Harm’s Way

by Catherine Aird

“It was there all the time, then, Inspector.” Gordon Briggs had spoken about going but in fact continued to stand where he was, unwilling to abandon the subject. “What you were looking for—”

  “We think so.” Sloan was conscious of some of the other walkers stirring uneasily in the background, clearly anxious to be on their way. Like bit players in life’s drama they had acted their parts and were ready to move off-stage. He was equally aware though that there were others who wanted to stay. Although patently no longer required by the action, so to speak, something held them there, fascinated.

  “Lying on the roof,” Briggs said, underlining the strangeness.

  “Yes,” said Sloan. Was this how Rosencrantz and Guildenstern had felt? he wondered. After all, they, too, in the beginning had been unwittingly caught up in events not of their choosing.

  “If you’re sure that we can’t do anything to help, Inspector,” murmured Briggs. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern had also gone off-stage reluctantly, hadn’t they?

  “Quite sure,” replied Sloan more firmly than he had intended. If he remembered rightly from his school-days Rosencrantz and Guildenstern had been a little uncertain of their roles as well.

  “In that case,” said Briggs reluctantly, “we’ll be on our way then.”

  In Sloan’s school’s third form’s memorable production of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark Rosencrantz had fallen over his own feet as he moved off-stage.

  Or had it been Guildenstern?

  “Very well,” said Sloan. With Rosencrantz and Guildenstern the action had continued somewhere else too.

  “Nothing to stay for really, is there, Inspector?”

  “Not now.”

  “Right, then,” said Briggs. Half turn to go yet turning stay … No, that had been another poet altogether.

  “You’ll be having a proper letter,” Sloan promised him, “thanking your society for all its help.”

  “When the dust has settled a bit, eh?” said Briggs.

  “When our investigations are complete,” said Sloan formally.

  “You’ve hardly started, have you?” said the schoolmaster. “I can see that.”

  “Let us say,” Sloan answered him grandly, conscious now that he was quoting the great, “that we’ve reached the end of the beginning.”

  NINE

  The pestilence that walketh in darkness

  “Paul, is that you?” The telephone bell had rung at Uppercombe Farm and had been answered with alacrity. “This is Andrina.”

  “Hullo,” he said guardedly.

  “Have you heard?”

  “Yes,” replied Paul Hucham soberly. “George rang me.”

  “He rang me too,” she said in a small voice.

  “He told me he was going to,” said Hucham, conscious of sounding stifled.

  “You might have let me know first,” said Andrina Ritchie lightly. “Before he did. It would have been a little less of a shock.”

  “I did think about that,” explained Hucham truthfully, “but George was dead set on telling everyone himself. You know how he feels about being a good neighbour. He’d already rung old Sam before he rang me.”

  “All the same,” she said, “it was a bit of a surprise.”

  Hucham responded to that with something approaching fervour. “You can say that again.”

  “Did he say,” she asked, “that they think it must be some stranger?”

  “No,” said Hucham, “now that I come to think about it, he didn’t say that.”

  “That’s funny,” said Andrina Ritchie. “I should have thought he would have done.”

  “It didn’t sound,” said Paul Hucham consideringly, “as if he’d had time to do a lot of thinking.”

  She changed the subject a little. “You can see Pencombe from where you are, can’t you?”

  “If I look.” Paul Hucham picked up the telephone receiver and shifted his position slightly so that he could see out of the nearest window. The view gave out over the valley.

  “Can’t you tell what’s going on there?” There was more than a little impatience in Andrina Ritchie’s voice.

  “Not really.”

  “You must be able to see something—”

  “Just that there’s a lot of activity down there.”

  “What sort of activity?”

  “Well, for one thing I can see that there are a lot of jam sandwiches about.”

  “Jam sandwiches? Are you mad?”

  “White police cars with red stripes round them.”

  Mrs. Andrina Ritchie was not amused. “This isn’t the best time to be funny, Paul.”

  “No use getting strung up,” he said. “That never does any good.”

  “I must say George Mellot sounded very uptight.”

  “Who wouldn’t?” asked the sheep-farmer reasonably. “Having a skeleton found in your backyard is enough to throw any man.”

  “Don’t!”

  “Well, it’s true.”

  “I suppose so. And to think,” she said, “that it might have lain up there for years and years without being found.”

  “So it might,” he agreed.

  “George told me that they’d got police everywhere.”

  “Bound to have,” opined the sheep-farmer with calculated casualness. “It’s only natural in the circumstances.”

  “That’s all very well but—”

  “I wouldn’t have expected anything else myself,” he said with a touch of firmness.

  “I was thinking,” said Andrina Ritchie with a fine show of indirectness, “of going over to Pencombe to ask if I might borrow their fork-lift tractor for tomorrow morning. Jenkins could use it to lift some bales.”

  “I shouldn’t do that if I were you,” said Hucham carefully. “For all you know Len Hodge may be needing it too. Besides, they’ll have quite enough to be thinking about as it is without your turning up there.”

  “Perhaps you’re right.”

  “I know I am,” said Paul Hucham confidently. “Added to which,” he went on smoothly, “I don’t suppose for one moment that the police will let anyone move anything into or out of that farmyard from now on.”

  She shuddered. “I hadn’t thought about that.”

  “Mind how you go,” adjured Detective Constable Crosby.

  “I’ve been in some funny places in my time,” responded Dyson, the police photographer, “but this is as daft as any of them.”

  “You’ll be all right if you hold on,” said Crosby.

  “It’s all right for you,” rejoined the photographer with spirit. “You don’t have to carry anything.”

  This was true. Dyson, on the other hand, was hung about with quite as much equipment as Don Quixote’s attendant, Sancho Panza.

  “Don’t let go of the ladder, that’s all,” said Crosby.

  “And how do you suppose I take photographs if I’m holding on to a ladder? With my teeth?”

  “If you don’t hold on to the ladder,” promised Crosby flatly, “you’ll fall off.”

  “And if I do,” responded Dyson, “I suppose the thing to do is to look out for the view on my left as I fall?”

  “All you’ll see if you do that is—”

  “I can guess,” said the photographer bitterly. “A midden.”

  “You said it,” said Crosby.

  “I can smell it from here.” Dyson advanced towards the ladder against the scaffolding tower. “It doesn’t look very safe to me.”

  “It isn’t,” said Crosby laconically.

  “All in the cause of duty, I suppose. You can put that on my tombstone. Make a nice epitaph. Come along, Williams.…” Williams was his assistant. “Got the tripod all right? I expect you want me to go first.…”

  This remark was greeted with the silence that lawyers say amounts to consent and Dyson approached the ladder that was propped up against a hastily erected scaffolding tower designed to bring the investigators level with the skeleton.

  “Onward, ever onward, go,” declared Dyson, taking the first st
ep up the ladder. It shook visibly. “Hold it, man. Don’t just stand there.”

  “I am holding it,” retorted Crosby in injured tones. “It’s shaking because there isn’t any firm ground for it to stand on.”

  “That’s a great comfort, I must say,” called Dyson over his shoulder. “No flowers, by the way, if I should die on duty. Just send the money.”

  “It won’t do you any good where you’re going,” said Crosby.

  “Are you quite sure about that, old man? I thought money and hell were as inextricably mixed as money and living. It’s the other place where they won’t be bothering with trifles like money any more.…” Dyson’s head suddenly drew level with the top of the scaffolding platform and the bottom of the barn roof. He looked along the gulley at the skeleton and called down, “I say, this chap’s a bit beyond aid, isn’t he?”

  “Yes,” said Crosby simply.

  “Talk about something nasty in the woodshed,” said Dyson, sucking his teeth sharply. “This is a lot worse than that.”

  “It is,” agreed Crosby.

  “Not nice at all.” Dyson had clambered from the top of the ladder onto the scaffolding platform and advanced to the edge of the roof. He called down, “You’d better come up, too, Williams. We’ll need that tripod.”

  “Hand shaking, then?” enquired Crosby pleasantly. “Or just lonely up there?”

  “You know me,” rejoined Dyson. “Nervous as a young filly.”

  Williams started to climb the ladder. Dyson had taken his first picture well before the other man got to the top. “The trouble is,” he called down, “unless I can get up on to one of these ridges, any view I take is going to be a bit too foreshortened for comfort.”

  “You can’t go onto the ridge,” called back Crosby. “Not yet.”

  “In that case,” said Dyson philosophically, “the view will just have to be foreshortened.”

  “No one is to go on the roof until it’s been examined properly.” The technical problems of professional photographers didn’t trouble the detective constable unduly but orders were, in any case, orders. “There may be some footprints up there.”

  “I’ll photograph them too,” said Dyson helpfully, “if I can find any.”

  “If you ask me,” said Crosby, “it’s been too dry.”

  “Someone must have stood up there on the roof to drag him far enough along the valley between the ridges to be out of sight,” said Dyson.

  “We know that,” responded Crosby regally.

  “The question is, then, did they leave any traces?” said the police photographer.

  “Everything leaves traces,” the detective constable chanted Edmund Locard’s Principle of Interchange. “Whether there’s anything to photograph is a different matter.”

  Dyson raised his camera again and took a number of shots of the skeleton in quick succession from different angles.

  “If you step back any farther,” forecast Crosby from below, “Williams here will be photographing you instead of him, whoever he is.”

  “It would be a good way to go, wouldn’t it?” called back the photographer. “You must admit, Crosby, that this chap up here, whatever he’s called, hasn’t a care in the world any longer.”

  “Which is more than can be said for the rest of us,” interposed Williams, arriving rather breathlessly on the platform beside Dyson. “Here’s the tripod.”

  “And there’s the subject,” said Dyson tersely.

  “Blimey O’Riley!” exclaimed Williams.

  “Exactly,” said Crosby.

  “Do you know anything about him?” called down Dyson.

  “Just the one thing,” replied Detective Constable Crosby sedulously.

  “What’s that?”

  “He’s got no head for heights,” said the constable, putting his foot on the bottom rung of the ladder.

  George Mellot and his employee, Leonard Hodge, were not in the farm kitchen with the members of the Berebury Country Footpaths Society. They were standing together outside in the farmyard watching the police photographers at work on the barn roof. The policemen who had helped to make up the search-party had been detailed to examine the farm buildings and were now scouring the ground like so many human vacuum cleaners. George Mellot bore the sight of them poking into every nook and cranny of Pencombe Farm as dispassionately as he could. Len Hodge, though, was visibly upset.

  “It’s a sight worse than that scare we had last year, isn’t it, guv’nor?” he said to his employer.

  “What scare, Len?” George Mellot took his mind off the present with an effort. Last year seemed altogether too remote for memory recall just now.

  “You remember,” said Hodge. “When they wondered if we’d got foot-and-mouth disease at Pencombe.”

  “Oh, that …” At the time George Mellot hadn’t been able to envisage a worse disaster than an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease in the Pencombe herd of Guernsey cows. He could now. Things were different. It was a measure of his present anxiety that he had almost forgotten the earlier one. “That was nothing,” he said. The funny thing was that he meant it, too.

  Now.

  Hodge hitched his shoulder in the direction of the barn roof. “Who could have guessed that there was anything up there?” he asked.

  “No one,” said the farmer shortly.

  Hodge jerked his thumb upwards to the sky. “And there are always crows in the yard, aren’t there?”

  “Always,” agreed Mellot.

  “I must say,” sniffed Hodge, “I never took no notice of them myself.”

  “Neither did I,” said Mellot.

  Hodge hunched his shoulders. “You sort of get used to them being around somehow.”

  “Of course you do,” the farmer said, adding carefully, “The police aren’t saying we should have noticed, Len.”

  “Yet,” emphasized Hodge. “They aren’t saying anything yet, are they?”

  “True.” In fact the silence of the police was one of the things George Mellot was finding most difficult of all. So far they were keeping their own counsel about everything and it was hard to endure.

  “It’s a bad business, all the same,” Hodge said obliquely, “him lying up there and us working down here all the time.”

  “Doesn’t bear too much thinking about,” agreed George Mellot in his usual understated way.

  Suddenly Hodge looked up and turned abruptly. “Hullo, hullo,” he drawled. “Here comes trouble.…”

  “Ted Mason,” said George Mellot. “Back again.”

  “Where have you been, then, Ted?” said Hodge to the policeman.

  “Back home to see if there were any messages,” said the village constable.

  “For a bite to eat, more like,” said Hodge.

  Constable Mason looked down at his portly frame. “Well, seeing as I was there and it happened to be there I did have a slice of cake,” he said with dignity. “Makes a most acceptable fruit-cake, does the wife.”

  Hodge sniffed. “Missed all the action, you did.”

  “So I hear,” replied Mason equably.

  “It’s a gift.…”

  “It was a very good cake,” insisted Mason with the fervour of the fat.

  “Some people have all the luck,” said Hodge scornfully.

  George Mellot stirred. “Does anyone have any idea at all who it is up there?”

  “We’re pursuing our enquiries,” parrotted Constable Mason immediately. He then promptly spoilt the whole effect of this noncommittal pronouncement by adding, “Not a clue, Mr. Mellot, really. Have you got any suggestions, Len?”

  Hodge shook his head.

  “From what I hear,” said George Mellot, “whoever’s up there is a bit far gone for clues.”

  “Don’t you believe it,” said Mason cheerfully. “They’re so clever these days they can even tell you what a mummy in a museum died from.”

  “That’s a great help, that is,” said Hodge.

  “Oh, it’ll take time, of course,” continued the constable
largely. “These things always do.”

  “What about the evening milking?” asked Hodge.

  “It’ll take time,” repeated Mason, ignoring the tricky question of the evening milking. “We know that but I daresay we’ll find out all about it in the end. We usually do.”

  “Where will you start?” asked the farmer.

  “Here.” Mason waved an arm in a gesture that encompassed the policemen diligently going over the farmyard as well as the complex that was Pencombe Farm. “Where the evidence is.”

  “And then?”

  “Missing persons,” said Mason promptly. “It must be someone who’s missing, mustn’t it?”

  Hodge nodded at the logic of this. “Stands to reason.”

  “Where do you go from there, though?” persisted George Mellot. “A lot of people go missing.”

  “Then we go into the logistics, Mr. Mellot.” Mason might not be any great shakes at activity but he was perfectly sound on theory.

  Hodge looked up suspiciously. “Clever stuff, eh?”

  “Logistics isn’t clever, Len,” said Mason. “It’s just working out how a crime was committed in the way it was.”

  Hodge scowled. “Like, did he fall or was he pushed?”

  “That’s the general idea,” said Mason. “And when we’ve worked that out,” he added neatly, “then we go on to other things.”

  “What other things?” demanded Hodge truculently.

  “Like how did he get up there?” said Mason steadily.

  A silence fell upon the little group. As if motivated by mesmerism all three looked upwards to the barn roof.

  “That sometimes tells you quite a lot,” remarked Mason.

  Neither of the other two spoke.

  “Not everyone,” continued Mason conversationally, “could get a body up on to a roof, could they? Women and children, for instance …”

  That wrung an unwilling assent from both his listeners.

  “Take a fair bit of doing,” admitted Hodge grudgingly.

  “It would sort out the men from the boys,” agreed George Mellot.

  “Mind you,” went on Constable Mason, “there’s always the easy way, isn’t there?”

  “What do you mean by that?” asked Mellot.

  The policeman let his gaze drift towards the fork-lift tractor standing by the barn. “That would get it a good part of the way up, wouldn’t it? If not to the very top …”