Heberden's Seat

by Douglas Clark

  “I asked that question. He said there was the south door with its porch for the main part of the house and the vestry door for the kitchen. He proposed to seal the west door to keep out draughts.” The Brigadier returned the sketches to their envelope. “I told him I would keep these well-hidden because they showed the possibilities too vividly. Anybody, on seeing these, would realise that refurbished in the way he suggested, that property would become valuable. Desirable as the agents say. And then what would happen to the price? It would shoot up astronomically.” The Brigadier put the envelope back in its drawer.

  “Then what?”

  “We discussed the outside. He’d got plans to turn the churchyard into a garden—lawn, flowers, fruit and vegetables. I told him, of course, that before he could clear the graves he would have to display a tombstone notice.”

  “We saw two copies at the church. Did he do it?”

  “Oh, yes. It is a legal requirement, where former graveyards are to be put to other uses, that the notice must be displayed for twenty-eight days warning of any intention to clear the land of tombstones. The notice gives interested parties a chance to know what you are about and to object if they wish.”

  “What happens if somebody does object?”

  “If the objectors are close relatives of somebody buried recently, then the body must be disinterred and reburied in consecrated ground elsewhere.”

  “Exhumation!” exclaimed Green. “That would cost a bob or two.”

  “No coffins are opened. Just dug up and transported.”

  “At whose expense?”

  The Brigadier grimaced. “Legally, at the expense of the church.”

  “So Melada was all right on that score.”

  The Brigadier shook his head. “I said legally. But with Melada offering as little as two thousand for St John’s, I knew the Commissioners would make it a condition of sale that he should foot the bill should there be one. Either that, or they would insist on the tombstone notice being displayed for its full time before completion of the contract, just to be sure there was no expense to the church itself. I told Melada this.”

  “If there were no objectors the sale would go through. If there were objectors the price would go up?”

  “The church has always had its cake and eaten it.”

  “What was Melada’s reaction when you told him this?”

  “Philosophical. He asked me to try, in my letter, to persuade the Commissioners to let him display the notice straight away so that he could see how he stood. I agreed and suggested that his best plan was to let our diocesan lawyers draw up and post the notice for him so that there should be no slip-ups. As it is more or less a standard document I told him it would cost him no more than a few guineas.”

  “He agreed?”

  “Yes. It was all done from here.”

  “And that was that?”

  “He wanted to know how soon the deal would be fixed. He seemed impatient when I asked him to give me at least a fortnight before he next got in touch with me, by phone. We move with measured tread, Superintendent, and I was not at all sanguine about having news for him in a fortnight. That is why I told him to ring rather than call in.”

  *

  Iliff had returned after lunch expecting to pick up Green and Berger. Instead he found Reed waiting for him in Green’s place.

  “That’s better,” said Iliff. “Your DCI gave me the run around this morning. Made me feel like a raw recruit. And for what? OK! We’ve learned that the fires were started with spectacle lenses. But we’re no nearer knowing who did it.”

  “No?” asked Reed, who had heard Green’s report at lunchtime.

  “No. Not a hope.”

  “It all depends how you look at it. My chief thinks there’s something interesting about your fires, and he’s asked me to follow it up. So I’d like to go and see this vet whose place exploded.”

  Iliff stared at Reed. “He’s not suggesting Mr Marchant blew up his own surgery? Because if he is, I think he’ll find he’s mistaken.”

  “I don’t know what he thinks, but he’s not often mistaken. Not for long at any rate.”

  “OK. Get aboard. We’ll go find Marchant, if he’s available. He could be out at a farm.”

  “Where’s he working from?” asked Berger.

  “The front of his house. It was only the extension at the back that got the chop. The full brunt that is. The fabric of the house is still safe enough to live in.”

  It took just over twenty minutes to reach the vet’s house in the little village of Wrigby. Iliff drew up outside the gate with its professional brass plate. “This is the front way in—the private way. The normal entrance to the surgery is down that eight-foot at the side. There’s a side door in the house.”

  “People didn’t go into the extension?”

  “No. Into the waiting room by the side door. Waiting room, consulting room and office are all in the house. He operated in the extension and kept his drugs there, too.”

  “We’ll try the front,” decided Reed. “It’s not as if we were attending surgery.”

  Marchant was a tall, rangy man in his early forties. His girl assistant who answered the door to the three sergeants called him from the office to meet them. He wore heavy brown shoes, dogtooth check slacks and a white, short-sleeved nylon jacket. He had a great deal of wavy brown hair, decently cut, but distinctly unruly. His face was lean and weather-beaten and he had blue eyes that carried a twinkle that matched the humorous quirk of the lips.

  “Scotland Yard? For a country fire-bug? You’re slipping, Sergeant Iliff. I’d have thought you’d have caught the nut without calling in the Yard.”

  Iliff reddened under this mild ribbing. “As to that, sir, we’ll have to see. But the Yard team is here to deal with the business in Oakby you’ve no doubt heard about.”

  “They’re surely not connecting me with it?”

  “No, sir,” replied Reed. “We’re not. But this is a particularly peaceful part of the country. You get very little except petty crime and I’ve no doubt you’re pleased about that.”

  “We are. Gives Sergeant Iliff an easy life, doesn’t it, Sergeant? An outbreak of foot-and-mouth causes about our biggest scare.”

  “And that is a rare event, sir?”

  “Thank heaven!”

  “Then you won’t be surprised to learn that if, simultaneously, you have an outbreak of fire raising and an outbreak of murder, all on the same little peaceful patch, we should want to make sure whether or not it is just a coincidence or whether there is a connection between the two.”

  “I see what you mean. But . . . outbreak of murder?”

  “We’ve found two bodies so far, sir.”

  “Two? I heard of one. Here, I say, you’re not expecting more, are you?”

  “We hope not. But where there are two—” Reed shrugged his shoulders—“there may be more already, or there may be more to follow.”

  “You mean five fires, five deaths?”

  “Hardly that, sir. But we have to be prepared for anything, so would you mind, first off, telling me if you have any enemies that you know of?”

  “Who would set fire to my surgery, you mean? No. Not one. I’ve had a few disgruntled clients in my time, if they think I’ve let an animal that could be saved die on them. But that has always worn off after the insurance has been paid, and certainly none of those people would go to the length of burning me out.”

  “Well now, sir,” said Reed, “that is just what Sergeant Iliff said of you. But if you have no enemies, what did you have in your surgery that somebody might want to get hold of?”

  “Nothing of any value to a layman. There were a few fairly valuable instruments, I suppose. Even an X-ray machine. But nobody would want to pinch them. What gives you the idea that theft was the motive?”

  “Revenge or theft, sir. Look at it this way. There have been five fires of which yours was the middle one. All the others have concerned old hay stacks and old barns—property of no
value. But yours—well that’s different. A house. And not just any house. A vet’s house. And not just any part of that vet’s house. His surgery, no less. Am I making myself clear, sir?”

  “Yes, but even so it could be coincidence.”

  “Not a chance, sir. Whoever set fire to your surgery had to choose his time. The only time when he could be sure your premises would be empty. That meant after the working day—after your assistant had left the premises; and at the one time in the week when your wife is certain to be out. You, yourself, could be got out of the way at any time by means of a bogus call. But all this means that it was the attempt on your premises which decided at what time of day all five fires should start. With the others, timing was unimportant. So, sir, you’ll see that if the incident here was the one by which the others were timed, and it was the only one where valuable property was attacked, it seems reasonable for us to suppose that either you were the target, or you had something the fire-raiser wanted.”

  Marchant raised his eyebrows. “Whoever it was didn’t come here to pinch anything. He came to set fire to it and blew it up in the process.”

  Berger came in at that point. “That may be true, sir, but there is a different interpretation.”

  “What’s that?”

  “That the fire was started with the intention of causing the bottles of gas to explode in order to cover a theft.”

  “To make us believe nothing was taken, you mean?”

  “It’s feasible, sir. To disguise the fact that there was a break in and a theft.”

  “I suppose that could be true.”

  “It is almost certainly what happened. The fire was started close to the gas. How else could that have happened unless somebody had broken in?”

  “They could have smashed the glass in the door and thrown a lighted bundle to where the bottles were.”

  “Possibly. But would you like to put your arm through a broken window to throw a flaming bundle of rags accurately at a target, or would you even trust yourself to get near that target?”

  “Frankly, no.”

  “And tell me, what sort of a flaming bundle could you trust to keep alight and burn long enough to achieve your object? In the short time, that is, before the vet you had sent off on a fool’s errand discovered he’d been hoaxed and returned to put the fire out?”

  Marchant looked impressed by Berger’s reasoning. But he shook his head and said: “I still don’t know why they picked on me.”

  Reed said: “It’s my guess that you’re the only vet within fifty miles that has a glass-panelled door to his operating room.”

  “Oh, lord!”

  “You see, sir, they might not even have found it necessary to unlock it. Break a glass panel out of a door and you leave a hole big enough for a man to squeeze through normally. As long as he removed the splinters of glass, that is.” Reed looked closely at Marchant. “Can you remember how the glass was fastened into the frame, sir?”

  The vet nodded. “Putty outside and battens inside.”

  Iliff snorted. “Nothing easier to clear,” he said. “Bust the glass close enough to the edge to prise a batten out, and the rest is easy. You clear as you go. No more than a two minute job.”

  “So, sir,” said Reed, “we’d like a comprehensive list of everything inside your surgery.”

  “You must be joking,” said Marchant. “There were hundreds of items in there.”

  “Nevertheless, sir, we want to know. The big items should be easy.”

  “I’ve already listed those for the insurance people. I can give you a copy.”

  “Good. Now how do you propose to claim for your drug stock?”

  “A blanket estimate. It’s not itemised down to the last horse pill.”

  “Probably not, sir, but I’m sure you can remember most of what you had. You have an office?”

  “In here.” He pointed to a door on the right.

  “Invoices?”

  “Mostly at my accountant’s.”

  Reed was not to be beaten. “Drug lists from suppliers, sir. And whatever you call your equivalent of that monthly index of specialities that doctors have. We’ll go through them all, and we’ll take down what you can remember having. You’ll not find it too hard if you visualise your surgery shelf by shelf, and your poisons’ cupboard, sir?”

  “Of course. It was a locked, wall cupboard. . . .”

  “Metal?”

  “Wood.”

  “I see.”

  “You sound disapproving. I was within the law, you know. A locked receptacle within a locked room. Just the same as when we have to leave a bag in a car. The bag has to be locked and the car has to be locked. But I needn’t tell you how easy it is to break into a car—or a locked bag.”

  “No, sir, you needn’t. Shall we go into the office and start the job?”

  Chapter Five

  Masters filled his pipe slowly as the Brigadier brewed a pot of tea himself. He brought the pot and cups out of a cupboard and a saucer with half a lemon on it from inside an old box file that was lying flat on a shelf. “No milk, I’m afraid. I’ve taken to lemon because milk always goes sour and I was faced with getting rid of what remained and then washing the bottle because I don’t like disposing of useful items. Don’t like throwing tonic bottles away.” He cut off three thin slices of the lemon with a little saw-edged kitchen knife. “Can you take it with lemon, gentlemen?”

  “Suits me,” said Green to Masters’ surprise. “Used to drink it iced in Cairo.”

  “Ah,” said the Brigadier, pouring the tea. “I take it you became partial to it stewed over a petrol fire with a matchstick in it to draw the smoke?”

  “That’s right? We used to tap the sides of the old brew can to make the tea leaves sink. There was an art in it. But then there always is in producing the earthly equivalent of nectar.”

  “May I butt in?” asked Masters, accepting a cup. “We’ve got a bit of sergeant major’s brew to deal with in the case of Melada.”

  “Sorry,” said Alton. “The old and bold tend to run on. Back to Melada. As I told you, we undertook to post the notices and we did so inside a couple of days. Melada had been back to the church and had seen them before he rang me at the end of the fortnight I had stipulated.”

  “Were you able to tell him he had got the church?”

  “No.”

  “Why not? Some objection after the notice was displayed?”

  The Brigadier squeezed his slice of lemon against the side of the cup with his teaspoon. “No. I told him that I thought his insistence on posting the notice before the sale was completed had turned out to be bad tactics. I hadn’t realised it would be, and so to some extent I was responsible for his disappointment.”

  “What disappointment?” asked Green. “Don’t tell me somebody gazumped him?”

  “Not quite, because his bid had not been accepted. But displaying the notice gave other people ideas. And, as I knew they would, the Commissioners jumped at a higher bid.”

  “How much higher?”

  “Five thousand. Two and a half times as much.”

  “Who by?”

  “I am not sure I need to tell you that, as the negotiations have so far been cloaked in some secrecy. What I mean is, that the purchaser has been working through a third party.”

  “An agent, you mean?”

  “Agent, yes. But if you mean house agent, no. I said third party. It was done to preserve anonymity and I can see no reason not to respect that.”

  Green who had been sitting quiet, chipped in: “Some property tycoon getting his claws in, I suppose?”

  “A man of property, certainly. But not a tycoon.”

  Masters said slowly: “A man of property? Now, let me see. Who is the person of whom we’ve heard mention—in connection with this case—as a man of property?”

  Green gulped. “Alexander Heberden!” He turned to the Brigadier. “The local squire. Don’t tell me he came in to buy the church?”

  Alton nodded. “How
you managed to guess is not my affair, but his family has been connected with St John’s for several hundred years and he disliked the idea of it passing into hands other than his own if the Commissioners were intent on selling it.”

  “Sentimental reasons only?”

  “Purely. Or so I was informed. He proposed to turn the churchyard into a garden of rest and retreat.”

  “No plans for the church?”

  “Vague ones only. I believe he was toying with the idea of recreating festivals—rural ones mostly—which have now been virtually forgotten.”

  “How d’you mean?” asked Green. “Maypole dancing and all that lark?”

  “I imagine so. Going up the church tower on Ascension Day, which was an old custom. All Hallows Eve junketings, Shrove Tuesday pie suppers, egg rolling at Easter—that sort of thing. Some of them pagan in origin, no doubt. Others probably druidical.”

  “Sunrise at the solstice?” asked Masters.

  “Could be. But I understand he was going to go for even bigger events. He aimed at giving Beckby a Passion Play. Like Oberammergau. To take place at Easter. Nativity play at Christmas, too, for local consumption, and in the summer a festival of church music. His idea was to centre the thing on the Cathedral choir and to augment it every day for a fortnight with different choirs from the diocese, ending up with some massive choral work.”

  “In a church that size?”

  “I’ve told you as much as I heard, but I gathered St John’s was definitely to be the hub of the affair. He probably envisaged using huge marquees in the churchyard, as I believe they sometimes do at Eisteddfods.”

  Masters pursed his lips.

  “You got to know quite a lot.”

  “I’m a nosey old man and I stick to the soldier’s creed. Time spent in reconnaissance is seldom wasted.”

  “But you didn’t see Heberden himself?”

  “I insisted—as I did with Melada—on knowing to what purpose the church would be put. It had obviously been discussed, even if only in general terms, between Heberden and his agent, and that agent did a good selling job with their proposals. Certainly it provided me with good material for the Commissioners and, since they agreed the sale, they must have approved.”