“Just the one?”
The pathologist nodded. “And from behind.”
“A weapon,” remarked Sloan, “would be nice.”
“Nothing to touch ’em with juries,” agreed the doctor. “Now, Sloan, I think you’ll be interested in some mental arithmetic I’ve been doing. Algebra, really.”
“Oh, yes, Doctor?” Sloan was wary in his response this time. Police work was one thing. Algebra was quite another.
“You can do any equation if you know all the quantities, of course.”
“Yes, Doctor.” He agreed to that readily enough.
“You can do quite a few with one unknown quantity.”
“I’m sure you can, Doctor.”
“And you can do one or two with two or more unknowns.”
“Can you, Doctor?”
“Our equation, Sloan,” said the pathologist, waving a hand at the sheaf of papers which Burns, his assistant, was working on, “concerns the time of death of Richard Mallory Tindall.”
“Good.”
“Our known factors are what the deceased had to eat at seven-thirty last evening …”
Sloan nodded. That wasn’t exactly blinding him with mathematics.
“… Confirmed by Mrs Marcia Osborne, plus a drink, the time he had it and the size of the drink.” Dr Dabbe raised his eyebrows appreciatively. “Talk about dishy. Our Mrs Osborne’s quite a stunner, isn’t she?”
“I couldn’t say, Doctor,” said Sloan a trifle stiffly. “I sent my Constable.”
“Bad luck. Still, you’ll have to go again, I daresay. Her old man still hadn’t shown up all through the dinner hour, did you know that?”
“I did.”
“Sorry. I forgot it was the close season for suspects. Your bird, of course. Where was I?”
“Doing an equation.”
“Oh, yes. Food plus time lapsed after its consumption equated to state of digestion of deceased gives you the time of death.” Dr Dabbe twiddled a pencil. “And if that’s not good enough there’s the state of the brain tissue. That’s always good enough.”
“Always?”
“Given these factors,” said the pathologist, ignoring this, “all I had to do then was to work on his stomach and brain and one or two other oddments and put them down, too, and bob’s your uncle.”
“Your equation?”
“Exactly. Narrows the time of death very nicely.”
Sloan turned back the pages of his notebook to his record of his interview with the two spinsters at Vespers Cottage by the churchyard.
“Would I be very far out, Doctor, if I said it was somewhere about two o’clock this morning?”
“You would,” said Dr Dabbe placidly. “Very.”
“Very?”
“Two and a half hours out. Give me those papers, Burns.”
Sloan stared at him. “Two and a half hours? That means you make it …”
“According to my equation,” said the pathologist, still amiable, “which Burns here has just finished checking and which I am prepared to read out in open court, I make the time of death pretty near eleven-thirty last night.”
“How near?” enquired Sloan.
“As near as dammit,” said the pathologist graphically.
HE DID SUSPECT ME WRONGFULLY.
16
There was quite a plaintive note in Detective Constable Crosby’s voice.
“What I don’t understand, sir, is why this guy who did it …”
“Yes?” It was funny, reflected Sloan, how the very word “murderer” stuck in your throat …
How you didn’t use it unless you had to …
Not even Crosby …
Not even now they’d done away with the death penalty … and they’d got the life penalty instead.
Well, the quarter life penalty. It wasn’t really life any longer…
Sloan made himself stop thinking about prison sentences.
It upset him too much.
They’d stopped talking about them at the Police Station long ago.
“What about him, Crosby?”
“Why didn’t he just hit him a bit harder the first time and be done with it?”
“I don’t know.”
“So what this guy did then, sir, was to arrange for this great lump of stuff to fall while Tindall was lying dead to the world in the right place underneath it?”
“That’s all, Crosby.”
Perhaps there was something to be said for a certain simplicity of approach, after all …
“So,” said Crosby, negotiating a right-hand turn, “it’s just a case of how and who, sir, then, is it?”
“Don’t strain yourself, will you?”
“Oh, and why, sir?” added the Constable seriously.
“Strictly speaking,” amended Sloan fairly, his sarcasm evaporating as quickly as it had conjured itself up, “I suppose we don’t really need to know why …”
“Don’t we?”
“But,” he added sardonically, “the jury like it.”
Sloan thought back to the bloodless crumpled figure lying on the church tower floor and wondered how much motive they were going to need to make head or tail of that.
He dismissed the image immediately.
Between them he could be sure that the cynics and the psychiatrists could explain everything.
He was a policeman and he should know that by now.
The constable was talking again.
“It’ll tell us who, sir, won’t it, if we can find out why?”
“I hope so, Crosby,” he replied heavily. “I’m sure I hope so.”
There was always that. Perhaps the boy was learning something after all. Sloan scratched his chin and glanced down at his notes.
There was no help there.
They were as meagre as a Spanish anchor.
“At this rate,” he added pessimistically, “we’ll just have to ask whoever did it to tip us the wink on how he did it when we’ve got him.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Because—quite apart from why—I’m hanged if I know how you arrange for a sculpture to be pushed over without being in there to do it.”
“The little window,” suggested Crosby helpfully.
“The little window,” agreed Sloan. “We’ve got as far as that already. Somebody put that ladder up against the wall and poked something through the window and knocked the Fitton Bequest off its plinth and then drove the deceased’s car back to Cleete.”
“But not the night fisherman at two o’clock this morning.”
“At approximately ten minutes to eleven,” said Sloan crisply, “someone was there doing something and they were gone by eleven if the evidence of the schoolmaster and those two dotty women is to be believed and he died at approximately eleven-thirty …”
They would have to take Dr Dabbe for Gospel—however inconvenient—because everyone else would.
“… when Gordon Cranswick was having a nightcap in his room in his hotel in London, Paul Blake tucked up in bed at his lodgings, Mrs Osborne tucked up in bed with Mr Osborne, which isn’t evidence, and Henry Pysden kipped down at the works after doing his bit on his experiment …”
“… and Sir Digby Wellow, Giuseppe Mardoni and Fenella Tindall unaccounted for,” finished Crosby.
Sloan looked at him with disfavour. Crosby was getting more like the Superintendent every day.
“There are one or two interesting events in Richard Tindall’s last forty-eight hours, Crosby, which have not, I hope, entirely escaped your attention …”
“Losing that file at the works,” he said promptly. “The United Mellemetics one.”
“The purchase,” said Sloan, “of a pair of emerald and diamond clips …”
“And,” Crosby chipped in, “him deciding to sell the business to Cranswick Processing.”
“Plus the discovery that someone was trying to buy the firm by methods he didn’t like. Someone else.”
“That and getting himself done,” added Crosby simply.
Sloan abandoned his train of thought. “We mustn’t forget that, must we?”
The next two reports to come in were both about the Italian, Giuseppe Mardoni.
One was from London.
The Metropolitan Police had checked as requested with the car hire firm from which Mardoni had rented the car he had used in England. They reported that the vehicle had been returned as arranged to the airport. The time of the check-in had been just before three o’clock in the morning.
The second came from Inspector Harpe and asked Sloan to drop by when he was near the Traffic Department.
“I may be wasting your time, Sloan,” began that worthy with characteristic pessimism, “but I thought you might like to know that two of my patrol boys turned something up about Wednesday night.”
“I would.”
“They were chatting up the blokes at the all-night garage on the Calleford road … they always keep in well with them …”
So much, thought Sloan, for all those voluntary advisers of the police who thought traffic should be separated from police work.
They forgot that man was now a motorised animal.
“The garage had a call-out to a foreign gent late last night.”
“Did they?” responded Sloan alertly. “And what time was this, may I ask? Did they remember?”
“’Course they remembered,” said an aggrieved Harpe. “Just about half-eleven. Very excited, they said the chap was. All over a puncture.”
“He had a plane to catch,” remarked Sloan absently. “Did you say puncture?”
“A flat, anyway. The garage didn’t repair it. They just changed the wheel for him. Put the spare on and got him going again.”
Sloan flipped back through his notes. “Couldn’t he change a wheel? I thought he was an engineer of sorts—oh, no. A civil engineer.”
“Couldn’t see to change a wheel,” said Harpe. “No torch.”
Sloan sighed. “And where was all this?”
Inspector Harpe rolled his eyes expressively. “Need you ask, Sloan? It was where they laid the tar on the Berebury to Randall’s Bridge road in the morning. It’s always like this when the County have had a go at the road. Punctures and windscreens shattering for days afterwards. Nothing but trouble.”
Sloan nodded briefly. Happy Harry wasn’t the only one with troubles. There was nothing easier to contrive than a flat tyre. Someone in Mets was going to have to go round to the car hire firm at the airport and check if that puncture had been genuine or a convenient alibi.
“Half-past eleven,” he said, “and Fenella Tindall says he left her at half-past ten at Cleete. I wonder where the hour went.”
“I can tell you that,” rejoined Harpe. “Walking along the Berebury road in the dark looking for a telephone kiosk. He’d be a good three miles from anywhere there, wouldn’t he?”
“Couldn’t he have got a lift?”
“That road isn’t exactly Piccadilly Circus after dark now, is it, Sloan? Anyway, who’s going to pick up a foreigner at that hour of the night? For all we know he may look like Sweeney Todd.”
“Machiavelli, more like.” Sloan sighed. Neither of them knew what he really looked like, though there was nothing he himself would like more this minute than a sight of Giuseppe Mardoni. “And then he’d have to find out who to ring.”
“There was some sort of handbook in the car with addresses and so forth.”
“So he could read and speak English all right …”
“Looks like it.”
“I thought he might.” Sloan made another note in his book.
Perhaps Giuseppe Mardoni had become a little less nebulous now but he was still shadowy.
Everyone in the case seemed just out of reach.
Giuseppe Mardoni.
George Osborne.
Sir Digby Wellow.
At least Gordon Cranswick was more substantial now than he had been. Heaven only knew where he’d got to, now, though. Luston, probably, thought Sloan morosely, to make an offer for United Mellemetics. They couldn’t keep him at the station, for all that the Superintendent would like to have done. And Cranswick would know that …
“Perhaps the airport people will come up with something,” he said to Happy Harry. “There’s always a chance of that.”
But there was no comfort to be had from that Jeremiah.
“Makes it difficult, doesn’t it?” agreed Harpe with a melancholy nod. “How are you getting on with the Tindall end of things?”
“All I want there,” said Sloan with feeling, “is some idea of how you arrange to kill a man without being there to do it. Half an hour after you’ve gone away, in fact.”
“He wasn’t starved to death, was he?” enquired the Traffic Inspector with interest. “I read a book once about a millionaire who died shut up in a gymnasium with plenty of food. Starved to death. Proper mystery it was, too. What these Indians had done was to hoist his bed forty feet up in the air with pulleys and then let it down again after he’d died …”
The Superintendent’s reaction to the news about Giuseppe Mardoni was immediate, predictable and not without glee.
“Complicity, Sloan. I’ve said so all along.”
“Er—who with, sir?”
“The girl, of course. She drives the car back to Cleete. He waits behind in the churchyard and pokes something through the little window and then sets off for the airport.”
“And the two o’clock trip? There was someone about then, sir.”
“A fisherman. Like those two old women said.”
Sloan didn’t tell Superintendent Leeyes that he’d already sent Crosby off to see the angling people. Both lots—the Calleshire Freshwater Club and the River Calle Angling Society—to see if they had any night fishing competitions laid on. Or if they knew if any of their members went fishing at two o’clock in the morning on Thursday.
Nothing would surprise him about fishermen.
Nothing.
And he didn’t want any case of his to founder on the life cycle of the roach.
When he came to think about it being aware of the close season for coarse fish wasn’t all that far from Sherlock Holmes and his seventy-five varieties of perfume.
“What about the other alibis?” asked Leeyes.
“Henry Pysden’s is the only one that’s cast iron. The others are a bit—er—circumstantial, sir. Even Sir Digby Wellow’s …”
That had been something of a delicate chat.
And it wasn’t what he’d joined the Force for.
Ringing a titled lady he’d never seen to ask if she’d spent the night with her husband, while Crosby set about discovering the private life of the trout.
Lady Wellow’s voice had been cool. “I heard the odd snore, Inspector. Through the wall.”
“Er—yes, of course, madam—er—milady.”
“We have separate rooms. My husband likes a hard mattress—for his back, you know. I like a soft one.”
Sloan had tapped his pencil to an old metre.
Jack Sprat could eat no fat,
His wife could eat no lean,
Why were there nursery rhymes everywhere he looked today?
Not that there was anything particularly childish about Lady Wellow’s tone.
It was ironic, detached.
“Are you trying to tell me, Inspector,” she had said, “that Sir Digby spent the night somewhere else?”
“No, milady.”
And so betwixt them both, you see
They licked the platter clean.
“Only trying to be sure that he spent it in Luston.”
“I see. He grunted when he took his shoes off. He always does. I heard that, too.”
“When?”
“About midnight.”
That wasn’t evidence, either, of course.
Not yet, anyway.
It would be soon.
If the reformers got their way.
When a husband could give evidence against his wife and vice versa.
&
nbsp; When you wouldn’t be able to tell the Criminal Court from the Matrimonial one.
He didn’t know if that was a blow for Women’s Lib or not.
The Superintendent had started up again. He had a piece of paper in his hand.
“The handwriting people say those letters from Constance Parva are all written by the same person.”
“So far,” said Sloan. “They won’t stay that way for long.”
There was nothing more infectious than a poison pen. Once the idea cottoned on all manner of people would be taking to it. Old scores would be settled by the dozen. Pale—and not so pale—imitations would hurtle round the village before long, seeding as fast as Enchanter’s Nightshade.
“And that shoe, Sloan …”
“The golf course one?”
“They’ve found its mate.”
“Where?”
“Behind the fourth green.”
“But nothing else?”
“Not yet,” said Leeyes ominously.
The next two messages were both for Detective Inspector Sloan.
Both concerned the transport cafe on the outskirts of Berebury near the junction of the Luston and Calleford roads. It was called simply Dick’s and all the heavy transport in the western half of the county used it. Its bumpy potholed car park was the only place for miles around where there was room and to spare for a dozen lorries and their trailers.
The first was in the form of a report from one of Inspector Harpe’s traffic patrol car drivers. He had noted a small grey van parked at Dick’s yesterday. The van answered to the description of the radio message issued at thirteen hundred hours. He had observed it at the Transport Cafe at about dinnertime yesterday. At about half-past twelve.
The second message wasn’t couched in anything like so stately terms.
It had come from Dick himself.
In a hoarse, hurried voice.
“A bloke,” he said, “in a car on the park. Dead. Thought he’d had a heart attack, they did. Until they saw the hole in the back of his head.”
DIAMONDS ARE OF MOST VALUE
THEY SAY THAT HAVE PASSED THROUGH
MOST JEWELLERS’ HANDS.
17
Even as he crossed the car park of Dick’s Transport Cafe, Sloan appreciated what a choice spot for murder it made.
His Burial Too Page 14
