“I can’t think and walk,” complained Crosby.
“That’s a pity,” he said with more than a little acerbity, “because there’s quite a lot for us to think about.” The plural pronoun was singularly generous, he thought. To date Crosby didn’t seem to have done any real thinking at all.
“The finger being found was a bit of bad luck for whoever put the body on the roof, anyway,” said Crosby.
“And for Wendy Lamport,” Sloan reminded him. There might be a message at any moment from the hospital.
Crosby kicked at another stone. “It’s not something where death has to be proved or the body wouldn’t have been hidden. It must have been someone who could just disappear.”
“That’s true.” Sloan nodded approvingly. The aphorism “Where’s there’s a will, there’s a way” could be construed in more than one fashion. And “will” could be written “will” with very sinister overtones indeed. “It doesn’t appear,” he concluded prosaically, “to be an inheritance matter.”
Crosby wrinkled his brow. “All that trouble with the furnishing firm stopped a bit suddenly, didn’t it?”
“The heat was off as soon as Ivor Harbeton disappeared,” assented Sloan. “That was when the take-over fell through.” What he really could have done with was a quiet chat with someone who knew about these things. Shocks and stares weren’t his cup of tea: he had been brought up to believe them to be one stage removed from the gaming tables at Monte Carlo and nothing had happened to him in later life to make him change this view.
“The timing wasn’t all that far out,” said Crosby.
“It was dead right,” said Sloan soberly. What he could not understand was why the entire police force of the United Kingdom could not lay their hands on Tom Mellot, his wife, two children and a dog.
“The timing was dead right for when Martin Ritchie took off as well,” pointed out Crosby helpfully. A man was on his way to Stanestede Farm to check on the size of his shoes.
“Pity his wife threw his letter away,” said Sloan. Circumstantial evidence always helped, especially when real evidence was hard to come by. And the making of marks on paper with pen and pencil was one of the most revealing actions a human being could make. There were those who could read more into handwriting than a biologist into a drop of pond water. It was just as well the study of calligraphy was a new science. Medieval graphologists would have soon been made bonfires of for witchcraft.
“She seems to be managing all right without him at the farm,” offered Crosby.
“Spiders eat their husbands and still do well,” said Sloan briskly. To his way of thinking militant feminists advanced all the wrong arguments.
The two policemen turned off the footpath and walked through the farmyard towards the back door of Pencombe Farm. Crosby jerked a finger in the direction of the barn roof as they did so. “Penny plain or twopence coloured?” he said. “You pays your money and you takes your choice.”
“It’s blood money, though, that you’re paying with, don’t forget,” said Sloan. “That’s the trouble.…”
Police Constable Ted Mason was feeling the heat in more ways than one. The temperature was rising steadily as the morning advanced. This sort of weather did not suit a man of his stature. The pressure of work which he was experiencing at the same time was all the more unwelcome for being unaccustomed. No one could have described Constable Mason as someone who was addicted to adrenalin.
He had been put in charge of the search for the instrument which might have been used to remove a head from a body—with a strong rider that he also apply himself to thinking of where a head, too, might have been hidden, “seeing how,” Detective Inspector Sloan had added, “he was supposed to know every inch of his patch.”
Neither task appealed to a man of his temperament. One required action and the other thought. Both were anathema to Constable Mason. His working life had been centred round the skilful referral to higher authority of anything involving any effort. Knotty problems arising in Great Rooden soon found themselves dispatched to the substation at Almstone. In the nature of things this was staffed by a series of young, ambitious—and newly promoted—sergeants, keen to show the powers that be at police headquarters how good they were at dealing with difficult matters. Points on which they were able to demonstrate their mastery of police law were sometimes even positively welcomed.
On the other hand anything that had been really likely to interfere seriously with the growing of prize cabbages Ted Mason had stamped on himself and forgotten to report.
With some good cause he had long ago decided that civil rights were a purely urban nicety and he had remained untroubled by them. Essentially rural devices like man-traps might be illegal and putting the villain in the stocks no longer a fashionable punishment, but the public pillory still existed in modern guise and Ted Mason had no hesitation in using it as a weapon. A threat to tell the world at large and the village of Great Rooden in particular—and for some the two were indivisible—about a breach of tribal behaviour kept many a petty law-breaker toeing the line. For those who had no fear of neighbours’ tongues—and were thus almost beyond redemption—he devised more condign punishment.
Only when he couldn’t think of a way of making the punishment fit the crime did Ted Mason invoke the due processes of the law. He was thus much less worried than most when the courts couldn’t match the two either.
He was, in short, a believer in the white-glove treatment rather than the kid-glove variety.
As a very young constable Edward Mason had once been drafted from Calleshire to London for ceremonial duty. A uniform preternaturally spick and span had been embellished by a pair of white gloves. His training days were still fresh in his memory at the time and he remembered having been told that there had been an ancient custom for judges to be given a pair of gloves before a trial, together with a nosegay to keep the plague or something at bay. He had vaguely associated the gloves with this and had started to put them on.
“Wait a minute, wait a minute,” growled the sergeant in charge. “They’re not for wearing, lad. They’re for carrying.”
Constable Mason had stammered his apologies.
“Up from the country, are you?” The sergeant, who had been of the old school, had winked mightily. “Now hold them out and I’ll show you a trick or two.”
Mason had obediently held the white gloves out in front of him while the sergeant had filled the fingers with small steel ball-bearings.
“Right, lad. Now you hold those gloves in your right hand, see? And if you have any trouble with anyone in the crowd just give them a flick with those gloves and they won’t forget it in a hurry. And,” he added meaningfully, “should the television cameras or anyone else with fancy ideas about the police happen to see you doing it, there won’t be any trouble afterwards, see?”
Constable Ted Mason had not only seen but had understood and remembered. He had long ago forgotten the event that had taken him to the capital. He had never forgotten the loaded white gloves.…
Neither the Mason theory nor practice of policing was much help to him at this moment, though. He stood at the entrance to Dresham Wood now, a mass of indecision. There were men at his beck and call but he did not know where to tell them to start looking.
An instrument suitable for removing a head might be anywhere.
So, if it came to that, might be the head.
Long grass would conceal anything at this time of the year—which didn’t help.
And he didn’t even know exactly what they were supposed to be looking for except that whatever it was it would have to have been man enough for the job.
Which didn’t get him very far.
Automatically economical of effort, he thought before he moved.
It was the village butcher’s shop which first came to mind. Hubert Wilkinson’s was of the old-fashioned variety. His name-board still proclaimed him as a butcher and grazier and time was when he had killed his own meat, but Hubert Wilkinson hun
g his knives up in the shop-window for all to see. If any one of them had been missing for so much as an hour, he, Ted Mason, would have heard all about it.
Somebody else who would have had a tool that would have taken off a head with ease was the old lengthman who used to keep the grass verges of the roadside cut, but he had been replaced by a gang of men from the County Council. They descended on Great Rooden once a year and did a botched job with an undiscriminating machine. The man who knew every culvert and gulley had been pensioned off and the village was the poorer for it.
Ted Mason dismissed the garage from his mind, too. Their tools weren’t sharp. Even when it had been a forge, the tools of the transport trade had been stout and blunt.
He didn’t allow his mind to dwell on the local doctor either, for all that he did have instruments that were sharp enough for the job. Doctors had easier ways of disposing of bodies than of humping them up onto barn roofs.
There was always Jimmie, the wood-spoiler, of course. Carpenters had saws. He would send a man to inspect Jimmie’s saws.
The minion duly dispatched, Ted Mason continued to think. Next he did what an old mentor of his had often advised and put himself in the other fellow’s shoes. He tried to imagine himself with a body on his hands whose head he wanted off. He would obviously look near at hand first and for something that would not lead the trail straight back to him.
That meant using an instrument that belonged to somebody else; double bluff was for a more considered crime than this, he thought. It wasn’t something for country constables to be worrying about anyway. What he was looking for was something that either would not be missed or had been replaced after use.
Police Constable Ted Mason was not an academic man and distinctions between pure and applied thought would have been lost upon him, but it was not all that long before he reached the conclusion that a search of Sam Bailey’s old barn at Lowercombe Farm would do no harm.
And it was not long after that when he found an old implement that had once been used for topping sugar-beet.
It was by no means as dry and dusty as the other old tools beside it in the barn.
SEVENTEEN
The quick and the dead
There was something new and fancy in psychiatric circles called transactional analysis. Detective Inspector Sloan had read about it from time to time in such police journals as kept an eye on what trick cyclists were up to. It made him more conscious of the quality of the exchange he had now with George and Meg Mellot.
There was a formality about his interview with them that had been absent before. It added a new dimension to this particular interface between the officers of the law and John Citizen and his wife.
Sloan’s first question had been a simple one. Even so it had provoked a visible shudder in Meg Mellot and clearly took George Mellot by surprise.
“The size of Tom’s shoes?” echoed the farmer. “No, of course I don’t know what size shoe Tom took. Why should I?” He turned to his wife. “Do you, Meg?”
She shook her head mutely.
Detective Inspector Sloan made a note. An ambitious young Spanish-speaking policeman in London might well get his fabada today after all. “Right, sir, then may we come back to the take-over bid for Mellot’s Furnishings?”
George Mellot ran a tongue over dry lips and said wearily, “If you wish.”
“When your father died and your brother took his portion—”
“No,” said George Mellot.
“No?”
“Tom didn’t take his portion,” said George Mellot, “and he wasn’t a prodigal son or anything like that. Tom just wasn’t cut out to be a farmer.”
“He couldn’t stand the waiting, Inspector,” put in Meg Mellot a little timidly.
Sloan turned to her for elucidation. “Waiting?”
There were two schools of thought in police circles. One was that you got more out of interviewing a husband and wife together and the other was that you extracted more from each separately. Detective Inspector Sloan took the more pragmatic view that it all depended on the husband and wife.
“Farmers have to take the long view,” she explained awkwardly. “Sometimes they have to wait for years and years to see the results of their work. It’s not an overnight affair.”
“Tom likes wheeling and dealing,” amplified George Mellot. “He enjoys having everything—er—instant, so to speak.”
“So …,” saidSloan steadily.
“So Tom went into business.”
“With his share of your father’s estate?” Business, conceded Sloan silently, called for everything instant—especially judgements.
“Not exactly,” temporised the farmer.
“How then?”
“It was all very well in the Bible,” said Mellot tangentially, “this taking off with your portion. I daresay all they had to do was to divide the flock of sheep into two.”
“Jacob and his sheep,” said Sloan intelligently, “of another colour.”
Detective Constable Crosby stirred. “Have you heard,” he asked chattily, “about the man who practised animal husbandry until they found out and stopped him?”
Nobody took any notice of him.
The farmer frowned. “It isn’t like it was in the Bible any more.”
Sloan projected polite interest in what Mellot was saying at the same time as striving to keep his blood pressure under control with Crosby. It was not easy.
“I couldn’t afford to buy Tom out,” said George Mellot, “and he couldn’t afford to get started in business without his share of the inheritance.”
“Yes, I see,” said Sloan. It was the classic dilemma. Some victor or another—he couldn’t remember which—had even imposed laws of inheritance on the vanquished that required land to be divided equally among all heirs in ever diminishing holdings. Was it called gavelkind? “What did you do?” he enquired with genuine curiosity.
“Left him as an equal partner in the farm,” replied Mellot concisely, “and went with him as an equal partner in the business firm.”
“Using the farm as surety?” Perhaps the very word firm derived from farm: perhaps they came of common stock.
“That’s right, Inspector.”
“Did it work?”
“Our wives got on,” said Mellot simply.
That would be the crux of the matter, thought Sloan to himself. Competitive sisters-in-law were the very devil. He said “So.…”
“So until Mellot’s Furnishings went public my wife and I owned half of the equity, with Tom and his wife owning the other half.”
“And they owned half of the farm?”
“Still do.”
“And after the firm went public?”
“We pulled out and just kept a nominal holding for the interest.”
Sloan nodded. All that explained the prosperity at Pencombe Farm over and beyond the agricultural.
“Then Ivor Harbeton came along?”
“The big bad wolf,” said Mellot tiredly. “We pitched in behind Tom, of course.”
“He would have needed all the support he could get,” said Sloan. Sometime last night—he couldn’t now think when—he had found time to read all about the take-over battle for Mellot’s Furnishings.
“Most of the shareholders were behind Tom,” said George Mellot. “He’s got a businessman’s head all right but Harbeton was offering quite a lot.”
“Would he have won the day, though, if Harbeton hadn’t disappeared when he did?” Sloan leant forward awaiting a reply. This was the question that mattered.
“Your guess is as good as mine, Inspector,” said Mellot drily.
Sloan cleared his throat. “Harbeton doesn’t seem to be the only person who has disappeared.”
Mellot looked up.
“Your brother’s not at home,” said Sloan. “Martin Ritchie from Stanestede hasn’t been seen for a month and a man who has been living rough in Dresham Wood certainly isn’t there any more.”
The farmer didn’t see
m interested.
“And someone,” added Sloan for good measure, “hit Wendy Lamport over the head last night outside the Lamb and Flag.”
Mellot nodded. “We’d heard about that.”
“Have you any suggestions to offer?” asked Sloan crisply.
George Mellot shook his head.
“It was your barn,” persisted Sloan.
“I know.”
“And your fork-lift tractor,” he said relentlessly. “Our forensic laboratory have found pieces of skin on the metal.”
“Don’t!” implored Meg Mellot.
“It was obvious that that would be used,” said Mellot without heat. “There is no other way of getting a body up onto the roof. I can see that myself.”
“If it had been daytime,” persisted Sloan, “you would have heard them. Or the dog would.”
“I know,” said Mellot tonelessly.
“So you did either see it happen or it must have been while you were both out.”
“Yes,” agreed Mellot.
“Which?” asked Sloan sharply.
“While we were out,” cried Meg Mellot wretchedly. “We didn’t see or hear anything, did we, George?”
He shook his head.
“So,” continued Sloan inexorably, “you are saying that there was a time when you were both out when it could have happened?”
“Market-day,” said Mellot. “We have thought about that. Meg always comes with me to Calleford. Every Thursday without fail.”
“And you’d be gone long enough for any amount of mischief, I suppose?”
“Anyone could have got a small army up on the barn roof in the time if they’d had a mind to,” said Mellot flatly. “I can’t say otherwise.”
“When you are away at the market who do you leave here?” asked Sloan although he knew the answer.
Harm’s Way Page 18
