Heberden's Seat

by Douglas Clark

  “Ought to have?”

  “Your pathologist didn’t seem too sure that he would be able to give us much help.”

  “Oh, he will. Watling’s a sound man.”

  Masters laughed. “You do realise what you’ve just said, don’t you?”

  Webb looked bewildered.

  “If Watling is so sound, why shouldn’t I believe his preliminary report? A good pathologist who admits to being unable to find a hypodermic mark is probably correct right at the start.”

  “I see what you mean. If he’s good, his first report is right, so you won’t expect much more from him.”

  “It’s a logical conclusion. I have to keep it in mind. Let’s hope I’m wrong.”

  “Thereby proving me wrong about Watling.”

  Masters grinned. “There’s a lot to do. Don’t let’s start by assuming we’re wrong about anything.”

  Green finished his course and pushed the plate away. “That’s better! Now, where are we? Lemon meringue pie for pud? Fair do’s. I’ll have a double helping.”

  Webb stared at him, hard. Green noticed the look.

  “What’s up, lad? Wondering why I want a double helping? It’s because I’ve got two men’s work to do, son.”

  “Meaning mine and your own?”

  “You said it.”

  Webb turned to Masters. “Just as a matter of interest, sir, what can I do to help?”

  “Provide us with a second car. I’d like you to help Mr Green and Sergeant Berger tomorrow morning. He’ll be eliminating the fires, and as you know the district you’ll be invaluable to him.”

  “What about a guide for you?”

  “Perhaps your Sergeant Iliff. . . .”

  “Uniform branch? Look, sir. The fires were on Iliff’s patch, so he could escort Mr Green. . . .”

  “Suits me,” said Green. “I took a shine to that boyo. He as good as told His Nibs here he was under suspicion for murder. I liked that.”

  Chapter Two

  “Where to, Chief?” asked Reed at half past eight the next morning.

  “Follow Mr Webb’s instructions. I want to go to the Belton house, but I think we’re a little too early for that. A woman who learned only last night that she is a widow won’t welcome visitors before the streets are aired, so we’ll have a look at the church first.”

  As they motored, Masters questioned Webb as to what steps he had taken at St John the Divine’s after the body had been found.

  “None, really. The big thing was to get the body up and away. After that I told Iliff to keep a man at the site. I expected you to be involved so I gave instructions that the constable on duty was to stay near the gate and not to trample near the well in case you wanted to examine the ground.”

  “Thanks. I did look about me while I was there yesterday, and so did Green. I know the grass is long, but I don’t think there’s anything there for us.”

  The roads were not too busy, and Reed made good time. It was another glorious day, with the clearness of air only to be found in countryside unpolluted by industry. The hedgerows were burdened with foliage and wild roses—single, frail, pale pink blossom—and the trees stood motionless, untroubled by any breeze across the flat landscape. It was only as they approached Oakby that there was any really noticeable rise and fall of hill and valley.

  “What are we approaching?” asked Masters. “The Lincolnshire Wolds or the Lincoln Edge? I can never remember which is further east.”

  “The Edge,” replied Webb. “You can always tell. The edge is limestone and broken in straight lines. The Wolds are chalk and all gently rounded. You need to go up to Louth and that area to see the Wolds properly. That’s how I tell.”

  “It doesn’t look very broken,” said Reed.

  “Not just here, sergeant. It’s just the odd rise about here. The scarp itself is further over.”

  Less than half a mile after they left the village, climbing gently as they went, they reached the church. The constable on duty had already removed his jacket, which now hung on a gate post.

  “Any trouble, constable?”

  “No, sir, nothing. I relieved PC Arthur at six and there’s hardly a soul been past since I took over. He reported all quiet during the night, too, sir.”

  Webb turned to Masters. “How long are you likely to be here, Chief?”

  Masters noted the form of address, which usually only his own sergeants used, but did not remark on it.

  “You’d like the constable to have a cup of tea, is that it? Right. Send him off to the village. Say half an hour. Reed can run him in.”

  “I’ve got my bike, sir,” said the grateful constable. “Just inside the hedge.”

  “Right. Cut along.”

  As the PC was retrieving his machine, Masters asked: “Do you live in Oakby?”

  “Yes, sir. I’m in Oakby. PC Arthur in Beckby.”

  Masters nodded and went through the gate. It was rather difficult for him to get a true picture of the plot, because it appeared to be entirely surrounded by trees and tall hedges and to contain overgrown bushes and trees which blocked the view. But it lay on the shallow hillside and was, as far as he could make out, roughly square, with the little church more or less in the middle. He made an estimate of its size. Something over a hundred yards each way. His maths was still good enough to tell him that there would be approximately two acres of graves and tombstones all overgrown by a wilderness that hadn’t been tended in any way for a number of years and, probably, only spasmodically for long enough before that.

  The grass grew waist-high: rye grass all ready to seed and bring on yet more of its kind. Privet, yellow-spotted laurel, yew and even overgrown ribes. Self-set, they burgeoned between the graves that were scarcely discernible to the foot as Masters moved forward. The grass was still wet with dew and he parted it before him with his arms. There were saplings, too. Mostly horse-chestnuts with stems already over an inch in diameter and six feet high—the progeny of a great conker tree towering at the north-west corner.

  Some yards in, Masters stopped and looked about him. Except over the top of the gate, he could no longer see the road. Another step to the right, and even this view was denied him.

  “What are you looking for, Chief?” asked Reed, standing on what remained of the beaten track to the south door.

  Masters replied slowly. “I find this place a bit sinister. Not enough to make me afraid, but enough to remove me from a neutral attitude towards it. Now that’s probably me being fanciful after discovering a murdered man yesterday. But Tennyson was a Lincolnshire poet, wasn’t he, Webb?”

  “Yes, Chief,” answered the DI in amazement.

  “And what do you know of his work?”

  “The Brook. ‘Men may come and men may go’. That one.”

  “Anything else?”

  “The one we used to call the Lady of the onions when I was a kid at school. The Lady of Shalott.”

  “Yes. Well we’ve lost two men who were such close mates they were like brothers. Now we’ve found one of them. And Tennyson wrote a piece called In Memoriam, in which one of the lines asks, ‘Where wert thou, brother, those four days?’”

  “And?”

  “It was some days between Melada’s disappearance and Belton’s, wasn’t it?”

  “About ten?”

  “So where was brother Melada during those ten days?”

  Reed gasped. “You mean . . . you mean you think he’s here, Chief?”

  “Why not?”

  Reed looked about him. “Where exactly?”

  “That’s for us to find out. He’s obviously not down the well, otherwise Iliff would have discovered him yesterday. But this is a graveyard. . . .”

  *

  Sergeant Iliff picked up Green and Berger at The Chestnut Tree a minute or two after Masters had left.

  “Where to, Mr Green?”

  “Nowhere, laddie, not for a moment.” Green got into the car. “These fires you’ve been having. Tell me about them.”

&nbs
p; “Nothing to tell, sir.”

  “Come on, laddie. There’s bags of it. In which order did they happen? How long between? What time of day? How far apart? What did the fire officers say?”

  “Well, sir, the first one was reported by PC Bannerman. It was the second Thursday in June. I don’t know if you remember, but it had been as hot and dry as anybody round here could remember and people were already talking about a coming water shortage—the one we’ve got now, in fact.”

  “If they were saying that,” said Berger, “it would mean the fire-brigades couldn’t cope, and that’s almost a direct invitation to fire-raisers. That’s probably why it started.”

  “As to that, I can’t say. But I do know the public were asked to be careful and vigilant, and the force—particularly the country bobbies—were warned to be on the lookout for outbreaks.”

  Green—unusually for him—offered his cigarette pack to both the two sergeants. “Right, lad. I’ve got the background picture. Now let’s get down to details. And don’t leave anything out.”

  “Wouldn’t it be better to see Bannerman personally, Mr Green?”

  “I will, laddie—if what you tell me warrants it.”

  Iliff accepted a light and then began. “Bannerman was cycling his beat. In the early evening, it was. He came on at six, and I suppose it would be maybe a quarter of an hour later when he rounded the spinney at Adthorpe’s corner. You won’t know where that is. . . .”

  “Never mind. Go on.”

  “It was then he saw the rick fire.”

  “No smoke before that? I’d have thought he’d have seen it miles away.”

  “No sir. Very little smoke. Too dry, you see. Just a great mass of flame two fields away from the road. Ricks are sometimes built out in the middle of nowhere, and this was several years old, so it was no great loss to the farmer, though I reckon he’ll have got compensation.”

  “What happened?”

  “Nothing much. Bannerman knew it was hopeless to try and save the rick. It had almost gone in any case. But there was danger to the nearby hedgerow and its trees and, of course, to the standing crops close by. So he needed beaters. He radioed in for help. And there was a car pulled up there—two young couples who had stopped on the road to gawp. He asked them to take a message to the farm, which was about half a mile down the road, in a dip. Farmer Clifford hadn’t seen the blaze, but he rustled up a few chaps with shovels to stand by. They couldn’t get close to put out the fire because of the heat, but they managed to stop it spreading.”

  “What about the brigade?”

  “We told them, and they came. But there was no water handy and they reckoned it was safer to let it burn itself out rather than use what water they had on board.”

  “Funny attitude.”

  “Not really. Water was short. And they’d have had to run out hoses across two fields of young crops—or drive across them.”

  “I see. Then what?”

  “Nothing. That’s it. Bannerman saw nobody who could have started it, and the fire-officer couldn’t say what caused it. There were no obvious signs of paraffin or petrol being used. It could have been a fag-end from a courting couple having a cuddle there, or spontaneous combustion even.”

  “Dead end, eh? Right, what next? A barn, wasn’t it?”

  “Two days later. On the Saturday. Early evening again and seven miles away from Farmer Clifford’s rick, Farmer Cobb’s barn was burned down. It was an old, ramshackle sort of building. . . .”

  “A bit like the rick?” asked Green. “Not worth much?”

  “If you’re thinking Cobb burned it down to get the insurance,” said Iliff with some heat, “you’ve got another think coming, Mr Green. Cobb isn’t like that.”

  “I didn’t say he was, son,” said Green soothingly. “Farmers don’t have to get up to that sort of trick to earn a bob or two.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning there’s as many fiddles as cows down on any farm and don’t pretend there isn’t. You never knew a farmer go without beef for Sunday dinner.”

  Iliff accepted this without comment. “Anyhow,” he continued, “it was an old barn, plank-built and pitched on the outside, and that helped the fire to burn more fiercely than might otherwise have been the case.”

  “Did the brigade get to it?”

  “Yes. They didn’t save it, of course, because there was nothing much to save. But I got a report from the fire officer next morning. I went along there and he was doing his inspection after it had all cooled down. He said that in his opinion the fire had started, not inside the barn, but outside it, in the middle of the south west side to be precise.”

  “Hottest point, was it?”

  “That’s right. And he said it had been started by a piece of glass.”

  “How did he know that?”

  “He found it. It was a spectacle lens. He said it had been thrown on some inflammable rubbish piled against the wall and it had drawn the sun’s rays.”

  “Concentrated them like a burning glass?” asked Berger.

  “That’s right.”

  “And what had the farmer to say about that?” asked Green.

  “He said he’d have understood a bit of broken bottle being there, though he’s pretty careful to see none’s left lying around because of the animals. But he was flummoxed by a spectacle lens.”

  “So am I,” said Green. “Who’d drop a spectacle lens without looking for it and picking it up? And in a place like that? If you’ve had to pay for a pair of glasses lately, like I had to for my missus a couple of months ago, you’d know they come too dear to be dropped on rubbish heaps.”

  “Did the fire-officer think it was arson?” asked Berger.

  “Not really. He had nothing to go on. But I interviewed Cobb, his family and the farmhands. None of those who had glasses had lost a lens and Cobb was sure no stranger had been near the barn because it’s pretty near the house, but it was Saturday and most of ’em had gone off after work. There was the old cowman left to do the evening milking, but he’d had to go out into the fields to get the animals, so there was plenty of opportunity for anybody to get to the farm unseen.”

  “Right,” said Green. “There was a gap of another two days, was there, and then a vet’s place went up?”

  “Three days. The following Tuesday.”

  “Early evening?”

  “Yes.”

  “Let’s have it.”

  “It was a very strongly built wooden extension at the back of the vet’s house. He used the bottom floor for waiting room, consulting room and office and he’d had this bit built on to house his full stock of drugs and to use as an operating surgery. The vet and his wife lived on the top floor.”

  “No kids?”

  “Just the two of them.”

  “And where were they when the shop went on fire?”

  Iliff grimaced. “The wife was out. She always was on Tuesdays. Went to see her mother or to play bridge or some such thing.”

  “And the vet himself?”

  “He was called out. Over to Cratchett’s farm, but. . . .”

  “But what?”

  “Cratchett hadn’t called him.”

  “You mean the call was bogus?”

  “Apparently.”

  “How do you know there was a call?”

  “We don’t. That is, we can’t prove it. But the vet’s a well-thought-of man, and I reckon that if he really wanted to blow his place up to get the insurance he could have done it at a time when he was out on a real case and wouldn’t have to rely on a bogus call for an alibi.”

  “Hold it, hold it!” growled Green. “Blow his place up? You mean explosives were used?”

  “As good as. Next to his operating table he had two cylinders—one of oxygen and one of ether. Before the brigade could get the fire under control, those gas bottles exploded. Believe me there wasn’t much left of that extension, and the back of the house was seriously damaged.”

  Green sucked at his partial den
ture for a moment before asking. “Could the fire officer say where the fire started and how?”

  “He said it had been started internally. He couldn’t be sure. Not after all the evidence had been showered for miles around. But he got the feeling that the heart of the fire had been just inside the door to the right near to where the vet had his operating table.”

  “Close to his gas bottles, in fact?”

  “I reckon.”

  “So whoever did it probably knew they’d explode.”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “No, but it’s worth bearing in mind. Now how did our incendiarist get in?”

  “He wouldn’t have to. If he broke a pane of glass in the door he could toss some burning materials to the point where the fire officer reckoned the blaze started.”

  “Glass door?”

  “There was a lot of glass in the extension. It was for operating in, remember. He needed the light.”

  Green expired noisily. “And I suppose there was a spring lock on the door.”

  “Yes. And a bolt, and a chain.”

  “All of which could be opened once a pane of glass was smashed, I suppose.”

  “Right.”

  “Won’t they ever learn?” Green turned to Berger. “O.K. It’s your turn to hand round the fags.” After the sergeant had obliged, Green again addressed Iliff. “Right, lad. That’s three fires. There’s two more. Another rick and another barn.”

  “Spaced a couple of days apart.”

  “Serious, were they?”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Well, so far, we’ve only had one fire that did what you might call serious damage. What about the last two?”

  “They were like the first two. Started in the early evening. An old rick and an old shed-like place near a crew yard.”

  “Near a what?”

  “Crew yard. A crew is a herd round here. A yard where they herd cattle. Usually ankle-deep in muck.”

  “Don’t go on. I can imagine it.”

  “Anything else you want to know, Mr Green?”

  “Lots, laddie. Lots. Start her up. We’ll go to the site of the first fire.”