Stiff News

by Catherine Aird

  ‘Anything that you can tell us, miss, would be helpful.’

  ‘It’s not my field, I’m afraid,’ warned the young woman, ‘so I can only give you very rough details…’

  ‘If you would,’ said Sloan courteously. That it wasn’t your province was something you weren’t allowed to say in the Force. Even the War Duties Officer had to be able to direct traffic, arrest a burglar and hold a shield in a Riot Squad. So, in theory, did the Chief Constable, but he was less likely to be put to the test on account of usually being away sitting on a committee somewhere.

  ‘I would say the provenance was almost certainly Egyptian,’ she began cautiously.

  There had been no doubt about where the stuffed capercaillie standing in the library fireplace had come from. Even Sloan knew that such birds were peculiarly Scottish. Haughty even in death, its beady eyes had – like those of the subject of a portrait whose sitter had looked at the painter while he was working – seemed to follow the two policemen round the room.

  ‘And that it’s meant to be symbolic of life,’ continued Miss Collins studiously.

  This time Crosby’s snort was unmistakable.

  ‘Ah…’ Sloan hadn’t needed anyone to explain to him the symbolism of the old sporrans on display in the library. You didn’t need to be an anthropologist to know what they and their fine tassels represented. What he’d have liked was a quick refreshing look at Sir James Frazer’s book The Golden Bough. When he had been a young constable his old Station Sergeant had always kept a copy by him to remind him that quirks of human behaviour were not confined to the Charge Room of one police station in the county of Calleshire. ‘The expurgated version, lad,’ he would say to a callow and uncomprehending Sloan. ‘Can’t go too far. Not in here.’

  ‘It is also meant to stand for dominion,’ expounded Hilary Collins, ‘although in precisely what way it achieves this, I cannot say.’

  Detective Inspector Sloan made a careful note, while uttering a silent prayer that no one would want to take up with him the deep philosophical question of whether there was a link between luck and dominion. Psychiatrists could make something of anything. Or something of nothing. Or even everything of anything.

  ‘The ankh part there,’ the Deputy Curator pointed to the outer part, ‘that’s the loop above the horizontal bar – is an ansate cross…’

  ‘The bit like a lacrosse stick with knobs on, you mean?’ said Crosby more colloquially.

  ‘… and is the symbol of life,’ she said hortatively, ‘whilst this straight length up the middle here,’ she indicated the inside of the loop, ‘is the sceptre set in it, which, as you will know, represents power and authority.’

  Detective Constable Crosby, who had to make do with a rather grubby warrant card as the symbol of his power and authority, leaned over and took a better look.

  ‘And the date, miss?’ asked Sloan. ‘How old is it?’

  ‘I’m no expert,’ she said self-deprecatingly, ‘but I should say something in the region of three thousand years.’

  Sloan stared at a piece of work crafted by the hand of man that had lasted longer than anything else he had ever known, his imagination soaring far away beyond the present and mundane. It was his detective constable who brought him back to earth.

  ‘What’s it worth?’ asked Crosby.

  ‘We’re not allowed to give valuations,’ said Miss Collins a little primly. ‘I think I might say, though, that it would be considered eminently collectable.’

  Sloan gave an untroubled nod. For his money, Lionel Powell wouldn’t have given it away if he had known it was valuable. Unless, of course, it had held unhappy associations. He’d seen that happen to plenty of things after a death.

  The Deputy Curator pointed to the polythene bag. ‘If I might be allowed to feel the object, Inspector, I might just be able to tell you some more about it. It’s clearly a very interesting piece…’

  ‘You’ve told us all we need to know, miss. Thank you,’ said Sloan untruthfully.

  As far as Detective Inspector Sloan was concerned, the one interesting thing about the artefact was something that they hadn’t mentioned at the museum at all and on which the Deputy Curator was unlikely to be able to give an opinion, this being most definitely not her field. That was that the only fingerprints on it were those of the Matron and of Hazel Finch, who had borne it from the bedroom down to the library at the Manor after Mrs Powell had died.

  Before that it had been wiped absolutely clean.

  Chapter Twelve

  And must give up their murmuring breath

  Unlike Maisie Carruthers but with equally careful forethought, Walter Bryant had chosen not to receive his two daughters in the privacy of his own room at the Manor. Instead, he had elected the relatively public setting of the library. Picking your ground was an important military maxim.

  Agnes, the elder, kissed him dutifully on the forehead.

  He wriggled uncomfortably, mentally chalking up yet another shortcoming to life in a wheelchair. Most – but not all – kisses landed, perforce, on his balding pate.

  ‘Nice to see you, Da,’ she said. ‘Mike’s sorry he couldn’t come.’

  ‘Didn’t ask him,’ growled her father.

  ‘Because it’s a Saturday,’ she said, ignoring, like her mother before her, what she didn’t like, ‘he’s taken the children to watch the Probables play the Possibles.’

  Helen, the younger, sat down opposite him, and decided not to mention her husband. Her father had never liked him.

  ‘You’re not ill, are you, Da, sending for us both like this?’ she asked.

  ‘On the contrary,’ he said, sitting up very straight. ‘I’m feeling fitter than I’ve done for a long time.’

  His daughters exchanged glances.

  ‘Good,’ said Helen nervously.

  ‘Much fitter,’ he said.

  ‘Splendid,’ said Agnes insincerely.

  ‘In fact that’s got a lot to do with my news … my good news.’

  ‘Good news?’ Helen fought to keep the quaver out of her voice. One of the reasons why her father had never liked her husband was his charming – but total – improvidence.

  ‘I’ve asked Miss Ritchie – Margot – to marry me,’ he said. He paused for effect. ‘And she said she would.’

  ‘I’ll bet she did,’ exploded Agnes.

  ‘Oh, dear,’ moaned Helen quietly. The only thing that had made her husband’s charming improvidence bearable was the thought that one day – in due course, naturally – her half-share – she didn’t grudge the other half-share to her sister – of her father’s money would come to her. She did grudge it to Miss Margot Ritchie.

  ‘That woman –’ began Agnes. But, catching sight of her father’s expression, she thought better of carrying on.

  ‘But what can she offer you?’ asked Helen.

  ‘A home,’ said Walter Bryant simply.

  ‘But you like it here, Da,’ wailed Agnes. Her Mike was a better provider than Helen’s husband but there were the boys to be settled and – one day in the future – she was sure she didn’t wish her father ill in any way – a few luxuries wouldn’t have come amiss. ‘You’ve always said how you’ve liked the Manor.’

  ‘It’s not the same as a home of one’s own,’ he said.

  That silenced both women. Neither had ever offered him a home with them when their mother had died.

  ‘Besides, I think I’ll be better off in Miss Ritchie’s bungalow,’ he said complacently.

  Agnes suddenly became very earnest while Helen, more disturbed by the news, started pacing up and down the library behind him.

  ‘But Da,’ said Agnes, leaning forward and patting his hand, ‘what about your bad heart?’

  ‘It’ll stay the same as it’s always been. It’s my address I’m changing,’ he snapped, ‘not my vital organs.’

  Agnes, who would have liked to have said something further about his vital organs, decided to keep the word ‘satyriasis’ until she got home. She settle
d instead for a few pointed remarks about old age.

  Her father listened with half an ear. He was attempting to keep his eye on Helen, still distractedly pacing about the library. He tried to spin his wheelchair round to keep her in view. ‘What are you doing over there?’ he said irritably. The irritability would have been recognized by any half-baked psychologist as a displacement activity. ‘You know I don’t like anything going on behind my back. No soldier ever does.’

  ‘Just looking,’ said Helen, feeling suddenly rebellious. From now on there would be no need to play the subservient daughter ever again.

  ‘Well, come where I can see you,’ he ordered.

  ‘They’ve got everything here, haven’t they?’ Helen said, looking round the walls, and not moving, ‘except shrunken heads.’

  ‘I dare say,’ said her sister drily, ‘they ought to have some of those, too.’

  ‘One, anyway,’ said Helen.

  ‘So,’ said Walter Bryant, affecting not to have heard this, ‘I’ve arranged for Miss Ritchie – Margot – to come in this morning to have coffee with us so you can congratulate her and hear about our wedding plans.’

  Agnes drew in her breath sharply but her father was already looking at his watch. Before she could speak he said, ‘She’ll be here any minute now…’

  But meeting Miss Ritchie just at this minute was something his daughters could not bring themselves to do. They left immediately without farewell kisses.

  * * *

  Berebury Police Station was a relatively quiet place on Saturday mornings. Like birds of prey, evildoers tended not to rise too early in the day. Avian raptors need rising thermals of spiralling hot air in which to soar above their quarry – malefactors seek darkness and a tired waning of attention in their potential victims. Detective Inspector Sloan and Detective Constable Crosby were therefore sitting in an almost empty canteen. They were drinking tea and concentrating on a list.

  ‘If you ask me,’ said Crosby, ‘they go to that Manor and forget to die.’

  ‘Not this lot,’ said Sloan, tapping the paper. ‘These are the ones who went there and did die.’

  Crosby sniffed. ‘I dare say, sir, but you can’t say that any of them were exactly knocked-off in their prime, can you?’

  ‘We can’t say that any of them were knocked-off at all,’ retorted Sloan with some asperity. Jumping to conclusions was something a properly professional detective constable should have learned by now not to do. That way led to miscarriages of justice on a grand scale – and compensation on an even grander one. ‘Not even Gertrude Powell.’ He paused and said thoughtfully, making a mental note, ‘Especially not her.’

  ‘But…’

  ‘These,’ Sloan waved the paper at him, ‘are just the names of all eight of the residents of the Manor who have died in the past three years, starting with a Lionel MacFarlane.’

  ‘Knocking-on, all of ’em,’ insisted the constable, ‘even if they weren’t knocked-off.’

  ‘Their ages,’ said Sloan grandly, ‘have got nothing to do with it. A crime is a crime is a crime.’

  This was Sloan’s own private adaptation of Gertrude Stein’s famous syllogism ‘A rose is a rose is a rose.’ He’d been very taken by this statement when he’d seen it plastered all over a catalogue from his favourite plant nursery. He’d given it quite a lot of thought while trying to make up his mind between buying a new Rosa banksiae or another Picasso rose bush.

  Crosby’s brow furrowed into a deep frown of incomprehension as he drained his mug.

  ‘A victim is always a victim,’ said Sloan. He didn’t think Crosby would understand the connection with roses even if he explained it to him. The constable wasn’t an inveterate rose grower and Sloan was. This was no accident. There weren’t very many recreations open to a busy detective inspector liable to be called back to duty at the drop of a hat – or the raising of a weapon – but growing roses was one of them.

  Crosby’s brow cleared a little.

  ‘And if any of these people on this list have died unnaturally then they are still victims,’ said Sloan, raising a hand in salute to his friend and colleague Inspector Harpe of Traffic Division, who had just come into the canteen. Now, Harpe’s hobby was keeping tropical fish. Fish didn’t mind being left. Like roses, they waited.

  ‘You wouldn’t think it’d matter so much, all the same,’ said the voice of youth sitting opposite him. ‘All these people over at Almstone must have been going to die very soon anyway, if not sooner.’

  ‘And,’ carried on Sloan, undeterred by this tempting philosophical byway, ‘whoever brought about their deaths…’

  ‘If they did,’ Crosby put in a caveat.

  ‘If they did,’ agreed Sloan, ‘is still a murderer.’

  Detective Constable Crosby plunged his face into his mug of tea and said slyly, ‘Even if, sir, it was their own doctor?’

  ‘Ay,’ thought Sloan privately, ‘there’s the rub.’ Shakespeare had put his finger on it, all right. The beneficent action, the best of intentions, the greatest good for the greatest number … a flood of half-remembered, half-thought-out justifications tumbled into mind, some of them relics of courtroom battles. The extent of what could be found to be said in mitigation by defence counsel always came as a surprise to him – and probably to the accused, too.

  The trouble was that none of the arguments was conclusive – satisfactory, even. Not even his own personal belief that actions taken in malice ought not to succeed. And what about that tricky one – bad action taken with bad intent that had a good outcome? He didn’t know. He was only a policeman.

  Aloud he said, ‘That, Crosby, is what the doctors call the defence of the double effect.’

  ‘Really, sir?’

  ‘The general idea is if the doctor is only setting out to kill the pain, then death is only a side effect.’

  ‘More tea, sir?’ Crosby interrupted this disquisition. ‘Before we start chasing up that list.’

  ‘What’s that?’ Sloan jerked back to the here and now. Some things were better left to the moralists. ‘Oh, yes, thank you.’

  He was not deceived. Crosby’s way to the canteen counter – and his way back – would let Inspector Harpe become aware of his presence. Harpe was known throughout the Calleshire Force as Happy Harry on account of his never having been seen to smile. His contention that there never was anything in Traffic Division at which to smile was only likely to have been reinforced by Detective Constable Crosby’s best efforts to join it.

  Sloan turned back to the names of those who had died at the Manor.

  They read like a roll-call of the Scottish army at the Battle of Flodden plus camp followers. The only name that meant anything to him was that of Maude Chalmers-Hyde; she whom Dr Browne had suspected of dying too soon. He must tell Crosby to get hold of copies of the death certificates of all the others – and the balance sheet of the Manor. The wisdom of always ‘taking a look at the accounts’ was something born of hard experience.

  Many a showy outfit, Sloan had good reason to know, was without financial substance; many an unobtrusive enterprise was backed by big money. He’d have a look at the Manor’s Trust Deed while he was about it. Grateful patients might have left them money and indigent ones been hastened on their way. The other side of the coin in more ways than one, you might say …

  ‘Your tea, sir.’ Crosby interrupted his thoughts by plonking the mug down on the table with a vigour that splattered drops of hot liquid – if nothing else, their canteen tea was always hot and wet – all over the list of those deceased.

  ‘You’re in luck, Crosby,’ observed Sloan pleasantly.

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘I’m going to give you the time to do out this muster list again.’ Inspector Harpe, Sloan was happy to see, had not allowed Crosby to catch his eye as he passed.

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  Sloan pushed the damp sheet of paper back to the constable. ‘Anything else you can make of this lot?’

  Superintendent Leeyes m
ight not be in the police station but he had made his presence felt by leaving a wordy memo about the importance of immediately reporting to him the results of their morning’s investigations.

  ‘More women than men,’ said Crosby at once.

  ‘Women live longer. Even at the Manor –’ Sloan pulled himself up with a jerk. He mustn’t jump to conclusions either.

  Crosby shrugged his shoulders. ‘Old soldiers must be getting pretty thin on the ground now anyway. Long time no war,’ he said, submerging Korea, Malaya, Northern Ireland, the Falklands Campaign and the Gulf War without a second thought – to say nothing of those notoriously dangerous military exercises, peacetime manoeuvres.

  ‘I think the Super will want a little more than…’

  Crosby waved his hand airily. ‘Don’t worry, sir. He won’t be in this morning.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘On duty on the domestic front,’ said Crosby. ‘His wife makes him take her to the supermarket Saturday mornings. He doesn’t get to play golf Sundays otherwise. Didn’t you know, sir?’

  ‘No,’ said Sloan, considerably entertained, ‘and how, may I ask, do you?’

  ‘It’s my landlady,’ said the constable. ‘She sees them there. She says Mrs Leeyes is a real tartar.’

  Detective Inspector Sloan could well believe it. He’d seen the Superintendent’s wife himself – a short, thin, shrewish woman with a tongue like a whiplash. At the police station she was uncharitably credited with being the reason for her husband’s irascibility. Sloan found it oddly comforting that his boss shouldn’t be in charge at home. Now, that was one thing he, Christopher Dennis Sloan, didn’t have to worry about … Suddenly a vision of the rose catalogue came unbidden into his mind. The choice between Rosa banksiae, a very vigorous climber which could reach thirty feet, and the rose bush Picasso, a two-foot-high shrub, had eventually come down in favour of the smaller rose. Their suburban garden, his wife, Margaret, had pointed out with gentle persistence, wasn’t really quite big enough for such vigorous climbers.