Losing Ground

by Catherine Aird

  ‘Sauce for the goose, sauce for the gander,’ muttered Crosby.

  ‘Anything taken?’ asked Sloan, who had known stolen goods go missing again and again, especially when being sought by their rightful owners.

  ‘Like a portrait?’ said Crosby under his breath.

  ‘I’ve never seen anything like it,’ said Ayling, still stunned. ‘It’s absolute mayhem indoors. It looks as if I only just missed him.’

  The house, Sloan could only agree, was in a poor state. Every drawer had been emptied onto the floor and upstairs in the bedroom, the mattress overturned and the wardrobe ransacked. Just like Stuart Bellamy had reported only a little earlier.

  ‘What do you suppose someone was looking for?’ asked Sloan.

  Jonathon Ayling didn’t answer him. All he did was stare at a room turned upside down.

  ‘And have they found it?’ asked Sloan.

  ‘I couldn’t say,’ responded Ayling stiffly.

  ‘I think you can,’ said Sloan.

  There was an uneasy silence

  ‘You see,’ went on Sloan in a conversational tone, ‘if the portrait of Sir Francis Filligree has been stolen from here it can only be for one reason.’

  Jonathon Ayling still did not speak.

  ‘And that,’ said Sloan implacably, ‘is because someone might be able to recognise a current member of the Filligree family from it.’

  Ayling sank onto a bedside chair, head in hands. ‘I know. That’s what he said.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The guy who wanted it stolen – well, taken, anyway.’

  ‘Theft is theft,’ chanted Crosby sententiously.

  ‘This fellow said in this case it wasn’t theft.’

  ‘Who?’ asked Sloan again.

  ‘The one I met in the pub. The Claviger’s Arms over at Almstone.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘I was talking about what we were going to do about the development at Tolmie – I’d had a few by then – well, quite a few, actually – and this guy who was there asked what. I told him I thought if a few Anglo-Saxon bits and pieces were to be discovered there, that it would hold things up a bit.’

  ‘It would,’ agreed Sloan. He’d learnt that much about planning today. ‘Go on.’

  ‘He thought that sounded a great idea.’ Jonathon Ayling said ‘I did, too. After all, they’d be taken straight back from whence they came. Bound to be. And it wasn’t as if they were anything in themselves.’

  Detective Constable Crosby gave a low growl. The unimportance of the intrinsic value of stolen goods had been the subject of one of the lectures he’d had to attend.

  ‘Go on,’ commanded Sloan.

  ‘He asked where I was going to get them and I said the museum and he said well if I was going to do that, would I take the portrait as well – just to have it kept safe. He was going to give it back later, no questions asked.’

  ‘Oh, he was, was he?’ began Crosby.

  ‘Who was he?’ barked Sloan.

  ‘Didn’t give me his name – just his mobile phone number. He didn’t want the portrait himself – I was just to keep it safe and then give it back when he said. It’s well and truly gone now, all right.’

  ‘What did he look like?’ asked Sloan, an eye, as always, on the essentials.

  ‘Can’t say that I took a lot of notice at the time. You know how dark it is in these really old pubs and anyway I was pretty plastered by then.’

  ‘Never mind that,’ said Sloan. ‘Give me his mobile number as quickly as you can.’

  Jonathon Ayling handed it over and then there was an uneasy silence as it became clear that the mobile telephone was not going to be answered.

  ‘There was one thing about him – the man in the pub – that I do remember,’ offered Ayling. ‘He was ginger-haired.’

  ‘Come on, Crosby,’ snapped Sloan, tossing the telephone back to Ayling. ‘We haven’t got time to hang about.’

  ‘Yes, sir. I mean, no sir. Where to?’

  ‘Wherever it was Ned Phillips said he lived. You’ve got the address in your notebook. Quickly, now.’

  ‘Almstone village,’ said Crosby, flicking through his notebook at speed. ‘I’m sure I’ve got Ned Phillips down as living in Almstone. Yes, here it is.’

  ‘You’d better be sure,’ said Sloan grimly, as they scampered for the car in the manner of drivers at start of the old Le Mans race. He reached for the microphone before he’d even slammed the car door shut, calling up police headquarters as Crosby started up the car.

  ‘Attention, attention,’ said Sloan as Crosby slammed his way swiftly up the car’s gears. ‘Any car within reach of Almstone village to attend One Five – Fifteen – High Street, Almstone, and ensure personal safety of a man going under the name of Ned Phillips. Over.’

  The crisp impersonal tones of the Controller came in response. ‘Message received, caller. Please identify your position.’

  ‘Between Larking and Tolmie,’ said Crosby.

  ‘Oh Lord,’ said Sloan.

  ‘What was that, caller?’

  ‘About seven miles south of Almstone on the Larking road,’ said Sloan.

  The microphone came to life again. ‘Two cars attending from Calleford, caller.’

  ‘That’s miles away from Almstone,’ groaned Sloan.

  ‘Their ETA not yet known.’

  ‘They’ll be too late,’ said Sloan.

  ‘And one on its way from Luston,’ said the voice over the air.

  ‘That’s farther away still.’

  ‘Further information on the nature of the emergency required, caller. Is it a domestic?’

  ‘No,’ Sloan said into the microphone. ‘Not a domestic. A serious attack possibly imminent.’ That was the trouble with today, he thought. People were beginning to think that only husbands and wives hit each other. Personal safety wasn’t only about battered husbands and wives.

  The controller was obviously thinking along other, different, lines. ‘Are body armour and firearms likely to be needed?’

  ‘It’s too early to say.’ Sloan cast a sidelong glance at Crosby and said, ‘or too late.’

  ‘Six miles,’ said Crosby. ‘There’s Billing Bridge, though.’ Billing Bridge had been the way over the River Alm since medieval times. It had been built wide enough to take a horse driven wooden cart, not two fast cars travelling in opposite directions, one at least travelling at a speed not allowed on any road in the country. As traffic hold-ups went, on a busy day it was in a class of its own.

  Sloan was still talking to the controller at police headquarters. ‘Locate and detain for questioning the following staff of Berebury Homes: Lionel Perry, Robert Selby, Randolph Mansfield and Ned Phillips – if you can find him.’

  ‘Five miles,’ sang out Crosby.

  Sloan was still talking into the microphone. ‘Notify me of anyone who can’t be found,’ he said. For reasons too complex to quantify he had left Auriole Allen off his list.

  ‘Noted, caller,’ came cool tones from some distant control room. The speaker there wasn’t being bounced about in a speeding car, blue light flashing, police siren sounding out across the empty fields.

  ‘And tell me if you get a three nines call from Almstone,’ added Sloan for good measure. Chance, he thought, would be a fine thing.

  ‘Requests logged, caller,’ said the same dispassionate voice.

  Detective Inspector Sloan leant back – in complete contrast with Detective Constable Crosby who was crouched over the wheel as if he could coax another few miles an hour out of the car by leaning forward. With a Herculean effort, Sloan took his eyes off the road and thought about where they were going and what they might find. They had ‘At Risk’ registers for children in bad homes but they didn’t have one at all for a ginger-haired man tangling with a desperate one.

  ‘Billing Bridge coming up,’ said Crosby, putting his foot down even further when he caught sight of another car approaching the bridge from the opposite side of the river.

  �
��I’ll book him if he doesn’t stop,’ vowed Crosby.

  As if he had read the constable’s lips, the other driver fell back on his side of the bridge leaving the police car a clear run. Sloan was conscious of the police car picking up speed once safely over the river but only at one level of his awareness. The rest of his mind was engaged in thinking of what might lie ahead.

  ‘Three and a half miles,’ chanted Crosby.

  Sloan called up control again. ‘Get someone to check the Claviger’s Arms at Almstone. Ned Phillips might be there.’

  ‘Message received.’ The controller sounded distant and detached – rather like the cows present near Bosworth Field who would have observed the end of the Plantagenets with bovine indifference.

  While the police car passed fields and hedges at speed Sloan had another thought. He bent towards the microphone yet again. ‘Get someone in C Division to start checking on the senior staff at Calleford Construction, too.’ That was something he hadn’t got round to yet.

  ‘Message received.’

  ‘And locate but do not detain Jason Burke and Stuart Bellamy.’

  ‘Message received.’

  ‘Just over two miles to go, sir,’ said Crosby.

  Sloan cast another sidelong glance at him. The detective constable was concentrating on the road with the close attention that he never gave to his notebook. His only moment of indecision came when he spotted an oncoming car approaching a crossroads with the clear – and duly signalled – intention of turning right ahead of the police car. Crosby put his foot down and the car leapt forward into the rapidly closing gap. When Sloan opened his eyes again there was no sign of either the other car or the crossroads.

  ‘Not far to go now, sir,’ said the constable serenely. ‘Almstone’s just round the corner now.’

  He brought the police car to a halt outside a modest cottage and the two men tumbled out.

  ‘You take the front, Crosby,’ said Sloan, ‘and I’ll go round the back.’

  It was just as well he did. The kitchen door was ajar. Inside, Lionel Perry, knife in hand, already had Ned Phillips pinned down in his chair, blood everywhere. Gone was the face of the urbane company chairman: instead there was a visage contorted by anger and desperation.

  His hand was raised to take another lunge at the sitting man when Detective Inspector Sloan gripped his wrist so hard that, giving a squeal of pain, Perry dropped the knife to the floor.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  By the time the doctors allowed the police to interview Ned Phillips the next morning the young man was sitting, stitched and bandaged, in a hospital bed. He was more than ready to tell his story.

  ‘He nearly got me,’ he said hoarsely, still surprised at the narrowness of his escape. ‘I wasn’t expecting him, you see. He just came in the back door behind me as I was sitting down having my supper in the kitchen.’

  ‘You were very lucky,’ said Sloan soberly. ‘Stab wounds are always more serious than they look.’ That was another lesson you learnt early on the beat.

  Ned Phillips managed a grin. ‘That’s what the doctors said. He must have hit my shoulder blade the first time. He’d have got me properly with his next effort if you hadn’t got there.’

  ‘Too right he would,’ said Detective Constable Crosby, never one for false modesty.

  ‘I never thought he’d ever do something like that,’ admitted Ned Phillips. ‘I thought it was all a bit of a lark.’

  ‘Lionel Perry didn’t,’ said Sloan. ‘He was at his wits’ end.’

  ‘What I want to know is why did he go for me just then?’ said Phillips. ‘He’d been seeing me around for quite a while.’

  ‘That’s easily explained.’ said Sloan. ‘Until today he’d been seeing you without knowing who you were.’

  Ned Phillips frowned. ‘So how did he get to know I was me, so to speak?’

  Sloan said, ‘As soon as he got his hands on the portrait of Sir Francis.’

  Ned Phillips groaned. ‘That’s what worried me. You see, everyone has always said I was the spitting image of my sainted ancestor. But how did he know where to find the portrait?’

  Sloan said ‘That’s easy. The firm’s press officer, Mrs Allen, mentioned at a meeting that the newspaper reporter had told her about the stolen portrait and that they’d had a tip-off that the police were chasing a couple of likely suspects. One way and another Bellamy and Ayling had both been involved with Tolmie Park.’ Sloan’s interview with Auriole Allen had been a painful mix of guilt and disillusion. Nobody likes to learn that the firm’s boss to whom for so long one had been unfailingly loyal had had not so much clay feet as clay legs.

  ‘Beats me how the paper gets to know these things before anyone else,’ muttered Crosby.

  ‘They have ways and means not open to the Force,’ said Sloan. This was a sore subject in some quarters: it gave the press leverage when trying to act as judge and jury. ‘That was when Perry put two and two together. Luckily he searched Bellamy’s house before he went to Jonathon Ayling’s place.’

  Phillips groaned again. ‘Ayling was so sure it would be safe in his house.’

  ‘Well, it wasn’t, was it?’ said Crosby flatly.

  ‘Lionel Perry had been looking for us everywhere…’ said Phillips.

  ‘Us?’ interrupted Sloan.

  ‘The family,’ said Ned Phillips. ‘He put an enquiry agent on to it but he couldn’t find us in England because we weren’t there.’

  ‘You were in Switzerland, weren’t you?’ said Sloan. At a guess, Lionel Perry had gone out there, too, snapping famous mountains as he went. One of the well-known ways of disguising something was to stress it: everyone would know he went there on his holidays.

  Phillips nodded, promptly discovered that this action was painful and so stilled his head. ‘The family never came back after grandfather died there in the war. My mother’s Swiss, you see, and they don’t use the title now.’

  ‘He didn’t dare advertise for you for fear everyone would wonder why,’ said Sloan.

  ‘Anyway,’ said Ned Phillips, ‘when Dad heard that someone had been sniffing around I offered to come over and see what all the fuss was about.’

  ‘The Muster Green,’ supplied Detective Inspector Sloan. Derek Hitchin had remembered how Lionel Perry had suggested developing that separately but the thought that Berebury Homes might not have owned it had come from the architect, Randolph Mansfield. ‘Lionel must have taken a really close look at the title deeds and seen they didn’t include it.’

  ‘The Muster Green,’ agreed Ned Phillips. He leant back on his pillow, winced and sat up again rather quickly. ‘You see that was never included in the sale of the property because it had been used by the militia for yonks – including grandfather and his beloved Territorials – without the Filligrees ever charging anyone for it. The civil defence people were still training there in the cold war or something…’ he added, dismissing a serious blip in European history with all the insouciance of youth. ‘And anyway, Dad wanted to keep a bit of old England because it had mattered so much to grandfather before the White Plague got him.’

  ‘A foothold,’ said Crosby, unaware that that word, too, had a military meaning.

  ‘But Lionel didn’t know that,’ said Sloan, ‘until later.’

  ‘I don’t suppose anyone did,’ said Ned Phillips cheerfully. ‘Unless they checked. From a landscape point of view it looks as if it belongs because it always did. It would have been easy for everyone to assume that the Muster Green was part of the whole especially as no one else had been near it for over sixty years.’

  ‘Neither part nor parcel,’ said Sloan. That had been the trouble.

  ‘Berebury Homes were taking on lots of extra staff to cope with the new development there,’ said Ned, ‘So I applied, too. I’d been educated over here so no one guessed.’ He pulled his lips down in mock grimace. ‘Robert Selby’s not such a bad old stick really.’

  It was Robert Selby who’d been up most of the night calculatin
g the financial importance to Berebury Homes of not owning the Muster Green.

  Ned Phillips couldn’t stop talking. ‘Then, of course, being around in the firm I got to hear that the Berebury Preservation Society wanted to delay building so I set out to find their Jonathon Ayling and got him to collect the portrait from the museum while he was about it…’

  ‘Collect?’ said Crosby indignantly. ‘Steal, you mean.’

  ‘And while he was about what?’ asked Sloan, policeman first, last and all the time.

  ‘The portrait was only on loan to the museum,’ said Ned. ‘My father told me that.’

  Crosby subsided, rumbling. Sloan pulled his notebook a little nearer.

  Phillips carried on. ‘Ayling needn’t have bothered nicking his Anglo-Saxon bits and pieces to plant in the ground because delay was all that Lionel Perry wanted, too. We didn’t know that at the time, of course.’

  ‘The fire,’ said Crosby suddenly.

  ‘I guess that was our Lionel,’ said Ned Phillips.

  ‘But why the bones and the lobster shells?’ asked Sloan. It had always been obvious that the fire was merely to slow things down, not do lasting damage.

  Phillips managed a half-smile. ‘That was me. Lionel did his dirty work in the billiard room through a broken window and can’t have seen them. I borrowed a key. Easy. It was just to let Lionel know that there was a Filligree around. A sort of shot across the bows.’

  ‘It frightened him,’ agreed Sloan. In his experience frightened men did things that confident men never would.

  ‘And he frightened me,’ admitted Ned Phillips, closing his eyes and visibly tired.

  ‘Lionel Perry made a big mistake,’ said Detective Inspector Sloan.

  ‘Criminals usually do,’ said Superintendent Leeyes loftily. ‘What put you on to it?’

  ‘Something Crosby said.’ Sloan believed in giving credit where credit was due.

  ‘Crosby?’ The superintendent’s eyebrows almost disappeared. ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘He pointed out that the portrait might have been stolen – taken – from the museum not to help find Phillips but to stop anyone else finding him. You see, sir, Lionel Perry thought that Ned Phillips was the only one besides himself who knew about the true ownership of the land that Berebury Homes needed so badly – he didn’t know the fellow’s father was alive and well, too.’