Sloan didn’t need telling. He looked round for Crosby. The constable had waded across to look at the plinth. “Crosby, what …”
“I’ve found some more Fitton girls over here, sir. On the four corners of the plinth. They’re a bit more grownup than the others.”
“I wish you were,” said Sloan, much-tried. “Try reading the small print.”
“Oh, I see, sir.” Crosby looked more closely and then slowly spelled out: “Temperance, Prudence, Justice … I can’t quite get round to this one … oh, yes … Fortitude.”
“The four cardinal virtues,” said Dr Dabbe, who had been well brought up.
“You wouldn’t know about them, Crosby,” said Sloan unkindly.
Dr Dabbe mentioned a cardinal virtue which the late Mr Fitton, father of ten, did not seem to have possessed but Constable Crosby had by now seen something else. He bent down towards the bottom of the back of the heavy marble slab and pointed.
“The plinth,” said Dr Dabbe in a suddenly cold voice. “Look down there, Sloan.”
Sloan moved forward so that he could see.
“At the back,” said the pathologist.
“Wedges,” said Sloan. “Iron wedges. Proper ones.”
He promptly dispatched Crosby to check with Bert Booth, the foreman, whether the workmen had put the wedges there. Somehow he didn’t think they had.
“To tilt it forward?” suggested Dabbe.
“But not too much.”
“Just so far …”
“That something could knock the sculpture off easily …” concluded Sloan grimly.
“But what?”
A complete search of the floor of the tower, scrupulously conducted, produced only broken marble and a spent match. The match was under a piece of marble just inside the west door and beneath the little slit window.
Sloan felt it wasn’t a lot to go on.
DOOMS MEN TO DEATH BY INFORMATION.
9
“Well?” barked Superintendent Leeyes down the telephone.
“It’s Richard Tindall, all right, sir.”
“All right is scarcely the phrase, Sloan.”
“No, sir. Sorry, sir.”
“Well?” he barked again.
“We’re doing what we can,” Sloan assured him hastily, “but there were all those marble bodies lying in the …”
“Sounds like a knacker’s yard,” said Leeyes more cheerfully.
“Yes, sir,” said Sloan evenly. It was all right for the Superintendent sitting safely in his office in Berebury. He hadn’t had to hump the marble about. The Superintendent—like Hamlet—had risen above action.
“Who benefits?” Superintendent Leeyes’s view of police life was in its way every bit as simplified as Crosby’s.
“I don’t know, sir, yet.” He cleared his throat. “There’s a lot we don’t know.”
He’d said that to Crosby, too.
“The great thing,” declared Superintendent Leeyes, “is to state your problem.”
He had once been on a Management Course and had returned permanently confused about aims and objects.
“Yes, sir.”
“In as few words as possible.”
“Yes, sir.”
“So that you know that you’re doing and why.”
Goals, they had called them on the course, but he had forgotten that.
“Yes, sir.”
“Well,” he growled, “what’s your problem?”
“How the Fitton Bequest got on top of Tindall,” said Sloan promptly.
There was a long pause. Then:
“No booby traps over the door, Sloan?”
“No, sir. I checked.”
“Nothing attached to the clock?”
“Not even a cuckoo, sir.”
A voice said icily as if from a great distance, “You know perfectly well what I mean, Sloan. When the hands reached—say—midnight they could have triggered something off …”
For one delicious moment Sloan dallied with the idea of mentioning Cinderella too; but decided against it. He had his pension to think of.
“There was no sign of anything, sir,” he said instead.
There had been no sign of anything at all out of the ordinary about the tower. As church towers went it had seemed to Sloan like all the other church towers he had ever known: a square of ancient architecture with an assortment of dangling bell ropes in the middle.
“What about a detonator under the sculpture, Sloan? Had you thought of that?”
“Yes, sir. We looked for signs of explosive devices. Burn marks, and so forth …” The Superintendent never gave up. You had to say that for him.
Leeyes grunted. “And nothing to actually prove that the blasted thing hadn’t just slipped, either, I suppose …”
“The gang who moved it,” replied Sloan carefully, “can’t remember putting any wedges underneath it at all. They swore it was steady enough when they left it—but then they’re not going to say anything else, sir, are they?”
“Not if they know what’s good for them,” growled Leeyes, who was nothing if not a realist where the British workman was concerned. “Not now …”
“No, sir. Not now …”
“So what have we got, Sloan, that’s any good to us?”
“One,” enumerated Sloan, “a dead man, who may be Richard Tindall; two, a missing report, which may or may not be important; three, some tale about the firm being sold yesterday to a man who’s been and gone again …”
“And?”
“Some scuff marks on the gravel outside the embrasure window.”
“Anything else?”
“A ladder out of place. It wasn’t in the church tower where it was usually kept. It was lying outside, and round the corner.”
“That all?”
“There was a used match on the floor of the tower which may or may not have anything to do with the case.”
“You’ll have to do better than that, Sloan, for a jury.”
“Yes, sir, I know.”
“And don’t be too long about it. There’s something else waiting for you when you get back.”
“Sir?”
“A shoe. A woman’s shoe. Size six. Part worn—just too much for discomfort, not enough to throw it away.”
“Just the one?”
“Just the one,” Leeyes said. “The left one. It’s where they found it …”
“Canal bank?”
“Golf course,” said that master of the Parthian shot.
Sloan groaned.
On his way back from using Mr Knight’s telephone again, Detective Inspector Sloan turned aside and made his way past the church tower towards the little cottage opposite. He noticed as he went by that the scuffed gravel outside the west door had been covered over by Crosby. So had the ladder which Bert Booth had carried round from somewhere behind the tower. Not that Sloan was hopeful that the ladder would yield any helpful fingerprints. Fingerprints were for easy cases. Something told him this wasn’t going to be an easy case.
His approach had been observed. He had hardly raised his hand to the knocker on the door of Vespers Cottage when it flew open.
“Yes?” said a small round woman with alacrity.
Behind her stood another small round woman.
Sloan explained himself.
So did they.
“I’m Miss Ivy Metford,” said one.
“I’m Miss Mabel Metford,” said the other.
“We’re sisters,” said Miss Ivy superfluously.
“Two unclaimed treasures,” chimed in Miss Mabel.
“Quite so,” said Sloan hastily. “I’m afraid … I fear that someone has been crushed …”
“An elm?” suggested Miss Ivy promptly.
“An elm?” echoed Sloan, bewildered. This was very nearly as difficult as talking to the Superintendent.
Miss Mabel waved a hand towards the churchyard behind him and intoned: “The elm hateth man and waiteth …”
“It wasn’t an elm, madam.�
��
“Not an elm.” They nodded in unison.
Sloan pulled himself together. “What I want to know is if either of you saw anyone about here last night or early this morning.”
Two heads shook as one.
“No one?”
“Just Mr Knight, of course.”
“And Tessa.”
“Tessa?”
“His dog.”
“No one else?”
Miss Mabel cocked her head to one side. “There was a night fisher …”
“A night fisher?”
Miss Ivy explained quite kindly. “A man with a fishing rod going down to the river. About two o’clock in the morning, that was.”
The aura of anxiety at the Dower House at Cleete had been succeeded by one of mourning. It was a house of stillness now. Hepple let Sloan and Crosby in by the back door.
“It’s Mrs Turvey I want to talk to first,” announced Sloan.
But the short stout daily woman in the Dower House kitchen could no more account for what had happened to Mr Tindall than could his daughter.
“Enemies? ’Course not. He wouldn’t hurt a fly. Ever such a nice quiet gentleman, he was, Inspector. And no trouble to no one.”
“Really?” commented Sloan, making a note.
Quietness might very well be a recommendation to a daily woman. It wasn’t necessarily one to a policeman. The last very quiet gentleman with whom Sloan had had dealings had been a professional blackmailer.
He didn’t suppose the anonymous letterwriter from the village of Constance Parva would be noisy, either.
Very quiet, Mrs Turvey said again, especially since the mistress died, but then that was only to be expected, wasn’t it?
Sloan coughed discreetly and enquired if there were any signs that Mr Tindall had been—er—contemplating marrying again.
“None,” declared Ada Turvey positively. “He was lonely. That’s only natural. You could see that he was lonely with half an eye—anyone could—that’s why Miss Fenella came back—but he never seemed interested in no one else. Not after the mistress.”
“Or of—er—not marrying again—if you take my meaning?”
Mrs Turvey took it all right, and shook her head.
“What about worries?”
Mrs Turvey smoothed down her apron. “We’ve all got worries, haven’t we?”
“Special worries …”
She shook her head again. “Not that I know of, Inspector. Just Miss Fenella.”
“What about her?”
“He was worried if he was doing the right thing letting her come back from Italy just to look after him. That I do know. Didn’t think it would be good for a young girl burying herself in the country on her own. What with her poor mother being gone and everything.”
“I see.”
“She would come home,” said Mrs Turvey. “There was no stopping her. Very attached to her father she was.”
“And to anyone else?” enquired Sloan. A girl like that wasn’t going to lack admirers. “She told us she was out most of yesterday evening …”
“That was with an Italian friend. Giu … Giu … something Mardoni, he’s called. Mr Mardoni, anyway. Someone she knew in Italy. Over here for a few days. Took her to that new Italian restaurant, he did, that’s just opened. He was going straight back to Rome.”
“When?”
“Last night. A night flight. Home by half-past ten easily, Miss Fenella said she was, so that this Mr Mardoni could get to the airport on time.”
“Is there,” enquired Sloan routinely, “anyone else besides this Italian friend?”
Mrs Turvey sniffed and said it wasn’t for her to say but there was that Mr Blake.
“Mr Blake?”
“Paul Blake. He’s one of the bright boys from the master’s works. Practical scientist or some such thing he calls himself. Been making sheep’s eyes at Miss Fenella, he has, ever since she came home.”
Sloan made note of the name.
“If you ask me,” said Mrs Turvey, sniffing again, “what that young man’s got is an eye for the main chance.”
Sloan nodded. That wouldn’t surprise him at all. Of all the manifold rules for success in this world one stood out head and shoulders above all the others.
Marrying the boss’s daughter.
And the good books didn’t even mention it.
He cleared his throat. “What did Mr Tindall think?”
“I reckon he wasn’t keen,” responded Mrs Turvey promptly, “but he’s got too much sense to try to stop Miss Fenella.”
“Not easily stopped?” hazarded Sloan, thinking of a pair of clear eyes and finely moulded chin.
“She’s got a mind of her own,” admitted the daily woman.
“Mr Tindall had no other problems that you were aware of?” asked Sloan formally. Daughters were, after all, the normal worries of normal fathers. They didn’t usually drive the fathers to leave home.
On the contrary, in fact …
“Mardoni,” repeated Superintendent Leeyes after him, spelling it out. “Signor Giuseppe Mardoni, a passenger back to Rome late last night.”
“Or very early this morning.”
“I’ll get them to start checking for you …”
“Thank you, sir.” Dutifully Detective Sloan radioed Berebury Police Station as soon as he had something—however crumblike—to report. Not that that would be soon enough for his superior officer.
“I’ve spoken to Mr Tindall’s general manager, too, sir. A chap called Henry Pysden. He says everything’s all right over at the works …”
“Doesn’t mean a thing.”
“… except that they’ve lost this confidential report.”
“They have, have they?”
“Belonging to United Mellemetics.”
Leeyes grunted. “That’s Sir Digby Wellow’s little lot, isn’t it? Over at Luston. The chap who can’t keep his mouth shut.”
If the highly paid and very professional Public Relations people retained by United Mellemetics to keep its name before the public could have heard this they would have swooned gently. They were very gentle men altogether.
Sloan, however, knew what he meant. He forged on.
“Otherwise, according to the daughter, it seems Mr Tindall spent yesterday quite normally. Nothing apparently out of the ordinary, anyway. And the business looks all right.”
“Businesses,” said Leeyes largely, “often look all right when they aren’t.”
“Yes, sir.”
“What’s his life-style like?” Leeyes wanted to know.
Sloan sighed. The Superintendent had never been the same since he had read a book on sociology.
“Er—good, sir.”
He might have known it wasn’t the right answer.
It never was with sociology.
“Try again, Sloan.”
“A nice house,” he said defensively, “and a big garden. All well kept.”
“Ah,” pronounced the Superintendent hortatively, “the carriage trade.”
“Yes, sir,” said Sloan, who considered this—after sociology—a most unfair lapse into an earlier idiom. “Exactly, sir.”
“Anything else?”
“His car’s at home,” said Sloan carefully.
“He won’t have walked to Randall’s Bridge,” pronounced Leeyes immediately. “Nobody walks anywhere these days. That’s the whole trouble with our traffic system. Ask ’em to park a hundred yards away from where the little dears want to go and they won’t do it.”
Inspector Sloan sighed. Once he was truly astride, dismounting the Superintendent from a favourite hobby-horse became a ticklish business.
“Mr Tindall’s car’s here, sir,” he said firmly. “Standing in the garage but …”
“The whole race’ll forget how to walk soon …” He was well in the saddle now.
“In the garage,” repeated Sloan. It was reminiscent of a joust: tilting him off.
“That’s just what I said, Sloan. He’ll have
gone by car wherever he went.”
“We found him at Randall’s Bridge, sir.”
“Your trouble,” retorted Leeyes robustly, “is that you aren’t looking for clues in the right place. What you want to do,” he added in atrocious French, “is to cherchez la femme.”
Sloan cleared his throat and said deliberately: “Whether Mr. Tindall put the car there himself or someone else put it there instead—well, I wouldn’t like to have to say. Not at this stage.”
“What’s that, Sloan?”
“The car, sir.”
“What about the car? I said to look for the lady.”
“I have a feeling that Mr Tindall might not have brought it back to the garage himself.”
“Why not?”
“There’s a slight chip of paint off the driver’s door—at the extreme edge—where it’s been opened against the wall …”
“And?”
“And a tiny sliver of the same paint on the gardening tool which was hanging on the wall at the same level.”
“Ha!”
“Yes, sir.”
“The good old exchange principle.” The Superintendent sounded almost gleeful over the telephone. “If objects meet they exchange traces. You can’t beat it, can you?”
“No, sir.” Dutifully.
“Fundamental, Sloan. The best rule in detection if it comes to that. And well over a hundred years old.”
Sloan sighed. A hundred years wasn’t going to be long enough to get his points over to the Superintendent.
Not at this rate.
“It looks to me, sir,” he said firmly, “very much as if whoever brought that car into the garage last drove just a fraction too much to the right-hand side.”
“Small garage?”
“Big car.”
“Sloan are you trying to tell me he was abducted after all?”
“No, sir. Not that I know of.”
“But this car was put there last night …”
“Perhaps we can’t prove it was last night,” admitted Sloan. “I don’t know about that yet.”
“Well, then …”
His Burial Too Page 8
