Amendment of Life

by Catherine Aird

  ‘Not a ward,’ he said thickly. ‘A department. Accident and Emergency.’ He rose to his feet. ‘And that’s where I’m going now, whatever anyone says. Good day to you all.’

  The wheelchair reversed noiselessly back to face the room as he left. ‘There now,’ said Miss Daphne with satisfaction. ‘What did I tell you, Inspector? He’s no good under questioning. No good at all.’

  ‘What I would really like to know, Miss Pedlinge,’ said Sloan quietly, ‘is how to go round the maze on my own.’

  Her lips twitched. ‘I thought you’d never ask, Inspector. It’s easy. Go in and don’t backtrack until you get to a dead end.’

  ‘And then?’ Hitting the buffers was all very well, but usually it didn’t help.

  ‘Then only come back as far as the next opening and take that.’

  ‘Right or left?’

  The half-smile was still there. ‘Whichever comes first. You won’t get lost that way, Inspector, I promise you.’

  Chapter Fifteen

  ‘Of course I’ll see the police, Sharon,’ said Eric Paterson testily. ‘Show them straight in.’

  ‘Just a few questions, sir,’ began Detective Inspector Sloan as the two policemen settled themselves down in the partners’ room at the offices of Double Felix back in Berebury and Sharon speedily withdrew to her own room.

  ‘That’s what they always say, isn’t it?’ said Paterson, lifting a stack of files off a chair. He stood with them in his hands for a moment, looking for somewhere else to put them down. Finding nowhere at the right level, he eventually lowered the whole lot to the floor, where the individual files gradually canted over, ending up in a disordered heap.

  ‘It’s as good a beginning as any,’ said Sloan philosophically.

  ‘It’s what Socrates said,’ said Paterson grimly, ‘and look where it got him. Now, what’s this all about?’

  ‘A missing goat—’

  ‘You’re joking, surely.’ Paterson’s expression was quite comical.

  ‘No, sir. I’m quite serious. Did your partner happen to mention having heard it bleating when he was at the Minster last night?’

  Paterson’s brow went into deep furrows. ‘Yes, he did, as it happens—’

  ‘And did he mention it when he came in first thing?’

  ‘Oh, yes.’ Paterson nodded. ‘To our secretary as well. That was before he went off to the hospital but I don’t see what on earth—’

  ‘And he also spoke of having seen two of the clergy over there…’

  ‘That’s right. The Bishop and the Dean,’ said Paterson readily. ‘Tell me, what has all this got to do with the police?’

  ‘Just checking,’ said Detective Inspector Sloan.

  ‘That’s something else they always say, isn’t it?’ said Paterson with twisted lips.

  ‘It’s something we always do,’ said Detective Inspector Sloan with emphasis. ‘Now I understand that your firm is about to do some work at Aumerle Court.’

  ‘We are. My partner’s been handling that, though.’

  ‘If I might see the file…’

  Eric Paterson pointed to the floor. ‘We had it out this morning so it’s one of those down on the dog shelf.’ He stooped and started pulling the heap about. ‘Here you are … Aumerle Court, marked for immediate action…’

  ‘Plenty of that over there today,’ said Crosby chattily.

  Paterson gave the Constable a long, considering look. ‘So I understand. All that Double Felix is meant to be doing at this stage is giving the owners the layout for installing the lighting for their project.’ He shrugged his shoulders. ‘I daresay I’ll have to go over myself now that David is out of action.’

  ‘Thank you, sir,’ said Sloan, ‘you’ve been very helpful. And if we might take the file away with us…’

  Crosby clambered back into the driving seat of the police car and said ‘Where to, now, sir?’

  ‘The hospital,’ said Sloan wearily. ‘Let’s go and see if we can make any sense out of whoever Master Bevis said he was with over there yesterday evening when he should have been at home with his missus.’

  ‘Funny place to be carrying on with anyone,’ said the Constable.

  ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ mused Sloan. ‘There’s so much coming and going at hospitals that I should have thought you could have got away with murder without anyone noticing.’ He fell silent for a moment. ‘I dare say they’re doing it all the time.’

  ‘I shouldn’t have wanted to have been at home myself with that Mrs Pedlinge anyway,’ said Crosby frankly. ‘All skin and bone and complaints.’

  ‘An uncomfortable mixture,’ agreed Sloan. ‘Now, tell me what you made of the goat business—’

  They were interrupted by a nasal voice on the car radio. ‘Calling DI Sloan, calling DI Sloan of “F” Division…’

  Sloan reached for the microphone and responded ‘Go ahead.’

  ‘A message, sir,’ said the nasal voice, ‘from the Superintendent. He said you were to be told at once that there is a Captain Jeremy Prosser here at the station wanting to make a statement in connection with the death of Margaret Collins.’

  * * *

  ‘Now, Miss Daphne, what have you been up to?’ Milly Smithers came into the Long Gallery with a tea tray and took one look at her animated charge.

  Daphne Pedlinge gave her a wolf-like smile. ‘Sorting out Master Bevis, Milly, that’s what I’ve been doing.’

  ‘I can always tell when you’ve been up to something,’ said Milly, setting down the tray on a long sideboard used for that purpose at the Court through many generations.

  ‘Been wanting to do that for a long time,’ cackled the old lady gleefully.

  ‘It needed doing,’ said Milly Smithers, who knew the Pedlinge family almost better than they knew themselves.

  ‘Badly,’ said Daphne Pedlinge. ‘And’, she said with considerable satisfaction, ‘now I’ve done it.’

  ‘Will it do any good, though?’ asked Milly, who also had things riding on a substantial portion of the Pedlinge family money not being hived off to a disaffected wife. As jobs went these days, looking after Miss Daphne suited her down to the ground.

  ‘Too soon to say, Milly,’ she said, ‘but he didn’t like the idea of the police going off and talking to that Sister in the hospital who he says makes him feel better.’ She gave a snort. ‘Feel better! Where’s his backbone? If Amanda won’t act like a loving wife, then he should put his arms round her and give her a kiss and, if that doesn’t work, then he should beat her.’

  ‘I don’t know why men play rugby,’ said Milly with seeming irrelevance.

  ‘Makes ’em feel bigger and stronger,’ opined Miss Pedlinge. ‘And it gave him a good excuse to go to the hospital. And keep going up there.’

  ‘And she did kiss him better, I suppose,’ said Milly cynically.

  ‘The uniform helps,’ said Daphne Pedlinge sagely. A distant look came into her eyes. ‘Does a lot for a woman, a uniform.’

  ‘And a man,’ agreed Milly. ‘Take my hubby, now. He’s nothing in his old suit, but put him back in a uniform and he’s a real man again.’

  Daphne Pedlinge still had a faraway look in her eyes. ‘An old wound…’ She bit her lip and stopped. ‘I mean an old injury … would have been the only excuse he needed.’

  ‘What Master Bevis needs’, said Milly Smithers firmly, ‘is home comforts.’

  ‘Which he hasn’t got,’ said Daphne Pedlinge. ‘Not with Amanda.’

  ‘He’s let her get the upper hand,’ said Milly, ‘that’s his trouble.’ There had never been any such trouble in the Smithers household. And while, had she known about it, Milly Smithers would undoubtedly have been all in favour of the Married Women’s Property Act, she didn’t hold with the idea of her son’s wife getting a half-share in the bits and pieces she’d given him if the couple ever split up. Especially the pretty little china clock which had come to Milly from her own mother …

  ‘I’ve sent him away with a flea in his ear,’ said D
aphne Pedlinge. ‘No, not away. Home. And told him to stay there. The police can do their own detecting.’ A shadow came over her face. ‘Turns out, though, Milly, that Bevis knew this dead woman in the maze. And her husband. Worrying, that.’

  ‘Don’t you let that bother you, Miss Daphne,’ said Milly Smithers robustly. ‘There’s more people know Tom Fool than Tom Fool knows.’

  ‘That, Milly,’ said Miss Daphne Pedlinge with some acerbity, ‘is a great help, I must say.’

  ‘There now,’ said the woman, exercising the displacement skills shared by all carers, ‘we’re letting our egg get cold, aren’t we?’

  ‘Pah!’ said Daphne Pedlinge.

  * * *

  The interview room at Berebury Staion was deliberately bare. There was a window, but it was high up in the wall and there was no view to be had from it. Also high up on the wall was a video camera and, on the wall opposite it, was a clock with a clear face. The furniture was minimal – a small table and four chairs.

  On two of these were sitting Captain Prosser and a middle-aged man, who introduced himself as the Captain’s solicitor. ‘I felt it appropriate in the circumstances, Inspector,’ he said, ‘having advised my client to make a statement, to accompany him while he did so.’

  ‘We’re ready when you are,’ said Sloan, who was well aware why solicitors deemed it prudent to accompany their clients to the police station. This one was not local and thus a stranger to him.

  Captain Prosser sat upright in his chair, looked straight ahead of him and said, ‘I wish to state quite categorically that I did not have anything whatsoever to do with the death of Mrs Margaret Collins.’

  ‘Make a note of that, Crosby,’ said Sloan without any inflexion at all.

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘I think my client might be a little more specific about his relationship with the deceased,’ said the solicitor into the silence which followed.

  The Captain flushed a deep red. ‘I am prepared to admit that we knew each other very well.’

  ‘Make a note of that, too,’ said Sloan.

  ‘I mean,’ said the Captain, irritated, ‘that we had had an affair.’

  ‘But you’re telling me now that it was all over long before she died, are you?’ suggested Sloan genially. There were those in the Force who thought it rattling good sport to sit at the back of the Court and laugh aloud at the evidence of the accused, but Sloan was not one of them. There were other ways of casting doubt on what was said by the guilty, but only after that guilt had been firmly established and not before. Fair was fair, even at the police station.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How long ago?’

  ‘About six months.’

  ‘Might I ask when and how it terminated?’ Every policeman knew that it was the end of the affair that was the moment of danger. Usually for the woman. But not always.

  Captain Prosser didn’t hesitate. ‘The day after James’s eye condition was diagnosed we broke it off—’

  ‘We?’ echoed Sloan gently.

  ‘She—’ said Prosser.

  ‘I see.’ And Sloan thought he did.

  ‘She – Margaret – said that there was no room in her life just then for anything but James.’ He licked his lips. ‘I could understand that and we stopped seeing each other except when I met the Collinses socially in Nether Hoystings. We remained neighbours, of course.’

  ‘But you were still seeing her husband at Aumerle Court, too.’

  Prosser relaxed a fraction. ‘Oh, yes. That was no problem. I’d always known David as well as Margaret and Double Felix is a very good firm. The best.’

  ‘And how did he feel about being cuckolded?’ asked Detective Inspector Sloan. If there was one thing for sure, it was that Crosby wouldn’t know how to spell the word, still less remember its meaning.

  Captain Prosser understood what he meant all right. ‘I have no reason to think that David knew about our affair,’ he said stiffly. ‘Margaret said she was sure he didn’t. We were always very discreet. For James’s sake.’

  ‘This affair,’ said Detective Inspector Sloan, trying to keep what he thought about affairs with married women out of his tone, ‘how long had it lasted?’

  Captain Prosser shot a swift glance in the direction of his solicitor, who nodded almost imperceptibly. ‘About three years,’ he replied uneasily.

  ‘And James is – let me see now…’ murmured Sloan. It had once been a cardinal principle of English law that children born within wedlock were the sons and daughters of the husband of the marriage, but now a mysterious substance called deoxyribonucleic acid had upset all that. DNA and genetic fingerprinting had taken over and you were what the results of those tests said you were. He, Sloan, didn’t know whether that was good or bad, but as someone else had said, ‘A man’s a man for all that.’

  ‘Two,’ said Prosser shortly.

  ‘So…’

  ‘I have no actual reason to suppose that James is my son,’ said the Captain. ‘Nor did Margaret ever suggest otherwise to me, but.…’, he swallowed, ‘the trouble is we couldn’t be absolutely sure.’

  Detective Inspector Sloan wasn’t listening. He was trying to remember what Dr Chomel had told him about the difficulties of the genetic counselling of parents of children with retinoblastoma without a full DNA analysis. And Dr Browne had said something important, too. He must check on that as well.

  ‘No reason whatsoever,’ repeated Prosser.

  Sloan still wasn’t listening.

  He was thinking that David Collins, though, might well have excellent grounds for not just thinking but being absolutely sure that little James was not his son.

  Which was something very different.

  Chapter Sixteen

  ‘You’ve arrested Prosser, I take it, Sloan,’ said Superintendent Leeyes.

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘I’ve said before and I’ll say it again, Sloan, that you’re not quick enough off the mark in the way of arrests.’ The Superintendent’s eyebrows came together in a ferocious glare. ‘The fact that he’d got his solicitor with him shouldn’t have made any difference at all. You’ve only got to go by the book and you’re all right.’

  ‘It wasn’t that…’

  ‘Did he have an alibi for yesterday evening, then?’ He grunted. ‘Granted you’ve got to check that out first or we’ll have the human rights people round our necks.’

  ‘No, sir, as it happened he didn’t.’ Sloan wasn’t quite sure where human rights came into the frame – or whether they should be lumped with all the other do-gooders the Superintendent so disliked – but he did know that Leeyes was all against them whenever they did crop up. ‘Captain Prosser tells me that he went for a good long walk over the Bield after Aumerle Court closed for the day.’ The Bield was a low mound, crisscrossed with footpaths not far from Berebury Golf Course.

  ‘What he tells you, Sloan, isn’t evidence until it’s proved.’

  ‘He says he went alone and saw no one except for a few golfers leaving the clubhouse as he came down the path off the Bield that’s near the eighteenth fairway.’

  ‘And did they see him?’ asked Leeyes pertinently.

  ‘He doesn’t know – the last of the light had nearly gone by then.’

  ‘At least the husband’s got an impeccable alibi,’ grunted the Superintendent. ‘Even in this secular day and age, the word of a Bishop and a Dean should carry some weight.’

  ‘And a goat…’

  ‘What’s that, Sloan? What’s that?’ The Superintendent frowned. ‘Where does a goat come in?’

  ‘I only wish I knew,’ said Detective Inspector Sloan, rising to his feet. ‘I’ll get back to you as soon as I can, sir.’

  He left the Superintendent’s room and was making his way back to his own when he encountered his old friend, Inspector Harpe from Traffic Division, in the corridor. ‘Just the man I wanted to see, Harry.’

  ‘What about?’ asked that worthy cautiously. He was known as Happy Harry throughout the Calleshire C
onstabulary because he had never been seen to smile. For his part he maintained that there had never ever been anything in Traffic Division at which to so much as twitch one’s lips, let alone smile. ‘If it’s about that Constable of yours wanting to transfer to Traffic you can forget it. He only gets to come over my bod deady. Understood?’

  ‘Understood,’ said Sloan pacifically. ‘No, Harry, I was wondering what you thought the odds are on whether a van could be driven from Calleford to Staple St James and back without being seen after dark.’

  ‘And parked?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How long parked for?’

  Sloan leaned back on his heels and thought. ‘Long enough for a man to trundle an industrial-sized rubbish bin all the way round a maze, tip a woman’s body out in the exact middle and retrace his steps to his vehicle.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘No what?’

  ‘No way that it could be done without somebody spotting it somewhere.’ He hunched his shoulders. ‘Especially when it was parked. Seeing unfamiliar vehicles in unfamiliar places seems to bring out something primitive in people.’

  ‘This was a Sunday evening.’

  ‘Then they’d have been even more likely to notice a commercial vehicle,’ said Happy Harry. ‘By the way, how did your chummie get to the middle of a maze in the dark? I can never do it even in daylight.’

  * * *

  Detective Constable Crosby was in Sloan’s office when he got back there. ‘Your wife rang, sir, while you were out. She wants to know when you’re coming home. If you are, that is.’

  Sloan sat down and pushed his hands through his hair. ‘Might as well go home,’ he said, ‘for all the good we’re doing here. It’s getting late, anyway.’

  ‘She said, sir, to say she wondered’, continued Crosby, unsure of the wisdom of delivering this part of her message, ‘if you were ever coming home again.’

  Sloan gave a great yawn. ‘I am, but before I went home I had wanted to work out who it is who had killed Mrs Margaret Collins and why.’

  ‘And how they did it, sir. Don’t forget that.’

  ‘We know how, Crosby. You know that. Dr Dabbe said she died from an overdose of a sedative called Crespusculan. How she ingested it, of course, is for us to establish.’ The Crown Prosecution Service would want them to prove beyond reasonable doubt that it wasn’t by accident, but that would have to wait. ‘Me, I reckon she was slipped a Mickey Finn.’ He grimaced. ‘Always plenty of those around at the hospital, too, as well as in the home as in her case…’