Stiff News

by Catherine Aird

  ‘No.’ She smiled faintly. ‘But with a picture of roses on the lid. Hazel said the box had always been kept just inside the top drawer of her dressing table.’

  ‘I take it that Mrs Powell wouldn’t have been able to get to them to destroy them herself?’

  ‘Oh no, Inspector. She was unconscious for several days before she died.’

  ‘And she hadn’t asked anyone else to burn them unread after she’d gone?’ Too deep for words was his own wife’s illogical conviction that the only person in the whole world who must never read their love letters to each other was their own son.

  ‘Hazel says not her, anyway. And,’ the Matron chose her words with obvious care, ‘I’ve always found her a very truthful girl.’

  Detective Inspector Sloan nodded. ‘The other staff?’

  ‘Hadn’t been in there at all after Mrs Powell died,’ said the Matron promptly. ‘I don’t, of course, know about before.’

  ‘But afterwards?’

  ‘I locked the door of her room myself while we were waiting for the undertakers.’

  ‘The keys?’

  ‘Hanging in the office.’

  Sloan sighed. ‘How accessible?’

  ‘Very, I’m afraid, Inspector. You must remember that this is meant to be a home from home, not a prisoner of war camp,’ she gave a tolerant smile, ‘for all that the residents do have what they call an Escape Committee.’

  ‘Me, I don’t blame them.’ Crosby hitched himself up on the sofa cushions and looked round. ‘Well, they are here for the duration, aren’t they?’

  ‘The Escape Committee is for arranging outings and excursions,’ protested Mrs Peden feebly. ‘To the theatre and open gardens in the summer and so forth.’

  Detective Constable Crosby, occasional reader of war stories, said, ‘Got a Senior British Officer, then, have they?’

  ‘The Brigadier.’ said the Matron.

  Sloan looked up. ‘Not the Judge?’

  ‘Too old,’ she said, adding lightly, ‘besides, judges don’t make leaders, do they?’

  Sloan looked at her plump and kindly features with new eyes. An unlikely spiritual sister of Superintendent Leeyes, she, too, had spotted a judicial weakness. Terrier-like, he returned to the matter of the keys.

  ‘Each on its own named hook, Inspector,’ she said. ‘It has to be that way because we don’t let the residents bolt themselves in their rooms in case they need help.’

  Detective Constable Crosby suddenly stirred again. ‘Where was the ornament?’

  ‘On the windowsill,’ said Mrs Peden. ‘That’s where it always was.’

  ‘And where is it now?’ asked Sloan more pertinently.

  ‘In our little library here, Inspector. Mr Powell presented it to us here in his mother’s memory when he took all Mrs Powell’s other things away with him the day she died.’

  ‘Except her letters,’ remarked Crosby.

  ‘Except her letters,’ agreed the Matron.

  Chapter Nine

  But their strong nerves at last must yield

  Matron’s knock on Mrs Forbes’ bedroom door was so perfunctory that Detective Inspector Sloan knew that she was not expecting to hear any response from its occupant.

  Lying in the bed and curled up in what the medical professionals called the foetal position was a figure almost as unaware as a newborn baby of anything other than its attendants and food and warmth. Lending a touch of verisimilitude to this neo-natal comparison, a baby’s feeding bottle was tucked in the bedclothes alongside her.

  Muriel Peden advanced on the patient with a Florence Nightingale brightness. ‘Hullo, Mrs Forbes, I’ve brought along a gentleman who just wants to make sure you’re all right.’

  Detective Inspector Sloan regarded the woman with unwonted compassion as he saw the effort it cost her to speak. Gnarled hands clenched with pain as her head inched up slowly to try to look at him.

  ‘Yes, thank you,’ Elizabeth Forbes enunciated carefully. ‘Quite all right.’

  All Sloan could think of was something that Rudyard Kipling had written and a chorus line at that. ‘No one thinks of winter when the grass is green!’ This was Mrs Forbes’ winter, all right … and a long, long one.

  As soon as she had finished speaking her head started to descend again towards her chest until her chin came to rest on her breastbone.

  Kipling had been writing about Napoleon on St Helena but ‘If you’ve taken the first step, you will take the last!’ applied just as well to Elizabeth Forbes ending her days at the Manor.

  Muriel Peden expertly slid the feeding bottle up between Mrs Forbes’ fingers and, like a blind nursling, the old lady immediately brought it up to her mouth and started to suck.

  ‘How long has she been like this?’ Sloan asked the Matron in a low voice. What Kipling had written was, ‘After open weather you may look for snow!’ He found himself hoping that Mrs Forbes had had her full mede of open weather.

  ‘A long time,’ said Mrs Peden.

  Sloan nodded. With Napoleon Bonaparte it had been, ‘What you cannot finish you must leave undone.’ If Elizabeth Forbes had left anything undone, it was too late now to do it.

  ‘She came in here after her husband died,’ murmured the Matron.

  An involuntary spasm of pity crossed Sloan’s face – for Mrs Forbes, not for Napoleon, who had been the architect of his own troubles.

  Matron said, ‘He’d looked after her for as long as he could up until then. And he was getting old and frail, too.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Sloan. Kipling had put his finger on it all right with his, ‘Morning never tries you till the afternoon.’

  ‘And she had no one else, you see.’

  ‘No family, you mean?’

  ‘That’s right. She’s quite alone in the world, Inspector.’

  It was Dr Samuel Johnson who came into Sloan’s mind as they left the room. An essay he’d been set long ago on something the Great Cham had said: ‘“Pity is an acquired emotion” – Discuss.’ The policeman in Sloan reasserted itself before his mind could run on any further.

  In this setting having no immediate heirs could be a positive safeguard.

  On the other hand it might not.

  * * *

  The most secure telephone at the Manor was in a cupboard under the stairs. It was cramped and dark there but at least it had the merit of being private. This was just as well, because Superintendent Leeyes did not mince his words.

  ‘That judge you asked about, Sloan…’

  ‘Yes, sir?’ Sloan positioned his notebook at the ready.

  ‘Nothing known against. Got a mysterious gong after the war – a Military Order of the British Empire – for unspecified services rendered while in the Judge Advocate’s Department.’

  Shakespeare’s play Othello was not a good one for schoolboys – perhaps it would have been more of an education for girls, Sloan didn’t know – but he had never forgotten the Moor’s, ‘I have done the State some service, and they know’t.’

  ‘Then,’ said Leeyes, ‘he became a Recorder over at Calleford.’ The Superintendent sniffed. ‘Quite highly thought of, I understand, in those days. Things were different then, of course.’

  ‘Quite so,’ said Sloan hastily. He already knew Leeyes’ ‘good old days’ speech almost by heart now. Hanging and flogging came into nearly every sentence.

  ‘He’s probably lost his Elgins at his age, though, Sloan, so watch it.’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ promised Sloan.

  ‘Now, did you get anywhere with that general practitioner over at Larking?’

  ‘I think, sir,’ replied Detective Inspector Sloan, conscious of theological overtones learned at his mother’s knee, ‘you could say that earlier he had had doubts.’

  ‘Doubts?’ echoed Superintendent Leeyes, never a man troubled by lack of conviction.

  ‘We have reason to believe he’d suspected something amiss over another death at the Manor.’

  ‘And why,’ enquired Leeyes at his most ma
gisterial, ‘didn’t Browne tell us that?’

  ‘Because Dr Dabbe couldn’t find anything wrong.’ Sloan coughed. ‘Even so, I’m going to get Crosby to make a list of all the deaths at the Manor in the last few years.’

  ‘Dabbe’s only a doctor,’ snorted Leeyes. ‘He’s not infallible.’

  ‘No, sir,’ agreed Sloan. ‘I know that.’

  Any Temple of Truth, he knew, was only as good as its current custodian. ‘But I think it might explain why Dr Browne was especially careful over Gertude Powell’s death.’

  ‘So I should hope,’ said Leeyes robustly.

  ‘Dr Browne even brought a medical consultant out from Berebury to make sure that nothing more could be done.’

  ‘Needed his hand holding, did he?’

  ‘Not necessarily.’

  ‘Covering his back, then?’

  ‘Taking precautions,’ said Sloan. ‘He’s a pretty wily bloke.’

  ‘It’s downright unnatural, if you ask me,’ pronounced the Superintendent. ‘I mean, everyone there’s knocking on a bit, aren’t they?’

  Sloan decided in the interests of his future pension to let this gross slur on the medical profession pass and concentrate instead on the police implications. ‘I don’t think it was the knocking-on aspect, sir, that troubled Dr Browne so much as the – er – knocking off.’

  ‘That, Sloan,’ said Leeyes icily, ‘if you remember, was what was bothering the deceased, too. You’d better get moving.’

  * * *

  Getting moving, Sloan decided, certainly ought to include another chat with Hazel Finch, the care assistant.

  They found her sitting at the kitchen table taking the weight off her feet, a large mug of tea in front of her. Without speaking, the cook, Lisa Haines, put two more mugs on the table and reached for the teapot.

  ‘We just need a little more background,’ said Sloan persuasively, pulling up a chair beside them, ‘and then we’ll be on our way.’

  ‘That’s all very well, Inspector,’ objected Lisa Haines, ‘but what’s going to happen about poor Mrs Powell’s funeral? You can’t just take her away like that and nothing said. It’s not right.’

  ‘Out of our hands, Mrs Haines.’ Detective Inspector Sloan looked as solemn as he knew how. ‘It’s up to the Coroner now.’

  ‘I’d forgotten all about him,’ said the cook, who had actually never given that august personage a single thought. ‘There now…’

  ‘The Coroner has the last word about any death,’ said Sloan. He himself almost always found any mention of the holder of that mysterious office of the Crown helpful. The exception was when his name cropped up in the presence of the Coroner’s archenemy, Superintendent Leeyes.

  ‘I suppose someone’s got to,’ she said doubtfully. In the Manor, it was the Matron who had the last word.

  ‘Yes, indeed,’ said Sloan, turning to the care assistant. ‘Now, Hazel, if you could just tell me about Mrs Powell’s box of letters that isn’t there, I promise we’ll soon be on our way.’

  Unperturbed, Hazel Finch confirmed everything the Matron had told Sloan.

  ‘And could you describe for us, too, the ornament that was moved?’

  ‘Funny-looking thing,’ said Hazel. ‘Egyptian, she always said it was. ‘Bout so high.’ She lifted a pudgy hand almost a foot above the kitchen table. ‘But not very wide.’

  ‘What was it made of?’

  ‘That I don’t rightly know. China, I think, because Mrs Powell was always on about me not breaking it.’ She patted the vast glazed-pottery teapot on the table. ‘It was shiny, like this.’

  ‘Colour?’

  Hazel Finch screwed up her eyes in the effort of recollection. ‘Sort of greeny-blue.’

  ‘And what did it look like?’

  This was clearly even more of a challenge but after a moment or two the care assistant said, frowning, ‘A sort of keyhole with arms but with the key left in the wrong way. You know, pointing upwards instead of through.’

  Detective Constable Crosby looked up. ‘Did she call it Keyhole Kate?’

  ‘I didn’t think nothing of it myself,’ said Hazel, ignoring the interruption, ‘but Mrs Powell set a lot of store by having it where she could see it. Always kep’ it on the corner of her dressing table.’

  Crosby drained his mug. ‘A mascot then?’ he suggested. ‘Seeing as it wasn’t very nice to look at.’

  ‘She said it had brought her luck,’ agreed Hazel, ‘though, me, I didn’t see that being ill and in bed here was luck.’

  ‘Good beds, good company and good food,’ countered the cook, who was older and wiser. ‘Let me tell you, Hazel Finch, there’s plenty of old ladies what’d be glad of all three.’

  ‘You’ve both been very helpful,’ said Sloan. This was quite true. If nothing more, Hazel Finch had shown she would make a good witness. The Crown Prosecution Service liked a good witness. He shut his notebook with rather more vigour than was absolutely necessary and ostentatiously put his pen away inside his jacket. ‘Tell me,’ he said conversationally, ‘what was it that so upset the Judge on his birthday?’

  ‘His birthday present,’ said Hazel promptly.

  ‘Ah…’ That took Sloan straight back to a certain birthday when a young Christopher Dennis Sloan had dearly wanted a bicycle and got a pair of football boots instead. He had been disappointed but not surprised. With the ruthless calculation of childhood, he’d soon worked out that his school would have insisted on the football boots but not the bicycle. In Sloan’s day bicycles were optional.

  Crosby’s mind was working along quite different lines. ‘What on earth could an old geezer of ninety want for his birthday?’

  ‘Don’t ask me,’ said Hazel Finch. ‘All I can tell you is what he got.’

  ‘And that was?’ asked Sloan.

  ‘His old coat repaired.’

  ‘And cleaned,’ put in Lisa Haines.

  ‘His coat?’ echoed Sloan.

  ‘He had one of those great big army overcoats,’ said the cook.

  ‘A British Warm,’ decided Crosby. ‘I’ve seen pictures of them.’

  ‘A greatcoat, he called it,’ said Hazel.

  Lisa Haines spotted Crosby’s empty mug and automatically reached for the teapot. ‘Whatever it was called, it was in a terrible state. Practically falling to pieces.’

  ‘He wouldn’t throw it away for all that it was in rags and tatters,’ said the care assistant. ‘He wouldn’t ever let me send it to the cleaners, either.’ She took a long draught of tea. ‘And that wasn’t for want of trying.’ She smiled benevolently at the two policemen. ‘Mind you, some old gentlemen get like that.’

  ‘I’m sure,’ said Sloan. He saw the ragged and tattered regularly under the railway arches by Berebury Station. But they were poor. The Judge presumably wasn’t.

  ‘So for his birthday some of the residents decided to have it cleaned and mended – well, to mend it themselves, actually,’ Lisa Haines said. ‘More tea, Inspector?’

  ‘And proper put out he was, I can tell you,’ said Hazel Finch stoutly, ‘when the Judge saw what they’d done to it.’

  ‘So shaky he couldn’t barely get his glass up to his mouth without spilling it,’ contributed the cook.

  ‘You’d’ve thought he’d’ve been grateful,’ said Hazel. ‘Wouldn’t you?’

  ‘But he wasn’t?’ said the policeman.

  Hazel shook her head. ‘He was very upset.’

  ‘Frightened, more like,’ said Lisa Haines soberly. ‘But we never did know why.’

  Chapter Ten

  They tame but one another still

  To describe a gathering of four geriatric patients in a care home as a council of war might at first sight have seemed to be stretching a point: especially when the group comprised an old lady visibly a victim of osteoarthritis and three old men, one of whom was in a wheelchair. And yet it would have been difficult to dismiss the little meeting in the Bridge Room of the Manor as anything else.

  Miss Bentley tapped the flo
or with her walking stick and the others stopped talking at once. ‘Now,’ she said peremptorily, ‘will someone kindly tell me exactly what has been going on?’

  ‘We don’t know,’ said Captain Markyate.

  ‘Can’t understand it at all,’ said Hamish MacIver. The spick and span former Military Person of the morning had gone. Now he just looked a tired old man.

  ‘Who on earth would have wanted to kill Gertie?’ asked Walter Bryant of no one in particular. ‘She’d been dying for ages anyway.’

  ‘Her son?’ suggested Peter Markyate, taking this literally. ‘Well,’ he said, looking round, ‘presumably he gets all her money.’

  The Brigadier tugged his moustache. ‘Dammit, the fellow hardly ever visited his mother.’

  ‘And never stayed very long when he did, either,’ sniffed Markyate. ‘He usually said he had to leave pretty soon because of his wife.’

  ‘As well he might.’ Walter Bryant leaned forward. ‘He always left Julia in the car park if she came with him. I know because I used to see her waiting there while I was waiting for Miss Ritchie to come and take me for a run.’

  Hamish MacIver muttered under his breath, ‘Take you for a ride, you mean.’

  ‘Now, Hamish…’ Bryant bristled.

  ‘Sorry,’ apologized the Brigadier gruffly.

  ‘So when he did come to see his mother,’ said Peter Markyate, ‘he was alone with her.’

  ‘What are you getting at, Peter?’ asked the Brigadier.

  ‘You only need one opportunity to kill,’ said Walter Bryant, eagerly edging his electric wheelchair forward. ‘I remember when A Company first came under fire at Wadi el Gebra and…’

  ‘Walter,’ Miss Bentley gave an exasperated snort, ‘I don’t think what you did at Wadi el Gebra has a lot of bearing on what we’re talking about today.’

  It was the Brigadier who flushed while Markyate intervened. ‘Steady on,’ he said earnestly. ‘We couldn’t have managed there without old Walter. Those terrible German tanks…’

  Miss Bentley ruthlessly cut this military reminiscence short. ‘That’s not the point. What I want to know is why Gertie thought she was going to be murdered.’ She searched the faces of the others carefully. ‘What exactly made her think that?’