Dead Heading

by Catherine Aird

  ‘I’ll have worked for the Chief Constable for years and years,’ said Crosby stoutly, ‘but I bet he won’t remember me in his Will either.’

  For a long moment Sloan toyed with the idea of trying to explain to the constable the concept that he worked for the well-being of the populace as a whole, not that of the superintendent, but just as soon decided against it as being too abstract. Instead he said, ‘We know that Enid Osgathorp had a large enough income in her retirement to support a long series of exotic holidays abroad and luxurious ones in this country although she still lived very simply when she was at home.’ The fact reminded him that they still hadn’t got any further with identifying the blood and hair on the broken glass at the back of her house. He resolved to give this his attention as soon as he could – not that he knew where to begin. All that he could deduce was that whoever it was who had come in through the front door with a key was more likely to have got it from Enid Osgathorp somehow, somewhere, than whoever had come in through the broken window at the back. This could hardly be described even by an optimist as progress on that investigative front.

  The police station came into view as they turned the corner. ‘My guess,’ continued Sloan, ‘is that the money to finance her lifestyle came from people such as the late Mrs Ann Beddowes by way of blackmail, which is why the money can’t be found, and that is also probably why the poor woman committed suicide.’

  ‘But she was the rector’s wife,’ protested Crosby.

  ‘That, I am afraid, Crosby, does not automatically convey blamelessness, although,’ he added grimly, ‘it does make the appearance of blamelessness very important as far as her husband’s parishioners were concerned.’ His own mother, a great churchwoman, always reminded him that Caesar’s wife was a woman above suspicion but even that was something, police officer that he was, that he had always taken with a pinch of salt.

  The superintendent greeted his return without enthusiasm. ‘The fact that nobody liked the missing person, Sloan, is not evidence.’

  ‘But it may be relevant …’ began Sloan.

  ‘She sounds to me like that “fat white woman in gloves”,’ interrupted the superintendent.

  ‘Enid Osgathorp was short and thin,’ pointed out Sloan, somewhat mystified and not knowing where this was leading. ‘Everyone has said so.’

  ‘“Who walked through the fields missing so much and so much”,’ quoted Leeyes. ‘It’s a poem, Sloan.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Sloan. That explained it. Once upon a time the superintendent had started to attend a series of lectures on modern verse but had left declaring to all and sundry that poems weren’t what they used to be when he was a lad and what had happened to the works of Sir Henry Newbolt? Sloan thought what was more important from a police point of view was whether they too – like the fat white woman in gloves – were missing so much and so much.

  And, if so, what.

  Answer came there none and Sloan made his way back to his own office. There was a report on his desk awaiting his return. Crosby was waiting for him there too.

  The report was from Charlie Marsden, the Division’s senior Scenes of Crime guru. He wrote that, as instructed, he had examined the remains of a bonfire in the garden of The Hollies at Pelling, the home of Benedict and Mary Feakins. He had retrieved a half-burnt gentleman’s hairbrush and the handle of a toothbrush from the embers, the fire being out but its remains still warm by the time he and his team had got there. He had also found traces of fibres and substances that could have been ivory, horn or bone, and did Detective Inspector Sloan want them sent for forensic examination.

  ‘Not half,’ said Crosby when he had read this too.

  Charlie Marsden had appended a footnote to the effect that Benedict Feakins had appeared very anxious when he and his men arrived and kept on saying that he had only been burning some items that had belonged to his late father because he found it upsetting to have them around and that wasn’t illegal, was it? ‘I assured him that it wasn’t,’ wrote Charlie, ‘since under my understanding of English Law a man could do what he liked provided there wasn’t a law against it, unlike some benighted countries where you could only do it if the law allowed you.’

  ‘It doesn’t sound as if Feakins was cremating Enid Osgathorp,’ said Sloan mildly, leaving aside Charlie Marsden’s world view. ‘It’s not something you usually do in full view of the neighbours and he would have had to park the body somewhere out of sight and smell for the best part of three weeks which wouldn’t have been easy.’

  ‘Someone’s done it somewhere, though,’ observed Crosby. ‘If she’s dead, that is.’

  ‘I asked the bank to let me know if she had made any withdrawals since she went missing,’ said Sloan in passing. ‘And they haven’t so far. The trouble is if she was only using her credit card any purchases wouldn’t show up quite yet.’ He pulled his notebook towards him. ‘What I want to know is why should Feakins need to dispose of anything on a bonfire at a time when any sort of movement gives him so much pain?’

  ‘And why get so twitchy if he hasn’t done anything wrong?’ Crosby responded. ‘That’s important.’

  ‘You must always remember, Crosby, that the appearance of guilt does not prove guilt,’ said Sloan, an early lesson by his own mentor fixed for ever in his mind. It was something juries need to be reminded of too.

  ‘Yes, sir. I mean no, sir.’

  ‘It looks to me as if he was trying to destroy evidence of his father’s DNA,’ remarked Sloan thoughtfully.

  ‘I can’t think why he should,’ said Crosby.

  ‘Neither can I,’ said Sloan seriously, ‘but if for a moment we suppose that our Miss Osgathorp was blackmailing both him and Mrs Beddowes we ought to be able to find out why.’

  ‘And why he’s so frightened now.’

  ‘There’s something else you’re forgetting, Crosby.’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘If they are victims, then you can bet your bottom dollar that they’re not the only ones.’ He pushed the report to one side. ‘Our trouble, Crosby, is that we’ve got a jigsaw with too many pieces and we don’t even know if they come from the same puzzle let alone our having a pretty picture to go on.’

  ‘That’s makes them too easy,’ opined Crosby. ‘Anyone can do a jigsaw with a picture.’

  ‘Then,’ said Sloan with a touch of asperity, ‘you tell me what deliberately frost-damaged plants, a missing woman and one who has taken her own life have in common.’

  ‘If anything,’ said Crosby, adding casually, ‘Oh, I rang the admiral’s house like you said. No point in going out there just now, sir. The woman what does for him said he’s just been taken in hospital. He’s gone and broken his hip.’ He grinned. ‘I asked her “Did he fall or was he pushed” and she said it had just broken but he wasn’t in any pain. Hard luck for the old boy, though, all the same, isn’t it?’

  Crosby got no further. Detective Inspector Sloan brought one of his hands into the palm of the other with a loud smack in what he was later to describe as a light bulb moment. ‘That’s it!’ he exclaimed softly. ‘Of course. I should have thought of it before.’

  ‘Thought what, sir?’

  ‘What William Shakespeare told us. He said “Consumptions sow in hollow bones of man”.’

  ‘Beg pardon, sir?’ said Crosby, even more bewildered.

  ‘The car, Crosby,’ Sloan snapped, springing to his feet. ‘Now!’

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  ‘Still no sign of Enid coming back,’ said Marilyn Potts over at Captain Purlieu Plants. ‘I’ve just rung her house in case she’s got home after all and could give her precious talk herself tonight but there was no reply.’

  ‘She’s probably stuck on a donkey in Petra,’ said Anna Sutherland.

  ‘Not Petra,’ said Marilyn. ‘She’s been there. Not enough flowers for her in Jordan, anyway. Now, if you’d said she was marooned on a mountain in Anatolia, that would be more likely.’

  ‘It wouldn’t surprise me,’ said Anna darkly
, ‘if she was one of those vandals who pinch rare seeds while they’re there.’

  ‘Wrong time of the year for seeds,’ said Marilyn ambivalently.

  ‘Rare plants, then. Have trowel, will travel. Don’t you remember that unusual cyclamen she brought back last year from above the tree-line somewhere in Turkey?’

  ‘I don’t know if Customs look in sponge bags,’ said Marilyn doubtfully, ‘but I wouldn’t put it past them.’

  ‘And I wouldn’t put it past Enid to try to smuggle something interesting back here and then ask us to grow it on for her. Goodness knows why she doesn’t have a greenhouse of her own.’

  ‘Greenhouses,’ declared Marilyn, ‘need watching. And don’t we know it,’ she added mournfully.

  ‘Our Enid never misses a trick,’ said Anna. ‘Not never.’

  Marilyn Potts gave a great sigh. ‘And now I must make a few notes for the Staple St James people tonight.’

  ‘You don’t need any notes, my girl. You could talk about orchids standing on your head. And all evening too.’

  ‘But not necessarily the ones we’ve got in the shed for tonight. Enid must have ordered those six special ones from Jack Haines for a reason. I’ll have to try to work out why.’

  Anna Sutherland gave one of her high cackles. ‘Don’t you start on the language of flowers.’

  ‘Why ever not?’ Marilyn giggled. ‘If it came to that, I could always send Norman a bouquet of lobelia.’

  ‘Malevolence,’ interpreted Anna. ‘Good thinking.’

  ‘Mock orange …’

  ‘Deceit,’ said Anna.

  ‘And bilberry,’ said Marilyn.

  ‘Can’t remember,’ admitted Anna.

  ‘Treachery.’

  ‘Just the job,’ concluded her friend. ‘That’s him – malevolent, deceitful and treacherous. And don’t we know it.’

  ‘Do get a move on, Crosby,’ urged Detective Inspector Sloan.

  ‘Yes, sir. Of course, sir.’ Crosby had followed Sloan at a dog trot out to the police station’s car park and into their police car. ‘Where to, sir?’ he asked as he started the car’s engine.

  ‘Berebury Hospital and don’t hang about.’

  Had it not been for the set look on his superior officer’s face, Detective Constable Crosby might have been inclined to retort that he never hung about when at the wheel but one glance at the expression on Sloan’s countenance was enough to ensure that he stayed silent as the car ate up the distance between the police station and the hospital. At one point he was tempted to ask what the hurry was all about but he held his tongue. After a few minutes he was rewarded with a terse explanation.

  ‘What I want to do, Crosby,’ said Sloan, ‘is to get to the hospital before they put the admiral under.’

  ‘I see, sir.’ The constable pressed his foot down on the accelerator a little more firmly.

  ‘They’ll be giving him an anaesthetic any minute now so they can set his leg and I must talk to him first.’

  ‘I’m sure, sir,’ said Crosby. He made a token pause at a roundabout, cutting in neatly ahead of a sports car to the manifest surprise of its young driver.

  ‘And I’m sure of something else,’ murmured Sloan, more to himself than to Crosby. ‘But I need to know for certain.’

  Detective Constable Crosby waited until more of the road had slipped by and then ventured a question. ‘Is it important, sir? I mean, seeing the admiral now.’

  ‘Anaesthetics can do funny things to the memory and also,’ he added caustically, ‘can be a gift to the defence.’

  ‘Am I being a bit slow, sir?’ Crosby asked humbly.

  Detective Inspector Sloan essayed a small smile. ‘I think that in the motoring sense, Crosby, that would be a first but we’re not talking fast cars now, are we?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘And you’re not being slow. If anyone’s been slow it’s me. It’s the admiral’s leg that’s broken for no reason and without pain that’s made me remember.’

  ‘Remember what, sir?’ Crosby caused the police car to round a blind bend with impeccable respect for any cars that might have been oncoming and straightened the vehicle up at just the right moment afterwards.

  ‘Timon of Athens.’

  ‘A Greek gentleman would that be, sir?’

  ‘No, Crosby, just a character in a play.’

  ‘But with hollow bones, I think you said.’

  ‘He was a man with many friends. Too many friends,’ Sloan said ambiguously, as some more of the play came back to him. It had been a youthful schoolmaster who had seen fit to bring it to the attention of a group of pubescent boys in a lesson called ‘Relationships’ but really to do with the facts of life: the dangerous ones. English literature had had nothing to do with it; sexually transmitted diseases everything.

  ‘You can’t have too many friends, surely,’ objected Crosby, who found it difficult to make them, based as he was in modest lodgings.

  ‘It depends on the friends,’ said Sloan dryly.

  ‘In Athens, were they, these friends?’

  ‘What? Oh, no, just in this play by William Shakespeare called Timon of Athens.’

  Detective Constable Crosby promptly returned his whole attention to the steering wheel, while Detective Inspector Sloan went back in his mind to when he first heard that bit of the play read out. It was the shape of the admiral’s nose that should have told him in the beginning. What was that quote? ‘Down with the nose, down with it flat, take the bridge quite away.’ The admiral’s nose had had no bridge.

  ‘Which door, sir?’ asked Crosby, swinging the car through the hospital entrance gates with a flourish and bringing it to a standstill in a bay marked ‘Ambulances Only’.

  ‘This will do,’ said Sloan, leaving the constable to find out for himself whether the authority of a policeman on duty ranked higher than that of an ambulance man with a patient on board. Once inside the hospital, though, and presented with a long direction board, Sloan wasn’t sure where to go next. As far as he was concerned it was a toss-up between ‘Orthopaedic’ and ‘Geriatric’ wards.

  Opting for the orthopaedic ward, he was met at its portals to his relief by a woman in nursing uniform. In Sloan’s experience people in uniform had the weight of authority behind them and as a rule knew what they were doing. This one admitted to having a patient called Waldo Catterick in her care and certainly knew what she was doing.

  This was refusing to let him onto her ward. ‘Until visiting time,’ she said flatly, ‘and then only if the patient is feeling like visitors.’

  ‘It is important that I see him before he is operated on,’ said Sloan. ‘Very.’

  ‘It is important that he has his premedication before then,’ she countered, adding in an acidulated tone that mocked his own, ‘very.’

  ‘Really important,’ he pleaded.

  This she showed no sign of responding to.

  ‘Please, sister,’ he said.

  ‘I really cannot have a patient disturbed at a time like this,’ she said austerely, the majesty of the nursing profession meeting the majesty of the law head on.

  He tried another approach. ‘Not even if it’s a matter of life or death?’

  The distinction between the two was obviously less important in the medical world than the police one since it cut no ice with a ward sister accustomed to daily matters of life or death. She said, ‘It is important that the patient goes to the operating theatre in a calm state of mind and,’ here she gave a minimal smile, ‘I cannot imagine that a visit from the police could be other than unsettling.’

  It wasn’t, thought Sloan, so much a case of irresistible force meeting immoveable object as of Greek meeting Greek. He decided on a different – and definitely duplicitous – ploy. ‘I could always arrest him,’ he said to the ward sister, even though he wasn’t sure that he could. He made to take a pair of handcuffs out of his pocket. ‘Neither you nor anyone else, sister, can stop me doing that in the performance of my duty as a police officer.’
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  ‘All right then,’ she conceded, yielding very reluctantly, the majesty of the law prevailing over the Florence Nightingale ethos at last. ‘I’ll give you a minute or two with the patient. No longer, mind. And don’t upset him.’

  It was all he needed.

  Admiral Waldo Catterick was lying on the bed, a pale blue flowered hospital operation gown giving the old sailor an oddly feminine appearance and one quite at odds with his grey beard.

  ‘There’s something I need to know about Miss Enid Osgathorp,’ said Sloan without prevarication.

  A pair of china blue eyes stared back at him. ‘A nasty piece of work,’ responded the admiral without hesitation.

  Sloan pulled up a chair and sat down beside his bed. ‘Tell me why. I need to know.’

  The old man gave him a shrewd look. ‘Will it stay between you and me?’

  ‘I’ll do my best but I can’t make any promises.’ There were other, higher, authorities than his and truth – the whole truth – came into their reckonings well ahead of such trifles as personal privacy, career and reputation.

  The beard lifted and fell, signifying its owner’s understanding of this. ‘She tried to blackmail me about having had what we called one of the venerable diseases,’ he said. ‘Oh, not directly but I knew quite clearly what she meant.’

  ‘They were old in history,’ offered Sloan. This much he did know. And he knew too, that judgements were for the courts, not the police. And perhaps – who knows? – to Saint Peter.

  ‘Oh, they’re treatable now but it wasn’t so easy in my day, Inspector. You’re too young to remember.’ He shifted slightly in the stiff hospital bed and then went on, ‘I caught a dose of the clap out east when I was a young man and it’s on my medical record. And,’ he added dryly, pointing to his broken leg, ‘you might say that I’m now paying the wages of sin.’

  The young schoolteacher had skirted round most of these in his talk on relationships but Sloan could see some of them embodied in the patient before him now.

  ‘That was enough for the Osgathorp woman, of course,’ he said. ‘She knew, all right, and could prove it.’ He sighed. ‘Every nice girl loves a sailor. That was the trouble.’