Harm’s Way

by Catherine Aird

  “They’re called intermittent rivers,” he informed her in his classroom manner.

  “They do say,” said Wendy, “that it only flows when something awful is going to happen.”

  Briggs sniffed. “There’s always something to be woeful about.”

  “If it’s flowing,” persisted Wendy obstinately, “it presages doom.”

  “It’s more likely,” said Briggs prosaically, “that there’s a sump under the hill at the head of the valley and when that’s full and primed the river starts up again.”

  Together they regarded the Westerbrook. Its shallow waters glistened in the sunshine.

  “I must say it looks harmless enough,” said Wendy.

  Briggs turned his gaze upwards. “There’ll be plenty of water under the hill at the moment. That’s why it’s flowing.”

  “We haven’t had so much rain lately though,” insisted the girl.

  “And when it’s all emptied away,” forecast Briggs, “the Westerbrook will dry up again.”

  “Woe waters,” insisted Wendy obdurately, “that’s what they are.”

  Gordon Briggs shrugged his shoulders and turned away from the stream. The two walkers soon resumed their steady pace, Wendy Lamport in the lead, Gordon Briggs a step or two behind.

  That was how it came about that Wendy saw the object first. She had been aware of the crows without particularly remarking on them. There were always crows about on farms and their presence had not especially impinged on her consciousness. Afterwards she could not even remember if she had noticed the actual bird that had flown across the path just ahead of her.

  What was certain, though, was that it had dropped something.

  Wendy was only a few paces away from that something and she automatically looked down to see what it was.

  And for ever afterwards wished that she hadn’t.

  As she saw what it was that was lying there she halted so abruptly that Gordon Briggs very nearly cannoned into her. He, too, stopped.

  “What’s the matter?” he asked.

  “Look!” whispered Wendy, her face paled.

  “Where?” said Briggs.

  “There!” She pointed an unsteady finger in the direction of the ground.

  “What at?”

  “That,” she said shakily.

  “I can’t see anything …” His voice trailed away as he too saw what was lying on the footpath. “Good Lord!”

  “A finger,” she gulped. “That’s what it is, isn’t it?”

  “It can’t be.”

  “But that’s what it is,” she repeated, a rising note of hysteria coming into her voice, “isn’t it?”

  Gordon Briggs nerved himself to bend forward and examine it more closely. “Yes,” he said soberly, “I’m very much afraid that it is.”

  TWO

  Before the ending of the day

  “Remains thought to be human,” said Police Superintendent Leeyes more technically.

  It was later that same afternoon and he was talking to Detective Inspector C. D. Sloan at Berebury Police Station. Inspector Sloan, who was known as Christopher Dennis to his nearest and dearest, was—for obvious reasons—called “Seedy” by his friends. He was the head of Berebury’s Criminal Investigation Department. It was a tiny department but such crime as there was in that corner of Calleshire usually landed up in Detective Inspector Sloan’s lap.

  “Constable Mason reported them,” continued Leeyes.

  “Mason from Great Rooden?” said Sloan.

  “None other,” said Leeyes heavily.

  “There’s never a lot of trouble out that way, sir,” remarked Sloan.

  “There’s never any trouble at all at Great Rooden,” declared Leeyes emphatically. “Ever.”

  “Not if Ted Mason can help it,” agreed Sloan. “You can count on it.”

  “Mason,” pronounced Leeyes flatly, “is one of your anything-for-a-quiet-life type of constables and he sees that there isn’t any trouble.”

  Detective Inspector Sloan knew this too. Police Constable Mason was well known for keeping the quietest beat in the county.

  “He grows prize cabbages very well,” snapped Leeyes tartly.

  “He won’t be pleased about human remains then, sir, will he?” said Sloan in an attempt to get back to the matter in hand.

  “He isn’t.”

  “Still, sir,” went on Sloan, determinedly looking on the bright side, “these remains—they could be archaeological, couldn’t they? Perhaps it was an ancient Briton.”

  “It’s not an ancient Briton,” said Leeyes, adding sourly, “You’re nearly as bad as Mason.”

  “No, sir?”

  “It’s not an ancient anybody, Sloan,” said Leeyes. “There’s still some flesh on the bone.”

  “That’s quite different,” agreed Sloan quietly.

  “It was the flesh that worried Mason, too,” grunted Leeyes. “Bones—old bones—you can sweep under the carpet, but not flesh. Not even Constable Edward Mason.”

  “What’s he done about it?”

  “Marked the spot,” replied Leeyes neatly, “and passed the buck.”

  “What’s he done with the finger?”

  “Taken it back home with him,” said Leeyes briskly. “At the moment it’s sitting in a cardboard box in his office in Great Rooden.”

  “This farm, sir …”

  “Pencombe.”

  “Anything known about it?”

  “Never heard of it before,” said Leeyes.

  “And the farmer?”

  “George Mellot,” said Leeyes, adding gratuitously, “Nothing known about him either.”

  “Mason will know him, of course.” Sloan was confident of this. What with warble fly and the dipping of sheep and this regulation and that, country constables knew farmers.

  “Oh, Mason knows him, all right,” said Leeyes. “Mason knows everyone out that way.”

  “Well?”

  “Mason,” said Leeyes scornfully, “has reported that George Mellot farms well—which doesn’t tell us a lot about flesh and bones on his farm.”

  “No, sir,” agreed Sloan. It told them something about the man though, and that might help. It was too early to tell. “Has he been at Pencombe long?”

  “Man and boy,” said Leeyes. “Mason knew that much.”

  “If there’s a finger, sir,” began Sloan tentatively, “then—”

  “I know what you’re going to say, Sloan,” interrupted Leeyes. “If there’s a finger there’s usually a body. I know that.”

  “Usually?” Sloan echoed a word he hadn’t expected to hear.

  “Not always,” said Leeyes testily.

  Sloan cast about wildly in his mind. Test tube babies and cloning had come a long way, he knew, but …

  “There are exceptions,” said Leeyes.

  “Sir?”

  “I never have been entirely happy about Berebury Hospital, Sloan.”

  “Really, sir?”

  “I’m sure if we looked into it that we would find their disposal system pretty haphazard.”

  “Very probably, sir.” The back doors of most institutions were not as imposing as the front.

  “They’ve got to do something with the bits they chop off, haven’t they?”

  “You think the finger could be surgical waste, do you, sir?” Sloan didn’t know if that was what the surgeons called the end product of an amputation, but it would be bound to be dressed up as some ambiguous euphemism. There was nobody better at doing that than the medical profession.

  “I don’t know,” responded Leeyes, “but I do know that we’ll look pretty silly in the county if this finger turns out to have come from a man who works in a sawmill who’s only got nine left on his hands.”

  “Quite so, sir. I’ll check with the hospital, of course. But if it isn’t one of theirs, so to speak, where should we be looking for the rest of the body?”

  “Exactly, Sloan, where.” On the wall behind Superintendent Leeyes was a vast map of the County o
f Calleshire. The limits of F Division were outlined by a thick black line. Great Rooden was in the south-east. Detective Inspector Sloan advanced towards the map while Superintendent Leeyes swivelled round in his chair and found a spot with his finger.

  “Here’s Great Rooden,” he said. “Now, where’s Pencombe Farm … Ah, here it is, Sloan. Just outside Great Rooden on the way to Sleden and Little Rooden.”

  “Yes, sir.” Sloan made a note. Archaeologists had a special word they used for the place where they found bones and other things. It would come to him in a minute. “Right, sir, I’ve got that,” he said aloud. Provenance, that was it.

  “It’s off the Sleden road if you’re going by car.”

  Detective Inspector Sloan would be going by car. To begin with, anyway. The foot-slogging came later. He said, “These people who found it …”

  “Two walkers,” said Leeyes. “The girl’s a bit upset.”

  “I’m not surprised.”

  “They were out on a Tewt.”

  “A what, sir?”

  “T.E.W.T.,” spelled out Leeyes. “A Tactical Exercise Without Troops.” Superintendent Leeyes’ time in the army had left him with a distinctly military turn of speech. He enlarged on the theme. “They were prospecting for a walk tomorrow with a group.”

  “So they were there by accident,” deduced Sloan. “Nobody knew they would be coming.”

  “Not even the crows,” said Leeyes.

  “I don’t know a lot about crows, sir,” began Sloan tentatively. Detection made many demands on a man, not all of them foreseeable.

  “They eat carrion,” Leeyes informed him.

  Sloan repressed a slight shudder. It was all very well to use a word like carrion. It was when you came to think about it that it wasn’t nice.

  “And you know what that means, Sloan, don’t you?”

  “Yes, sir.” He cleared his throat. “If this finger didn’t come from the hospital …”

  “Yes?”

  “Then ten to one there’s the rest of the body about somewhere.”

  “I wondered when you were going to get round to that, Sloan.”

  “We’ll have to find it.”

  “You will,” said Leeyes. “Can’t have an inquest on a finger, can we? The coroner wouldn’t like that.”

  “No, sir.”

  “Besides,” said Leeyes, “we’d be the laughing-stock of the force.”

  “Yes, sir.” Sloan could see that that factor took an even higher priority.

  “And the sooner the better.”

  “Yes, sir.” That went for all detection. Cold trails made work more difficult.

  “And the only man I can spare today,” said Leeyes by way of a Parthian shot, “is Detective Constable Crosby. I know you won’t like it, Sloan, but you’ll have to take him.”

  “Thank you,” murmured Wendy Lamport. “You’re very kind.” She put her hands gratefully round a proffered cup of tea. Even though it was a warm day she was still shivering slightly.

  “You’ll feel better when you’ve drunk it,” forecast the woman whom she took to be Mrs. Mellot.

  Wendy Lamport and Gordon Briggs were sitting in the farmhouse kitchen at Pencombe. It was a big room with a low ceiling and a great stove at one end. In the middle of the room was the largest kitchen table that Wendy had ever seen. Mrs. Mellot’s first reaction to the news about the finger had been to put the kettle on the stove.

  “I never have liked crows,” she said.

  “Nasty brutes,” agreed Wendy, shuddering. She put her cup down on the big table. It was made of elmwood, scrubbed white for generations.

  “Never mind,” said Mrs. Mellot. “Mr. Mason has taken it away now.”

  “That won’t be the end of it,” said Gordon Briggs with a short laugh. He exchanged significant glances with George Mellot and said to him, “Will it?”

  “Only the beginning, I’m afraid,” agreed the farmer. “It must have come from somewhere.”

  “I said that the Westerbrook only flowed when something was wrong,” insisted Wendy tightly.

  “Somewhere near,” said Gordon Briggs implacably.

  All George Mellot’s responses seemed to be temperate. “Not too far afield,” he said.

  Briggs swept on. “The crow would be looking for a quiet spot to—”

  “Don’t!” implored Wendy. “It doesn’t bear thinking about, what it was going to do next.”

  “You’ve got to face facts,” said the schoolmaster uncompromisingly.

  George Mellot, quiet and controlled at the edge of the room, nodded.

  “It might have come from somewhere else, mightn’t it?” said the girl tremulously.

  Mrs. Mellot said quickly, “Of course.”

  “I mean,” she said, “crows fly quite a long way, don’t they?”

  “Not with something in their beaks,” pointed out Gordon Briggs.

  “That’s what our policeman said,” murmured the farmer.

  “That means then,” carried on Wendy uncertainly, “that you’ve got a dead body on the farm somewhere.”

  The farmer seemed anxious not to catch his wife’s eye. “I’m afraid it does.”

  “And what will you have to do about it?” the girl asked.

  “Look for it,” said George Mellot. “The question is where to begin.…”

  They were interrupted by a knock at the back door. Mrs. Mellot went across the kitchen to answer it, saying over her shoulder, “That’ll be Leonard Hodge.”

  “My bailiff,” said George Mellot.

  “I sent a message down,” his wife said. “Hullo, Len, it is you, then.”

  “Come along in, Len,” said George Mellot. He explained about the finger to a powerfully built and ruddy-faced man who stood attentively by the kitchen door.

  “There’s always plenty of crows about at Pencombe, Mr. Mellot,” said Len Hodge immediately. He was dressed in working clothes in spite of its being a Saturday afternoon and had the look of someone who had been interrupted at something. There was still grease on his arms, although his hands had obviously been hastily washed.

  “I know,” said Mellot.

  “But I haven’t seen no body,” said Hodge, shaking his head.

  “Have you noticed more crows than usual?”

  “Can’t say that I have, Mr. Mellot.” Hodge looked round at the others in the kitchen and said, “Hard to tell when they’re always around. You get used to them being there and don’t notice particular like.”

  George Mellot persisted with his questioning. “You’d have noticed them flocking around anywhere special though, wouldn’t you, Len?”

  “Daresay I would, Mr. Mellot.”

  “So would I,” said Mellot decisively, “and I certainly haven’t.”

  “Mind you,” the bailiff screwed up his eyes, “don’t forget that there’s upwards of three hundred acres at Pencombe.”

  “Quite.” Mellot nodded.

  “And a man can’t be everywhere.”

  “The police will be,” forecast George Mellot. “And quite soon.”

  As he stood up Gordon Briggs ran his fingers over the vast kitchen table and said tactlessly, “They make coffins from elm, too, don’t they?”

  “A finger?” echoed Detective Constable Crosby.

  “That’s what I said,” repeated Detective Inspector Sloan grimly.

  “It’s not a lot to go on, sir,” said the constable, “is it?”

  “It’s a beginning,” said Sloan. All cases had to begin somewhere.

  “But …”

  Sometimes cases only began with a rumour—a mere whiff of wrongdoing, whispered behind cautious hands. Without anything as tangible as a finger at all. And as often as not they still ended up as full-blown cases too.

  “There is nothing to say at this stage, Crosby,” said Sloan austerely, “that there is any crime of any sort involved at all.”

  “Then …”

  Detective Inspector Sloan climbed into the waiting police car. “It could be ju
st an ordinary death.”

  “It could be one of those ransom jobs, sir, though, couldn’t it?” Detective Constable Crosby clambered more enthusiastically into the driving seat. “You know the sort of thing—pay up or we’ll send you an ear or—”

  “I know,” said Sloan heavily. “Or a finger.”

  “It’s been done before, sir. The Camorra—”

  Sloan shook his head. “I don’t think so somehow. Not this time. For one thing, it wasn’t delivered through the post with a note or anything like that.”

  “Oh?” Crosby sounded disappointed.

  “It was found lying on a footpath.”

  “Not the same thing at all, sir,” agreed Crosby.

  “You’ve been reading too many books,” said Sloan briskly. “It’s probably just from some old tramp who wandered into the woods to die.”

  The detective constable engaged gear and steered the car out of the police station. “Where to, sir?”

  “Great Rooden.”

  Crosby grinned. “The real sticks.” He did not like the country.

  “To the police house first,” said Sloan, unmoved. “To see what Constable Mason has to say.”

  Constable Mason welcomed them to a conspicuously neat house and garden. Mrs. Mason provided tea and homemade scones and a general feeling of homeliness.

  “Fancy,” she said, “a crow dropping a finger like that. You sit here, Inspector. I think you’ll find that chair quite comfortable.”

  “I’ll need to know the names of the farmers on either side of Pencombe too,” said Sloan, struggling to introduce a businesslike note into the domestic atmosphere.

  “There’s Paul Hucham at Uppercombe,” said Constable Mason. “He’s nearly all sheep. And the Ritchies at Stanestede. That’s a mixed farm. Both those farms march alongside Pencombe—to the north-west and east, that is. Oh, and Bailey is at Lowercombe on the other side of the road to the south. Mustn’t forget Sam Bailey’s land. A road wouldn’t mean anything to a crow, would it?”

  “I’m surprised that a finger did,” said Sloan.

  Constable Mason shook a grizzled head. “You’d be astonished what a crow’ll take a meal off.”

  “Another scone, Inspector?” said Mrs. Mason.

  Police wives, like doctors’ wives, had to get used to mixing life with work.