’

  ‘And as for this Mr Stuart Bellamy…’ he said.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Who knows what he wants Tolmie Park for – I don’t – but I can tell you one thing about Stuart Bellamy and that’s that he can afford to buy it.’

  ‘That’s interesting,’ she said. ‘How do you know?’

  ‘The fellow gave us the name of his bank so that we could check that he was genuine and, guess what, he’s with the same bank as we are. When I ran his name past the Calleshire and Counties Bank chap, Douglas Anderson, he told me that though he couldn’t tell me anything about him…’

  ‘Professional ethics,’ said Auriole immediately. ‘It’s a well-known get-out if the press are chasing you and one there’s no other way round.’

  ‘But,’ went on the finance director, ‘what the bank manager told me he could do for Berebury Homes was assure me that Bellamy wouldn’t even need to borrow to pay for it. Apparently Bellamy had given his permission for us to be told as much.’

  ‘No money worries on the Bellamy front, then?’ Auriole Allen drew those arched eyebrows together in an expression of puzzlement. ‘That makes a change in this day and age, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Exactly,’ said Robert Selby, ‘and in my experience that’s always interesting in itself. Very. It makes you think, too.’

  ‘Does Lionel know all this?’

  ‘Not yet, but he soon will. As soon as I can get hold of him.’

  * * *

  ‘Jonathon,’ bawled a girl over the steady background hum of machinery at the works of Berebury Precision Engineering out on the Luston road, ‘you’re wanted in the front office.’ When there was no immediate response to this she added even more loudly and with evident satisfaction, ‘By the police.’

  That did the trick.

  A door opened and an untidy young man in a white coat appeared. ‘And what is it I’m wanted for?’ he asked the two policemen waiting there truculently.

  ‘We’d just like a little help with our enquiries,’ said Detective Inspector Sloan blandly.

  ‘You ought to get yourselves a new record,’ said Jonathon Ayling. ‘That one’s practically worn out. And whatever it is you’re trying to pin on me, I didn’t do it.’

  ‘Good,’ said Detective Inspector Sloan briskly, ‘but we’d still like a chat about the fire at Tolmie Park.’

  ‘I might have guessed,’ he sounded resigned. ‘The Preservation Society hauled me over to one of their precious meetings in my lunch-hour and grilled me about it. I didn’t get any lunch.’

  ‘Neither did I,’ said Crosby plaintively.

  Jonathon Ayling ignored this. ‘And no, for your information I didn’t set the fire there.’

  ‘Then you won’t mind our asking you about your movements this morning, will you?’ said Sloan, taking out his notebook.

  ‘I mind you trying to pin something on me that I didn’t do,’ said Ayling heatedly. ‘I’m a preservationist, not a fire-raiser, and you don’t preserve buildings by burning them down.’

  ‘Not usually,’ said Sloan.

  Suddenly Jonathon Ayling relaxed. ‘But I grant you, investigations tend to delay developments.’

  ‘That had occurred to us,’ said Sloan, although he wasn’t at all sure that the thought had crossed Crosby’s mind.

  Ayling said, ‘Give Berebury Council’s planning officer, Jeremy Stratton, half a chance and you bet he’ll put off making any recommendation to his precious committee as long as he can and they can’t decide until he does.’

  ‘Would he by any chance have been the man whose face was painted on your balloon earlier this year?’ asked Sloan. The police had been called in when the biggest rubber balloon ever seen in the village of Cullingoak had been blown up by the forge’s bellows and attracted a crowd deemed in need of control, that is until someone stuck a pin in it and it shrivelled to nothing with an eerie squeal.

  Ayling grinned. ‘I’ll say. It was a beautiful old forge and our God-awful planning officer recommended that permission be given for it all to be dismantled so that some fat cat could build a block of flats on the site.’ He gave Sloan a very straight look indeed and added, ‘And if you were to ask me why, I couldn’t say I’m sure. He’s normally a right antediluvian.’

  ‘So,’ said Sloan, sticking to the point but all the same tucking Ayling’s unspoken implication into his mind for further consideration at a later time, ‘what exactly were your movements this morning?’

  ‘I had a bit of breakfast at Bellini’s over the road then I clocked in at the grindstone here as usual at eight o’clock, checked all our electronic gear and computer settings, micrometers now being a thing of the past, chatted with the bloke in charge of future orders and then headed out to deliver some custom-built burglar alarms for Calleshire Construction.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Detective Constable Crosby, looking interested for the first time. The mental road-map of the county of Calleshire was one thing that was clear in his mind. ‘That’s out beyond Tolmie.’

  ‘Aren’t our policemen wonderful?’ marvelled Ayling.

  ‘So you went past Tolmie Park this morning?’ said Sloan.

  ‘Twice, actually,’ said Ayling solemnly. ‘There and back.’

  ‘On business?’

  ‘I can assure you that nobody in their right mind goes to see the firm of Calleford Construction Ltd for pleasure.’ He gave a disparaging sniff. ‘The rotters were complaining about some work we’d done for them here.’ Jonathon Ayling waved a hand to encompass the building behind them from which the steady hum of machinery could still be heard.

  ‘And what do you do here?’ asked Sloan curiously.

  ‘Manufacture really minute parts for other manufacturers or, as Jonathon Swift put it so well, “A flea hath smaller fleas that on him prey; and these have smaller fleas to bite ‘em, and so proceed ad infinitum”.’ He gave a wry grin. ‘You might say that we at Berebury Precision Engineering are the smallest fleas of all. The bottom of the heap.’

  ‘Skilled, though, all the same,’ said Sloan appreciatively. Policing wasn’t precise.

  ‘Skill without imagination is mere craftsmanship,’ said Jonathon Ayling cynically. ‘It’s skill with imagination that makes art. We just make tiny bits and pieces for companies like Calleford Construction, God rest their souls – except that I doubt if they have them.’

  ‘Have what?’ asked Crosby, somewhat bewildered.

  ‘Souls,’ spat out Jonathon Ayling. ‘We make what they want to their own specifications, like very, very small usually. Only this t
ime they say we didn’t.’

  ‘Didn’t what?’ asked Crosby.

  Jonathon Ayling said, ‘Make it to their precise specification. At least that’s what they insist. If you ask me, all they really want to do is delay paying us. And if it’s of any interest to you the bloke I saw there was their works manager.’ He stopped, struck by a sudden thought. ‘If you do catch your arsonist you might send him out to Calleford Construction. Their outfit could do with a good fire. Nineteen-sixties architecture at its very worst. It’s enough to make you see why we get passionate about saving buildings like Tolmie Park.’

  ‘And last night?’ said Sloan, unmoved by this. ‘What did you do after work yesterday?’

  Jonathon Ayling cocked his head on one side. ‘So the two gentlemen are interested in all my movements, are they?’

  ‘Just those after you left work yesterday,’ said Sloan. Crosby gave no sign of interest whatsoever.

  ‘I didn’t get to leave this sweatshop until after seven,’ said Ayling, ‘and I made for The Claviger’s Arms over at Almstone. As pubs go, it’s quite good. Had a bite and a few jars there and eventually went home.’

  ‘Alone?’

  He gave a mocking sob. ‘Home alone, Inspector.’

  ‘By car?’ said Sloan unamused.

  ‘Sure. It’s nearly as clapped-out as I am these days but it still goes.’

  Detective Inspector Sloan pointed to Ayling’s footwear. ‘Are these yesterday’s shoes?’

  ‘And today’s. I don’t sleep in them though.’

  Sloan produced a sealable plastic bag and some slippers. ‘What I would like to do is to take your shoes away to let our people have a look at them. I’m sure you won’t have any objection to that, now, will you?’

  If Jonathon Ayling did have any objection, he wasn’t saying, but his self confidence visibly oozed away, deflating not unlike the pricked balloon on the bellows at the forge at Cullingoak.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Behind the scenes at the Greatorex Museum, Hilary Collins produced the results of her researches. She had clearly been beavering away in their archives. ‘As far as I can establish so far, Inspector, the Filligree family left England before the Second World War – that is in the middle of the nineteen-thirties for – Switzerland.’