He looked up and down the street. There would be a back way in somewhere. The two policemen set off and walked until they found it—a narrow uneven way, leading to back gates. Some as neatly painted as the front doors. Some not. None numbered.
Crosby counted the houses back from the beginning of the row. “Nine, ten, eleven, twelve.” He stopped at a gate that was still hanging properly on both hinges. “I reckon this is the one, sir.”
“Well done,” said Sloan, who had already noticed that that back door was painted the same deep green as they had seen in the front. “Perhaps he’s one of those who’ll answer the back door but not the front.”
They never discovered if this was so.
When they got to the back door it was ever so slightly ajar.
It opened a little further at Sloan’s knock, and when there was no reply to this, Sloan opened it a bit more still and put his head round.
“Anyone at home?” he called out.
Cyril Jenkins was at home, all right.
There was just one snag. He was dead.
Very.
FIFTEEN
Superintendent Leeyes was inclined to take the whole thing as a personal insult.
“Dead?” he shouted in affronted tones.
“Dead, sir.”
“He can’t be.”
“He is.”
“Not our Jenkins,” he howled. “Not the one we wanted.”
“Cyril Edgar,” said Sloan tersely. That much, at least, he had established before leaving number twelve and a pale but resolute Crosby standing guard. “As for him being ours …”
“Yes?”
“I should think the fact that he’s had his brains blown out rather clinches it.”
Sarcasm was a waste of time with the superintendent. “Self-inflicted?” he inquired eagerly.
“Impossible to say, sir, at this stage.”
“Was there a note?”
“No.” Sloan paused. “Just a revolver.”
He wasn’t sitting in the comfort of Inspector Blake’s office now. He was in the cramped public telephone kiosk in Cullingoak High Street hoping that the young woman with a pram who was waiting to use it after him, couldn’t lip-read. At least she couldn’t hear the superintendent.
Sloan could.
“What sort of revolver?” he was asking.
“Service.” Sloan sighed. “Old Army issue.”
“Officers, for the use of, I suppose,” heavily.
“Yes, sir.”
Leeyes grunted. “So it’s still there?”
“Yes, sir. Silencer and all.”
“Not out of reach, I suppose?”
“No, sir.”
“I didn’t think it would be.”
“By his right hand.”
“That’s what I thought you were going to say. No hope of him being left handed?”
“None. I checked.” Sloan had searched high and low himself for signs which would reveal whether Cyril Edgar Jenkins had taken his own life or if someone had taken it for him.
“I don’t like it, Sloan.”
“No, sir.” Sloan didn’t either. There was nothing to like in what he had just seen. The recently shot are seldom an attractive sight and Cyril Edgar Jenkins was no exception. He had been sitting down when it had happened and the result was indescribably messy. Experienced—and hardened—as he was, Sloan hadn’t relished his quick examination. At least there hadn’t been the additional burden of breaking the news to anyone. “He lived alone,” he told Leeyes. “Mrs. Walsh out at Holly Tree Farm was quite right about his wife. She did die about eight years ago.”
“Who says so?”
“The woman next door. Remembers her well.”
“Which wife?” demanded Leeyes contentiously.
Sloan paused. “The one he had been living with ever since he came to Cullingoak.”
“Ah, that’s different.” Sloan could almost hear the superintendent fumbling for the word he wanted. “She might have just been his concubine.”
“Yes, sir, except that we couldn’t find any record of a marriage between Cyril Edgar Jenkins and Grace Edith Wright in the first place.”
“I hadn’t forgotten,” said Leeyes coldly. “Now I suppose you’re going to set about finding out if he was really married to this second woman.”
What Sloan wanted to do—and that very badly—was to set about finding out who had killed Cyril Jenkins.
“Yes, sir. In the meantime, do you think Dr. Dabbe would come over?”
“I don’t see why not,” said Leeyes largely. When he himself was working through a weekend he was usually in favor of as many people doing so as possible. “What do you want him for?”
“Inspector Blake is handling the routine side of this, seeing as it’s in his division,” said Sloan, “but I want to talk to Dr. Dabbe about blood.”
There was no shortage of this vital commodity in the living room of number twelve Cullingoak High Street.
Sloan had vacated the telephone kiosk with a polite apology to the girl with the pram. In the manner of a generation brought up without courtesy, she had favored him with a blank stare in return. Oddly disconcerted, but without time to wonder what things were coming to, he had hurried back to the house.
His friend, Inspector Blake, had just arrived from Calleford and was standing surveying the scene.
“Nasty.”
Sloan could only agree. Crosby, who had been surveying the same scene for rather longer and more consistently than either Blake or Sloan, was looking rather green at the gills.
“He got wind that you wanted a little chat, did he then?” asked Digger Blake. He had brought his own photographer and fingerprint man with him and he motioned them now to go ahead with their gruesome work.
“Perhaps,” said Sloan slowly. “Perhaps not.”
“Not a coincidence anyway,” said Blake.
“No. Someone knew.”
“Many people realize you wanted this word or two with him?” Digger’s questions were usually obliquely phrased.
“Enough.” Sloan took a deep breath. “A girl who said she saw him in Calleford yesterday afternoon.” Henrietta had probably been right about that, now he came to think of it, but how significant it was he couldn’t sort out. Not for the moment. “Her solicitor. He knew, of course. He’s called Arbican.”
“That’ll be Waind, Arbican & Waind, in Ox Lane,” said Blake. “There’s only him left in the firm now.”
“And a young man called Bill Thorpe.” He hesitated. “I can’t make up my mind about him.”
“What’s the trouble?”
“Too ardent for my liking.”
“It’s not whether you like it, old chap,” grinned Blake. “It’s if the lady likes it.”
“She’s got quite enough on her plate as it is,” said Sloan primly.
And he told Digger the whole story.
“A proper mix-up, isn’t it?” Blake said appreciatively. “Rather you than me.”
“Thank you. Crosby, if you want to be sick go outside.”
“Who else knew you wanted Jenkins?” asked Blake, who was nowhere near as casual as he sounded.
Sloan frowned. “The rector of Larking and his wife. Meyton’s their name.”
“Lesson One,” quoted Blake. “The cloth isn’t always what it …”
“It is this time.”
“Oh, really? And who else is in the know?”
“No one that I know of. There’s a James Heber Hibbs, Esquire.”
“Gent?”
“Landed Gent,” said Sloan firmly, “of The Hall, Larking, but he doesn’t know about Jenkins. Not unless the girl’s told him and I don’t quite see when she would have done. Owns about half the village if you ask me.”
“For Hibbs read Nibs,” said Digger frivolously. “Has he got a missus?”
“Yes, but you call her madam, my lad.”
“And their connection with this case?”
“Obscure,” said Sloan bitterly.
&
nbsp; “Anyone else?”
Sloan hesitated. “There’s a certain Major Hocklington, but …”
“But what?”
“He might be dead.”
“I see. Well, when you’ve made your mind up …”
“He might have had the M.C. and the D.S.O., too.”
“That’ll be a great help in finding him,” murmured Digger affably, “but I’d rather he had a scar on his left cheek, if it’s all the same to you.”
“There’s always the possibility,” said Sloan, “that he had an agent.”
“If he’s dead, for instance?” Blake moved out of the photographer’s line of vision.
“That’s right.”
Blake pointed the same way as the photographer’s camera. “He’s not going to tell you. Not now.”
“No,” said Sloan morbidly, “though, oddly enough, I’m after his blood too.”
It was something after eight o’clock that evening when Inspector Sloan, supported by a still rather wan-looking Constable Crosby, reported back to Superintendent Leeyes in person at the Berebury Police Station.
“As pretty a kettle of fish, sir,” Sloan said, “as you’ll find anywhere.”
“Suicide or murder?” demanded Leeyes.
But it wasn’t as simple as that.
Dr. Dabbe had got to Cullingoak at a speed which, as far as Sloan was concerned, didn’t bear thinking about. He was well known as the fastest driver in Calleshire and nothing that his arch enemy, Inspector Harpe of Traffic Division, could do seemed to slow him down at all.
At the house Dr. Dabbe had met his opposite number, the consultant pathologist for East Calleshire, Dr. Sorley McPherson. The two doctors had treated each other with an elaborate and ritual courtesy which reminded Sloan of nothing so much as the courtship display of a pair of ducks at mating time.
With professional punctiliousness each had invited the other’s opinion on every possible point.
The upshot—after, in Sloan’s private opinion, a great deal of unnecessary billing and cooing—was that Cyril Edgar Jenkins had probably been shot in the head by someone sitting opposite him across the table, who had pulled out a revolver and leaned forward.
“We can’t be certain, of courrrse”—Dr. Sorley McPherson had rolled his “r’s” in an intimidating way—“but it looks as if the rrevolver was placed in deceased’s rright hand after death.”
“I see, Doctor.”
“Suicide,” he went on, “was doubtless meant to be inferrrred.”
Sloan thought the “r’s” were never going to stop.
“We’ll be needing a wee look at the poor chap’s fingerprints on the revolver handle. D’you not agree, Dabbe?”
Dr. Dabbe had agreed. The powder burns, the position of the shot, the body, the revolver, all indicated murder made to look like suicide.
Sloan said all this to the superintendent. “But only inferred, sir. Not proved yet.”
Leeyes snorted in a dissatisfied way. “Except, then, that he’s dead, we’re no further forward.”
Sloan said nothing. If Leeyes cared to regard that as progress there was nothing he could say.
“What about the blood?” said the superintendent.
“Dr. Dabbe’s grouping it now. He’s going to ring.”
Leeyes drummed a pencil on his desk. “You say no one in Cullingoak saw or heard anything?”
“No one. The people in the house next door on one side were out and the woman in the other always has a lay down after her lunch. Anyone could walk in the back, just like we did. He did have a job in Calleford, by the way. She confirms that.”
“No other children?”
“No sir, not that she knew of.”
Leeyes grunted. “And Major Hocklington—where have you got with him?”
“The Army are doing what they can, but …”
“I know, Sloan. Saturday night’s not the best time.”
“No, sir. If he were a serving officer now it would be quite simple.”
“I presume,” coldly, “you checked the Army List days ago.”
“Yes, sir.”
“So we have to wait.” Leeyes wasn’t good at waiting.
“Yes, sir.”
“And our other friends?”
Sloan turned back the pages of his notebook though he knew well enough what was written there. “Bill Thorpe excused himself pretty smartly after the inquest and went off just before Arbican went back to Calleford.”
“Went off where?”
“Larking, he says. He wouldn’t have lunch in Berebury with the Meytons and Henrietta.”
“Why not?”
“Said he hadn’t time. Had to get back to the farm.”
“And did he?”
Sloan said carefully. “No one happened to see him at Shire Oak—which, of course, is not to say he wasn’t there.”
“Did you get his background?”
“It seems all right, sir. Second son of middling-size farmers with quite a good name locally. Lived in Larking all his life. Known Henrietta ever since she was a child. Been home from agricultural college for about two years.”
“Found the body with the postman, could have knocked it down, stuck to the girl like a leech since it happened, wants to marry her quickly.” Leeyes’s rasping tones supplanted Sloan’s matter-of-fact report. “Could have killed Cyril Jenkins. Could have known the whole story. Could have wanted money.”
“Why, sir?”
“He’s the second son, Sloan. You’ve just said so.”
“Yes, sir.” It was futile to argue with the superintendent.
Leeyes grunted. “And this other fellow—the one with the money. What about him?”
“Hibbs?” said Sloan. The superintendent was always suspicious of people with money, assuming it—in the absence of specific evidence to the contrary, to be ill-gotten. Sloan cleared his throat uneasily. “He and his wife went into Calleford for the day.”
“They did what?”
“Went into Calleford,” repeated Sloan, going on hastily, “they had a meal at The Tabard. She went to a dress shop and he called in at a corn chandlers in the morning.”
“Whatever for?”
“He’s hand-rearing some pheasants this year, sir.” Sloan himself had always wondered what you did at a corn chandlers. “And he visited a wine merchant just after lunch.”
“When was Jenkins shot?”
“Roughly about three o’clock.” The two pathologists had been as agreed on this as on everything else.
“Could he have done it?”
“Easily. So could Bill Thorpe. Anyone could have done it. Even Arbican if he had had a mind to—to say nothing of Major Hocklington. Always supposing he exists.”
Leeyes was thinking, not listening. “Sounds as if it could have been someone Jenkins knew fairly well—all this business of back doors and sitting down at the table together.”
“Yes, sir.” Inspector Blake had cottoned on to that fact, too, as he went methodically about his routine investigation. “The only trouble is that we don’t know who it was that Cyril Jenkins knew.”
“No.” Leeyes frowned. “Or what.”
“The whole story, I expect,” said Sloan gloomily. “That’s why he had to go.”
The telephone rang. Leeyes answered it and handed it to Sloan. “The hospital,” he said. “Dr. Dabbe.”
Sloan listened for a moment, thanked the pathologist, promised to let him know something later and then rang off.
“The late Cyril Jenkins’s blood was Group AB,” he announced.
“And the girl’s?” asked Leeyes.
“We don’t know yet. We’re going to ask her if we can have some to see.”
“Tricky,” pronounced Leeyes. “Be very careful.”
“Why, sir?”
“Because if this case ever gets to court”—he stressed the word “if” heavily, and implied if it didn’t it would be Sloan’s fault—“If it does then you will probably find some clever young man arguing that you
’ve committed a technical assault, that’s why.”
“But if the putative father …”
“Get as many witnesses to her free consent as you can,” advised Leeyes sourly. “That’s all.”
“Yes, sir,” promised Sloan, “and then we’re going to Camford to see the bursar of her college.”
He and Crosby got up to go but Sloan turned short of the door.
“That AB Blood Group, sir …”
“What about it?”
“It’s the same as Grace Jenkins’s.”
“Well?”
“If the girl hadn’t said the woman’s maiden name was Wright, I could make out quite a good case for Grace Jenkins and Cyril Jenkins being brother and sister.”
SIXTEEN
“Dead?” said Henrietta dully.
“I’m afraid so.” Sloan wished her reaction could have been more like the superintendent’s. It couldn’t be doing her any good sitting here in Boundary Cottage, hanging on to her self-control with an effort that was painful to watch.
“Inspector,” she whispered, “I killed him didn’t I?”
“I don’t think so, miss,” responded Sloan, surprised.
“I don’t mean actually.” She twisted her hands together in her lap. “But as good as.”
“I don’t see quite how, miss, if you’ll forgive my saying so.” It occurred to Sloan for the first time that this was what people meant by wringing their hands.
“By seeing him.” She swallowed. “Don’t you understand? If I hadn’t seen him yesterday and recognized him, then he wouldn’t be dead today.”
This, thought Sloan, might well be true.
“Perhaps, miss,” he said quietly, “but that doesn’t make it your fault.”
“I haven’t got the Evil Eye, or anything like that, I know, but”—she sounded utterly shaken—“but if he was my father and I’ve been the means of killing him, I don’t think I could bear that.”
Sloan coughed. She had given him the opening he wanted. “That’s one of the reasons why we’ve come, miss. About the question of this Cyril Jenkins being your father.”
“Do you know then?” directly.
“No, miss. We don’t think he was but we can’t prove it either way yet.”
“Yet?” she asked quickly.
“Dr. Dabbe—he’s the hospital pathologist, miss—he says a blood test can prove something but not everything.”
Henrietta Who? Page 14
