Learning Curve Read online

What was waiting for them back at the police station could have been either.

  Or both.

  Or neither.

  Sitting on his desk was a wodge of photocopies of press cuttings from the Calleford weekly local paper, the Calleshire Chronicle.

  ‘They’re about that caving accident, sir,’ said Crosby, laying them out in front of the inspector. ‘The one over at Chislet Crags.’

  ‘The third man,’ said Sloan enigmatically, conscious that he would have to be careful not to get carried away in the matter of deaths like the man, given a hammer, who saw nails wherever he looked. ‘Well, it’s the third death that we know about, anyway.’

  ‘It looks as if there were actually four of them there, sir,’ the constable said stolidly. ‘It says here that the party was led by Edmund Leaton, who was followed by Simon Thornycroft, Derek Tridgell and a Katherine Booth, whoever she might have been.’

  Sloan pulled the papers towards him and read a headline aloud. ‘Tragedy Underground at Chislet Crags. Death in the Caves.’ Automatically he glanced at the date of the newspaper. ‘Let me see, it’s five – no, six – years ago now.’

  ‘Long enough for the dust to have settled,’ said Crosby, who was still young enough for six years to seem an aeon of time.

  ‘Time for a lot of things,’ growled Sloan, ‘but, according to Tod Morton at the undertakers, not long enough to have got the body out.’

  ‘If they tried,’ pointed out Crosby.

  Sloan scanned the text. ‘It looks as if the others there tried to do so all right at first but that a lot of water started to build up in front of the rockfall because the stream was blocked and they had to get out pretty quickly. It says here that the cavers went down again later with police divers but even so they didn’t get very far.’

  ‘Nasty,’ observed the constable.

  ‘And,’ said Sloan, still reading aloud, ‘since they didn’t know how long the rockfall went on for or how dangerous it would be to try to shift the debris, especially underwater, it looks as if they …’

  ‘Trod water?’ suggested Crosby.

  ‘Were afraid of setting off another roof fall,’ said Sloan coldly.

  ‘They manage to do it in coal mines,’ said Crosby. ‘What’s the difference?’

  ‘Health and safety,’ said Sloan.

  ‘How did they know he, whoever he was …?’

  Sloan interrupted him. ‘We know who he was, Crosby, remember. He was the father of that chatty child who sat next to us in the church and he was mentioned at the funeral service, too.’ He searched his memory for a name. ‘Leaton, that was it. Besides, his name is here in the paper: “Edmund Leaton, a married man with one child”.’

  ‘How did they know he hadn’t escaped and was waiting for rescue on the other side of the rockfall, sir?’

  Detective Inspector Sloan bent his head over the press cuttings again. It took him a minute or two to find the answer to that. ‘It seems that they were all pretty sure that the rockfall had killed him. It was a big one. Besides, they didn’t know if there was another side of the Bite that they could get to. That was the trouble. It seems that finding that out was the object of the exercise that day – to see if there was anything in the way of a new cave beyond what they called the Baggles Bite.’ He paused and said pensively, ‘If there was, they didn’t reach it.’

  ‘Some people get their pleasure in funny ways,’ said Crosby. ‘That reminds me, sir, have you heard about the man who practised animal husbandry until the police found out and arrested him?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Sloan briefly. ‘A very long time ago.’ He scooped up the press cuttings. ‘Find out where this Katherine Booth and Simon Thornycroft live while I talk to the superintendent.’

  Superintendent Leeyes listened carefully to Sloan’s account of the chairman of Berebury Pharmaceuticals, Jonathon Sharp’s, hiring of Chris Honley from their business rivals, Luston Chemicals.

  ‘Even before his friend Derek Tridgell had died, you say?’ said Leeyes, unusually wide-eyed. ‘What sort of a school did the man go to, one where they hit men when they were down?’

  ‘I couldn’t say, I’m sure, sir,’ said Detective Inspector Sloan, alumnus of St Martin’s Primary and Berebury Grammar Schools. He knew, though, that all schoolboys had a code of honour, and one which he didn’t think would have included filling a friend’s position at work while he was still dying. Not unless it was really urgent.

  ‘I don’t like the sound of that, Sloan.’ The name of the superintendent’s old school was not known to his underlings, although Borstal and sundry other young offenders establishments were often suggested.

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘Not cricket.’

  ‘Definitely not, sir,’ said Detective Inspector Sloan, whose own ethics came from an amalgam of the Ten Commandments, the Scout Law and Stone’s Justices’ Manual.

  ‘Doesn’t seem right to me, all the same,’ sniffed Leeyes.

  ‘No, sir, me neither,’ agreed Sloan, who knew all about honour among thieves but not a lot about ethics in other fields.

  ‘Jonathon Sharp could have had a lot to gain by that fellow who fell into a vat and died, couldn’t he?’ mused Leeyes. ‘And probably has by his poaching of Chris Honley, too.’

  ‘It would seem so, sir,’ said Sloan, ‘but Ralph Iddon, Luston Chemicals’ chairman, could still carry on with his war of attrition without both of them and no doubt will.’ He toyed with the idea of saying something about the waters closing over a man’s head when he wasn’t there, but discarded it as inappropriate in the sad circumstances of the head of sales at Luston Chemicals’ terrible death in a vat of chemicals.

  ‘And,’ went on Leeyes, ‘you say this Jonathon Sharp was in the building at the time, pleading for mercy …’

  ‘Or words to that effect,’ put in Sloan, who didn’t know exactly how the chairman of Berebury Pharmaceuticals had made out his case for peaceful coexistence. Perhaps there was no such thing in business.

  As there wasn’t in some warring cultures.

  ‘And you say that Derek Tridgell – the late Derek Tridgell – was there in the building, too, at the same time.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘And he’s the man who had insisted that there had been a murder.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Was this Jonathon Sharp at the funeral, too?’

  ‘Yes, sir. I know that because his name was mentioned.’ Sloan indicated a file in his hand. ‘He wasn’t down in that cave, though, where another man was killed.’

  ‘He probably had more sense than to go caving,’ said Leeyes robustly. ‘He sounds a very clever fellow to me.’

  Marion and Paul Tridgell were both at home the next morning when Jonathon Sharp called at Legate Lodge. Jane had gone out.

  ‘I hope I haven’t come at an awkward time,’ Sharp began as he accepted Marion’s warm invitation to come in and sit down.

  ‘There’s always a bit of a lull after a funeral,’ Marion said obliquely.

  Paul muttered only just out of the visitor’s hearing, ‘After the Lord Mayor’s Show, comes the dustcart.’ His mother heard him, though, and frowned, shaking her head at her son.

  ‘I needed to see you, Marion,’ said Sharp gruffly, ignoring Paul. ‘It’s about the legacy of Derek’s work, his good work. His very good work.’

  ‘It was,’ she said, nodding. ‘I do know that. I always have.’

  ‘And I know it’s a cliché but life does go on,’ said the chairman, unusually tentative.

  She sighed. ‘I know that, too, Jonathon, only too well.’

  ‘Marion, I am sure that we can’t ever really fill Derek’s place … he was truly a key man at Berebury Pharmaceuticals …’

  Paul erupted from the other side of the room. ‘But you’re going to have a damn good try, aren’t you?’

  ‘Your father is irreplaceable,’ said Sharp, turning to him, ‘but the business has to go on too. We all depend on it.’

  ‘Capitalist!’


  ‘Paul,’ protested Marion, ‘your father would have understood what Jonathon is saying.’

  Paul looked at the chairman angrily. ‘You’ve got someone lined up to fill his shoes, haven’t you? I bet you’ve had him in your sights for ages – even while Dad was dying. Must have, if you’re talking about taking him on already.’

  Jonathon Sharp had the grace to look uncomfortable. ‘It was important that we went for the right person.’

  ‘I’ll bet,’ said Paul derisively. ‘I’ve heard all about the funeral baked meats coldly furnishing forth the marriage tables, too. It’s in Hamlet if you haven’t come across it.’

  ‘I know, Jonathon,’ intervened Marion quietly, ‘that you’ll need a very special person to fill Derek’s shoes.’

  ‘That’s exactly who we’ve gone for,’ said Sharp.

  ‘Well, then, who is it?’ demanded Paul. ‘Someone that Dad would have known and hated?’

  ‘Known but not hated,’ protested Sharp. ‘There aren’t all that many men in his particular speciality and in the nature of things they mostly get to know each other.’

  ‘What does that mean?’ asked a truculent Paul.

  ‘As I said, it means that it was important that we went for the right person. We couldn’t afford any delay either.’ Sharp looked from mother to son. ‘Pharmaceuticals is an industry that doesn’t sleep.’

  ‘And of course money doesn’t have feelings,’ said the young man. ‘And that never sleeps either.’

  ‘It’s not that,’ said Sharp uneasily.

  ‘Well?’ Paul demanded. ‘What is it, then?’

  ‘I wanted your mother to know before I announced it, that’s all.’

  ‘All right, then. Tell us. Who is it?’

  ‘Chris Honley.’

  ‘Never heard of him,’ declared Paul.

  ‘Chris Honley from Luston Chemicals?’ asked Marion, who obviously had.

  Jonathon Sharp nodded. ‘Their bright boy.’

  ‘Oh, no,’ Paul howled. ‘I don’t believe it! How could you? Sleeping with the enemy. That’s what I call that.’

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Detective Inspector Sloan’s first action on getting to the police station the next morning had been to ring his friend, Harry Harpe of traffic division.

  ‘Harry,’ he said, ‘there was something I forgot to ask you to spell out for me about that road traffic accident I got you to look up.’

  ‘Go ahead.’

  ‘You remember, don’t you, it was the one with the Tridgell son involved.’

  ‘What about it?’

  ‘All those youngsters in the car swore that they didn’t know who was driving when they crashed—’

  ‘They did know all right but they clammed up,’ interrupted Harpe. ‘I’m pretty sure about that and anyway you can usually tell.’

  ‘That’s what I mean. Why did they gang up like they did? Remind me exactly what did they have to gain by us or anyone else not knowing who it was?’

  ‘Up to fourteen years of freedom for one of them, the one who was driving, that is,’ said the traffic inspector promptly. ‘In other words, Seedy, not going to prison for a maximum of fourteen years on a charge of causing death by dangerous driving. Plus an obligatory driving ban for two years and an unlimited fine. If proved in court,’ he added from sheer force of habit. ‘Mitigating circumstances come into it, of course, but that’s for the court. They don’t ask me.’

  ‘Fourteen years is a long time,’ reflected Sloan.

  ‘If you ask me it should be life, not fourteen years,’ growled Inspector Harpe, a man who had had perforce to attend every road traffic accident in East Calleshire for years and years. ‘Especially as they were all under the influence. You get up to fourteen years for causing death by careless driving under the influence of drink, too,’ he growled, ‘in case anyone thought the lesser charge would be better for the accused.’

  Lesser charges were never the flavour of the month with the traffic inspector. Or with Superintendent Leeyes. Detective Inspector Sloan was more pragmatic, feeling as he did that circumstances altered cases – even police ones.

  ‘And they were all friends, except one of them,’ said Sloan, remembering that that particular man, Danny Saville, had not been at Derek Tridgell’s funeral with the others. He was the one who’d only accepted a lift that night. Even so he, too, had remained silent on the matter of who had been at the wheel.

  ‘And an obligatory driving ban for at least two years plus a compulsory driving retest does make a driver think,’ completed Harry Harpe with a certain amount of relish.

  The pony club’s mantra that if you fell off a horse you were supposed to get straight back into the saddle again before fear could set in obviously didn’t apply to dangerous drivers. They had to come to terms with driving again two years after a fatal accident: not easy, thought the detective inspector who had not so far ever sat astride a horse.

  Sloan swiftly changed tack before the traffic inspector could progress to hanging, drawing and quartering. ‘Tell me, Harry, what hope do you still have of finding out which of them was driving?’

  ‘Not a lot,’ replied Harpe gloomily. ‘Not short of finding fingerprints on the steering wheel or the gear lever which I may say we couldn’t, or DNA on the driving seat which had been covered in oil so we couldn’t do that either.’

  ‘DNA anywhere else?’ asked Sloan. ‘I mean then you might have been able to place one or other of them in the back.’

  ‘No such luck. Without seat belts, they’d all been tossed about so much inside the vehicle that we couldn’t make out which of them had been sitting where.’ He sighed. ‘I assure you, Seedy, that it’s not for want of trying that we couldn’t nail the driver. The others – the passengers – don’t come into it, of course. Not in our book.’

  ‘No, no,’ said Sloan hastily, ‘I know that.’ Meticulousness figured high in the traffic inspector’s code.

  ‘As far as I can see,’ said Harpe, ‘there’re only two ways that we’re ever going to get whoever was at the wheel of that car into court. Either an accusation by one of them …’

  ‘Or a confession by another,’ Sloan finished for him.

  ‘Kate Booth works at Fixby and Fixby, the accountants, in the high street,’ announced Crosby when the inspector sent for him. ‘They’re on the left just beyond the Bellingham Hotel.’

  ‘Walking distance, then,’ decreed Sloan.

  ‘There’s nowhere to park down there, anyway,’ said the constable grudgingly. He didn’t like walking. ‘And the third man in the cave that day, Simon Thornycroft, the civil engineer bloke, is working where they’re building that new bridge over Calleford way although he lives in Berebury.’

  ‘We’ll get the walking over first,’ decreed Sloan, ignoring the sour grapes.

  Kate Booth was a plump young woman, suitably dressed in a dark professional suit, dark stockings and black shoes. She seemed to be quite pleased to be diverted from her work. ‘It’s not every day that you get the police calling at an accountant’s office, Inspector, I can tell you.’

  ‘I should hope not,’ said Crosby righteously.

  ‘It’s usually pretty dull round here,’ she said, waving her hand at a full in-tray and a bookcase filled with leather-bound tomes. ‘That’s why I took up caving. It’s got a bit of an edge to it which accountancy hasn’t.’ She paused and then added, ‘Unless the client hasn’t been rendering unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s, of course. That can get quite hairy.’

  ‘What we’d like to know in the first instance, miss,’ began Sloan without preamble, ‘is whether you were at the late Derek Tridgell’s funeral at Friar’s Flensant?’

  The thought had crossed his mind that the question was like the beginning of an algorithm: if the woman hadn’t been in the church to be fixed by Paul’s beady eye when he mentioned the word ‘killing’, then Sloan thought they could well go away again. Perhaps they could go away anyway – he wasn’t sure. Although Derek Tridgell had spoken as if
it had been a man who had done the killing, Sloan had been trained to remember that in matters legal the male embraced the female.

  ‘Of course I was, Inspector,’ she responded vigorously. ‘All the cavers from the club were there. We sat together near the front of the church. After all, Derek had been one of us for yonks, well before I ever took up caving, anyway. I had quite a chat with his son at the wake afterwards – that’s quite a good pub out at Friar’s Flensant, by the way.’

  ‘So I believe,’ murmured Sloan. Any hostelry he knew would compare favourably with the canteen at the police station for a wake.

  ‘Paul Tridgell’s thinking of taking up caving now,’ she chattered on, ‘and following in his father’s footsteps and all that. I promised I’d give him a hand when he got round to it.’

  ‘Show him the ropes,’ put in Crosby.

  ‘Well, how to rappel down into a cave, anyway,’ she said, taking this literally.

  ‘Ah, yes,’ murmured Sloan casually, ‘I remember reading that you were one of those down there with Derek Tridgell when a man was killed in the Hoath Hole at Chislet Crags.’

  ‘And not likely to forget it either, even though it was so long ago,’ the young woman came back smartly. She shuddered. ‘It was pretty awful at the time, I can tell you, Inspector. I couldn’t stop shaking for ages.’

  ‘Tell me,’ invited Sloan, his notebook remaining just an indeterminate bulge in his pocket.

  She pushed aside some papers on her desk and concentrated on her reply. ‘It was something we’d been planning to do for ages – find out if there was a cave beyond the Baggles Bite. Bit of a feather in our caps at the club if we could, you know. Then we could write it up for the caving journals, too. It would have been a real speleological breakthrough.’

  This particular behaviour Sloan could well understand. There were detectives in the Calleshire County Constabulary who went home every night and made notes for the memoirs that they would publish on their retirement. One thing he knew was that he wasn’t going to be one of them. When he retired it would be a proper retirement and would be devoted to tending his roses. And perhaps one day winning a prize with them at the Berebury Flower Show.