“Which leaves us rather a lot of people without one,” concluded Crosby.
The radio suddenly came to life again.
“A member of the public,” said Doris, the announcer, “having it out with Traffic Warden Number Five in Berebury High Street.”
“Someone will do that man one day,” forecast Sloan, “and I only hope that I don’t have to take them in for it.”
“Near the traffic lights,” directed Doris.
“If it’s nobody else’s job,” remarked Crosby gloomily, “then it’s a policeman’s …”
“He’s a bit stroppy,” Doris informed the radio circuit informally.
Sloan was bracing. “We’re Society’s maids-of-all-work, Crosby, and you might as well get used to the idea. There’s another thing it’s like …”
“Sir?”
“Women’s work. It’s never done …”
“Number Five isn’t very happy either,” added Doris, confident that Number Five would have switched off while he dealt with a turbulent member of the public.
“Now,” said Sloan, “Hallworthy’s Small Motors of Birmingham. What we need to know is their link with Struthers and Tindall …”
Sloan and Crosby were so engrossed in the possibilities of this that they didn’t hear County Headquarters the first time they called them up.
“Foxtrot Delta One Six, Foxtrot Delta One Six,” repeated Doris patiently. “Have you got Detective Inspector Sloan on board? Come in, Foxtrot Delta One Six. Constable Hepple would like to talk to you at Randall’s Bridge. He thinks you should see the Captain of the Tower.”
The wizened figure standing in the nave just outside the tower in the church at Randall’s Bridge didn’t look like the captain of anything to Sloan. He had a bent back and a leathery face and he was called Nathan Styles.
“Caught me at me dinner, ’e did,” he said, pointing an accusing finger at Police Constable Hepple.
“Did he now?” said Sloan. “Well?”
“’Appen I had a bit of a look round for ’im like Earnie ’ere said.”
“And what did you find?” So the worthy Hepple was called Earnest, was he?
“Nothing much amiss in ’ere.”
Sloan nodded. “That’s what Mr Knight told us this morning.”
Nathan Styles dismissed the Church Secretary with a jerk of his shoulder. “He’s not a ringer.”
“The bells?” said Sloan. “Is there something wrong with the bells?”
Nathan Styles shook a grizzled head. “No, it’s not that.”
“Well?”
“There’s an extra rope.”
“What!”
“One too many.”
“Where?”
“Hanging down the middle.” Styles stepped forward into the church tower. It was tidier now than it had been earlier.
Sloan followed him and stared up the shaft of the tall tower.
Nathan Styles pointed aloft with a gnarled and none-too-clean finger. “Up there. The thin one.”
Sloan could see the one he meant.
Hanging down was a very thin length of something. It wasn’t rope. From where he stood it looked as if it could be twine.
Say fishing line.
It was black and practically invisible. Sloan took a second look at Nathan Styles. He must be pretty sharp eyed.
And know his bell tower.
“If you doesn’t believe me,” rasped the old man, “you can always ask Charlie Horton. He’ll tell you the same. T’wasn’t there when we rung Sunday.”
“I don’t suppose it was,” agreed Sloan softly. “I don’t suppose for one moment that it was. Or that you’ve had your practice night this week yet?”
“Not this week,” agreed Styles. “Friday’s practice night.”
“It’s a tidy length.”
“Seventy feet,” said the old man promptly. “Buy the ropes by the foot we has to do so I knows. Cost a lot do ropes, I can tell you.”
Sloan peered up into the dimness. “It’s too far and too dark up there to see how it’s fixed …”
Nathan Styles jerked his shoulder upwards. “Daresay it’s hitched round one of the bell beams.”
“We’ll have to get up top and have a proper look.” Sloan turned to Crosby and Hepple. “It looks as if it comes straight down all right.”
“Shall I go up the tower, sir,” offered Hepple, “and see what I can see from up there?”
“Not yet.” Sloan waved a hand. “Later. There’s a little experiment I want you both to do first. You, Hepple, go outside and find that ladder, and then get up to that little window from the path side. And you, Crosby, go and get hold of something that we can use to get the end of that twine over towards the window.”
Hepple crunched away. Crosby moved off down the church and reappeared a few moments later with a churchwarden’s stave.
“Will this do, sir?”
Sloan sighed. Justice being, in his view, only a very short head behind godliness and rather ahead of cleanliness, he supposed it would have to.
He took the stave and held it up to the twine. With the flat head of the stave he showed Crosby how to steer it towards the little window above the outer tower door. As he did so the familiar face of Police Constable Hepple appeared at the window.
Crosby continued to walk in Hepple’s direction.
Hepple thrust his hand through the embrasure and caught the twine.
“It just reaches the window, sir,” reported Crosby over his shoulder. “Exactly.”
“I thought it might,” said Detective Inspector Sloan.
PROSPERITY DOTH BEWITCH MEN.
20
It was Sergeant Wharton who rung the makers of the time punch machine being used by Henry Pysden in his experiment.
They were faintly affronted at his enquiry.
“But we guarantee that the mechanism is accurate, Sergeant. That’s what it’s there for. It’s one of those tied to both a time clock and a personal signature.”
“Why?” enquired Wharton.
“Evidence that the readings from the experiment were taken at the right time and by the right person.”
“Does that matter?”
The man cleared his throat. “In some types of very accurate experiment it reduces some of the room for error if one person and one person only takes all the readings. It keeps the personal interpretation element down to one, doesn’t it?”
Sergeant Wharton supposed it did.
“Very important in this case,” said the voice. “Or so we were told when we were asked to set it up.”
“Were you?” said Wharton, interested.
“Struthers and Tindall checked with us first—and that it was proof against tampering.”
Wharton coughed. “And it is?”
“One hundred percent,” responded the manufacturer’s man unhesitatingly. “It’s got twin seals with a built-in bonus highly popular with policemen.”
“I’ll buy it,” said Sergeant Wharton.
“We apply the seals and give the guarantee, and we can tell if anyone’s been playing about with them—even if anyone else can’t.”
“Belt and braces,” observed Wharton who was so weighty that he didn’t need either.
“Buttons, too, if you like, Sergeant. We don’t leave anything to chance here …”
Constable Crosby had an objection.
He was looking in the direction of the marble plinth.
“It’d still have missed the Fitton Bequest, sir. I’m sure it would. It’s too high.”
“It could swing easily enough,” put in Hepple from his perch outside the window. “You can see that from here. With the bell ropes tethered out of the way like they are, it would have a clear run.”
Sloan nodded briskly. “Hepple, can you tell what happened to the end of the twine?”
Hepple squinted at the piece in his hand. “Cut, sir, I should say.”
“Not burnt?”
The twine would have to go under a comparison microscop
e at the Forensic Laboratory but there was still such a thing as the naked eye. Microscopic examination was what it was called but he wouldn’t put that in his report. The Superintendent was sensitive to long words.
And there was still the spent match unaccounted for.
Superintendent Leeyes had no time for loose ends either.
“No, sir,” Hepple was saying. “It’s quite a clean cut. No charring. Could have been scissors or a knife. Something like that.”
There was another thing a microscope might be able to do for them. Tell if a heavy weight had strained the fibres of the twine. You never knew with microscopes these days.
“Ah.” Nathan Styles’s creaking voice started up again. “B’ain’t be the length it is now that counts, is it? It’s the length it was afore it was cut …”
“That’s right, Mr Styles,” said Sloan. Crosby shouldn’t need a country rustic to spell things out for him like this. “It could have been long enough before it was cut to knock the sculpture off its plinth.”
“But why take it away anyway?” asked Crosby mulishly. “Why not leave it there?”
“Because it’d be a dead giveaway,” said the old bell-ringer promptly. “Can’t you see that, lad? Stands to reason.”
“There was a good chance,” said Sloan, “that we might miss the twine or not know what it was for.”
“It still doesn’t tell us how it was done,” Crosby persisted obstinately.
“No.”
“The chap could have aimed for the sculpture from up here,” observed Hepple from the window. “I’ve got quite a good view.”
“You wouldn’t have in the dark,” said Sloan.
“There was that match …” put in Crosby.
Sloan took a deep breath. “There’s only one thing we do know …”
“Sir?”
“The time the twine was cut and whatever was on the end of it taken away.”
“No, we don’t, sir …” Then his face changed. “Oh, yes, we do …” he breathed. “We do. At two o’clock this morning …”
“Exactly.”
“By the night fisherman those two Metford women said they saw.”
“The Metfords? Daft as coots the pair of ’em,” remarked Nathan Styles conversationally, “especially Ivy.”
Hepple, still at the window, tilted his helmet back. “And who would the night fisherman be, sir, if I might ask?”
“That’s why he needed a rod,” interrupted Crosby excitedly, waving the churchwarden’s stave about in a way not envisaged by the Vicar. “He wouldn’t be able to reach it from the window otherwise and we know he couldn’t get in through the doors, don’t we?”
“What rod?” asked a bewildered Hepple.
“A fisherman’s rod, Hepple,” explained Sloan kindly. “To catch the end of the twine. Now we know why he needed a long rod. To hook the twine and take away whatever was hanging at the end of it.”
“Ah,” said Nathan Styles entering into the spirit of things, “that would have been back in the middle of the tower, by then, wouldn’t it?”
“It would,” agreed Sloan.
“Dead underneath the bell beam,” said the little man. “Gravity would do that.”
Sloan nodded. It had been the Superintendent who had said you couldn’t interfere with gravity, hadn’t it?
Aeons ago.
Or this morning.
They seemed all the same to Sloan now.
“A fisherman’s rod would do the trick nicely,” said Hepple ponderously, measuring the distance to the middle of the tower with his eye.
“I suppose,” said Crosby, sounding doubtful, “that it would have stopped swinging by then …”
“I think,” said Sloan softly, “that we can take it that it would.”
Crosby scratched his head. “You mean that’s why he waited until then?”
“I do.”
“He knew?”
“I think,” said Sloan heavily, “that he worked it out. Just like he worked everything else out.” He looked up at the window. “All right, Hepple, you can come down now.”
Hepple let go of the twine and withdrew his arm from the embrasure. His face disappeared as he backed down the ladder. The twine—even without anything on the end of it—fell back towards the middle of the tower and then—pendulumlike—swung on through an arc towards the opposite door—the one leading back into the nave and church proper.
Sloan stopped in his tracks.
“Crosby, did you see that?”
“No, sir. What, sir?”
“The twine, man.”
“What about it, sir?”
“Crosby, we’re fools.”
“Yes, sir.”
“You didn’t notice anything about the way that the twine fell back from the window?”
“No, sir.”
“It went towards the door, Crosby. The door. Not the plinth. Don’t you see? The window and the sculpture—they aren’t in line, are they?”
“No, sir.”
“So how did anything on the twine aimed from the window in the dark hit the Fitton Bequest?”
“Search me, sir,” said Crosby agreeably.
There was a sudden high cackle from old Nathan Styles.
“Proper mystery, isn’t it?”
“You don’t have to explain pendulums to me, Sloan,” said Superintendent Leeyes testily. “I know all about Galileo.”
“Galileo, sir?”
“The chap who chucked two things from the top of the Leaning Tower of Pisa to see which got to the bottom first. I’ve been there.” The Superintendent and his wife had once been to Italy on a package tour and they were never allowed to forget it at the Police Station. “He found out about pendulums.”
“What about them, sir?”
Leeyes waved a lofty hand. “The swing of the pendulum always takes exactly the same time whether it’s a long swing or a short one.”
“Clocks,” said Sloan suddenly.
“That sort of thing,” agreed Leeyes. “They sent him to prison for it.”
“For finding out?”
“Oh, yes,” said the Superintendent grandly. “They thought he was a dangerous chap. Had a lot of new ideas.”
“I see, sir. A bad lot.”
Sloan had so far never been instrumental in sending anyone to prison except for having old ideas—some of them very old indeed.
Cain and Abel old.
Some older than that, too, now he came to think of it …
He had got Crosby to drive him back to the police station at Berebury from Randall’s Bridge after all. And it was just as well. There had been all manner of messages waiting for him there.
The Airport people in London had traced a passenger called G. Mardoni who had caught a plane to Schiepol in Holland an hour or so after the Rome flight on which he had been booked had left.
The next message had been more useful still and Sloan had taken it in with him to Superintendent Leeyes.
It was from the Guardia de Publica Sicurezza in Rome. They had traced Giuseppe Mardoni from a Dutch flight to his apartment near the Castelsanangelo and were holding him. Please, what would their esteemed friends the Politzei Inglesi like doing with him?
“You’d better acknowledge this quickly, Sloan,” instructed Leeyes, whose knowledge of Italian history was hazy (but whose celebrated holiday tour had included Rome), “before they throw him in the Tiber.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Anything else come in?”
“Details of the two patents. The one which Sergeant Wharton’s man found in Blake’s room is an old one—registered in the name of Jonah Bernard Struthers before the war. The other is George Osborne’s and that’s dated yesterday like they said.” Far too much happened yesterday for Sloan’s liking.
“Appleton’s still watching Osborne, I hope.”
“He is.”
“Anything else?”
“The link with Hallworthy’s Small Motors. Someone’s been quick …”
“
Ah …” The Superintendent stretched his arms in a way that was positively feline.
“Paul Blake.”
Leeyes rubbed his hands together. “Blake, eh?”
“Hallworthy’s Small Motors were his last employers but one.”
“Were they, indeed?” said Leeyes silkily, the cat-and-mouse touch even more apparent now.
“The last people he worked for were bought out by Hallworthy’s a year ago.”
Leeyes pounced. “Then he came to Struthers and Tindall and Hallworthy’s tried to buy Struthers and Tindall?”
“Could be. But Tindall wouldn’t sell. At least, not to the highest bidder.”
“So someone kills Tindall …”
“Tindall was killed, sir, but we don’t know exactly how or why yet.”
“What’s all this business about pendulums for then?”
Sloan shook his head. “I don’t think a pendulum would necessarily do the trick, sir. The sculpture was off-line from the window.”
“Well,” said the Superintendent, leaning comfortably back in his chair, “seeing that there’s no such thing as an eccentric pendulum you’d better go away and have another think, hadn’t you?”
As he walked back down the corridor to his own room a little frisson of cold trickled down Sloan’s spine …
Then his head came up …
There was such a thing as an eccentric pendulum.
He’d seen it.
In a museum somewhere.
He and Margaret. It had something to do with the earth’s gravity pulling it to one side or something like that.
But only if the cord was long enough.
Long enough?
Seventy or eighty feet. It had to be something like that.
Seventy feet! whispered a little voice in Sloan’s brain.
Inspector Harpe loped by him in the corridor but Sloan didn’t see him.
It was coming back to him now.
If he remembered rightly the only thing this particular pendulum needed was a long drop and a smooth start and half an hour later it was right off course. Pulled by the earth’s gravity.
The smooth start had been important. He remembered that, too. It had to be released very carefully indeed. No jerk or push or anything like that. In fact he remembered standing with Margaret while a man from the Museum came along and started it by burning away the anchoring string with a match.
His Burial Too Page 17
