Passing Strange Read online

  Inspector Harpe had wearied of the bureaucratic approach years ago but as it was almost impossible for a planning application not to involve some aspect of Traffic Division – greenhouses and loft conversions excepted – he had instead learned to derive a certain amount of masochistic satisfaction from them. It was he who had told Sloan that protests seldom came from natives.

  “It’s the newcomers, Sloan, who can’t stand change. Always. Don’t ask me why. They come to a place, take a liking to it as it is – as they found it, that is – and they want it to stay like that for all time. The old inhabitants don’t mind change anything like so much. If you ask me, half the time the real old stagers don’t want their villages pickled …”

  “I’m sure, madam,” said Sloan formally to Miss Tompkins, “that the appropriate authorities will take note of all your representations.” Policemen, he reminded himself, were civil servants of a very superior order. There was no reason why they shouldn’t talk like them from time to time.

  Speciously.

  “We shall never surrender,” declared Miss Tompkins militantly.

  “Quite so,” said Sloan. He stood up to go. “By the way …”

  “Yes, Inspector?”

  “Mr Esdaile – did he talk about anything except Manciple House?”

  “No.”

  It came out too quickly for it to be truth of the whole cloth. Sloan waited.

  Miss Tompkins hesitated. She was, Sloan was sure, an essentially truthful woman. Time and truth went together. Sloan gave her time.

  “No,” she repeated. “He didn’t mention anything else, but …”

  “Yes?” prompted Sloan with considerable restraint.

  “But,” she said with evident difficulty, “he did something.”

  “What was that?”

  Miss Tompkins went quite pink. “He made a donation to our funds.”

  Sloan did not know what to say.

  “I couldn’t very well stop him, could I, Inspector?” she said in anguished tones. “He gave it, you see.”

  “No,” said Sloan. There were minds that thought every difficulty could be overcome with money. Perhaps Maurice Esdaile had one of them.

  “Though I don’t know what the Committee will say.”

  If Sloan knew anything about Committees they would be divided.

  “Bad money drives out good,” said Miss Tompkins sanctimoniously.

  That was one way of putting it. Down at the police station they had less polite names for money that changed hands to further causes.

  “Besides,” went on Miss Tompkins, “we had this notice up.”

  “What notice?”

  “It said, ‘All contributions gratefully received and suitably acknowledged.’”

  Sloan clamped his jaws together.

  “I wish now we hadn’t had it there,” said Miss Tompkins plaintively.

  Sloan took his leave without comment. Game, set and match seemed to have gone to Maurice Esdaile and moreover Miss Tompkins knew it. He shut the gate of Blenheim Cottage behind him with care. As he turned to secure the latch the word carved in the wooden sign board proclaiming the name of the house caught his eye.

  “Let me see now,” he murmured to the closed door, “wasn’t there a famous victory there too?”

  Inspector Harpe’s men brought Miss Richenda Mellows to Sloan. He had gone back to the patch of grass near the old stables and waited there. The long summer evening shadows cast dappled patches of contrasting shade here and there over the ground and the tents and the people were gone but in essence the scene was very much as it had been earlier in the day.

  Detective-Inspector Sloan waited with Constable Crosby at his side as two burly Traffic men brought her across to him. She looked quite tiny between the two tall policemen.

  “Miss Mellows?” he began. “Miss Richenda Mellows?”

  “Yes?” she said huskily. “Is there something wrong? These men wouldn’t tell me anything.”

  “I’m Detective-Inspector Sloan of the Criminal Investigation Department at Berebury.”

  “Another policeman?”

  “Yes.” He cleared his throat. “I have some questions to put to you – important questions.”

  Sloan found himself being considered by a pair of highly alert blue eyes. Their owner was on the tall side of short, with a crop of mid-brown hair. This looked to have a natural wave in it, which, if the casual nature of the rest of her appearance was anything to go by, was probably just as well. She was wearing blue jeans and a shaggy brown woollen jacket, and looked about sixteen. Eighteen was what she said she was.

  “I can’t keep warm in England,” she said, following his gaze. “I’d forgotten how cold the summers were.”

  Sloan nodded. Apart from the heavy jacket, though, she was wearing what every other youngster in the country seemed to be wearing these days.

  She flapped the jacket open with hands sunk deep into its pockets and again read his mind with uncanny accuracy. “When I got back to England there didn’t seem to be any other kind of clothes to buy in the shops.”

  Sloan could well believe it. He seldom saw any variety of teenager – good, bad or indifferent – dressed in anything else.

  “It’s a sort of uniform now, isn’t it?” she said.

  “Sort of,” agreed Sloan readily. The other thing about uniform was that it was a disguise too, though he did not say this. That was why policemen had numbers on their shoulders and motor vehicles had theirs fore and aft. It was the other sort of safety in numbers – though he did not say that either.

  “Like school,” she said gravely.

  There was something to be said for starting an interview on neutral ground. Sloan would be the first to agree with that.

  “Make jeans compulsory,” he agreed, “and nobody would wear them.”

  “We had tunics,” she said. “Can you believe it?”

  Sloan looked up. “You went to school in England, miss, did you?” he said, though there was that in her voice that made him almost certain.

  He was rewarded with an appraising stare.

  “For a time,” said Miss Mellows noncommittally. “Daddy had to do something with me when my mother died. It didn’t last.”

  “I see.” There was a teasing lilt in her speech not entirely English too.

  “I didn’t like it,” she said. “They didn’t like it.” She waved a hand. “And Daddy didn’t like them so he took me back to South America with him.”

  “Ah.”

  “It isn’t any help though, Inspector.”

  “No?”

  “Mr Terlingham has gone into all that.”

  “Has he now?” Sloan would be having a word with Mr Stephen Terlingham of Messrs Terlingham, Terlingham and Owlet as soon as he could, although Saturday evening was not the most propitious time to invoke the help of that branch of the legal profession. Law enforcement went on all round the clock. Advice and advocacy on the other hand ‘kept no late lamps.’

  “The school,” Miss Mellows informed him, “hadn’t kept any of my exercise books.” She shrugged her shoulders. “It’s not really surprising, is it?”

  “Exercise books, miss?”

  “A set of fingerprints would have been a help.” She peered at him. “You are a policeman, aren’t you?”

  “Yes, miss. I’m a policeman all right.” It was taking the oath of allegiance that made an ordinary citizen into a policeman. That, Sloan had decided years ago, was the dividing line. That and nothing else. The moment when a man or woman put forward their right hand and began, “I do solemnly and sincerely declare and affirm that I will well and truly serve our Sovereign Lady the Queen in the office of Constable, without favour or affection, malice or ill will …”

  It was as bad as the Book of Common Prayer for saying everything twice over. On the other hand there was no ambiguity about it at all.

  “… and that I will, to the best of my power cause the peace to be kept and preserved, and prevent all offences against the persons
and properties of Her Majesty’s subjects and that while I continue to hold the said office I will, to the best of my skill and knowledge, discharge all the duties thereof faithfully according to law.”

  As undertakings went, it was pretty comprehensive.

  “Fingerprints, did you say, miss?” It was a long time ago that a young and rather self-conscious Christopher Dennis Sloan had made his declaration of intent. “I’m afraid you have the advantage of me …”

  “Mr Terlingham doesn’t believe I’m me,” she said coolly.

  “Why doesn’t he?”

  “Because of a letter,” she said.

  “Yes?” said Sloan encouragingly.

  “My father’s uncle’s wife …”

  “That would be Mrs Agatha Mellows, I take it, miss?”

  “It would.” She looked straight at Sloan. “Just after I was born she wrote to someone saying I was brown-eyed.” She turned her face slightly. A pair of bright blue eyes regarded him steadily. “That letter has turned up. Fingerprints,” she repeated, “might have proved I was me.”

  Sloan considered the figure before him. “So …”

  “Or handwriting,” she said. “They can do a lot with handwriting these days, can’t they?”

  “Sometimes,” said Sloan cautiously. Of all experts, handwriting ones went down least well in the witness-box. He didn’t know why. Perhaps it was because there was still something of the fairground cheapjack about what they professed to know. People didn’t like to think that what manner of person they were was apparent to a calligraphist in the way in which they formed their pothooks and hangers …

  “So,” said Richenda Mellows, “I came down to Almstone today to see if there was anything else that might do instead.”

  “And what did you find?” asked Sloan, though he was beginning to think he might know the answer.

  “I found Nurse Cooper,” she said simply.

  That was precisely what Sloan had feared.

  “I was born at the Priory, you know, Inspector. That was before the great family bust-up.”

  Families weren’t so very different from nations. They usually had a dividing line which became for ever afterwards a chronological datum point. With England the benchmark was the Norman Conquest. And the Great War.

  “You see,” said the girl, “my parents never did have a home in England.”

  “Nurse Cooper knew you as a baby?” spelled out Sloan without enthusiasm.

  “Intimately,” said Miss Mellows solemnly. She drew breath and said impressively “So intimately that she can prove to Mr Terlingham that I am Richenda Hilary Pemberton Mellows.”

  Sloan did not know – had no means of knowing yet – if he had news for Miss Mellows or not.

  “She told me so this afternoon,” carried on the girl. “She remembered, so it’s all all right now. They can’t say I’m not me any longer.”

  “And I have to tell you, Miss Mellows,” said Sloan with unwonted harshness, “that this afternoon someone killed Nurse Cooper.”

  She fell, the colour drained from her face, like someone trained in the art of falling – first tottering a few steps, then slowing down a bit before going into an even slower weave, after that going down a little on one side, then at the knees, then hips, then torso.

  The loose edges of her woollen jacket got in the way as Detective-Inspector Sloan tried to catch her.

  8

  Flageolet swell

  It didn’t say a great deal for the prevailing climate of the legal system in the United Kingdom that Detective-Inspector Sloan’s first anxiety as the unconscious form of Richenda Hilary Pemberton Mellows fell gracefully to the ground at his feet was what capital a skilled Defence Counsel would make out of it.

  Give them an inch, was his experience, and they would take an ell.

  He cast rapidly about in his mind for the proper course of action.

  “What we need, Crosby,” he said, “are reinforcements.”

  “Reinforcements, sir?” The detective-constable looked distinctly unbelieving. “Are you sure?”

  The last time constable Crosby had had to send back to base for help had also been late on a Saturday afternoon but there the resemblance ended. It had been winter and he had been drafted on duty outside the football ground after the Luston United team had lost a home match. As in Macaulay’s ‘Horatius’, those on the march for Rome had been fourscore thousand and, while in theory Crosby was prepared to echo brave Horatius – he, too, did not think a man could die better than facing fearful odds – he hadn’t wanted to do it that particular day.

  One unconscious girl seemed rather less of a threat, though.

  “She can’t do us any harm, sir, surely. Not like this.”

  “That’s what you think, Crosby,” said Sloan tersely.

  “A little thing like her?” The young policeman positively towered over the girl. “Besides, she’s right out.”

  “We think she’s right out,” said Sloan, who hadn’t taken his eyes off the prone figure for a single moment. “We don’t know for sure.”

  His grandmother, he remembered, had known a trick or two involving burnt feathers and smelling salts – indeed a vinaigrette, cherished but unused, even now reposed in his mother’s china cabinet. The modern world didn’t immediately offer a handy equivalent. There was less call for them, of course, he understood, because stays were out of fashion.

  Sloan bent over and looked at the girl even more closely. So far no eyelid had peeped open to take a sly look at what was going on.

  “I don’t see how,” Crosby began his objection, “a girl on her own can …”

  “Exactly,” said Sloan. “A girl on her own. Two of us, one of her and not another woman in sight. What we need is a woman constable.”

  At this moment Richenda Mellows did stir but it wasn’t her eyelids that moved. It was her chest that did. She gave a great shuddering sigh but she did not speak.

  “In a minute,” forecast Sloan pessimistically, “she’s going to come round and ask where she is.”

  “A woman constable,” said Crosby, fingering his personal radio dubiously. “I’ll see if I can raise one.”

  Sloan noticed the reluctance. Whatever Happy Band of Brothers existed in Crosby’s mind, ‘We Few’ – be they Porthos, Athos and Aramis; or Harry, the King, Bedford and Exeter; or even Horatius, Herminius and Lartius – didn’t include a Sister. Equal rights notwithstanding, Eve had no place in the holding of bridges against Tuscan hordes.

  Richenda Mellows was beginning to surface. She opened her eyes – and promptly shut them again. She swallowed several times in rapid succession and then licked her lips as if her mouth were dry. A moment later she opened her eyes again.

  “Where am I?” she asked.

  “There,” said Sloan under his breath. “What did I tell you, Crosby?”

  The girl peered uncomprehendingly at the two policemen.

  “You’re at Almstone Priory,” said Sloan.

  “What happened?” said the girl.

  Sloan didn’t answer her straightaway. He waited instead for recollection to come flooding back on its own. He saw a frown gather.

  “Nurse Cooper,” she said painfully, her forehead puckered.

  “Dead,” Sloan reminded her.

  Her response was quite unexpected.

  “What will Maurice Esdaile do now?” she murmured.

  Sloan moved forward alertly. “What was that?”

  He shouldn’t have let his interest show. He knew that at once.

  Richenda Mellows took a deep breath and spoke apparently with great effort. “I have nothing to say, Inspector. Nothing at all.”

  Nevertheless it took Sloan another five minutes to be sure that she meant it.

  “To you,” sang Ken Walls.

  “Mind that guy,” said the ever-watchful Norman Burton, used to being responsible for small children.

  “To you,” responded Fred Pearson with the ease of long practice.

  “Watch that wall pol
e,” said Edward Hebbinge.

  “To you,” repeated Walls.

  “Catch that trail rope, someone,” called out Burton.

  “To you,” shouted Fred Pearson, catching the trail rope.

  “Easy does it,” said Ken Walls.

  “Hold the centre,” said Burton.

  “You let go your end now, Mr Milsom,” instructed Fred Pearson.

  “Damn!” exploded Milsom. “Caught my foot,” he explained.

  “Now pull,” called out Ken Walls.

  Fred Pearson had worked on the land all his life. He didn’t pause in what he was doing now. Nor did he waste a single movement. He pulled purposefully at a section of canvas. It subsided like an airship suddenly denuded of essential gas.

  “Carry on with your bit, Ken.”

  Ken Walls, too, knew just what he was doing. His segment of the marquee wall sank gently downwards.

  “My bit’s stuck,” complained Cedric Milsom. “Blast it.”

  “Quick,” commanded Norman Burton unceremoniously. “Undo the right-hand rope.”

  For a moment Cedric Milsom looked as if he might be going to object to the schoolmaster’s tone but he evidently thought better of it and did as he was told. Suddenly his section of the marquee too capitulated and fell inwards.

  Ken Walls called across “Now your lot, Mr Hebbinge.”

  The Priory agent didn’t hesitate. His end of the wall of the Flower Show Marquee capsized according to plan.

  “That just leaves the poles and the main guys,” said Burton. “All together now on the ridge pole.”

  “Now we’ve got her down,” said Pearson presently, “we just want her folding up …”

  Ken Walls jerked his shoulder towards the old stables. “I wonder how the Inspector’s getting on?”

  “It’s a bad business.” Edward Hebbinge shook his head. “I don’t like it at all.”

  They all stood for a moment in silence. Busy as all the men had been, they had none of them forgotten what had happened to Joyce Cooper.

  Fred Pearson was sizing up the collapsed tentage. “Worst part of the job’s still to come, if you ask me.”

  “That goes for the murder, too, doesn’t it?” said Cedric Milsom thickly.